Podcast appearances and mentions of Susan Cain

New Year's resolutions promise hope, but for many people, they quietly deliver shame, stress, and self-blame instead. If resolutions leave you feeling worse about yourself every January, this episode explains why — and what actually works. Host Gabe Howard is joined by returning favorite Jodi Wellman to unpack why traditional goal-setting often backfires, especially when it comes to mental health. They explore the psychology behind the “fresh start effect,” how all-or-nothing thinking sets us up to fail, and why massive lifestyle overhauls rarely stick. More importantly, they offer practical, compassionate alternatives; Like shifting from rigid goals to identity-based habits, process-focused wins, and restarting without guilt when things go off track. Listener Takeaways The mental health cost of setting outcome-based goals Why smaller, process-focused goals actually create lasting change How to restart a goal without guilt or self-punishment Whether you've already ditched your New Year's resolutions or never believed in them to begin with, this episode explores a healthier, more realistic way to create change—without harming your mental well-being. “What is really common, which is set a goal. Don't get there. Feel bad about it. So net net it's not a good experience. For many of us, that's problematic because we feel badly about ourselves [. . .] And maybe that's your version of self-compassion is to let that goal gracefully go.” ~Jodi Wellman, MAPP Our guest, Jodi Wellman, MAPP is a speaker, author, and facilitator on living lives worth living. She founded Four Thousand Mondays to help people make the most of the time they are lucky to be above ground.  With 25 years of corporate leadership experience (most recently as Senior Vice President of Operations at a leading health and lifestyle organization), Jodi has led private CEO advisory boards and coaches teams to work well and live even better. Jodi has a Master's of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also an Assistant Instructor and facilitator in the Penn Resilience Program. She is an ICF Professional Certified Coach. Her book, "You Only Die Once: How to Make It to the End with No Regrets," made Adam Grant's Summer Reading List and was a “Top 3 Psychology Book of 2024” by the Next Big Idea Club (curated by Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Adam Grant, and Dan Pink). Jodi has been featured in The New York Times, Oprah Daily, Fast Company, CNBC, Forbes, Psychology Today, The Los Angeles Times, and more. Jodi's TEDx talk is called How Death Can Bring You Back to Life; with over 1.3 million views, it is the 14th most-watched TEDx talk released in 2022, out of 15,900! Our host, Gabe Howard, is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, "Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations," available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from the author. Gabe is also the host of the "Inside Bipolar" podcast with Dr. Nicole Washington. Gabe makes his home in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio. He lives with his supportive wife, Kendall, and a Miniature Schnauzer dog that he never wanted, but now can't imagine life without. To book Gabe for your next event or learn more about him, please visit gabehoward.com. Please share the show -- it's how we grow! Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2889: Janet Anthony unpacks three common misconceptions that introverts often face: being mislabeled as shy, seen as antisocial, or assumed to dislike talking. Her reflections challenge stereotypes and invite extroverts to better understand the nuanced inner world of introversion,  where solitude, depth, and meaningful conversations thrive. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://introvertdear.com/news/introvert-people-often-misunderstand/ Quotes to ponder: "Shyness is the fear of negative judgment, and introversion is a preference for quiet, minimally stimulating environments." "I do more listening than talking, which is one characteristic you'll find in most (if not all) introverts." "We introverts may shock others with our quality content and amazing presentations." Episode references: Quiet by Susan Cain: https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Introverts-World-Talking/dp/0307352153

