Hidden Brain

You Are Not Ordinary

Most of us have been taught to think about luck as something fleeting — a good parking spot, or finding a twenty-dollar bill on the sidewalk. But psychologists who study this topic say that some people are consistently luckier than others, and that luck is less about chance than it is about how you move through the world.

It's Been a Minute

Feeling stuck? Take a side quest.

Adults spend so much time in environments where they're trying to control the outcome that play as a practice becomes about not knowing, not having an attachment to what the outcome is. Side quests release us from worrying about the outcome. Learning begins with inquiry. In fact, the word quest comes from the root question or inquiry.

Radiolab

Return of Alpha Gal

It made no sense: why couldn't she eat something that she had routinely enjoyed for decades?

Daily Stoic

9 Stoic Habits To Change Your Life

The truth is that virtue is not different than any other skill. You don't have it or not have it. You do it or you don't do it. And you get better at it the more you do it. This is the fundamental insight of Aristotle, that excellence is not innate. It is a habit.

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

Most of us recognize that we don't always act in our own best interests. We procrastinate. We reach for the candy bar instead of the apple. We say things we later regret. Psychologists have long recognized that our behavior is shaped by mental maps — internal representations of the world that guide our actions, often without our awareness.

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

our brains actually navigate the world by coming up with mental maps. These maps act like an autopilot system, allowing us to navigate our lives more efficiently. But sometimes, they can lead us astray, leaving us stuck on a path of negativity and unhappiness.

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

When we think about making changes in our lives, we typically focus on behaviors. But often, the more powerful lever is the mental map we're using to navigate the world. If the map is wrong, no amount of effort will get us to our destination.

TED Radio Hour

Tracking what your body needs

When we kind of learn how to check back in with our bodies, right? And we don't have to rely on external cues to do that, right, that behavior is much more likely to stick.

TED Radio Hour

Tracking what your body needs

When we compare brain activity after movement versus after sitting, the differences are so striking. The brain after movement looks like one certainly far more ready to learn and to work, and yet somewhere along the way, we decided that sitting and staring in front of a computer screen for eight hours straight is the best way to work.

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

These maps act like an autopilot system, allowing us to navigate our lives more efficiently. But sometimes, they can lead us astray, leaving us stuck on a path of negativity and unhappiness.

TED Radio Hour

Tracking what your body needs

When we compare brain activity after movement versus after sitting, the differences are so striking. The brain after movement looks like one certainly far more ready to learn and to work, and yet somewhere along the way, we decide that sitting and staring in front of a computer screen for eight hours straight is the best way to work.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

Most of us think of spirituality as something that happens when we have extraordinary experiences — when we see something beautiful, hear a piece of music that moves us to tears, or find ourselves confronted with the vastness of the universe. But Andrew says the research suggests something different: that spiritual experiences are available to all of us, and that we can cultivate them through intentional practice.

Daily Stoic

How The Stoics Sparked The American Revolution

Stoicism is not something you are, it's something you do, right? It's a practice. John Adams would say that Washington had a great self-command, but that required a great amount of work.

TED

Why I Love My Bad Days | Alexi Pappas | TED

The rule of thirds is that when you're chasing a dream or doing anything hard, you're supposed to feel good a third of the time, OK a third of the time and crappy a third of the time. If you're within this ratio, then the bad days aren't bad. They just mean you're chasing a dream.

Hidden Brain

A Secret Source of Connection

Most of us think of rituals as ceremonies attached to special occasions. But researchers have found that everyday rituals — the small, patterned behaviors we engage in regularly — can be a source of profound connection. Unlike habits, which we perform mindlessly, rituals are imbued with meaning. They signal to others and ourselves that something matters.

Throughline

Captain America and the nation's conscience | Throughline

You are never going to be Superman unless you suddenly find a lot of money from somewhere. You are never going to be Batman. But, there's always that chance, isn't there, that you could one day be Captain America.

Daily Stoic

Ways To Looksmaxx Like A Stoic

If your choices are beautiful, then you will be beautiful. We are the product of our choices. Beauty can't be separated from the process, from the regiment that creates it.

TED

How to Build a Career You Actually Love | Bill Gurley | TED

Obsessive and continuous learning is not an input -- it's an output. It's not the cause, it's the effect.

TED

Can Play Change the World? | Play@TED Full Event | TED, the LEGO Group and the LEGO Foundation

We are living through a play deprivation crisis. We've systematically removed everything that makes play what it is — the spontaneity, the freedom, the wonder — from all parts of adult life and replaced it with efficiency and achievement. And in doing so, we're losing the very survival skills that we need the most right now.

Hidden Brain

Unleashing Your Creativity

Most people assume that creativity is a fixed trait — you either have it or you don't. But research suggests that creativity is less like a gift and more like a muscle: it can be developed, strengthened, and yes, sometimes exhausted.