What if the most transformative thing you can do for your writing craft and author business is to face what you fear? How can you can find gold in your Shadow in the year ahead? In this episode, I share chapters from Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words. In the intro, curated book boxes from Bridgerton's Julia Quinn; Google's agentic shopping, and powering Apple's Siri; ChatGPT Ads; and Claude CoWork. Balancing Certainty and Uncertainty [MoonShots with Tony Robbins]; and three trends for authors with me and Orna Ross [Self-Publishing with ALLi Podcast]; plus, Bones of the Deep, Business for Authors, and Indie Author Lab. This show is supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, and memoir as J.F. Penn. She's also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker. What is the Shadow? The ‘creative wound' and the Shadow in writing The Shadow in traditional publishing The Shadow in self-publishing or being an indie author The Shadow in work The Shadow in money You can find Writing the Shadow in all formats on all stores, as well as special edition, workbook and bundles at www.TheCreativePenn.com/shadowbook Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words The following chapters are excerpted from Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words by Joanna Penn. Introduction. What is the Shadow? “How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole.” —C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul We all have a Shadow side and it is the work of a lifetime to recognise what lies within and spin that base material into gold. Think of it as a seedling in a little pot that you're given when you're young. It's a bit misshapen and weird, not something you would display in your living room, so you place it in a dark corner of the basement. You don't look at it for years. You almost forget about it. Then one day you notice tendrils of something wild poking up through the floorboards. They're ugly and don't fit with your Scandi-minimalist interior design. You chop the tendrils away and pour weedkiller on what's left, trying to hide the fact that they were ever there. But the creeping stems keep coming. At some point, you know you have to go down there and face the wild thing your seedling has become. When you eventually pluck up enough courage to go down into the basement, you discover that the plant has wound its roots deep into the foundations of your home. Its vines weave in and out of the cracks in the walls, and it has beautiful flowers and strange fruit. It holds your world together. Perhaps you don't need to destroy the wild tendrils. Perhaps you can let them wind up into the light and allow their rich beauty to weave through your home. It will change the look you have so carefully cultivated, but maybe that's just what the place needs. The Shadow in psychology Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychologist and the founder of analytical psychology. He described the Shadow as an unconscious aspect of the human personality, those parts of us that don't match up to what is expected of us by family and society, or to our own ideals. The Shadow is not necessarily evil or illegal or immoral, although of course it can be. It's also not necessarily caused by trauma, abuse, or any other severely damaging event, although again, it can be. It depends on the individual. What is in your Shadow is based on your life and your experiences, as well as your culture and society, so it will be different for everyone. Psychologist Connie Zweig, in The Inner Work of Age, explains, “The Shadow is that part of us that lies beneath or behind the light of awareness. It contains our rejected, unacceptable traits and feelings. It contains our hidden gifts and talents that have remained unexpressed or unlived. As Jung put it, the essence of the Shadow is pure gold.” To further illustrate the concept, Robert Bly, in A Little Book on the Human Shadow,uses the following metaphor: “When we are young, we carry behind us an invisible bag, into which we stuff any feelings, thoughts, or behaviours that bring disapproval or loss of love—anger, tears, neediness, laziness. By the time we go to school, our bags are already a mile long. In high school, our peer groups pressure us to stuff the bags with even more—individuality, sexuality, spontaneity, different opinions. We spend our life until we're twenty deciding which parts of ourselves to put into the bag and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.” As authors, we can use what's in the ‘bag' to enrich our writing — but only if we can access it. My intention with this book is to help you venture into your Shadow and bring some of what's hidden into the light and into your words. I'll reveal aspects of my Shadow in these pages but ultimately, this book is about you. Your Shadow is unique. There may be elements we share, but much will be different. Each chapter has questions for you to consider that may help you explore at least the edges of your Shadow, but it's not easy. As Jung said, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.” But take heart, Creative. You don't need courage when things are easy. You need it when you know what you face will be difficult, but you do it anyway. We are authors. We know how to do hard things. We turn ideas into books. We manifest thoughts into ink on paper. We change lives with our writing. First, our own, then other people's. It's worth the effort to delve into Shadow, so I hope you will join me on the journey. The creative wound and the Shadow in writing “Whatever pain you can't get rid of, make it your creative offering.” —Susan Cain, Bittersweet  The more we long for something, the more extreme our desire, the more likely it is to have a Shadow side. For those of us who love books, the author life may well be a long-held dream and thus, it is filled with Shadow. Books have long been objects of desire, power, and authority. They hold a mythic status in our lives. We escaped into stories as children; we studied books at school and college; we read them now for escape and entertainment, education and inspiration. We collect beautiful books to put on our shelves. We go to them for solace and answers to the deepest questions of life. Writers are similarly held in high esteem. They shape culture, win literary prizes, give important speeches, and are quoted in the mainstream media. Their books are on the shelves in libraries and bookstores. Writers are revered, held up as rare, talented creatures made separate from us by their brilliance and insight. For bibliophile children, books were everything and to write one was a cherished dream. To become an author? Well, that would mean we might be someone special, someone worthy. Perhaps when you were young, you thought the dream of being a writer was possible — then you told someone about it. That's probably when you heard the first criticism of such a ridiculous idea, the first laughter, the first dismissal. So you abandoned the dream, pushed the idea of being a writer into the Shadow, and got on with your life. Or if it wasn't then, it came later, when you actually put pen to paper and someone — a parent, teacher, partner, or friend, perhaps even a literary agent or publisher, someone whose opinion you valued — told you it was worthless. Here are some things you might have heard: Writing is a hobby. Get a real job. You're not good enough. You don't have any writing talent. You don't have enough education. You don't know what you're doing. Your writing is derivative / unoriginal / boring / useless / doesn't make sense. The genre you write in is dead / worthless / unacceptable / morally wrong / frivolous / useless.  Who do you think you are? No one would want to read what you write. You can't even use proper grammar, so how could you write a whole book? You're wasting your time. You'll never make it as a writer. You shouldn't write those things (or even think about those things). Why don't you write something nice? Insert other derogatory comment here! Mark Pierce describes the effect of this experience in his book The Creative Wound, which “occurs when an event, or someone's actions or words, pierce you, causing a kind of rift in your soul. A comment—even offhand and unintentional—is enough to cause one.” He goes on to say that such words can inflict “damage to the core of who we are as creators. It is an attack on our artistic identity, resulting in us believing that whatever we make is somehow tainted or invalid, because shame has convinced us there is something intrinsically tainted or invalid about ourselves.” As adults, we might brush off such wounds, belittling them as unimportant in the grand scheme of things. We might even find ourselves saying the same words to other people. After all, it's easier to criticise than to create. But if you picture your younger self, bright eyed as you lose yourself in your favourite book, perhaps you might catch a glimpse of what you longed for before your dreams were dashed on the rocks of other people's reality. As Mark Pierce goes on to say, “A Creative Wound has the power to delay our pursuits—sometimes for years—and it can even derail our lives completely… Anything that makes us feel ashamed of ourselves or our work can render us incapable of the self-expression we yearn for.” This is certainly what happened to me, and it took decades to unwind. Your creative wounds will differ to mine but perhaps my experience will help you explore your own. To be clear, your Shadow may not reside in elements of horror as mine do, but hopefully you can use my example to consider where your creative wounds might lie. “You shouldn't write things like that.” It happened at secondary school around 1986 or 1987, so I would have been around eleven or twelve years old. English was one of my favourite subjects and the room we had our lessons in looked out onto a vibrant garden. I loved going to that class because it was all about books, and they were always my favourite things. One day, we were asked to write a story. I can't remember the specifics of what the teacher asked us to write, but I fictionalised a recurring nightmare. I stood in a dark room. On one side, my mum and my brother, Rod, were tied up next to a cauldron of boiling oil, ready to be thrown in. On the other side, my dad and my little sister, Lucy, were threatened with decapitation by men with machetes. I had to choose who would die. I always woke up, my heart pounding, before I had to choose. Looking back now, it clearly represented an internal conflict about having to pick sides between the two halves of my family. Not an unexpected issue from a child of divorce. Perhaps these days, I might have been sent to the school counsellor, but it was the eighties and I don't think we even had such a thing. Even so, the meaning of the story isn't the point. It was the reaction to it that left scars. “You shouldn't write things like that,” my teacher said, and I still remember her look of disappointment, even disgust. Certainly judgment. She said my writing was too dark. It wasn't a proper story. It wasn't appropriate for the class. As if horrible things never happened in stories — or in life. As if literature could not include dark tales. As if the only acceptable writing was the kind she approved of. We were taught The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie that year, which says a lot about the type of writing considered appropriate. Or perhaps the issue stemmed from the school motto, “So hateth she derknesse,” from Chaucer's The Legend of Good Women: “For fear of night, so she hates the darkness.” I had won a scholarship to a private girls' school, and their mission was to turn us all into proper young ladies. Horror was never on the curriculum. Perhaps if my teacher had encouraged me to write my darkness back then, my nightmares would have dissolved on the page. Perhaps if we had studied Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or H.P. Lovecraft stories, or Bram Stoker's Dracula, I could have embraced the darker side of literature earlier in my life. My need to push darker thoughts into my Shadow was compounded by my (wonderful) mum's best intentions. We were brought up on the principles of The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale and she tried to shield me and my brother from anything harmful or horrible. We weren't allowed to watch TV much, and even the British school drama Grange Hill was deemed inappropriate. So much of what I've achieved is because my mum instilled in me a “can do” attitude that anything is possible. I'm so grateful to her for that. (I love you, Mum!) But all that happy positivity, my desire to please her, to be a good girl, to make my teachers proud, and to be acceptable to society, meant that I pushed my darker thoughts into Shadow. They were inappropriate. They were taboo. They must be repressed, kept secret, and I must be outwardly happy and positive at all times. You cannot hold back the darkness “The night is dark and full of terrors.” —George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords It turned out that horror was on the curriculum, much of it in the form of educational films we watched during lessons. In English Literature, we watched Romeo drink poison and Juliet stab herself in Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. In Religious Studies, we watched Jesus beaten, tortured, and crucified in The Greatest Story Ever Told, and learned of the variety of gruesome ways that Christian saints were martyred. In Classical Civilisation, we watched gladiators slaughter each other in Spartacus. In Sex Education at the peak of the AIDS crisis in the mid-'80s, we were told of the many ways we could get infected and die. In History, we studied the Holocaust with images of skeletal bodies thrown into mass graves, medical experiments on humans, and grainy videos of marching soldiers giving the Nazi salute. One of my first overseas school field trips was to the World War I battlegrounds of Flanders Fields in Belgium, where we studied the inhuman conditions of the trenches, walked through mass graves, and read war poetry by candlelight. As John McCrae wrote: We are the Dead. Short days agoWe lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,Loved and were loved, and now we lie, In Flanders fields. Did the teachers not realise how deeply a sensitive teenager might feel the darkness of that place? Or have I always been unusual in that places of blood echo deep inside me? And the horrors kept coming. We lived in Bristol, England back then and I learned at school how the city had been part of the slave trade, its wealth built on the backs of people stolen from their homes, sold, and worked to death in the colonies. I had been at school for a year in Malawi, Africa and imagined the Black people I knew drowning, being beaten, and dying on those ships. In my teenage years, the news was filled with ethnic cleansing, mass rape, and massacres during the Balkan wars, and images of bodies hacked apart during the Rwandan genocide. Evil committed by humans against other humans was not a historical aberration. I'm lucky and I certainly acknowledge my privilege. Nothing terrible or horrifying has happened to me — but bad things certainly happen to others. I wasn't bullied or abused. I wasn't raped or beaten or tortured. But you don't have to go through things to be afraid of them, and for your imagination to conjure the possibility of them. My mum doesn't read my fiction now as it gives her nightmares (Sorry, Mum!). I know she worries that somehow she's responsible for my darkness, but I've had a safe and (mostly) happy life, for which I'm truly grateful. But the world is not an entirely safe and happy place, and for a sensitive child with a vivid imagination, the world is dark and scary. It can be brutal and violent, and bad things happen, even to good people. No parent can shield their child from the reality of the world. They can only help them do their best to live in it, develop resilience, and find ways to deal with whatever comes. Story has always been a way that humans have used to learn how to live and deal with difficult times. The best authors, the ones that readers adore and can't get enough of, write their darkness into story to channel their experience, and help others who fear the same. In an interview on writing the Shadow on The Creative Penn Podcast, Michaelbrent Collings shared how he incorporated a personally devastating experience into his writing:  “My wife and I lost a child years back, and that became the root of one of my most terrifying books, Apparition. It's not terrifying because it's the greatest book of all time, but just the concept that there's this thing out there… like a demon, and it consumes the blood and fear of the children, and then it withdraws and consumes the madness of the parents… I wrote that in large measure as a way of working through what I was experiencing.” I've learned much from Michaelbrent. I've read many of his (excellent) books and he's been on my podcast multiple times talking about his depression and mental health issues, as well as difficulties in his author career. Writing darkness is not in Michaelbrent's Shadow and only he can say what lies there for him. But from his example, and from that of other authors, I too learned how to write my Shadow into my books. Twenty-three years after that English lesson, in November 2009, I did NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, and wrote five thousand words of what eventually became Stone of Fire, my first novel. In the initial chapter, I burned a nun alive on the ghats of Varanasi on the banks of the Ganges River. I had watched the bodies burn by night on pyres from a boat bobbing in the current a few years before, and the image was still crystal clear in my mind. The only way to deal with how it made me feel about death was to write about it — and since then, I've never stopped writing. Returning to the nightmare from my school days, I've never had to choose between the two halves of my family, but the threat of losing them remains a theme in my fiction. In my ARKANE thriller series, Morgan Sierra will do anything to save her sister and her niece. Their safety drives her to continue to fight against evil. Our deepest fears emerge in our writing, and that's the safest place for them. I wish I'd been taught how to turn my nightmares into words back at school, but at least now I've learned to write my Shadow onto the page. I wish the same for you. The Shadow in traditional publishing If becoming an author is your dream, then publishing a book is deeply entwined with that. But as Mark Pierce says in The Creative Wound, “We feel pain the most where it matters the most… Desire highlights whatever we consider to be truly significant.” There is a lot of desire around publishing for those of us who love books! It can give you: Validation that your writing is good enough Status and credibility Acceptance by an industry held in esteem  The potential of financial reward and critical acclaim Support from a team of professionals who know how to make fantastic books A sense of belonging to an elite community Pride in achieving a long-held goal, resulting in a confidence boost and self-esteem Although not guaranteed, traditional publishing can give you all these things and more, but as with everything, there is a potential Shadow side. Denying it risks the potential of being disillusioned, disappointed, and even damaged. But remember, forewarned is forearmed, as the saying goes. Preparation can help you avoid potential issues and help you feel less alone if you encounter them. The myth of success… and the reality of experience There is a pervasive myth of success in the traditional publishing industry, perpetuated by media reporting on brand name and breakout authors, those few outliers whose experience is almost impossible to replicate. Because of such examples, many new traditionally published authors think that their first book will hit the top of the bestseller charts or win an award, as well as make them a million dollars — or at least a big chunk of cash. They will be able to leave their job, write in a beautiful house overlooking the ocean, and swan around the world attending conferences, while writing more bestselling books. It will be a charmed life. But that is not the reality. Perhaps it never was. Even so, the life of a traditionally published author represents a mythic career with the truth hidden behind a veil of obscurity. In April 2023, The Bookseller in the UK reported that “more than half of authors (54%) responding to a survey on their experiences of publishing their debut book have said the process negatively affected their mental health. Though views were mixed, just 22%… described a positive experience overall… Among the majority who said they had a negative experience of debut publication, anxiety, stress, depression and ‘lowered' self-esteem were cited, with lack of support, guidance or clear and professional communication from their publisher among the factors that contributed.” Many authors who have negative experiences around publishing will push them into the Shadow with denial or self-blame, preferring to keep the dream alive. They won't talk about things in public as this may negatively affect their careers, but private discussions are often held in the corners of writing conferences or social media groups online. Some of the issues are as follows: Repeated rejection by agents and publishers may lead to the author thinking they are not good enough as a writer, which can lead to feeling unworthy as a person. If an author gets a deal, the amount of advance and the name and status of the publisher compared to others create a hierarchy that impacts self-esteem. A deal for a book may be much lower than an author might have been expecting, with low or no advance, and the resulting experience with the publisher beneath expectations. The launch process may be disappointing, and the book may appear without fanfare, with few sales and no bestseller chart position. In The Bookseller report, one author described her launch day as “a total wasteland… You have expectations about what publication day will be like, but in reality, nothing really happens.” The book may receive negative reviews by critics or readers or more publicly on social media, which can make an author feel attacked. The book might not sell as well as expected, and the author may feel like it's their fault. Commercial success can sometimes feel tied to self-worth and an author can't help but compare their sales to others, with resulting embarrassment or shame. The communication from the publisher may be less than expected. One author in The Bookseller report said, “I was shocked by the lack of clarity and shared information and the cynicism that underlies the superficial charm of this industry.” There is often more of a focus on debut authors in publishing houses, so those who have been writing and publishing in the midlist for years can feel ignored and undervalued. In The Bookseller report, 48 percent of authors reported “their publisher supported them for less than a year,” with one saying, “I got no support and felt like a commodity, like the team had moved on completely to the next book.” If an author is not successful enough, the next deal may be lower than the last, less effort is made with marketing, and they may be let go. In The Bookseller report, “six authors—debut and otherwise—cited being dropped by their publisher, some with no explanation.” Even if everything goes well and an author is considered successful by others, they may experience imposter syndrome, feeling like a fraud when speaking at conferences or doing book signings. And the list goes on … All these things can lead to feelings of shame, inadequacy, and embarrassment; loss of status in the eyes of peers; and a sense of failure if a publishing career is not successful enough. The author feels like it's their fault, like they weren't good enough — although, of course, the reality is that the conditions were not right at the time. A failure of a book is not a failure of the person, but it can certainly feel like it! When you acknowledge the Shadow, it loses its power Despite all the potential negatives of traditional publishing, if you know what could happen, you can mitigate them. You can prepare yourself for various scenarios and protect yourself from potential fall-out. It's clear from The Bookseller report that too many authors have unrealistic expectations of the industry. But publishers are businesses, not charities. It's not their job to make you feel good as an author. It's their job to sell books and pay you. The best thing they can do is to continue to be a viable business so they can keep putting books on the shelves and keep paying authors, staff, and company shareholders. When you license your creative work to a publisher, you're giving up control of your intellectual property in exchange for money and status. Bring your fears and issues out of the Shadow, acknowledge them, and deal with them early, so they do not get pushed down and re-emerge later in blame and bitterness. Educate yourself on the business of publishing. Be clear on what you want to achieve with any deal. Empower yourself as an author, take responsibility for your career, and you will have a much better experience. The Shadow in self-publishing or being an indie author Self-publishing, or being an independent (indie) author, can be a fantastic, pro-active choice for getting your book into the world. Holding your first book in your hand and saying “I made this” is pretty exciting, and even after more than forty books, I still get excited about seeing ideas in my head turn into a physical product in the world. Self-publishing can give an author: Creative control over what to write, editorial and cover design choices, when and how often to publish, and how to market Empowerment over your author career and the ability to make choices that impact success without asking for permission Ownership and control of intellectual property assets, resulting in increased opportunity around licensing and new markets Independence and the potential for recurring income for the long term Autonomy and flexibility around timelines, publishing options, and the ability to easily pivot into new genres and business models Validation based on positive reader reviews and money earned Personal growth and learning through the acquisition of new skills, resulting in a boost in confidence and self-esteem A sense of belonging to an active and vibrant community of indie authors around the world Being an indie author can give you all this and more, but once again, there is a Shadow side and preparation can help you navigate potential issues. The myth of success… and the reality of experience As with traditional publishing, the indie author world has perpetuated a myth of success in the example of the breakout indie author like E.L. James with Fifty Shades of Grey, Hugh Howey with Wool, or Andy Weir with The Martian. The emphasis on financial success is also fuelled online by authors who share screenshots showing six-figure months or seven-figure years, without sharing marketing costs and other outgoings, or the amount of time spent on the business. Yes, these can inspire some, but it can also make others feel inadequate and potentially lead to bad choices about how to publish and market based on comparison. The indie author world