Hidden Brain

Unleashing Your Creativity

Most people think about creativity as a gift — something you either have or you don't. But research suggests that creativity is less like a trait and more like a muscle: it can atrophy if you don't use it, and it can grow stronger with practice.

Hidden Brain

Unleashing Your Creativity

Most people think that creativity is something you either have or you don't — that it's a fixed trait, like eye color. But researchers who study creativity say this belief is not only wrong, it may actually be preventing people from thinking creatively.

Hidden Brain

Unleashing Your Creativity

We worry so much about the blank page or the blank canvas. But research suggests that placing too high a premium on originality can actually be a creativity killer. When we feel we have to be original, we become self-conscious, and self-consciousness is the enemy of creativity.

Hidden Brain

Unleashing Your Creativity

Most people assume that creativity is a trait — you either have it or you don't. But research suggests that creativity is less like a fixed ability and more like a muscle: it can be strengthened with practice, and it can also atrophy when it goes unused.

TED

The Simple Habit for a Happier Social Life | Nicholas Epley | TED

Social connection, after all, isn't something that just happens to us. It's a choice we make.

TED

The Fleeting Euphoria of Success | Debbie Millman | TED

What if the actual reward is not accomplishment but the act of creating? The finished products and trappings of creative accomplishment are often seen as the goal. But I believe that the act of making is like oxygen. When the making stops, it becomes hard to breathe.

TED

Joy Will Find You — If You Let It | David Larbi | TED

I don't think that it's naive at all to look for joy in the everyday. In fact, if I'm ever to be truly content, it seems to me to be the only way.

TBPN

Chad Janis: How I Sold Grüns to Unilever for $1.2B

I was drinking a greens powder and looked up in the corner of the room and I was just like, there's no way I'm keeping this habit past 30 days. Um, so that was sort of the epiphany of, hey, how do I take uh something as robust and comprehensive and make it into a form factor that could build a habit for consumer.

TBPN

Chad Janis: How I Sold Grüns to Unilever for $1.2B

How do I take uh something as robust and comprehensive and make it into a form factor that could build a habit for consumer. Make it something they look forward to. They go to bed at night thinking about, excited about taking Gruns the next day.

TED

What to Do When You’re Told There’s Nothing Left to Try | David Fajgenbaum, Kiah Williams | TED

Sometimes motivation follows motion. Not the other way around. And so I think sometimes literally just by putting one foot in front of the other, you don't have to have 100 percent of the answer.

It's Been a Minute

The world is awful. Is it healthier to stop caring? | It's Been A Minute

This pose of acting like you don't care and maybe the pose becomes so real that you actually don't really care.

Compound Interest

Why Oura’s CEO Is Embracing Washington Regulation

I think peak subscription refers to subscriptions that don't deliver a lot of value because it's so easy I think to sign up for an app or you know a service and then maybe even forget about it and then six months later you look at say I haven't been using this or I haven't been consuming it.

Fresh Air

Humorist Annabelle Gurwitch faces stage 4 cancer, finds ‘unexpected joys’

I can't go on. I'll go on. And I really did not know how I could go from I can't go on to I'll go on. And that's when I started thinking about this idea of devoting myself to everyday joys or like cultivating these tiny victories, like just having a different metric for what would make me happy or also how I could stay engaged in life?

The Origins Podcast

The Science Behind Drinking To Get Sober | Katie Herzog & Lawrence Krauss

One can take this pill a few hours before drinking and behaviorally produce over time a lost craving for alcohol that allows at least some users to have a reasonable alcohol consumption for the rest of their life without having to abstain forever.

The Origins Podcast

The Science Behind Drinking To Get Sober | Katie Herzog & Lawrence Krauss

Given that, it's kind of remarkable that this is a disease for which there's claimed to be no cure. The only approach has been to basically help people abstain for life from drinking. Once they're an alcoholic, they can never have a drink again.

Daily Stoic

How to Focus (From the Stoics)

You think you're taking revenge bedtime by staying up and scrolling your phone or watching TV or or even reading, which is isn't is hardly a sin. But by staying up late, you are making it harder to get up early.

Daily Stoic

How a Stoic Handles Change

You will get knocked off course. You will lapse on a resolution. You will fall off the wagon. You will get out of sorts. That's unavoidable. What matters is how quickly you return, how fast you find the rhythm again.

The Prof G Pod – Scott Galloway

Scott's Early Career Advice, and Are Dating Apps Making Us Lonelier? | Office Hours

your 20s sort of dictate your trajectory into your 30s and 40s, and your ability to kind of get to the right positions in your 30s and 40s to really then aggregate influence and economic security are somewhat a function of the trajectory or the scale or the velocity you establish in your 20s.