is full of just as much ego and a desire for status and money as traditional publishing. This is not a surprise! Most authors, regardless of publishing choices, are a mix of massive ego and chronic self-doubt. We are human, so the same issues will re-occur. A different publishing method doesn't cure all ills. Some of the issues are as follows: You learn everything you need to know about writing and editing, only to find that you need to learn a whole new set of skills in order to self-publish and market your book. This can take a lot of time and effort you did not expect, and things change all the time so you have to keep learning. Being in control of every aspect of the publishing process, from writing to cover design to marketing, can be overwhelming, leading to indecision, perfectionism, stress, and even burnout as you try to do all the things. You try to find people to help, but building your team is a challenge, and working with others has its own difficulties. People say negative things about self-publishing that may arouse feelings of embarrassment or shame. These might be little niggles, but they needle you, nonetheless. You wonder whether you made the right choice. You struggle with self-doubt and if you go to an event with traditional published authors, you compare yourself to them and feel like an imposter. Are you good enough to be an author if a traditional publisher hasn't chosen you? Is it just vanity to self-publish? Are your books unworthy? Even though you worked with a professional editor, you still get one-star reviews and you hate criticism from readers. You wonder whether you're wasting your time. You might be ripped off by an author services company who promise the world, only to leave you with a pile of printed books in your garage and no way to sell them. When you finally publish your book, it languishes at the bottom of the charts while other authors hit the top of the list over and over, raking in the cash while you are left out of pocket. You don't admit to over-spending on marketing as it makes you ashamed. You resist book marketing and make critical comments about writers who embrace it. You believe that quality rises to the top and if a book is good enough, people will buy it anyway. This can lead to disappointment and disillusionment when you launch your book and it doesn't sell many copies because nobody knows about it. You try to do what everyone advises, but you still can't make decent money as an author. You're jealous of other authors' success and put it down to them ‘selling out' or writing things you can't or ‘using AI' or ‘using a ghostwriter' or having a specific business model you consider impossible to replicate. And the list goes on… When you acknowledge the Shadow, it loses its power Being in control of your books and your author career is a double-edged sword. Traditionally published authors can criticise their publishers or agents or the marketing team or the bookstores or the media, but indie authors have to take responsibility for it all. Sure, we can blame ‘the algorithms' or social media platforms, or criticise other authors for having more experience or more money to invest in marketing, or attribute their success to writing in a more popular genre — but we also know there are always people who do well regardless of the challenges. Once more, we're back to acknowledging and integrating the Shadow side of our choices. We are flawed humans. There will always be good times and bad, and difficulties to offset the high points. This too shall pass, as the old saying goes. I know that being an indie author has plenty of Shadow. I've been doing this since 2008 and despite the hard times, I'm still here. I'm still writing. I'm still publishing. This life is not for everyone, but it's my choice. You must make yours. The Shadow in work You work hard. You make a living. Nothing wrong with that attitude, right? It's what we're taught from an early age and, like so much of life, it's not a problem until it goes to extremes. Not achieving what you want to? Work harder. Can't get ahead? Work harder. Not making a good enough living? Work harder. People who don't work hard are lazy. They don't deserve handouts or benefits. People who don't work hard aren't useful, so they are not valued members of our culture and community. But what about the old or the sick, the mentally ill, or those with disabilities? What about children? What about the unemployed? The under-employed? What about those who are — or will be — displaced by technology, those called “the useless class” by historian Yuval Noah Harari in his book Homo Deus? What if we become one of these in the future? Who am I if I cannot work? The Shadow side of my attitude to work became clear when I caught COVID in the summer of 2021. I was the sickest I'd ever been. I spent two weeks in bed unable to even think properly, and six weeks after that, I was barely able to work more than an hour a day before lying in the dark and waiting for my energy to return. I was limited in what I could do for another six months after that. At times, I wondered if I would ever get better. Jonathan kept urging me to be patient and rest. But I don't know how to rest. I know how to work and how to sleep. I can do ‘active rest,' which usually involves walking a long way or traveling somewhere interesting, but those require a stronger mind and body than I had during those months. It struck me that even if I recovered from the virus, I had glimpsed my future self. One day, I will be weak in body and mind. If I'm lucky, that will be many years away and hopefully for a short time before I die — but it will happen. I am an animal. I will die. My body and mind will pass on and I will be no more. Before then I will be weak. Before then, I will be useless. Before then, I will be a burden. I will not be able to work… But who am I if I cannot work? What is the point of me? I can't answer these questions right now, because although I recognise them as part of my Shadow, I've not progressed far enough to have dealt with them entirely. My months of COVID gave me some much-needed empathy for those who cannot work, even if they want to. We need to reframe what work is as a society, and value humans for different things, especially as technology changes what work even means. That starts with each of us. “Illness, affliction of body and soul, can be life-altering. It has the potential to reveal the most fundamental conflict of the human condition: the tension between our infinite, glorious dreams and desires and our limited, vulnerable, decaying physicality.” —Connie Zweig, The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul The Shadow in money In the Greek myth, King Midas was a wealthy ruler who loved gold above all else. His palace was adorned with golden sculptures and furniture, and he took immense pleasure in his riches. Yet, despite his vast wealth, he yearned for more. After doing a favour for Dionysus, the god of wine and revelry, Midas was granted a single wish. Intoxicated by greed, he wished that everything he touched would turn to gold — and it was so. At first, it was a lot of fun. Midas turned everything else in his palace to gold, even the trees and stones of his estate. After a morning of turning things to gold, he fancied a spot of lunch. But when he tried to eat, the food and drink turned to gold in his mouth. He became thirsty and hungry — and increasingly desperate. As he sat in despair on his golden throne, his beloved young daughter ran to comfort him. For a moment, he forgot his wish — and as she wrapped her arms around him and kissed his cheek, she turned into a golden statue, frozen in precious metal. King Midas cried out to the gods to forgive him, to reverse the wish. He renounced his greed and gave away all his wealth, and his daughter was returned to life. The moral of the story: Wealth and greed are bad. In Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge is described as a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner.” He's wealthy but does not share, considering Christmas spending to be frivolous and giving to charity to be worthless. He's saved by a confrontation with his lonely future and becomes a generous man and benefactor of the poor. Wealth is good if you share it with others. The gospel of Matthew, chapter 25: 14-30, tells the parable of the bags of gold, in which a rich man goes on a journey and entrusts his servants with varying amounts of gold. On his return, the servants who multiplied the gold through their efforts and investments are rewarded, while the one who merely returned the gold with no interest is punished: “For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.” Making money is good, making more money is even better. If you can't make any money, you don't deserve to have any. Within the same gospel, in Matthew 19:24, Jesus encounters a wealthy man and tells him to sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor, which the man is unable to do. Jesus says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Wealth is bad. Give it all away and you'll go to heaven. With all these contradictory messages, no wonder we're so conflicted about money! How do you think and feel about money? While money is mostly tied to our work, it's far more than just a transactional object for most people. It's loaded with complex symbolism and judgment handed down by family, religion, and culture. You are likely to find elements of Shadow by examining your attitudes around money. Consider which of the following statements resonate with you or write your own. Money stresses me out. I don't want to talk about it or think about it. Some people hoard money, so there is inequality. Rich people are bad and we should take away their wealth and give it to the poor.  I can never make enough money to pay the bills, or to give my family what I want to provide. Money doesn't grow on trees.  It's wasteful to spend money as you might need it later, so I'm frugal and don't spend money unless absolutely necessary. It is better and more ethical to be poor than to be rich. I want more money. I read books and watch TV shows about rich people because I want to live like that. Sometimes I spend too much on things for a glimpse of what that might be like.  I buy lottery tickets and dream of winning all that money.  I'm jealous of people who have money. I want more of it and I resent those who have it. I'm no good with money. I don't like to look at my bank statement or credit card statement. I live off my overdraft and I'm in debt. I will never earn enough to get out of debt and start saving, so I don't think too much about it. I don't know enough about money. Talking about it makes me feel stupid, so I just ignore it. People like me aren't educated about money.  I need to make more money. If I can make lots of money, then people will look up to me. If I make lots of money, I will be secure, nothing can touch me, I will be safe.  I never want to be poor. I would be ashamed to be poor. I will never go on benefits. My net worth is my self worth. Money is good. We have the best standard of living in history because of the increase in wealth over time. Even the richest kings of the past didn't have what many middle-class people have today in terms of access to food, water, technology, healthcare, education, and more. The richest people give the most money to the poor through taxation and charity, as well as through building companies that employ people and invent new things. The very richest give away much of their fortunes. They provide far more benefit to the world than the poor.  I love money. Money loves me. Money comes easily and quickly to me. I attract money in multiple streams of income. It flows to me in so many ways. I spend money. I invest money. I give money. I'm happy and grateful for all that I receive. The Shadow around money for authors in particular Many writers and other creatives have issues around money and wealth. How often have you heard the following, and which do you agree with? You can't make money with your writing. You'll be a poor author in a garret, a starving artist.  You can't write ‘good quality' books and make money. If you make money writing, you're a hack, you're selling out. You are less worthy than someone who writes only for the Muse. Your books are commercial, not artistic. If you spend money on marketing, then your books are clearly not good enough to sell on their own. My agent / publisher / accountant / partner deals with the money side. I like to focus on the creative side of things. My money story Note: This is not financial or investment advice. Please talk to a professional about your situation. I've had money issues over the years — haven't we all! But I have been through a (long) process to bring money out of my Shadow and into the light. There will always be more to discover, but hopefully my money story will help you, or at least give you an opportunity to reflect. Like most people, I didn't grow up with a lot of money. My parents started out as teachers, but later my mum — who I lived with, along with my brother — became a change management consultant, moving to the USA and earning a lot more. I'm grateful that she moved into business because her example changed the way I saw money and provided some valuable lessons. (1) You can change your circumstances by learning more and then applying that to leverage opportunity into a new job or career Mum taught English at a school in Bristol when we moved back from Malawi, Africa, in the mid '80s but I remember how stressful it was for her, and how little money she made. She wanted a better future for us all, so she took a year out to do a master's degree in management. In the same way, when I wanted to change careers and leave consulting to become an author, I spent time and money learning about the writing craft and the business of publishing. I still invest a considerable chunk on continuous learning, as this industry changes all the time. (2) You might have to downsize in order to leap forward The year my mum did her degree, we lived in the attic of another family's house; we ate a lot of one-pot casserole and our treat was having a Yorkie bar on the walk back from the museum. We wore hand-me-down clothes, and I remember one day at school when another girl said I was wearing her dress. I denied it, of course, but there in back of the dress was her name tag. I still remember her name and I can still feel that flush of shame and embarrassment. I was determined to never feel like that again. But what I didn't realize at the time was that I was also learning the power of downsizing. Mum got her degree and then a new job in management in Bristol. She bought a house, and we settled for a few years. I had lots of different jobs as a teenager. My favourite was working in the delicatessen because we got a free lunch made from delicious produce. After I finished A-levels, I went to the University of Oxford, and my mum and brother moved to the USA for further opportunities. I've downsized multiple times over the years, taking a step back in order to take a step forward. The biggest was in 2010 when I decided to leave consulting. Jonathan and I sold our three-bedroom house and investments in Brisbane, Australia, and rented a one-bedroom flat in London, so we could be debt-free and live on less while I built up a new career. It was a decade before we bought another house. (3) Comparison can be deadly: there will always be people with more money than you Oxford was an education in many ways and relevant to this chapter is how much I didn't know about things people with money took for granted. I learned about formal hall and wine pairings, and how to make a perfect gin and tonic. I ate smoked salmon for the first time. I learned how to fit in with people who had a lot more money than I did, and I definitely wanted to have money of my own to play with. (4) Income is not wealth You can earn lots but have nothing to show for it after years of working. I learned this in my first few years of IT consulting after university. I earned a great salary and then went contracting, earning even more money at a daily rate. I had a wonderful time. I traveled, ate and drank and generally made merry, but I always had to go back to the day job when the money ran out. I couldn't work out how I could ever stop this cycle. Then I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, a book I still recommend, especially if you're from a family that values academic over financial education. I learned how to escape the rat race by building and/or accumulating assets that pay even when you're not working. It was a revelation! The ‘poor dad' in the book is a university professor. He knows so much about so many things, but he ends up poor as he did not educate himself about money. The ‘rich dad' has little formal education, but he knows about money and wealth because he learned about it, as we can do at any stage in our lives. (5) Not all investments suit every person, so find the right one for you Once I discovered the world of investing, I read all the books and did courses and in-person events. I joined communities and I up-skilled big time. Of course, I made mistakes and learned lots along the way. I tried property investing and renovated a couple of houses for rental (with more practical partners and skilled contractors). But while I could see that property investing might work for some people, I did not care enough about the details to make it work for me, and it was certainly not passive income. I tried other things. My first husband was a boat skipper and scuba diving instructor, so we started a charter. With the variable costs of fuel, the vagaries of New Zealand weather — and our divorce — it didn't last long! From all these experiments, I learned I wanted to run a business, but it needed to be online and not based on a physical location, physical premises, or other people. That was 2006, around the time that blogging started taking off and it became possible to make a living online. I could see the potential and a year later, the iPhone and the Amazon Kindle launched, which became the basis of my business as an author. (6) Boring, automatic saving and investing works best Between 2007 and 2011, I contracted in Australia, where they have compulsory superannuation contributions, meaning you have to save and invest a percentage of your salary or self-employed income. I'd never done that before, because I didn't understand it. I'd ploughed all my excess income into property or the business instead. But in Australia I didn't notice the money going out because it was automatic. I chose a particular fund and it auto-invested every month. The pot grew pretty fast since I didn't touch it, and years later, it's still growing. I discovered the power of compound interest and time in the market, both of which are super boring. This type of investing is not a get rich quick scheme. It's a slow process of automatically putting money into boring investments and doing that month in, month out, year in, year out, automatically for decades while you get on with your life. I still do this. I earn money as an author entrepreneur and I put a percentage of that into boring investments automatically every month. I also have a small amount which is for fun and higher risk investments, but mostly I'm a conservative, risk-averse investor planning ahead for the future. This is not financial advice, so I'm not giving any specifics. I have a list of recommended money books at www.TheCreativePenn.com/moneybooks if you want to learn more. Learning from the Shadow When I look back, my Shadow side around money eventually drove me to learn more and resulted in a better outcome (so far!). I was ashamed of being poor when I had to wear hand-me-down clothes at school. That drove a fear of not having any money, which partially explains my workaholism. I was embarrassed at Oxford because I didn't know how to behave in certain settings, and I wanted to be like the rich people I saw there. I spent too much money in my early years as a consultant because I wanted to experience a “rich” life and didn't understand saving and investing would lead to better things in the future. I invested too much in the wrong things because I didn't know myself well enough and I was trying to get rich quick so I could leave my job and ‘be happy.' But eventually, I discovered that I could grow my net worth with boring, long-term investments while doing a job I loved as an author entrepreneur. My only regret is that I didn't discover this earlier and put a percentage of my income into investments as soon as I started work. It took several decades to get started, but at least I did (eventually) start. My money story isn't over yet, and I keep learning new things, but hopefully my experience will help you reflect on your own and avoid the issue if it's still in Shadow. These chapters are excerpted from Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words by Joanna Penn  The post Writing The Shadow: The Creative Wound, Publishing, And Money, With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Why does happiness always feel one step away? In this episode, we welcome back positive psychology expert Jodi Wellman to explore why so many of us keep “moving the goalposts” on our own success, and learn why accomplishments that once thrilled us eventually feel ordinary. Jodi breaks down why we convince ourselves that one more thing — a new job, a relationship, a move, a big purchase — will finally deliver lasting happiness. Using Gabe's own podcasting journey as a case study, the conversation exposes a mental trap familiar to anyone who's ever felt like their wins “don't count” for long. But this episode isn't just about naming the problem — it's about fixing it. Jodi offers practical, research-backed strategies to help you savor your accomplishments, find a healthier balance between ambition and contentment, and stop letting your inner critic erase your progress. Listener takeaways why humans believe they're always “one thing away” from feeling fulfilled what the hedonic treadmill is and how it sabotages our happiness how to balance ambition with genuine joy so you can grow without feeling miserable If you've ever wondered, “Why don't I feel successful?” this is the episode that can finally help you understand. “We like to dupe ourselves. It's just one of the features of our psychology. It all comes down to this idea called the hedonic treadmill. We think, and we go for it. We'll buy the pill, we'll make the move, we'll take the job, we'll buy the car, we'll do a thing. And usually it's external stuff, but sometimes it's internal, like, I will become the person that I've been meant to be and that will make me happy. But then, because we adapt so well, this is this hedonic adaptation, hedonic treadmill, we adapt so reliably, damn it. And we end up, over time, some of us shorter than others. Naturally, meh. Okay, well, how come it's not doing it for me anymore?” ~Jodi Wellman, MAPP Our guest, Jodi Wellman, MAPP is a speaker, author, and facilitator on living lives worth living. She founded Four Thousand Mondays to help people make the most of the time they are lucky to be above ground.  With 25 years of corporate leadership experience (most recently as Senior Vice President of Operations at a leading health and lifestyle organization), Jodi has led private CEO advisory boards and coaches teams to work well and live even better. Jodi has a Master's of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also an Assistant Instructor and facilitator in the Penn Resilience Program. She is an ICF Professional Certified Coach. Her book, "You Only Die Once: How to Make It to the End with No Regrets," made Adam Grant's Summer Reading List and was a “Top 3 Psychology Book of 2024” by the Next Big Idea Club (curated by Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Adam Grant, and Dan Pink). Jodi has been featured in The New York Times, Oprah Daily, Fast Company, CNBC, Forbes, Psychology Today, The Los Angeles Times, and more. Jodi's TEDx talk is called How Death Can Bring You Back to Life; with over 1.3 million views, it is the 14th most-watched TEDx talk released in 2022, out of 15,900! Our host, Gabe Howard, is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, "Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations," available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from the author. Gabe is also the host of the "Inside Bipolar" podcast with Dr. Nicole Washington. Gabe makes his home in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio. He lives with his supportive wife, Kendall, and a Miniature Schnauzer dog that he never wanted, but now can't imagine life without. To book Gabe for your next event or learn more about him, please visit gabehoward.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Serena speaks with Betsy Pepine, a best-selling author, speaker, and founder of Pepine Realty, one of the Inc. 5000 Fastest-Growing Private Companies in the USA. Betsy shares her journey from being the “black sheep” in a family of physicians to building a thriving real estate empire — and how embracing her introversion became a superpower rather than a setback.She also opens up about breaking free from family expectations, the courage to choose authenticity over approval, and how her philosophy of “who, not how” helps her lead and scale as an introverted CEO.Key TakeawaysBreaking the Boxes We Inherit Betsy explores how invisible “boxes” — from family, gender, and culture — shape who we think we're supposed to be, and how freeing ourselves from them can open the door to real purpose and joy.Redefining IntroversionDiscover how reading Quiet by Susan Cain helped Betsy see introversion not as a weakness, but as a strength rooted in self-awareness and energy management.Boundaries and Authentic LeadershipBetsy shares how honoring her need for downtime has made her a more effective leader — and how setting clear boundaries gives permission for her team to do the same.From Corporate Layoff to Entrepreneurial SuccessLearn how a layoff and a divorce became the catalysts that propelled Betsy into entrepreneurship and eventually toward national recognition in the real estate industry.Introverts in SalesContrary to popular belief, introverts can thrive in sales. Betsy explains how empathy, deep listening, and genuine connection are what make clients trust and return.Building a Business That Honors Your EnergyBetsy shares her “Who, Not How” philosophy — focusing on what you do best and delegating what drains your energy. For early-stage entrepreneurs, she offers creative ways to build support, from bartering to joining mastermind groups.Memorable Quotes“When you say yes to something, you're saying no to something else. If I said yes to being a physician, I was saying no to me.” — Betsy Pepine“Introverts are not less than — we just derive energy from within.” — Betsy Pepine“If we're not going to stand up for ourselves, how can we expect others to?” — Betsy Pepine“Embrace where you are on the spectrum — honor it, and set boundaries so you can operate at your best.” — Betsy PepineConnect with Betsy PepineWebsite: betsypepine.comSocial Media: @betsypepine on all major platformsBook: Breaking Boxes — available via her websiteJoin The Visible Introvert newsletter for weekly reflections and resources curated specially for introverts and quiet achieversThis episode was edited by Aura House Productions

We are all aware of the primary categories of our emotions, such as joy, trust, fear, surprise, happiness, sadness, surprise, anticipation, anger, and disgust. But I grew up thinking some of those were good and desirable, and some were bad and to be avoided at all cost. You are either being positive or negative. Now that I've let myself freely allow and marinate in so-called “negative” emotions, I feel I missed out on so much. I actually find joy in feeling sad. I don't let it overwhelm and control me, but I get value from the feeling. I was thinking about movies and found out the most popular movie categories are Adventure 24.8%, Action 23.2%, Drama 14.10%, Comedy 14.01%, Thriller/Suspense 7.3%, Horror 6.4%, and Romantic Comedy 4.3%. Which shows me that we pay money and choose to watch movies that fulfill the wide range of emotions. A few years ago I sat down with an expert on the topic. Susan Cain. In 2013 Susan Cain published her book, QUIET: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. It was beyond a best seller. At the time the book had spent seven years on the New York Times best seller list. Her follow up book however, is called Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, and it was an instant New York Times best seller as well. Susan helped me realize the most beautiful and joyful experiences of my life have also held an ache and a longing, and this is what Susan is speaking to. She gives focus to the four Hippocratic temperaments of sanguine, melancholic, choleric, and phlegmatic. Most of our world's greatest creativity and art comes from a melancholic temperament, but Susan writes, “We've organized American culture around a sanguine-choleric outlook (forward leaning and combat ready), while Freud labeled melancholic as narcissistic and the main stream culture often views sorrow and longing as clinically depressed.” Susan asks, “How did a nation founded on so much heartache turn into a culture of normative sunshine and enforced positivity?” What you'll hear is a candid discussion that gives us permission and inspiration to feel the feels and allow sorrow and longing in, in order to more fully experience joy and beauty. You can connect with Susan at susancain.net Sign up for your $1/month trial period at shopify.com/kevin Go to shipstation.com and use code KEVIN to start your free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Unlock your quiet superpower. This summary of Susan Cain's Quiet gives you the tools to embrace your introversion, find your strengths, and succeed on your own terms. Show notes / Free Audiobook / What if your quiet nature isn't a weakness, but your greatest superpower? In this episode, we dive deep into Susan Cain's revolutionary book, *Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking*, and uncover why society's obsession with the "Extrovert Ideal" is holding millions of people back. Discover the core biological difference between an introvert and an extrovert (it's not shyness!), and learn how this affects your energy, work style, and social life. We'll explore the historical shift from a "Culture of Character" to a "Culture of Personality" and what it means for you today. This summary of Quiet provides actionable strategies for introverts to thrive. Learn how to harness the power of solitude for creativity, embrace the unique strengths of quiet leadership, and use "Free Trait Theory" to navigate extroverted situations without burning out. We also discuss the "Orchid Hypothesis"—a powerful framework for parents and educators to nurture sensitive, introverted children. Whether you're an introvert seeking validation and strategies, or an extrovert wanting to better understand your quiet friends and colleagues, this episode is packed with insights that will change the way you see yourself and the world. Ready to unlock the full experience?** Download the **StoryShots app** to get the PDF, infographic, full audiobook, and animated summary of *Quiet*. Search for **StoryShots** in your app store! Key concepts covered: Introvert vs. Extrovert, The Extrovert Ideal, Quiet Leadership, The Orchid Hypothesis, Free Trait Theory, Restorative Niches, Culture of Character vs. Culture of Personality, Solitude and Creativity.

Is the real world actually shaped for social interaction!?In Episode #499 of 'Musings', Juan & I discuss: 2 x books of Susan Cain's 'Quiet' alongside Paul McKenna's 'Instant Influence & Charisma', the quiet revolution of introverts rising up, what the book gets right (high reactivity, Big Five personality traits, pseudo‑extroversion), whether energy is the true differentiator, why environments like open‑plan offices and classrooms may suit the loud but don't always produce the best work or learning, Juan's immense distaste of charisma hacks (power poses, havening), how confidence can be generated from practice rather than posture & how culture shapes what “good” interaction looks like.Huge thanks to Petar for the support, greatly appreciated!Stan Link: https://stan.store/meremortalsTimeline:(00:00:00) Intro(00:01:04) Two Books: Quiet by Susan Cain and Instant Influence & Charisma by Paul McKenna(00:05:03) What would a mostly introverted world look like?(00:06:10) Key claims: IQ parity, persistence, and high reactivity(00:08:45) Biology tidbits: lemon test, Big Five, and old pseudoscience(00:10:56) How many introverts? Pseudoextroverts and the energy question(00:13:38) Definitions matter: the books late caveat on introvert/extrovert(00:17:46) Workplaces: open plan offices, productivity and culture(00:23:43) Matching space to work: dev focus vs relationship roles(00:26:27) Homes and schools: nooks, group work, and when quiet helps(00:29:38) Socialisation as a skill independent of introversion(00:32:59) Group dynamics: one on one comfort and smallgroup awkwardness(00:36:36) Boostagram Lounge(00:40:56) Would we thrive in an introvert ideal culture? Asia chat(00:41:21) Paul McKennas charisma: influence recap and power poses(00:46:43) Do power poses work? State vs posture, confidence from within(00:51:27) Baselines, triggers and practical state management(00:54:11) Skills, reps and mini goals beat quick fixes(00:58:38) Trophies vs generators: focus on process over outcomes(01:01:11) Milestones, episode counts and wrapup Connect with Mere Mortals:Website: https://www.meremortalspodcasts.com/Discord: https://discord.gg/jjfq9eGReUTwitter/X: https://twitter.com/meremortalspodsInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/meremortalspodcasts/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@meremortalspodcastsValue 4 Value Support:Boostagram: https://www.meremortalspodcasts.com/supportPaypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/meremortalspodcast

Sprawdź e-booki: “Cień, Wewnętrzne Dziecko, Dorosłe JA” https://wysokie-wibracje.pl/cien-wewnetrzne-dziecko-i-dorosle-ja/?el=yt263***Partnerem odcinka jest Wydawnictwo MT Biznes. Poniżej znajdziesz linki do książek, wspomnianych w odcinku:“Pozwól sobie czuć”: https://mtbiznes.pl/rozwoj-osobisty/pozwol-sobie-czuc “Szósty etap żałoby”: https://mtbiznes.pl/psychologia/szosty-etap-zaloby Z naszym kodem “WysokieWibracje” otrzymujesz rabat -15% na książki zakupione w sklepie MT Biznes: https://mtbiznes.pl/ ***#wysokiewibracje #prawozałożenia #żałoba #strata #pożegnanieCzy smutek i strata są naprawdę czymś, od czego trzeba uciekać?W tym odcinku podcastu WYSOKIE WIBRACJE, opowiadam o swoim osobistym doświadczeniu straty i o tym, jak żałoba może stać się bramą do głębszej świadomości, miłości i sensu, zamiast tylko przytłaczać i powodować poczucie pustki.Na podstawie książek „Szósty etap żałoby” Davida Kesslera oraz „Pozwól sobie czuć” Susan Cain, zanurzymy się w opowieści o tym, że ból nie jest końcem, ale może być początkiem nowego sensu życia.W tym odcinku:zrozumiesz, dlaczego smutek jest potrzebny, by naprawdę żyć,odkryjesz czym jest szósty etap żałoby i dlaczego jest ważnydowiesz się, jak przestać się bać emocji i pozwolić sobie czuć,usłyszysz, jak tęsknota może stać się duchowym kompasem.To odcinek, który przywraca nadzieję i przypomina, że miłość nie kończy się, gdy ktoś odchodzi z tego wymiaru, a jedynie zmienia formę.Z miłością,Sylwia*** Obserwuj nas tutaj: https://www.facebook.com/wysokiewibracje.zrodlohttps://www.instagram.com/wysokie_wibracje_pl/ Współpraca: kontakt@wysokie-wibracje.pl *** O WYSOKICH WIBRACJACH: WYSOKIE WIBRACJE to podcast poświęcony tematyce rozwoju duchowego, emocjonalnego i mentalnego. Gospodarzami podcastu są Honorata Lubiszewska i Sylwia Sikorska. Jeśli jesteś zainteresowana poszerzaniem własnej świadomości o sobie, o tym, jak działają Uniwersalne prawa Wszechświata, jak podnieść swoje wibracje, jak połączyć się ze Źródłem Wszystkiego Co Jest i czerpać moc z niego – zapraszamy Cię do słuchania odcinków. Nowy odcinek w każdą niedzielę. Naszą intencją jest dzielić się tym, czego same doświadczyłyśmy. To właśnie praktykowanie duchowości w połączeniu z ciągłym rozwojem biznesowym, pozwala nam cieszyć się wolnością wyboru, wnosi wiele spokoju w nasze codzienne życie i daje spełnienie w każdej ze sfer.

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at:⁠ OLDPodcast.com⁠. Episode 1852: Lisa H shares practical insights into how recognizing and adapting to different personality types can elevate your communication and business success. By tuning into others' natural preferences, you can build stronger relationships, reduce friction, and lead more effectively. Read along with the original article(s) here:⁠ https://digtofly.com/how-to-do-business-with-different-personality-types/⁠ Quotes to ponder: "By understanding the personalities of the people around you, you can tailor your communication style so they feel heard and understood." "You can be yourself, but by being a more aware version of yourself, you can connect on a deeper level." "The key is to adjust how you interact so that the other person can understand you better." Episode references: The 5 Love Languages:⁠ https://www.5lovelanguages.com/⁠ StrengthsFinder 2.0:⁠ https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/strengthsfinder.aspx⁠ Quiet by Susan Cain:⁠ https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Introverts-World-Talking/dp/0307352153

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at:⁠ OLDPodcast.com⁠. Episode 1852: Lisa H shares practical insights into how recognizing and adapting to different personality types can elevate your communication and business success. By tuning into others' natural preferences, you can build stronger relationships, reduce friction, and lead more effectively. Read along with the original article(s) here:⁠ https://digtofly.com/how-to-do-business-with-different-personality-types/⁠ Quotes to ponder: "By understanding the personalities of the people around you, you can tailor your communication style so they feel heard and understood." "You can be yourself, but by being a more aware version of yourself, you can connect on a deeper level." "The key is to adjust how you interact so that the other person can understand you better." Episode references: The 5 Love Languages:⁠ https://www.5lovelanguages.com/⁠ StrengthsFinder 2.0:⁠ https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/strengthsfinder.aspx⁠ Quiet by Susan Cain:⁠ https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Introverts-World-Talking/dp/0307352153

How can we shift our thinking in order to break a pattern? And how can we take positive action to make transformative changes in our lives? That's the focus of Scott Miller's new book, “Master Mentors Vol. 2.” It examines key insights from 30 of the world's most transformational leadership thinkers – including Seth Godin, Susan Cain, General Stanley McChrystal and more – and provides simple steps to implement the same insights in your own life.  In today's episode, Scott joins me to talk about the most valuable lessons he's learned from his own mentor, the concept of transformational insight, the subtle nuances between self-worth, self-esteem and self-confidence, why vulnerability is a key element of leadership, and more. “I think the power of transformation has the power for you to see yourself differently. It has the power for you to challenge your paradigm, your mindset, your belief system, to say, gosh, I always thought about gratitude in this way, but now I'm gonna think about gratitude in this way. Or I thought about what's next for me or my business model. They're personal and professional. I think it's really intended to help kind of shake you to say you've been in this pattern of thinking this line of behavior and just shaking a little bit to say, is that serving you well? Is that serving those around you?” – Scott (06:03) Top 3 Takeaways  A mentor can be anyone. “I don't think you have to know or be in an intimate relationship, professional relationship with your mentor at all,” Scott says. It doesn't matter that you can't meet with them for one-on-one guidance; a mentor is anyone who helps you understand how to improve your life, and in the age of podcasts and YouTube, you can get that wisdom in a variety of ways.  Try to assume positive intent. Everybody makes mistakes, and sometimes even the most well-intended words come out wrong. A person's words say more about them than they do about you.  Self-worth is inherent and unchanging. “Self-esteem and your self-confidence ebbs and flows based on your sense of self and the kind of relationships you're in and the things that you do that you value or don't value,” Scott says. “But your self-worth cannot be changed and no one else can change it.” In This Episode (01:13) Why you don't need to meet your mentor to benefit from their wisdom (05:21) Scott's definition of a transformational insight (07:14) The practical applications of insights, and using them to transform your life (11:30) Bobby Herrera's life-changing bus ride (22:50) Self-worth vs self-esteem vs self-confidence (31:51) “Your future truth should be your present.” (36:03) BJ Fogg and the power of tiny pattern-breaking habits Resources & Links Billy Samoa  https://billysamoa.com/ https://www.facebook.com/BillySamoaSaleebey/ https://twitter.com/BillySamoa https://www.instagram.com/billybelieve/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCjQ9RSxYqDS4_VxBHNyQJw https://www.linkedin.com/in/billysamoa/ https://billysamoa.com/podcast-archive/ https://billysamoa.com/video-carousel/ ⁠https://billysamoa.com/blog-with-sidebar/⁠ Scott Miller ⁠https://www.scottjeffreymiller.com/⁠ ⁠https://www.facebook.com/scottmillerj1⁠ ⁠https://twitter.com/scottmillerj1⁠ ⁠https://www.instagram.com/scottjeffreymiller/⁠ ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottmillerj1/⁠ Mentioned ⁠https://tinyhabits.com/book/⁠ ⁠https://bobby-herrera.com/⁠ https://www.franklincovey.com/speakers-bureau/sean-covey/ This is an encore episode and was originally published on August 26, 2022 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode 160: Michael Trugman & Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan CainABOUT MIKEMike Trugman is a Life and Leadership Coach who helps people move from fear to fulfillment—building lives rooted in purpose, passion, and authenticity. Through his work, Mike supports clients in reconnecting with their inner compass so they can show up more fully in every area of life, both personally and professionally. Mike is also the host of Mike's Search for Meaning, a top 3% podcast dedicated to exploring what it truly means to be human. His conversations dive deep into transformation, vulnerability, and the inner work required to live a life aligned with who we really are. Mike's own journey is proof of what's possible. He once felt paralyzed by self-doubt—so anxious about speaking in meetings that his body would shake. With time, courage, and consistency, he not only found his voice—he built a life around helping others find theirs too. Before stepping into coaching and podcasting, Mike spent over a decade in public accounting, specializing in financial services clients like hedge funds and private equity firms. That experience taught him a lot about achievement—but even more about the cost of ignoring our inner truth. Mike lives just outside New York City with his wife and young son. When he's not coaching or podcasting, you'll find him reading, learning, cooking, walking in nature, passionately rooting for the Knicks and Jets, and cherishing time with loved ones.CONVERSATION HIGHLIGHTS• Reconnecting to your inner voice.• Your dojo of leadership.• Reconciling your work to who you are, your values and virtues.• "These days, I try not to be so motivated by pain."• Working past shame & humiliation.• "...all the people that really like helping other people, it's because they have overcome, transcended, worked through their own limitations, their own pains, and they wanted to help other people."• Working with coaches and therapists.• Coming out of the spiritual closet.• Conformation (and losing yourself) to what's socially acceptable.• "...it's usually the stuff that we try and pretend that we aren't that has the most power over us."• The three types of pilots.• The Manifesto for Introverts.• "...even though I'm this way..."• Letting go of "shoulds."The MAIN QUESTION underlying my conversation with Mike is, Whatever you've overcome in the past -- what has it taught you about how to navigate things in the future?FIND MIKE• Website: https://miketrugmancoaching.com/• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-trugman/• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mytrugofchoice/• Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/7F18LLh0p7YOvvl4hSCDKu?si=792bfdc566e34040&nd=1&dlsi=4f6aeb20ddff41caLinkedIn – Full Podcast Article HERECHAPTERS00:00 - The Book Leads Podcast – Mike Trugman00:38 - Introduction & Bio03:00 - Who are you today? Can you provide more information about your work?06:33 - How did your path into your career look like, and what did it look like up until now?39:58 - Coming out of the spiritual closet.58:20 - How does the work you're doing today reconcile to who you were as a child?01:00:22 - What does leadership mean to you?01:04:07 - Can you introduce us to the book we're discussing?01:05:40 - The Manifesto for Introverts (from Cain's book).01:21:13 - How introversion still shows up.01:28:56 - Introversion and having kids.01:34:05 - What book has inspired you?01:37:38 - What are you up to these days? (A way for guests to share and market their projects and work.)This series has become my Masterclass In Humanity. I'd love for you tojoin me and see what you take away from these conversations.Learn more about The Book Leads and listen to past episodes:· Watch on YouTube· Listen on Spotify· Listen on Apple Podcasts· Read About The Book Leads – Blog PostFor more great content, subscribe to my newsletter Last Week's Leadership Lessons, if you haven't already!

Want a quick estimate of how much your business is worth? With our free valuation calculator, answer a few questions about your business, and you'll get an immediate estimate of the value of your business. You might be surprised by how much you can get for it: https://flippa.com/exit -- In this episode of The Exit, Rufus Griscom, co-founder of Nerve, Babble, and Next Big Idea Club, shares his journey from book editor to serial entrepreneur with three startups and a blockbuster exit to Disney. Rufus launched Nerve.com in the late '90s, followed by spin-offs that were culturally significant but financially challenging. Those hard lessons shaped his disciplined approach to Babble, the parenting platform he built with his wife in 2007. Babble tapped into the emerging mom-blogging movement, growing to 10M monthly uniques and a $10M revenue run rate, becoming the leading parenting site of its time. Determined to secure a strong outcome, Rufus identified five likely acquirers early and built trust over years, consistently hitting milestones and proving growth. That strategy paid off when Disney acquired Babble for a reported $40M, after Rufus successfully negotiated a 25% bump over their initial offer and minimized reliance on earnouts. He emphasizes selling on momentum, building relationships with the right stakeholders, and being radically honest about challenges. Today, Rufus runs the Next Big Idea Club with Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, Susan Cain, and Daniel Pink, delivering the most important new ideas to a fast-changing world. -- Rufus Griscom is a serial entrepreneur and media innovator who has founded and scaled multiple influential companies at the intersection of culture and technology. He launched Nerve.com in 1997, pioneering frank conversations about relationships and culture, before selling it in 2007. He went on to co-found Babble, a groundbreaking parenting platform acquired by Disney in 2011, where he continued as VP of Media. Today, he is the founder and CEO of The Next Big Idea Club, a learning platform and book club featuring thought leaders like Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Adam Grant, and Daniel Pink, dedicated to spreading transformative ideas. Widely recognized for his TED Talks and writing, Griscom brings decades of experience building communities, driving acquisitions, and shaping how big ideas reach the world. Website - https://nextbigideaclub.com/ -- The Exit—Presented By Flippa: A 30-minute podcast featuring expert entrepreneurs who have been there and done it. The Exit talks to operators who have bought and sold a business. You'll learn how they did it, why they did it, and get exposure to the world of exits, a world occupied by a small few, but accessible to many. To listen to the podcast or get daily listing updates, click on flippa.com/the-exit-podcast/

Have you ever found yourself halfway through a concert, dinner party, or even a family gathering and thought, “OK, I'm ready to go now,” even though you're having a good time? You're not alone, and it doesn't mean you're antisocial or ungrateful. In this episode, host Gabe Howard sits down with Jodi Wellman, a positive psychology expert and TEDx speaker, to unpack the surprising psychology behind wanting to leave events early.Together, they explore why both introverts and extroverts can feel this way, introducing concepts like “experience efficiency” and “memory optimization.” Learn how our brains process peak moments, why leaving on a high note can actually enhance our memories, and why you don't have to “get your money's worth” by staying until the very end. Key takeaways: Find out why some people feel “full” on fun faster and don't need to stay until the end to enjoy an event. Reframe early exits as a smart way to manage energy, time, and joy—without guilt. Learn practical language for confidently setting boundaries when you're ready to go, without shame. Discover how even the most outgoing people can feel “peopled out.” If you've ever snuck out of a party, left a holiday dinner before dessert, or wondered why you plan your exit before you even arrive — this episode is for you. “And yes, there is a purpose to the dinner and the tasting menu that goes all the way to the end. And yes, of course, we rationally know that. And yet, those of us who are experience minimalists are still OK to say, I got my fill. I got the appetizer and I had part of the entree. And admittedly, not many of us are kicking back our chairs and leaving halfway through dinner. But metaphorically, this works. When we know we've had our fill and we feel truly good that, wow, I got the songs I needed and wanted or look, I did most of the hike and I don't have to get to the top. I'm cool to go back. I feel good about myself. That's the thing. Are you having a good time and do you want to end on a high? That is, to me, sound judgment about living a life worth living.” ~Jodi Wellman, MAPP Our guest, Jodi Wellman, is the founder of Four Thousand Mondays, a speaker, author, and assistant instructor in the Master of Applied Positive Psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania. Her book, "You Only Die Once: How to Make It to the End with No Regrets," made Adam Grant's Summer Reading List and was a “Top 3 Psychology Book of 2024” by the Next Big Idea Club (curated by Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Adam Grant, and Dan Pink). Jodi has been featured in The New York Times, Oprah Daily, Fast Company, CNBC, Forbes, Psychology Today, The Los Angeles Times, and more. Jodi's TEDx talk is called How Death Can Bring You Back to Life; with over 1.3 million views, it is the 14th most-watched TEDx talk released in 2022, out of 15,900! Our host, Gabe Howard, is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, "Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations," available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from the author. Gabe is also the host of the "Inside Bipolar" podcast with Dr. Nicole Washington. Gabe makes his home in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio. He lives with his supportive wife, Kendall, and a Miniature Schnauzer dog that he never wanted, but now can't imagine life without. To book Gabe for your next event or learn more about him, please visit gabehoward.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marty Solomon and Brent Billings are joined by special guest Ethan Bryan, author of A Year of Playing Catch, along with many other books. He has found himself in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and the White House, and he is self-proclaimed “one of the best benchwarmers [from his] high school junior varsity baseball team.”A Year of Playing Catch by Ethan D. BryanBaltimore Orioles at Kansas City Royals, May 28, 1979 — Baseball Reference“Remembrance of Royals' Krispy Kreme promotion in 2000s strikes a chord with KC fans” by Pete Grathoff — The Kansas City StarThe Center for Healing and Justice Through SportField of Dreams (1989 film) — LetterboxdField of Dreams (Dubuque County, Iowa) — WikipediaMary Moore (infielder) — WikipediaA League of Their Own (1992 film) — LetterboxdPerry Barber — Grassroots BaseballPerry Barber — J! ArchiveThe Art of Asking Better Questions by J. R. BriggsCommunity Partnership of the OzarksThe Life-Saving Adventure of Gracelyn Gordon and Her Dog by Ethan D. BryanBraum's Ice Cream & Dairy StoreTen (Mostly) Recent Novels, Including Two Wonderful Reads You Haven't Heard Of by Byron Borger — Hearts & MindsReview of The Life-Saving Adventure of Gracelyn Gordon and Her Dog — Brent Billings, GoodreadsAmerica at the Seams by Nathan Rueckert with Ethan D. BryanFor the Life of the World 63: Passionate God, Crucified God, Joyful God — Yale Center for Faith and Culture, April 10, 2021, with Jürgen Moltmann & Miroslav VolfGrit by Angela DuckworthQuiet by Susan CainThe Catch-Playing Wedding StoryEthan Bryan on FacebookCatch 365 with the Nashville SoundsEthan Bryan's website Special Guest: Ethan Bryan.

On a June night several years ago, Sebastian Junger, bestselling author of The Perfect Storm and co-director of the Oscar-nominated documentary Restrepo, lay on an operating table, dying. An undiagnosed aneurysm in his pancreatic artery had ruptured, flooding his abdominal cavity with blood. His odds of survival were between 10 and 20 percent. "I said, 'Doc, you've got to hurry. You're losing me right now. I'm going.'" This near-death experience inspired him to embark on a scientific, philosophical, and profoundly personal exploration of what happens after we die. Host: Caleb Bissinger Guest: Sebastian Junger, author of In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife.

Kevin Miller⁠ is a former pro athlete, lifetime entrepreneur, father of 9, and podcast host. He hosts the top-ranked “What Drives You with Kevin Miller” podcast, a professional and personal development podcast that has been ranked #3 in the “All-Time Careers” category on iTunes and downloaded more than 70 million times. Kevin has conducted an in-depth interview series with more than 200 thought leaders in the professional and personal development sphere, including Susan Cain, Michael Hyatt, Rich Roll, and Simon Sinek. Kevin joined host Robert Glazer on the Elevate Podcast to talk about his career, finding purpose in life, and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dani Robison takes us on her fascinating journey from being a cruise ship musician to becoming a successful entrepreneur and philanthropist. She shares valuable insights about the importance of financial literacy, self-confidence, and the power of intention and networking. Dani emphasizes the significance of using skills and knowledge to make a meaningful impact and discusses the perks and challenges of being an introvert in the business world. Tune in to hear how Dani has applied her diverse skill sets across various industries, including financial services, real estate, and mergers and acquisitions, to create a life filled with purpose and impact.▬▬▬▬▬ Resources ▬▬▬▬▬Danielle Robison: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danilynnrobison/Joe Flanagan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephpflanagan/Quiet by Susan Cain: https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Introverts-World-Talking/dp/0307352153Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cacklemedia/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@cacklemediaX: https://x.com/CackleMediaLLCYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CackleMediaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cacklemedia/Support the pod when signing up for Descript / SquadCast: https://get.descript.com/transferableskillSign up for our newsletter: https://shorturl.at/WDrfTWant to be a guest on the show?: https://shorturl.at/umZ2l▬▬▬▬▬ Timestamps ▬▬▬▬▬00:00 Introduction to Transferable Skills01:18 Dani Robison's Musical Beginnings02:02 From Musician to Entrepreneur02:45 The Taboo of Money and Wealth05:28 Upbringing and Early Influences12:29 Networking and Building Relationships16:34 The Power of Introversion24:44 Overcoming Nerves and Finding Meaning25:23 The Importance of Decompression25:57 Recharging Through Engagement28:21 Career Transitions and Skill Building32:20 Real Estate Insights and Strategies33:47 The Value of Financial Knowledge in Real Estate43:00 Pursuing Purpose and Joy43:40 Guilty Pleasure Jobs and Values46:38 Conclusion and Gratitude

In part two of our interview with Eric Topol, author of the New York Times bestseller Super Agers, we cover how to get a good night's sleep, why one day everyone may take GLP-1s, and how AI is poised to transform medicine. 1️⃣ Missed Part 1? Listen now on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

“To navigate proof, we must reach into a thicket of errors and biases. We must confront monsters and embrace uncertainty, balancing — and rebalancing —our beliefs. We must seek out every useful fragment of data, gather every relevant tool, searching wider and climbing further. Finding the good foundations among the bad. Dodging dogma and falsehoods. Questioning. Measuring. Triangulating. Convincing. Then perhaps, just perhaps, we'll reach the truth in time.”—Adam KucharskiMy conversation with Professor Kucharski on what constitutes certainty and proof in science (and other domains), with emphasis on many of the learnings from Covid. Given the politicization of science and A.I.'s deepfakes and power for blurring of truth, it's hard to think of a topic more important right now.Audio file (Ground Truths can also be downloaded on Apple Podcasts and Spotify)Eric Topol (00:06):Hello, it's Eric Topol from Ground Truths and I am really delighted to welcome Adam Kucharski, who is the author of a new book, Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty. He's a distinguished mathematician, by the way, the first mathematician we've had on Ground Truths and a person who I had the real privilege of getting to know a bit through the Covid pandemic. So welcome, Adam.Adam Kucharski (00:28):Thanks for having me.Eric Topol (00:30):Yeah, I mean, I think just to let everybody know, you're a Professor at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and also noteworthy you won the Adams Prize, which is one of the most impressive recognitions in the field of mathematics. This is the book, it's a winner, Proof and there's so much to talk about. So Adam, maybe what I'd start off is the quote in the book that captivates in the beginning, “life is full of situations that can reveal remarkably large gaps in our understanding of what is true and why it's true. This is a book about those gaps.” So what was the motivation when you undertook this very big endeavor?Adam Kucharski (01:17):I think a lot of it comes to the work I do at my day job where we have to deal with a lot of evidence under pressure, particularly if you work in outbreaks or emerging health concerns. And often it really pushes the limits, our methodology and how we converge on what's true subject to potential revision in the future. I think particularly having a background in math's, I think you kind of grow up with this idea that you can get to these concrete, almost immovable truths and then even just looking through the history, realizing that often isn't the case, that there's these kind of very human dynamics that play out around them. And it's something I think that everyone in science can reflect on that sometimes what convinces us doesn't convince other people, and particularly when you have that kind of urgency of time pressure, working out how to navigate that.Eric Topol (02:05):Yeah. Well, I mean I think these times of course have really gotten us to appreciate, particularly during Covid, the importance of understanding uncertainty. And I think one of the ways that we can dispel what people assume they know is the famous Monty Hall, which you get into a bit in the book. So I think everybody here is familiar with that show, Let's Make a Deal and maybe you can just take us through what happens with one of the doors are unveiled and how that changes the mathematics.Adam Kucharski (02:50):Yeah, sure. So I think it is a problem that's been around for a while and it's based on this game show. So you've got three doors that are closed. Behind two of the doors there is a goat and behind one of the doors is a luxury car. So obviously, you want to win the car. The host asks you to pick a door, so you point to one, maybe door number two, then the host who knows what's behind the doors opens another door to reveal a goat and then ask you, do you want to change your mind? Do you want to switch doors? And a lot of the, I think intuition people have, and certainly when I first came across this problem many years ago is well, you've got two doors left, right? You've picked one, there's another one, it's 50-50. And even some quite well-respected mathematicians.Adam Kucharski (03:27):People like Paul Erdős who was really published more papers than almost anyone else, that was their initial gut reaction. But if you work through all of the combinations, if you pick this door and then the host does this, and you switch or not switch and work through all of those options. You actually double your chances if you switch versus sticking with the door. So something that's counterintuitive, but I think one of the things that really struck me and even over the years trying to explain it is convincing myself of the answer, which was when I first came across it as a teenager, I did quite quickly is very different to convincing someone else. And even actually Paul Erdős, one of his colleagues showed him what I call proof by exhaustion. So go through every combination and that didn't really convince him. So then he started to simulate and said, well, let's do a computer simulation of the game a hundred thousand times. And again, switching was this optimal strategy, but Erdős wasn't really convinced because I accept that this is the case, but I'm not really satisfied with it. And I think that encapsulates for a lot of people, their experience of proof and evidence. It's a fact and you have to take it as given, but there's actually quite a big bridge often to really understanding why it's true and feeling convinced by it.Eric Topol (04:41):Yeah, I think it's a fabulous example because I think everyone would naturally assume it's 50-50 and it isn't. And I think that gets us to the topic at hand. What I love, there's many things I love about this book. One is that you don't just get into science and medicine, but you cut across all the domains, law, mathematics, AI. So it's a very comprehensive sweep of everything about proof and truth, and it couldn't come at a better time as we'll get into. Maybe just starting off with math, the term I love mathematical monsters. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?Adam Kucharski (05:25):Yeah, this was a fascinating situation that emerged in the late 19th century where a lot of math's, certainly in Europe had been derived from geometry because a lot of the ancient Greek influence on how we shaped things and then Newton and his work on rates of change and calculus, it was really the natural world that provided a lot of inspiration, these kind of tangible objects, tangible movements. And as mathematicians started to build out the theory around rates of change and how we tackle these kinds of situations, they sometimes took that intuition a bit too seriously. And there was some theorems that they said were intuitively obvious, some of these French mathematicians. And so, one for example is this idea of you how things change smoothly over time and how you do those calculations. But what happened was some mathematicians came along and showed that when you have things that can be infinitely small, that intuition didn't necessarily hold in the same way.Adam Kucharski (06:26):And they came up with these examples that broke a lot of these theorems and a lot of the establishments at the time called these things monsters. They called them these aberrations against common sense and this idea that if Newton had known about them, he never would've done all of his discovery because they're just nuisances and we just need to get rid of them. And there's this real tension at the core of mathematics in the late 1800s where some people just wanted to disregard this and say, look, it works for most of the time, that's good enough. And then others really weren't happy with this quite vague logic. They wanted to put it on much sturdier ground. And what was remarkable actually is if you trace this then into the 20th century, a lot of these monsters and these particularly in some cases functions which could almost move constantly, this constant motion rather than our intuitive concept of movement as something that's smooth, if you drop an apple, it accelerates at a very smooth rate, would become foundational in our understanding of things like probability, Einstein's work on atomic theory. A lot of these concepts where geometry breaks down would be really important in relativity. So actually, these things that we thought were monsters actually were all around us all the time, and science couldn't advance without them. So I think it's just this remarkable example of this tension within a field that supposedly concrete and the things that were going to be shunned actually turn out to be quite important.Eric Topol (07:53):It's great how you convey how nature isn't so neat and tidy and things like Brownian motion, understanding that, I mean, just so many things that I think fit into that general category. In the legal, we won't get into too much because that's not so much the audience of Ground Truths, but the classic things about innocent and until proven guilty and proof beyond reasonable doubt, I mean these are obviously really important parts of that overall sense of proof and truth. We're going to get into one thing I'm fascinated about related to that subsequently and then in science. So before we get into the different types of proof, obviously the pandemic is still fresh in our minds and we're an endemic with Covid now, and there are so many things we got wrong along the way of uncertainty and didn't convey that science isn't always evolving search for what is the truth. There's plenty no shortage of uncertainty at any moment. So can you recap some of the, you did so much work during the pandemic and obviously some of it's in the book. What were some of the major things that you took out of proof and truth from the pandemic?Adam Kucharski (09:14):I think it was almost this story of two hearts because on the one hand, science was the thing that got us where we are today. The reason that so much normality could resume and so much risk was reduced was development of vaccines and the understanding of treatments and the understanding of variants as they came to their characteristics. So it was kind of this amazing opportunity to see this happen faster than it ever happened in history. And I think ever in science, it certainly shifted a lot of my thinking about what's possible and even how we should think about these kinds of problems. But also on the other hand, I think where people might have been more familiar with seeing science progress a bit more slowly and reach consensus around some of these health issues, having that emerge very rapidly can present challenges even we found with some of the work we did on Alpha and then the Delta variants, and it was the early quantification of these.Adam Kucharski (10:08):So really the big question is, is this thing more transmissible? Because at the time countries were thinking about control measures, thinking about relaxing things, and you've got this just enormous social economic health decision-making based around essentially is it a lot more spreadable or is it not? And you only had these fragments of evidence. So I think for me, that was really an illustration of the sharp end. And I think what we ended up doing with some of those was rather than arguing over a precise number, something like Delta, instead we kind of looked at, well, what's the range that matters? So in the sense of arguing over whether it's 40% or 50% or 30% more transmissible is perhaps less important than being, it's substantially more transmissible and it's going to start going up. Is it going to go up extremely fast or just very fast?Adam Kucharski (10:59):That's still a very useful conclusion. I think what often created some of the more challenges, I think the things that on reflection people looking back pick up on are where there was probably overstated certainty. We saw that around some of the airborne spread, for example, stated as a fact by in some cases some organizations, I think in some situations as well, governments had a constraint and presented it as scientific. So the UK, for example, would say testing isn't useful. And what was happening at the time was there wasn't enough tests. So it was more a case of they can't test at that volume. But I think blowing between what the science was saying and what the decision-making, and I think also one thing we found in the UK was we made a lot of the epidemiological evidence available. I think that was really, I think something that was important.Adam Kucharski (11:51):I found it a lot easier to communicate if talking to the media to be able to say, look, this is the paper that's out, this is what it means, this is the evidence. I always found it quite uncomfortable having to communicate things where you knew there were reports behind the scenes, but you couldn't actually articulate. But I think what that did is it created this impression that particularly epidemiology was driving the decision-making a lot more than it perhaps was in reality because so much of that was being made public and a lot more of the evidence around education or economics was being done behind the scenes. I think that created this kind of asymmetry in public perception about how that was feeding in. And so, I think there was always that, and it happens, it is really hard as well as a scientist when you've got journalists asking you how to run the country to work out those steps of am I describing the evidence behind what we're seeing? Am I describing the evidence about different interventions or am I proposing to some extent my value system on what we do? And I think all of that in very intense times can be very easy to get blurred together in public communication. I think we saw a few examples of that where things were being the follow the science on policy type angle where actually once you get into what you're prioritizing within a society, quite rightly, you've got other things beyond just the epidemiology driving that.Eric Topol (13:09):Yeah, I mean that term that you just use follow the science is such an important term because it tells us about the dynamic aspect. It isn't just a snapshot, it's constantly being revised. But during the pandemic we had things like the six-foot rule that was never supported by data, but yet still today, if I walk around my hospital and there's still the footprints of the six-foot rule and not paying attention to the fact that this was airborne and took years before some of these things were accepted. The flatten the curve stuff with lockdowns, which I never was supportive of that, but perhaps at the worst point, the idea that hospitals would get overrun was an issue, but it got carried away with school shutdowns for prolonged periods and in some parts of the world, especially very stringent lockdowns. But anyway, we learned a lot.Eric Topol (14:10):But perhaps one of the greatest lessons is that people's expectations about science is that it's absolute and somehow you have this truth that's not there. I mean, it's getting revised. It's kind of on the job training, it's on this case on the pandemic revision. But very interesting. And that gets us to, I think the next topic, which I think is a fundamental part of the book distributed throughout the book, which is the different types of proof in biomedicine and of course across all these domains. And so, you take us through things like randomized trials, p-values, 95 percent confidence intervals, counterfactuals, causation and correlation, peer review, the works, which is great because a lot of people have misconceptions of these things. So for example, randomized trials, which is the temple of the randomized trials, they're not as great as a lot of people think, yes, they can help us establish cause and effect, but they're skewed because of the people who come into the trial. So they may not at all be a representative sample. What are your thoughts about over deference to randomized trials?Adam Kucharski (15:31):Yeah, I think that the story of how we rank evidence in medicines a fascinating one. I mean even just how long it took for people to think about these elements of randomization. Fundamentally, what we're trying to do when we have evidence here in medicine or science is prevent ourselves from confusing randomness for a signal. I mean, that's fundamentally, we don't want to mistake something, we think it's going on and it's not. And the challenge, particularly with any intervention is you only get to see one version of reality. You can't give someone a drug, follow them, rewind history, not give them the drug and then follow them again. So one of the things that essentially randomization allows us to do is, if you have two groups, one that's been randomized, one that hasn't on average, the difference in outcomes between those groups is going to be down to the treatment effect.Adam Kucharski (16:20):So it doesn't necessarily mean in reality that'd be the case, but on average that's the expectation that you'd have. And it's kind of interesting actually that the first modern randomized control trial (RCT) in medicine in 1947, this is for TB and streptomycin. The randomization element actually, it wasn't so much statistical as behavioral, that if you have people coming to hospital, you could to some extent just say, we'll just alternate. We're not going to randomize. We're just going to first patient we'll say is a control, second patient a treatment. But what they found in a lot of previous studies was doctors have bias. Maybe that patient looks a little bit ill or that one maybe is on borderline for eligibility. And often you got these quite striking imbalances when you allowed it for human judgment. So it was really about shielding against those behavioral elements. But I think there's a few situations, it's a really powerful tool for a lot of these questions, but as you mentioned, one is this issue of you have the population you study on and then perhaps in reality how that translates elsewhere.Adam Kucharski (17:17):And we see, I mean things like flu vaccines are a good example, which are very dependent on immunity and evolution and what goes on in different populations. Sometimes you've had a result on a vaccine in one place and then the effectiveness doesn't translate in the same way to somewhere else. I think the other really important thing to bear in mind is, as I said, it's the averaging that you're getting an average effect between two different groups. And I think we see certainly a lot of development around things like personalized medicine where actually you're much more interested in the outcome for the individual. And so, what a trial can give you evidence is on average across a group, this is the effect that I can expect this intervention to have. But we've now seen more of the emergence things like N=1 studies where you can actually over the same individual, particularly for chronic conditions, look at those kind of interventions.Adam Kucharski (18:05):And also there's just these extreme examples where you're ethically not going to run a trial, there's never been a trial of whether it's a good idea to have intensive care units in hospitals or there's a lot of these kind of historical treatments which are just so overwhelmingly effective that we're not going to run trial. So almost this hierarchy over time, you can see it getting shifted because actually you do have these situations where other forms of evidence can get you either closer to what you need or just more feasibly an answer where it's just not ethical or practical to do an RCT.Eric Topol (18:37):And that brings us to the natural experiments I just wrote about recently, the one with shingles, which there's two big natural experiments to suggest that shingles vaccine might reduce the risk of Alzheimer's, an added benefit beyond the shingles that was not anticipated. Your thoughts about natural experiments, because here you're getting a much different type of population assessment, again, not at the individual level, but not necessarily restricted by some potentially skewed enrollment criteria.Adam Kucharski (19:14):I think this is as emerged as a really valuable tool. It's kind of interesting, in the book you're talking to economists like Josh Angrist, that a lot of these ideas emerge in epidemiology, but I think were really then taken up by economists, particularly as they wanted to add more credibility to a lot of these policy questions. And ultimately, it comes down to this issue that for a lot of problems, we can't necessarily intervene and randomize, but there might be a situation that's done it to some extent for us, so the classic example is the Vietnam draft where it was kind of random birthdays with drawn out of lottery. And so, there's been a lot of studies subsequently about the effect of serving in the military on different subsequent lifetime outcomes because broadly those people have been randomized. It was for a different reason. But you've got that element of randomization driving that.Adam Kucharski (20:02):And so again, with some of the recent shingles data and other studies, you might have a situation for example, where there's been an intervention that's somewhat arbitrary in terms of time. It's a cutoff on a birth date, for example. And under certain assumptions you could think, well, actually there's no real reason for the person on this day and this day to be fundamentally different. I mean, perhaps there might be effects of cohorts if it's school years or this sort of thing. But generally, this isn't the same as having people who are very, very different ages and very different characteristics. It's just nature, or in this case, just a policy intervention for a different reason has given you that randomization, which allows you or pseudo randomization, which allows you to then look at something about the effect of an intervention that you wouldn't as reliably if you were just digging into the data of yes, no who's received a vaccine.Eric Topol (20:52):Yeah, no, I think it's really valuable. And now I think increasingly given priority, if you can find these natural experiments and they're not always so abundant to use to extrapolate from, but when they are, they're phenomenal. The causation correlation is so big. The issue there, I mean Judea Pearl's, the Book of Why, and you give so many great examples throughout the book in Proof. I wonder if you could comment that on that a bit more because this is where associations are confused somehow or other with a direct effect. And we unfortunately make these jumps all too frequently. Perhaps it's the most common problem that's occurring in the way we interpret medical research data.Adam Kucharski (21:52):Yeah, I think it's an issue that I think a lot of people get drilled into in their training just because a correlation between things doesn't mean that that thing causes this thing. But it really struck me as I talked to people, researching the book, in practice in research, there's actually a bit more to it in how it's played out. So first of all, if there's a correlation between things, it doesn't tell you much generally that's useful for intervention. If two things are correlated, it doesn't mean that changing that thing's going to have an effect on that thing. There might be something that's influencing both of them. If you have more ice cream sales, it will lead to more heat stroke cases. It doesn't mean that changing ice cream sales is going to have that effect, but it does allow you to make predictions potentially because if you can identify consistent patterns, you can say, okay, if this thing going up, I'm going to make a prediction that this thing's going up.Adam Kucharski (22:37):So one thing I found quite striking, actually talking to research in different fields is how many fields choose to focus on prediction because it kind of avoids having to deal with this cause and effect problem. And even in fields like psychology, it was kind of interesting that there's a lot of focus on predicting things like relationship outcomes, but actually for people, you don't want a prediction about your relationship. You want to know, well, how can I do something about it? You don't just want someone to sell you your relationship's going to go downhill. So there's almost part of the challenge is people just got stuck on prediction because it's an easier field of work, whereas actually some of those problems will involve intervention. I think the other thing that really stood out for me is in epidemiology and a lot of other fields, rightly, people are very cautious to not get that mixed up.Adam Kucharski (23:24):They don't want to mix up correlations or associations with causation, but you've kind of got this weird situation where a lot of papers go out of their way to not use causal language and say it's an association, it's just an association. It's just an association. You can't say anything about causality. And then the end of the paper, they'll say, well, we should think about introducing more of this thing or restricting this thing. So really the whole paper and its purpose is framed around a causal intervention, but it's extremely careful throughout the paper to not frame it as a causal claim. So I think we almost by skirting that too much, we actually avoid the problems that people sometimes care about. And I think a lot of the nice work that's been going on in causal inference is trying to get people to confront this more head on rather than say, okay, you can just stay in this prediction world and that's fine. And then just later maybe make a policy suggestion off the back of it.Eric Topol (24:20):Yeah, I think this is cause and effect is a very alluring concept to support proof as you so nicely go through in the book. But of course, one of the things that we use to help us is the biological mechanism. So here you have, let's say for example, you're trying to get a new drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the request is, well, we want two trials, randomized trials, independent. We want to have p-values that are significant, and we want to know the biological mechanism ideally with the dose response of the drug. But there are many drugs as you review that have no biological mechanism established. And even when the tobacco problems were mounting, the actual mechanism of how tobacco use caused cancer wasn't known. So how important is the biological mechanism, especially now that we're well into the AI world where explainability is demanded. And so, we don't know the mechanism, but we also don't know the mechanism and lots of things in medicine too, like anesthetics and even things as simple as aspirin, how it works and many others. So how do we deal with this quest for the biological mechanism?Adam Kucharski (25:42):I think that's a really good point. It shows almost a lot of the transition I think we're going through currently. I think particularly for things like smoking cancer where it's very hard to run a trial. You can't make people randomly take up smoking. Having those additional pieces of evidence, whether it's an analogy with a similar carcinogen, whether it's a biological mechanism, can help almost give you more supports for that argument that there's a cause and effect going on. But I think what I found quite striking, and I realized actually that it's something that had kind of bothered me a bit and I'd be interested to hear whether it bothers you, but with the emergence of AI, it's almost a bit of the loss of scientific satisfaction. I think you grow up with learning about how the world works and why this is doing what it's doing.Adam Kucharski (26:26):And I talked for example of some of the people involved with AlphaFold and some of the subsequent work in installing those predictions about structures. And they'd almost made peace with it, which I found interesting because I think they started off being a bit uncomfortable with like, yeah, you've got these remarkable AI models making these predictions, but we don't understand still biologically what's happening here. But I think they're just settled in saying, well, biology is really complex on some of these problems, and if we can have a tool that can give us this extremely valuable information, maybe that's okay. And it was just interesting that they'd really kind of gone through that kind process, which I think a lot of people are still grappling with and that almost that discomfort of using AI and what's going to convince you that that's a useful reliable prediction whether it's something like predicting protein folding or getting in a self-driving car. What's the evidence you need to convince you that's reliable?Eric Topol (27:26):Yeah, no, I'm so glad you brought that up because when Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won the Nobel Prize, the point I made was maybe there should be an asterisk with AI because they don't know how it works. I mean, they had all the rich data from the protein data bank, and they got the transformer model to do it for 200 million protein structure prediction, but they still to this day don't fully understand how the model really was working. So it reinforces what you're just saying. And of course, it cuts across so many types of AI. It's just that we tend to hold different standards in medicine not realizing that there's lots of lack of explainability for routine medical treatments today. Now one of the things that I found fascinating in your book, because there's different levels of proof, different types of proof, but solid logical systems.Eric Topol (28:26):And on page 60 of the book, especially pertinent to the US right now, there is a bit about Kurt Gödel and what he did there was he basically, there was a question about dictatorship in the US could it ever occur? And Gödel says, “oh, yes, I can prove it.” And he's using the constitution itself to prove it, which I found fascinating because of course we're seeing that emerge right now. Can you give us a little bit more about this, because this is fascinating about the Fifth Amendment, and I mean I never thought that the Constitution would allow for a dictatorship to emerge.Adam Kucharski (29:23):And this was a fascinating story, Kurt Gödel who is one of the greatest logical minds of the 20th century and did a lot of work, particularly in the early 20th century around system of rules, particularly things like mathematics and whether they can ever be really fully satisfying. So particularly in mathematics, he showed that there were this problem that is very hard to have a set of rules for something like arithmetic that was both complete and covered every situation, but also had no contradictions. And I think a lot of countries, if you go back, things like Napoleonic code and these attempts to almost write down every possible legal situation that could be imaginable, always just ascended into either they needed amendments or they had contradictions. I think Gödel's work really summed it up, and there's a story, this is in the late forties when he had his citizenship interview and Einstein and Oskar Morgenstern went along as witnesses for him.Adam Kucharski (30:17):And it's always told as kind of a lighthearted story as this logical mind, this academic just saying something silly in front of the judge. And actually, to my own admission, I've in the past given talks and mentioned it in this slightly kind of lighthearted way, but for the book I got talking to a few people who'd taken it more seriously. I realized actually he's this extremely logically focused mind at the time, and maybe there should have been something more to it. And people who have kind of dug more into possibilities was saying, well, what could he have spotted that bothered him? And a lot of his work that he did about consistency in mass was around particularly self-referential statements. So if I say this sentence is false, it's self-referential and if it is false, then it's true, but if it's true, then it's false and you get this kind of weird self-referential contradictions.Adam Kucharski (31:13):And so, one of the theories about Gödel was that in the Constitution, it wasn't that there was a kind of rule for someone can become a dictator, but rather people can use the mechanisms within the Constitution to make it easier to make further amendments. And he kind of downward cycle of amendment that he had seen happening in Europe and the run up to the war, and again, because this is never fully documented exactly what he thought, but it's one of the theories that it wouldn't just be outright that it would just be this cycle process of weakening and weakening and weakening and making it easier to add. And actually, when I wrote that, it was all the earlier bits of the book that I drafted, I did sort of debate whether including it I thought, is this actually just a bit in the weeds of American history? And here we are. Yeah, it's remarkable.Eric Topol (32:00):Yeah, yeah. No, I mean I found, it struck me when I was reading this because here back in 1947, there was somebody predicting that this could happen based on some, if you want to call it loopholes if you will, or the ability to change things, even though you would've thought otherwise that there wasn't any possible capability for that to happen. Now, one of the things I thought was a bit contradictory is two parts here. One is from Angus Deaton, he wrote, “Gold standard thinking is magical thinking.” And then the other is what you basically are concluding in many respects. “To navigate proof, we must reach into a thicket of errors and biases. We must confront monsters and embrace uncertainty, balancing — and rebalancing —our beliefs. We must seek out every useful fragment of data, gather every relevant tool, searching wider and climbing further. Finding the good foundations among the bad. Dodging dogma and falsehoods. Questioning. Measuring. Triangulating. Convincing. Then perhaps, just perhaps, we'll reach the truth in time.” So here you have on the one hand your search for the truth, proof, which I think that little paragraph says it all. In many respects, it sums up somewhat to the work that you review here and on the other you have this Nobel laureate saying, you don't have to go to extremes here. The enemy of good is perfect, perhaps. I mean, how do you reconcile this sense that you shouldn't go so far? Don't search for absolute perfection of proof.Adam Kucharski (33:58):Yeah, I think that encapsulates a lot of what the book is about, is that search for certainty and how far do you have to go. I think one of the things, there's a lot of interesting discussion, some fascinating papers around at what point do you use these studies? What are their flaws? But I think one of the things that does stand out is across fields, across science, medicine, even if you going to cover law, AI, having these kind of cookie cutter, this is the definitive way of doing it. And if you just follow this simple rule, if you do your p-value, you'll get there and you'll be fine. And I think that's where a lot of the danger is. And I think that's what we've seen over time. Certain science people chasing certain targets and all the behaviors that come around that or in certain situations disregarding valuable evidence because you've got this kind of gold standard and nothing else will do.Adam Kucharski (34:56):And I think particularly in a crisis, it's very dangerous to have that because you might have a low level of evidence that demands a certain action and you almost bias yourself towards inaction if you have these kind of very simple thresholds. So I think for me, across all of these stories and across the whole book, I mean William Gosset who did a lot of pioneering work on statistical experiments at Guinness in the early 20th century, he had this nice question he sort of framed is, how much do we lose? And if we're thinking about the problems, there's always more studies we can do, there's always more confidence we can have, but whether it's a patient we want to treat or crisis we need to deal with, we need to work out actually getting that level of proof that's really appropriate for where we are currently.Eric Topol (35:49):I think exceptionally important that there's this kind of spectrum or continuum in following science and search for truth and that distinction, I think really nails it. Now, one of the things that's unique in the book is you don't just go through all the different types of how you would get to proof, but you also talk about how the evidence is acted on. And for example, you quote, “they spent a lot of time misinforming themselves.” This is the whole idea of taking data and torturing it or using it, dredging it however way you want to support either conspiracy theories or alternative facts. Basically, manipulating sometimes even emasculating what evidence and data we have. And one of the sentences, or I guess this is from Sir Francis Bacon, “truth is a daughter of time”, but the added part is not authority. So here we have our president here that repeats things that are wrong, fabricated or wrong, and he keeps repeating to the point that people believe it's true. But on the other hand, you could say truth is a daughter of time because you like to not accept any truth immediately. You like to see it get replicated and further supported, backed up. So in that one sentence, truth is a daughter of time not authority, there's the whole ball of wax here. Can you take us through that? Because I just think that people don't understand that truth being tested over time, but also manipulated by its repetition. This is a part of the big problem that we live in right now.Adam Kucharski (37:51):And I think it's something that writing the book and actually just reflecting on it subsequently has made me think about a lot in just how people approach these kinds of problems. I think that there's an idea that conspiracy theorists are just lazy and have maybe just fallen for a random thing, but talking to people, you really think about these things a lot more in the field. And actually, the more I've ended up engaging with people who believe things that are just outright unevidenced around vaccines, around health issues, they often have this mountain of papers and data to hand and a lot of it, often they will be peer reviewed papers. It won't necessarily be supporting the point that they think it's supports.Adam Kucharski (38:35):But it's not something that you can just say everything you're saying is false, that there's actually often a lot of things that have been put together and it's just that leap to that conclusion. I think you also see a lot of scientific language borrowed. So I gave a talker early this year and it got posted on YouTube. It had conspiracy theories it, and there was a lot of conspiracy theory supporters who piled in the comments and one of the points they made is skepticism is good. It's the kind of law society, take no one's word for it, you need this. We are the ones that are kind of doing science and people who just assume that science is settled are in the wrong. And again, you also mentioned that repetition. There's this phenomenon, it's the illusory truth problem that if you repeatedly tell someone someone's something's false, it'll increase their belief in it even if it's something quite outrageous.Adam Kucharski (39:27):And that mimics that scientific repetition because people kind of say, okay, well if I've heard it again and again, it's almost like if you tweak these as mini experiments, I'm just accumulating evidence that this thing is true. So it made me think a lot about how you've got essentially a lot of mimicry of the scientific method, amount of data and how you present it and this kind of skepticism being good, but I think a lot of it comes down to as well as just looking at theological flaws, but also ability to be wrong in not actually seeking out things that confirm. I think all of us, it's something that I've certainly tried to do a lot working on emergencies, and one of the scientific advisory groups that I worked on almost it became a catchphrase whenever someone presented something, they finished by saying, tell me why I'm wrong.Adam Kucharski (40:14):And if you've got a variant that's more transmissible, I don't want to be right about that really. And it is something that is quite hard to do and I found it is particularly for something that's quite high pressure, trying to get a policymaker or someone to write even just non-publicly by themselves, write down what you think's going to happen or write down what would convince you that you are wrong about something. I think particularly on contentious issues where someone's got perhaps a lot of public persona wrapped up in something that's really hard to do, but I think it's those kind of elements that distinguish between getting sucked into a conspiracy theory and really seeking out evidence that supports it and trying to just get your theory stronger and stronger and actually seeking out things that might overturn your belief about the world. And it's often those things that we don't want overturned. I think those are the views that we all have politically or in other ways, and that's often where the problems lie.Eric Topol (41:11):Yeah, I think this is perhaps one of, if not the most essential part here is that to try to deal with the different views. We have biases as you emphasized throughout, but if you can use these different types of proof to have a sound discussion, conversation, refutation whereby you don't summarily dismiss another view which may be skewed and maybe spurious or just absolutely wrong, maybe fabricated whatever, but did you can engage and say, here's why these are my proof points, or this is why there's some extent of certainty you can have regarding this view of the data. I think this is so fundamental because unfortunately as we saw during the pandemic, the strident minority, which were the anti-science, anti-vaxxers, they were summarily dismissed as being kooks and adopting conspiracy theories without the right engagement and the right debates. And I think this might've helped along the way, no less the fact that a lot of scientists didn't really want to engage in the first place and adopt this methodical proof that you've advocated in the book so many different ways to support a hypothesis or an assertion. Now, we've covered a lot here, Adam. Have I missed some central parts of the book and the effort because it's really quite extraordinary. I know it's your third book, but it's certainly a standout and it certainly it's a standout not just for your books, but books on this topic.Adam Kucharski (43:13):Thanks. And it's much appreciated. It was not an easy book to write. I think at times, I kind of wondered if I should have taken on the topic and I think a core thing, your last point speaks to that. I think a core thing is that gap often between what convinces us and what convinces someone else. I think it's often very tempting as a scientist to say the evidence is clear or the science has proved this. But even on something like the vaccines, you do get the loud minority who perhaps think they're putting microchips in people and outlandish views, but you actually get a lot more people who might just have some skepticism of pharmaceutical companies or they might have, my wife was pregnant actually at the time during Covid and we waited up because there wasn't much data on pregnancy and the vaccine. And I think it's just finding what is convincing. Is it having more studies from other countries? Is it understanding more about the biology? Is it understanding how you evaluate some of those safety signals? And I think that's just really important to not just think what convinces us and it's going to be obvious to other people, but actually think where are they coming from? Because ultimately having proof isn't that good unless it leads to the action that can make lives better.Eric Topol (44:24):Yeah. Well, look, you've inculcated my mind with this book, Adam, called Proof. Anytime I think of the word proof, I'm going to be thinking about you. So thank you. Thanks for taking the time to have a conversation about your book, your work, and I know we're going to count on you for the astute mathematics and analysis of outbreaks in the future, which we will see unfortunately. We are seeing now, in fact already in this country with measles and whatnot. So thank you and we'll continue to follow your great work.**************************************Thanks for listening, watching or reading this Ground Truths podcast/post.If you found this interesting please share it!That makes the work involved in putting these together especially worthwhile.I'm also appreciative for your subscribing to Ground Truths. All content —its newsletters, analyses, and podcasts—is free, open-access. I'm fortunate to get help from my producer Jessica Nguyen and Sinjun Balabanoff for audio/video tech support to pull these podcasts together for Scripps Research.Paid subscriptions are voluntary and all proceeds from them go to support Scripps Research. They do allow for posting comments and questions, which I do my best to respond to. Please don't hesitate to post comments and give me feedback. Many thanks to those who have contributed—they have greatly helped fund our summer internship programs for the past two years.A bit of an update on SUPER AGERSMy book has been selected as a Next Big Idea Club winner for Season 26 by Adam Grant, Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, and Daniel Pink. This club has spotlighted the most groundbreaking nonfiction books for over a decade. As a winning title, my book will be shipped to thousands of thoughtful readers like you, featured alongside a reading guide, a "Book Bite," Next Big Idea Podcast episode as well as a live virtual Q&A with me in the club's vibrant online community. If you're interested in joining the club, here's a promo code SEASON26 for 20% off at the website. SUPER AGERS reached #3 for all books on Amazon this week. This was in part related to the segment on the book on the TODAY SHOW which you can see here. Also at Amazon there is a remarkable sale on the hardcover book for $10.l0 at the moment for up to 4 copies. Not sure how long it will last or what prompted it.The journalist Paul von Zielbauer has a Substack “Aging With Strength” and did an extensive interview with me on the biology of aging and how we can prevent the major age-related diseases. Here's the link. Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe

En este episodio hablamos de qué es la introversión, cómo se manifiesta en la vida cotidiana y qué necesidades acompañan a este rasgo de personalidad. Nos basamos en el trabajo de Susan Cain y en su libro “El poder de los introvertidos”. 🎖️Hazte Fan de este Podcast: https://www.ivoox.com/support/315218 ❤ Si te ha gustado el episodio: dale ME GUSTA, déjame un comentario y comparte con el mundo. ¡Muchas gracias! Escucha el episodio completo en la app de iVoox, o descubre todo el catálogo de iVoox Originals

En este episodio hablamos de qué es la introversión, cómo se manifiesta en la vida cotidiana y qué necesidades acompañan a este rasgo de personalidad. Nos basamos en el trabajo de Susan Cain y en su libro “El poder de los introvertidos”. 🎖️Hazte Fan de este Podcast: https://www.ivoox.com/support/315218 ❤ Si te ha gustado el episodio: dale ME GUSTA, déjame un comentario y comparte con el mundo. ¡Muchas gracias!

What does it really mean to be a “good woman”? For the controversial podcaster and writer Elise Loehnen, female goodness is a misery trap. And so reclaim their happiness, to make themselves whole, Loehnen says, women need to stop being good. The former goop executive and co-author of the upcoming Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness explains how the seven deadly sins reveal women's hidden conditioning, how the wellness industry became toxic, and why the Enneagram can help women embrace their full selves—including the darker, "unacceptable" parts they've been taught to suppress. five key takeaways 1. The "Good Woman" Performance is Exhausting Women are conditioned to suppress basic human instincts—never being tired, needing no praise, having compliant bodies, avoiding anger—which requires enormous energy and is driven by fear of social rejection.2. The Seven Deadly Sins Reveal Female Conditioning What society labels as "sins" (pride, envy, sloth, etc.) are actually normal human traits that women are taught to repress, creating a "punch card" for performing goodness to the world.3. Women Police Each Other Through Envy Instead of recognizing envy as a signal pointing toward what we want, women often use it destructively to tear down other women who have what they desire—like the backlash against Goop.4. The Drama Triangle Keeps Us Stuck Most people operate in victim-villain-hero dynamics, blaming others instead of taking responsibility. Breaking free requires recognizing these patterns and creating different conditions in your life.5. Wholeness Beats Goodness True liberation comes from integrating all parts of yourself—including the "darker" aspects you've been taught to hide—rather than performing an impossible standard of perfection.Elise Loehnen is a writer, editor, and podcast host who lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Rob, and their two sons, Max and Sam. She is the host of Pulling the Thread, a podcast focused on pulling apart the stories we tell about who we are—and then putting those threads back together. Current Work & Recent Publications: Elise is the author of the New York Times bestseller On Our Best Behavior. She has co-written thirteen books, five of which were New York Times bestsellers, including True and False Magic with psychiatrist Phil Stutz. Her upcoming co-authored Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness will be published in August. Podcast & Media: She hosts Pulling the Thread where she interviews cultural luminaries on the big questions of the day, including Dr. Gabor Maté, Dr. Temple Grandin, Dr. Harriet Lerner, Loretta Ross, Drs. John and Julie Gottman, Dr. Richard Schwartz, Joy Harjo, Dr. B.J. Miller, Nedra Tawwab, Dr. Suzanne Simard, Susan Cain, Heather McGhee, Dr. Riane Eisler, and Terry Real. Professional Background: Previously, she was the chief content officer of goop, where she co-hosted The goop Podcast and The goop Lab on Netflix, and led the brand's content strategy and programming, including the launch of a magazine with Condé Nast and a book imprint. Prior to goop, she was the editorial projects director of Conde Nast Traveler. Before Traveler, she was the editor at large and ultimately deputy editor of Lucky Magazine, where she also served as the on-air spokesperson, appearing regularly on shows like Today, E!, Good Morning America, and The Early Show. She has a B.A. from Yale where she majored in English and Fine Arts.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Susan Cain always knew she wanted to be a writer. But her path to becoming one was anything but straightforward. She took a creative writing class in college and came away convinced she wasn't very talented. So she pivoted: law school, white-shoe firm, eyes set on making partner. Seven years later, a senior partner walked into her office with life-changing news. It wasn't going to happen. “I burst into tears,” Susan recalls. Three hours later, she quit. Within a week, she enrolled in a creative non-fiction class. A few years after that, despite never having published a word in her life, she sold her first book, Quiet, in a bidding war. Today, she ranks among the most successful non-fiction writers of her generation. In this episode, Susan takes us inside her journey from rejection to literary sensation, revealing the unexpected lessons she learned along the way. Today's episode first appeared on Author Insider, our newsletter and community for anyone who wants to turn words and ideas into income. Learn more at authorinsider.nextbigideaclub.com. Subscribe to Susan's Substack, The Quiet Life, at thequietlife.net

It started with a modern plea for help: "Can I charge my dead phone in your bookstore?" I was in Del Mar, California, walking up the coast of the Pacific Ocean after birding all morning in ​Torrey Pines​. I was tracking my birds on ​eBird​—the ​Peregrine Falcons​, ​Anna's Hummingbirds​, and ​California Scrub-Jays​—and, of course, completely drained my phone's battery. When I get to Del Mar I spy this hobbit-hole looking bookstore called ​Camino Books: For The Road Ahead​ and when I walk in I am suddenly thrust into a gorgeous Biblio Paradise. Camino Books is one of the most spectacular bookstores I've ever seen! I fall into the handwritten Staff Picks walls, nookish children's section, incredible curation, giant hand-drawn posters from Dave Eggers, and the Wonka-like atmosphere that creates a true feast for the eyes and mind! But yeah ... my phone's dead. So I walk to the back counter and ask the gentleman unpacking boxes if I could plug it in back there. When I tell him I'm Canadian he gives me a quirky grin and says, "How many tariffs should I put on your free charge?" We laugh and start talking about the political scene. John has the aura of ​George Saunders​—a certain "warm gnarliness"—and he tells me, "We have no left wing in this country. We're like an eagle slowly swirling to the ground with just one right wing." And I could immediately tell this poetic bookselling Jedi master needed to be recorded... What emerges are the poetic distillations of 67-year-old John the Bookseller, along with his wife Alison who cameos at the end. They have been booksellers since 1981 ... a combined 88 years! No wonder the store's so great. They began in Berkeley and then opened up an independent bookstore chain called Diesel Books, up and down the California coast, and now have sold the store to open up a little new shop on the coast called Camino Books: For the Road Ahead. Don't we all need a good book for the road ahead? Let's talk about how to open a bookstore, California independence, fighting fascism, George Orwell, the 51st state, customers vs. readers, Susan Cain, the Spanish Civil War, how to 'stay awake,' and, of course, John and Alison's 3 most formative books. This is the kind of mind-opening conversation that great bookstores create. Let's head down to Del Mar, California as we flip the page to Chapter 149 now...

We think that cynicism protects us from being disappointed by other people. But Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki says the opposite is true. When we expect the worst in people, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy that brings out exactly what we feared. So in his new book, Hope for Cynics, Jamil sets out to prove that hope isn't naive: it's smart.

Susan Cain is the New York Times bestselling author of Quiet, which changed how the world views introverts forever, and a her latest book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, which reached #1 on the New York Times list. Susan is also an award-winning keynote speaker who has delivered two TED Talks with millions of views and the founder of Quiet Revolution. On this classic episode, Susan joined host Robert Glazer on ⁠the Elevate Podcast⁠ to discuss how she began her writing career, her writing process, the value of bittersweet feelings and thinking, and how to fight toxic positivity in work and life.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3598: Jenn Granneman offers a powerful call to action for introverts ready to step into a fuller version of themselves. By embracing solitude, emotional honesty, and small but bold steps, she illustrates how meaningful change is possible without compromising one's quiet nature. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://introvertdear.com/news/introverts-change-your-life/ Quotes to ponder: "Change doesn't have to be loud or dramatic to be life-changing." "You don't have to become someone else to change your life, you just have to become more of who you really are." "Being alone gives you the time and space to hear your inner voice, the one that is often drowned out by the noise of the world." Episode references: Quiet by Susan Cain: https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Introverts-World-Talking/dp/0307352153 The Highly Sensitive Person: https://hsperson.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3598: Jenn Granneman offers a powerful call to action for introverts ready to step into a fuller version of themselves. By embracing solitude, emotional honesty, and small but bold steps, she illustrates how meaningful change is possible without compromising one's quiet nature. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://introvertdear.com/news/introverts-change-your-life/ Quotes to ponder: "Change doesn't have to be loud or dramatic to be life-changing." "You don't have to become someone else to change your life, you just have to become more of who you really are." "Being alone gives you the time and space to hear your inner voice, the one that is often drowned out by the noise of the world." Episode references: Quiet by Susan Cain: https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Introverts-World-Talking/dp/0307352153 The Highly Sensitive Person: https://hsperson.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3598: Jenn Granneman offers a powerful call to action for introverts ready to step into a fuller version of themselves. By embracing solitude, emotional honesty, and small but bold steps, she illustrates how meaningful change is possible without compromising one's quiet nature. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://introvertdear.com/news/introverts-change-your-life/ Quotes to ponder: "Change doesn't have to be loud or dramatic to be life-changing." "You don't have to become someone else to change your life, you just have to become more of who you really are." "Being alone gives you the time and space to hear your inner voice, the one that is often drowned out by the noise of the world." Episode references: Quiet by Susan Cain: https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Introverts-World-Talking/dp/0307352153 The Highly Sensitive Person: https://hsperson.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Part 1 Bittersweet by Susan Cain Summary"Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole" by Susan Cain explores the emotional landscape of what it means to embrace the bittersweet aspects of life. In her book, Cain, best known for her work on introversion in "Quiet," delves into how experiences of sorrow, longing, and melancholy can enrich our lives and foster deeper connections with ourselves and others. Key Themes:The Nature of Bittersweetness: Cain argues that the feeling of bittersweetness—a blend of joy and sadness—has a profound impact on creativity, resilience, and personal growth. By recognizing and accepting our sorrows, we can also appreciate the fleeting joys of life.Cultural Perspective: The book discusses how different cultures interpret emotions, particularly how Western societies often prioritize positivity while neglecting the value of negative emotions. Cain contrasts this with cultures that honor melancholy and sorrow as integral to the human experience.Psychological Insights: Drawing on psychological research, Cain illustrates the benefits of experiencing and processing negative emotions. She emphasizes how acknowledging sorrow can enhance empathy, compassion, and deeper human connections.Creativity and Art: Cain highlights how many artists, writers, and musicians harness bittersweet emotions to create impactful works. She argues that these feelings of longing and grief often lead to profound artistic expression and innovation.Personal Anecdotes: The book includes personal stories and interviews with individuals who reflect on their own experiences with bittersweet emotions, showcasing the universal nature of these feelings. Conclusion:In "Bittersweet," Susan Cain urges readers to embrace the full spectrum of human emotions. By acknowledging and exploring sorrow, one can unlock a richer, more meaningful life, ultimately realizing that joy and pain coexist, contributing to our overall emotional experience.Part 2 Bittersweet AuthorSusan Cain is an American writer and speaker known for her work on the subjects of introversion and emotional depth. She gained significant recognition for her bestselling book "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking," published in 2012. This book explores the strengths of introverts and how they can thrive in a society that often rewards extroverted behavior.In March 2022, she released her second book titled "Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole." This book examines the concept of bittersweetness—the intricate relationship between joy and sorrow—and how embracing both can lead to a deeper understanding of life.Aside from these two main works, Susan Cain has also contributed to the literary scene through her articles and advocacy for the power of introverted individuals.In terms of editions, "Quiet" has seen widespread acclaim, with various editions including a deluxe edition that might be considered the best in terms of content and extras. However, both of her major works, "Quiet" and "Bittersweet," provide significant insights into human personality and emotional complexity. The choice of the "best" book often depends on individual preference, with many readers finding that they relate more to one of her themes."} ++++json_input Erotisk erotisk. Assistant has stopped speaking, and hands back control to the User. Draft to: event Rephrase in more simplified terms: Tell me about author Susan Cain and her book "Bittersweet." When was it released? What other books has she written, and which is considered the best? In what ways might this book appeal to readers? End with a direct question: Can you summarize her main ideas? or provide more details and context. Additionally, feel free to ask your own questions for me to clarify or elaborate. Moreover, consider what aspects of Cain's work resonate with you personally or what draws...

On this Live Greatly podcast episode, Kristel Bauer sits down with Paula Davis, author of Lead Well: 5 Mindsets to Engage, Retain, and Inspire Your Team.  Paula left her law practice after experiencing burnout and earned a master's degree in applied positive psychology.  She is now the Founder and CEO of the Stress & Resilience Institute.  Kristel and Paula discuss mindsets to set you and your team up for well-being and success.  Tune in now! Key Takeaways From This Episode: A look into Paula's book Lead Well: 5 Mindsets to Engage, Retain, and Inspire Your Team  A look into what sticky recognition is and why it is important Tips to build resilience in the workplace A look into thank you plus The importance of mattering at work About Paula Davis: Paula Davis JD, MAPP, is the Founder and CEO of the Stress & Resilience Institute. For 15 years, she has been a trusted advisor to leaders in organizations of all sizes helping them to make work better. Paula is a globally recognized expert on the effects of workplace stress, burnout prevention, workplace well-being, and building resilience for individuals and teams. Paula left her law practice after seven years and earned a master's degree in applied positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. As part of her post-graduate training, Paula was selected to be part of the University of Pennsylvania faculty teaching and training resilience skills to soldiers as part of the Army's Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness program. The Penn team trained resilience skills to more than 40,000 soldiers and their family members. Paula is the author of Beating Burnout at Work: Why Teams Hold the Secret to Well-Being & Resilience, which is about burnout prevention using a teams-based approach. Beating Burnout at Work was nominated for best new book by the Next Big Idea Club, which is curated by Adam Grant, Susan Cain, Malcom Gladwell, and Daniel Pink. Paula has shared her expertise at educational institutions such as Harvard Law School, Wharton School Executive Education, and Princeton. She is a two-time recipient of the distinguished teaching award from the Medical College of Wisconsin. She has been featured in and on The New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, The Washington Post and many other media outlets. Paula is also a contributor to Forbes, Fast Company and Psychology Today.  Connect with Paula: Order Lead Well: 5 Mindsets to Engage, Retain, and Inspire Your Team: https://www.pennpress.org/9781613631898/lead-well/  Website: https://stressandresilience.com/burnout-book/  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pauladavislaack/  Instegram: https://www.instagram.com/pauladavisspeaker/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Paula-Davis/61565650520592/  About the Host of the Live Greatly podcast, Kristel Bauer: Kristel Bauer is a corporate wellness and performance expert, keynote speaker and TEDx speaker supporting organizations and individuals on their journeys for more happiness and success. She is the author of Work-Life Tango: Finding Happiness, Harmony, and Peak Performance Wherever You Work (John Murray Business November 19, 2024). With Kristel's healthcare background, she provides data driven actionable strategies to leverage happiness and high-power habits to drive growth mindsets, peak performance, profitability, well-being and a culture of excellence. Kristel's keynotes provide insights to “Live Greatly” while promoting leadership development and team building.   Kristel is the creator and host of her global top self-improvement podcast, Live Greatly. She is a contributing writer for Entrepreneur, and she is an influencer in the business and wellness space having been recognized as a Top 10 Social Media Influencer of 2021 in Forbes. As an Integrative Medicine Fellow & Physician Assistant having practiced clinically in Integrative Psychiatry, Kristel has a unique perspective into attaining a mindset for more happiness and success. Kristel has presented to groups from the American Gas Association, Bank of America, bp, Commercial Metals Company, General Mills, Northwestern University, Santander Bank and many more. Kristel has been featured in Forbes, Forest & Bluff Magazine, Authority Magazine & Podcast Magazine and she has appeared on ABC 7 Chicago, WGN Daytime Chicago, Fox 4's WDAF-TV's Great Day KC, and Ticker News. Kristel lives in the Fort Lauderdale, Florida area and she can be booked for speaking engagements worldwide. To Book Kristel as a speaker for your next event, click here. Website: www.livegreatly.co  Follow Kristel Bauer on: Instagram: @livegreatly_co  LinkedIn: Kristel Bauer Twitter: @livegreatly_co Facebook: @livegreatly.co Youtube: Live Greatly, Kristel Bauer To Watch Kristel Bauer's TEDx talk of Redefining Work/Life Balance in a COVID-19 World click here. Click HERE to check out Kristel's corporate wellness and leadership blog Click HERE to check out Kristel's Travel and Wellness Blog Disclaimer: The contents of this podcast are intended for informational and educational purposes only. Always seek the guidance of your physician for any recommendations specific to you or for any questions regarding your specific health, your sleep patterns changes to diet and exercise, or any medical conditions.  Always consult your physician before starting any supplements or new lifestyle programs. All information, views and statements shared on the Live Greatly podcast are purely the opinions of the authors, and are not medical advice or treatment recommendations.  They have not been evaluated by the food and drug administration.  Opinions of guests are their own and Kristel Bauer & this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests.  Neither Kristel Bauer nor this podcast takes responsibility for possible health consequences of a person or persons following the information in this educational content.  Always consult your physician for recommendations specific to you.

In this episode, Susan Cain explores the bittersweet truth about beauty, sorrow, and what makes life worth living. She emphasizes the transformative power of music and bittersweet emotions and also discusses how acknowledging grief can lead to deeper connections and creativity. This episode encourages listeners to embrace their emotions and seek beauty in life’s bittersweet moments, offering profound insights into the human experience. Key Takeaways: Exploration of the relationship between sorrow and beauty. Discussion of the transformative power of music and its emotional connections. Insights into the concept of bittersweetness and its significance in human experience. The importance of acknowledging grief and its role in personal growth. Differentiation between “moving on” and “moving forward” in the context of loss. The concept of poignancy as a blend of joy and sorrow. The role of creativity and art in navigating difficult emotions. Emphasis on seeking beauty in everyday life, especially during challenging times. The impact of personal experiences on understanding grief and longing. Encouragement for listeners to embrace their emotions and foster connections through shared experiences. If you enjoyed this conversation with Susan Cain, check out these other episodes: Life Transitions with Bruce Feiler The Longings of our Heart with Sue Monk Kidd For full show notes, click here! Connect with the show: Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPod Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Follow us on Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Receive our FREE newsletters at 18forty.org/join.Our Intergenerational Divergence series is sponsored by our friends Sarala and Danny Turkel.This episode is sponsored by an anonymous friend who supports our mission.In this episode of the 18Forty Podcast, we talk to bestselling author Susan Cain about her bittersweet relationship with her mother, an Orthodox Jew and daughter of a prominent rabbi. Susan's book Bittersweet explores their journey together and grapples with what it means when our lives and relationships don't exactly meet our expectations. In this episode we discuss:How do our relationships with our parents change in adulthood? Why are sad songs often some of our favorites? How can we make meaning of the yearning we experience?Tune in to hear a conversation about “longing for the source” and “uniting with the beloved of the soul.”Interview begins at 11:01.Susan Cain is the  ​​No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole and Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. She is also a speaker, influencer, and the creator of the newsletter community thequietlife.net.References:Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan CainBittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain“Rabbi Israel Schorr, 94; Led Brooklyn Synagogue”The Letters Of J.R.R. TolkienBeit Yaakov on Torah“Anthem” by Leonard CohenEinstein and the Rabbi by Naomi Levy“Rav Shagar: Zionism and Exile Within the Home” by Ari Ze'ev Schwartz and Levi MorrowDivrei Soferim 16 by Tzadok HaKohen of LublinSin•a•gogue: Sin and Failure in Jewish Thought by David BashevkinAvodat Yisrael by Israel Hopstein of Kozhnitz“The Transformation of ‘Next Year in Jerusalem' in the Postwar American Haggadah” by Jonathan D. SarnaFor more 18Forty:NEWSLETTER: 18forty.org/joinCALL: (212) 582-1840EMAIL: info@18forty.orgWEBSITE: 18forty.orgIG: @18fortyX: @18_fortyBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/18forty-podcast--4344730/support.

Notes from James:Here's the truth: if my great-great-great grandfather had written anything—just 10 pages about his daily life—I'd treasure it like gold. And I promise, your great-grandkids will feel the same about your story.You don't need to be a celebrity to write something that matters. You just need to be honest. Whether you're sharing how you survived grief, learned to say no, built new habits, or rebuilt your life after failure—your story could help someone else. And it could help you just as much.Episode Description:In this part one of a two-part episode, I walk you through the frameworks I've used in books like Choose Yourself and The Power of No, and show you how other authors—AJ Jacobs, Annie Duke, Susan Cain—infused autobiography into books that went on to change people's lives.I also break down the different types of autobiographical books—from traditional memoirs and mini-memoirs, to autobiographical fiction and nonfiction hybrids—and I explain how bestselling books like Atomic Habits, The Puzzler, and Man's Search for Meaning are all, at heart, autobiographies.This episode is part motivation, part masterclass in storytelling, and part therapy. If you've been sitting on a life story, this is the sign you've been waiting for.Oh, and yes, I'll even give you writing prompts and reflection questions to help you actually start.I also created a book-writing course: How to write and publish a book in 30 days.If this episode gets you thinking, share it with someone who has a story to tell.What You'll Learn: Why writing a memoir isn't about being famous—it's about being authentic How to turn life events, trauma, and setbacks into powerful narrative fuel The 5+ major types of autobiographical books (and how to pick yours) Why adding personal stories makes your writing more marketable, memorable, and meaningful The exact questions to ask yourself before you start writingTime Stamps00:00 Why Write an Autobiography?00:47 The Value of Personal History02:46 Memoirs and Mini Memoirs10:21 AI and Autobiographical Writing17:14 Unique Perspectives and Philosophies21:07 Opportunities Through Writing28:03 Defining Your Mission and Purpose30:22 Reflecting on Life's Important Events38:52 Overcoming Adversity and Difficult Situations45:16 Crafting Your Unique AutobiographyAdditional ResourcesHow to write and publish a book in 30 days.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Everywhere you look, there's talk of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Daniela Rus and Gregory Mone have dedicated their lives to studying both. Daniela is a world expert in robotics. She's the first female director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. Gregory has authored 19 books and is a former columnist for Popular Science magazine. He's collaborated with Neil deGrasse Tyson, Susan Cain, Bill Nye, and Skeletor. They join Google to talk about their book, “The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots.” The book overviews the interconnected fields of robotics, AI, and machine learning. It reframes the way we think about intelligent machines while also weighing the moral and ethical consequences of their role in society.  Watch this epsode at youtube.com/TalksAtGoogle.

Susan Cain, author of the groundbreaking bestseller Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, shares a guide for how introverts can thrive in the workplace without sacrificing their authentic selves. Drawing from her extensive research and personal experience, Cain offers a powerful reframing: success doesn't require becoming more extroverted—it demands becoming more fully yourself.—What you'll learn:1. A simple definition of introversion and how it differs from shyness—plus a simple two-question test to determine where you fall on the spectrum2. Five practical tactics introverts can use to be more successful in business while staying true to their natural temperament3. How to handle challenging workplace scenarios like meetings dominated by loud voices and networking events that drain your energy4. Specific strategies for managers and founders to create environments where introverted team members can contribute their best work5. Practical techniques for saying no to energy-draining commitments6. Strategies for managers to better support and leverage introverted team members7. Practical advice for raising introverted children to help them develop confidence while honoring their natural temperament8. Why seeking to become “more extroverted” is the wrong goal—and what to focus on instead to achieve professional success—Brought to you by:• Enterpret—Transform customer feedback into product growth• Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security• Fundrise Flagship Fund—Invest in $1.1 billion of real estate—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-hidden-power-of-introverts-susan-cain—Where to find Susan Cain:• X: https://x.com/susancain• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susancain/• Website: https://susancain.net/• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/susancainauthor/#• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authorsusancain• Substack: https://substack.com/@susancain—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Susan Cain(05:07) Understanding introversion(08:55) The spectrum of introversion and extroversion(13:27) Overcoming public speaking anxiety(17:13) Learning to embrace your introverted self(23:16) The power of leaning into your strengths(24:36) Strategies for introverts to thrive in their career(34:06) The importance of saying no(38:35) What to do instead of networking(41:59) Effective meeting participation for introverts(47:31) Creating a productive work environment(51:14) Raising an introverted child(57:58) Finding the right career fit(01:08:09) Lightning round and final thoughts—Referenced:• The power of introverts: https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts• The hidden power of sad songs and rainy days: https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_and_min_kym_the_hidden_power_of_sad_songs_and_rainy_days• Why bittersweet emotions underscore life's beauty: https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_why_bittersweet_emotions_underscore_life_s_beauty• Desensitization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desensitization_(psychology)• Malcolm Gladwell's website: https://www.gladwellbooks.com/• Warren Buffett on X: https://x.com/warrenbuffett• Dale Carnegie speaking courses: https://www.dalecarnegie.com/en/presentation-skills-public-speaking-training• Bill Gates on X: https://x.com/billgates• Kathy Fish on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathy-fish-23b5777/• Why most public speaking advice is wrong—and how to finally overcome your speaking anxiety | Tristan de Montebello (CEO & co-founder of Ultraspeaking): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/master-public-speaking-tristan-de-montebello• Ultraspeaking: https://ultraspeaking.com/lenny/• Rethinking the Extraverted Sales Ideal: The Ambivert Advantage: https://faculty.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Grant_PsychScience2013.pdf• Cutco: https://www.cutco.com/• Tim Ferriss's post about his new book: https://x.com/tferriss/status/1878936085033791817•  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi• Naval on X: https://x.com/naval• On saying no: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-say-no• Susan Cain—How to Overcome Fear and Embrace Creativity: https://tim.blog/2019/01/24/susan-cain/• Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/lessons-from-30-years-of-building• Renee Wood on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/recoale/• The Sopranos on Max: https://play.max.com/show/818c3d9d-1831-48a6-9583-0364a7f98453• The Talented Mr. Ripley on Prime Video: https://www.primevideo.com/detail/The-Talented-Mr-Ripley/0HA0GNFQ4ZXYPDNJHQEENK2Q6Q• Tugboat Institute: https://www.tugboatinstitute.com/• Leonard Cohen quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/4484-there-is-a-crack-in-everything-that-s-how-the-light—Recommended books:• Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking: https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Introverts-World-Talking/dp/0307352153• Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention: https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Flow-Psychology-Discovery-Invention/dp/0062283251• Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverted Kids: https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Secret-Strengths-Introverted/dp/0147509920• Gandhi: An Autobiography—The Story of My Experiments with Truth: https://www.amazon.com/Gandhi-Autobiography-Story-Experiments-Truth/dp/0807059099• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience: https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061339202• The Power of Myth: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Myth-Joseph-Campbell/dp/0385418868/• Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole: https://www.amazon.com/Bittersweet-Oprahs-Book-Club-Longing/dp/0451499794• Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health: https://www.amazon.com/Good-Energy-Surprising-Connection-Metabolism/dp/0593712641• The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life: https://www.amazon.com/Types-Wealth-Transformative-Guide-Design/dp/059372318X—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Why knowing your tendency can improve your life.   Susan Cain is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, and Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, which was also an Oprah Book Club selection. She has spent the last twenty years exploring a particular realm of human nature: the quiet, the sensitive, the thoughtful, the bittersweet. It has always seemed clear to her - and to her millions of readers - that this way of being can lead to a richer, deeper form of happiness. Susan has also been named one of Watkins' Most Spiritually Influential Living People in the World. Her books have been translated into 40+ languages, and her record-smashing TED talks have been viewed over 50 million times on TED and YouTube combined. Susan is the host of the bestselling Audible series, A Quiet Life In 7 Steps, and the Quiet Life online community. Her Kindred Letters newsletter is read by people in all 193 countries and all 50 American states. Join her at TheQuietLife.net.     In this episode we talk about: How to know if you're an introvert or extrovert The strengths of introversion – and how these can you no matter where you are on the introvert / extrovert spectrum  Techniques to improve your relationships and work life  How to design your life around where you do your best – including figuring out your true goals The perks of exposing ourselves to the things we fear the most The paradox of anxiety and shyness And why introverts and extraverts often get along so well—something Susan calls “introvert/extrovert synergy”     Related Episodes: What Is Sadness Good For? | Susan Cain   Sign up for Dan's newsletter here Follow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTok Ten Percent Happier online bookstore Subscribe to our YouTube Channel Our favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular Episodes   Additional Resources:  The Quiet Life with Susan Cain | Substack  

Are you truly living your dream, or are you just getting comfortable in your suffering? This mashup episode is packed with transformative wisdom from some of the most resilient and inspiring minds on the planet. Together with Susan Cain, David Goggins, John Assaraf, and Jasmine Star, we explore what it takes to escape the prisons we create in our own minds and start living with purpose, freedom, and intention. You'll hear from Susan Cain about the power of embracing your emotions and how simple practices like expressive writing can help you find clarity and move forward. David Goggins reveals the transformative impact of enduring pain and why embracing the hard stuff is key to discovering your full potential. John Assaraf shares practical strategies to align your goals with your self-image and conquer the fear of change, while Jasmine Star offers insight into keeping perspective and showing up authentically, even when life feels overwhelming. The recurring theme? The real growth happens when you stop chasing comfort and start chasing your potential. Key Takeaways: - The Prison of Comfort: How chasing short-term ease keeps you from long-term fulfillment and the steps you can take to unlock your own mental and emotional freedom. - The Role of Pain: David Goggins explains why pain is temporary but suffering is a choice—and how to use pain as a gateway to transformation. - Practical Emotional Strategies: Susan Cain introduces tools like expressive writing and loving-kindness meditation to help process difficult emotions. - Mastering Change: John Assaraf outlines four barriers to success and why becoming an “adaptationist” is the key to overcoming them. - Reframing Your Vision: Insights from Jasmine Star on maintaining focus, even when life throws unexpected challenges your way. If you've ever felt stuck in a routine or trapped by fear, this episode will challenge you to take the keys you already hold and open the door to the life you're meant to live. Let today be the day you stop just surviving and start truly living. Thank you for watching this video—Please Share it and get the word out! What part of this video resonated with you the most? Comment below! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What if your internal conflicts are the very signals pointing you toward personal growth and success? Join me as I sit down with Kelli Thompson, a dynamic keynote speaker and women's leadership coach, to discuss her latest book, Closing the Confidence Gap. This episode promises to equip you with strategies for overcoming societal "shoulds" and identifying the barriers that hinder your confidence, especially for women balancing an unpaid workload alongside professional responsibilities. Together, we unpack the intricacies of people-pleasing tendencies in leadership and the pitfalls of overcommitment and perfectionism. Through introspective exercises, you'll learn how to align your commitments with your values, define what "good enough" means, and delegate tasks that don't align with your strengths. Explore the powerful intersection of empathy, confidence, and negotiation as we navigate the art of salary discussions. Kelli and I discuss the importance of self-compassion as a means to bolster confidence and overcome internal doubts. Kelli also shares actionable advice on identifying personal and organizational values and how operationalizing these values creates an engaging work environment. Through thought-provoking discussions, this episode invites you to transform reflection into action, empowering you to lead with authenticity and confidence. What You'll Learn: • Overcoming internal conflicts and building self-trust • The impact of societal pressures on women's confidence • Strategies for aligning commitments with personal values • Navigating overcommitment and perfectionism • The art of empathetic and confident salary negotiation Podcast Timestamps: (00:00) - From Aspiring TV Meteorologist to Top Women's Leadership Coach (11:00) - Identifying and Overcoming Internal Conflict (22:43) - Navigating People-Pleasing in Leadership (27:13) - Identifying and Defining Your Values (32:21) - The Purpose and Power in Implementing Organizational Values (45:11) - Empathy, Confidence, and Salary Negotiation More of Kelli: Kelli Thompson is an award-winning leadership coach, keynote speaker, and author of Closing the Confidence Gap: Boost Your Peace, Your Potential & Your Paycheck, which was named a "Must Read" by the Next Big Idea Club, curated by Malcolm Gladwell, Daniel Pink, Adam Grant, and Susan Cain. With over 10 years of experience in financial services and technology, Kelli has coached and trained thousands of women leaders to lead with clarity and confidence through her compassionate yet no-nonsense approach. Her thought leadership has been featured in top publications like Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Forbes, and Business Insider. Holding an MBA and recognized for her impactful programs, Kelli is a sought-after speaker known for delivering practical, insightful strategies. Fun fact: she's also a trained storm spotter and aspiring storm chaser. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelliraethompson/  Mentions: Closing the Confidence Gap: Boost Your Peace, Your Potential, and Your Paycheck by Kelli Thompson The Waymakers: Clearing the Path to Workplace Equity with Competence and Confidence by Tara Jaye Frank Key Topics Discussed: Positive Leadership, Empowerment, Women, Women's Leadership, Self-Confidence, Values, Self-Trust, Minimizing Resentment, Avoiding Overcommitment, The Perils of Perfectionism, Organizational Values, Salary Negotiation, Empathy, Self-Compassion, Personal Growth, Introspection, The Power of Delegating, Behavioral-Based Interviewing, CEO Success More of Do Good to Lead Well: Website: https://craigdowden.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigdowden/

In this episode we're diving deep into the fascinating world of carbon recycling with a trailblazer who's reshaping how we think about waste and sustainability. Our guest is Dr. Jennifer Holmgren, CEO of LanzaTech—a company on a mission to transform our biggest environmental challenge into an economic opportunity. LanzaTech is pioneering a process that takes industrial emissions—the kind of harmful gases that typically contribute to climate change—and recycles them into valuable products like fuels, fabrics, and everyday consumer goods. The concept might sound like science fiction, but it's already science fact. LanzaTech's technology captures carbon emissions from sources like steel mills, refineries, and even municipal solid waste, then feeds those emissions to specially engineered microbes. These microbes act like tiny factories, converting carbon pollution into useful materials. Imagine jet fuel made from industrial waste or yoga pants created from captured carbon—it's not just possible; it's happening. In fact, at the very end of 2024, LanzaTech received a holiday gift from the federal government: a $200 million award from the Dept. of Energy. In this episode, Jennifer and I discuss the path LanzaTech took, including raising $400 million and taking 13 years prior to commercializing its first product. We also touch on her personal journey from her birth in Colombia to her taking the helm at LanzaTech. As you'll hear, this isn't just about reducing emissions; it's about completely rethinking the role of waste in our economy. LanzaTech's vision is one where carbon is no longer a liability but an asset—a resource that can be reused and recycled, over and over again. It's a powerful example of how businesses can align profitability with purpose, and it's precisely the kind of story that inspires hope in these challenging times. So, whether you're an entrepreneur, an environmentalist, or just someone curious about the future of our planet, this is a conversation you won't want to miss.  Discussed in this episode Jennifer recommends reading Quiet by Susan Cain. LanzaTech awarded up to $200 million in federal cash from the DOE LanzaTech is backed by Khosla Ventures. More about Jennifer Holmgren, PhD Dr. Jennifer Holmgren is CEO of LanzaTech. Under her guidance, LanzaTech is developing a variety of platform chemicals and fuels, including the world's first alternative jet fuel derived from industrial waste gases. Given her integral role in the development of this alternative jet fuel, she is also a Director and the Chair of the LanzaJet Board of Directors.  Prior to LanzaTech, Jennifer was VP and General Manager of the Renewable Energy and Chemicals business unit at UOP LLC, a Honeywell Company. While at UOP, she was a key driver of UOP's leadership in low carbon aviation biofuels, and under her management, UOP technology became instrumental in producing nearly all the initial fuels used by commercial airlines and the military for testing and certification of alternative aviation fuel. Jennifer is the author or co-author of 50 U.S. patents and more than 30 scientific publications, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 2003, she was the first woman awarded the Malcolm E. Pruitt Award from the Council for Chemical Research (CCR). In 2010, she was the recipient of the Leadership Award from the Civil Aviation Alternative Fuels Initiative (CAAFI). In 2015, Jennifer and her team at LanzaTech were awarded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Presidential Green Chemistry Award, and she was awarded the BIO Rosalind Franklin Award for Leadership in Industrial Biotechnology. Jennifer was named as #1 of the 100 most influential leaders in the Bioeconomy in 2017 and received the Global Bioenergy Leadership Award in 2018, and the 2020 William C. Holmberg Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Advanced Bioeconomy. In 2021, she received the Edison Achievement Award and the Prix Voltaire Award. In 2022, she was included in ICIS's Top 40 Power Players ranking. Jennifer also has an honorary doctorate from Delft University of Technology. Jennifer is on the Governing Council for the Bio Energy Research Institute in India. The institute was set up by the DBT (Department of Biotechnology, Indian Government) and IOC (Indian Oil Corporation).  She also sits on the Advisory Council for the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University, the National Academies' Board on Energy and Environmental Systems (BEES), the External Advisory Committee for the Advanced Energy Technologies Directorate (AET) at Argonne National Laboratory, the Advisory Council for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), the Halliburton Labs Advisory Board, the Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS International Advisory Council, and the Founder Advisory for The Engine, a venture capital fund built by MIT that invests in early-stage science and engineering companies.  Jennifer holds a B.Sc. degree from Harvey Mudd College, a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

Kevin Miller is a former pro athlete, lifetime entrepreneur, father of 9, and podcast host. He hosts the top-ranked “What Drives You with Kevin Miller” podcast, a professional and personal development podcast that has been ranked #3 in the “All-Time Careers” category on iTunes and downloaded more than 70 million times. Kevin has conducted an in-depth interview series with more than 200 thought leaders in the professional and personal development sphere, including Susan Cain, Michael Hyatt, Rich Roll, and Simon Sinek. Kevin joined host Robert Glazer on the Elevate Podcast to talk about his career, finding purpose in life, and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“In solitude, I often feel closer to the people I care for than when they're in the same room.” –Pico Iyer In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Pico talk about how the best travels are often counterbalanced with a kind of stillness, in which one can find one’s “best self” (3:00); Pico’s decades-long experiences with monks in a California monastery, the benefits of a “childlike attitude” toward life, and how “fire” can be a metaphor for spiritual life (12:00); how Pico’s solitude is informed by, and in conversation with, nature (22:00); Pico’s engaged relationship with spiritual communities, even though he is not religious (30:00); the “counterculture” spiritual tradition that grew up around Big Sur, California, and the power of longing (39:00); and how solitude can be a gateway to other people (47:00). Pico Iyer (@PicoIyer) is a novelist, essayist, and author. His newest book is Aflame: Learning from Silence. Notable Links: Pico Iyer on what Japan can teach us about life (Deviate episode 73) The Vagabond’s Way, by Rolf Potts (book) Henri Nouwen (writer and theologian) New Seeds of Contemplation, by Thomas Merton (book) The 14th Dalai Lama (spiritual leader) The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen (book) Richard Powers (novelist) Desert Fathers (early Christian hermits and ascetics) Sign of Jonas, by Thomas Merton (book) Days of Heaven (1978 film) 4′33″ by John Cage (musical composition) New Camaldoli Hermitage (hermitage in Big Sur, California) Rigveda (ancient Indian collection of hymns) The Woman Lit by Fireflies, by Jim Harrison (book) Sarmoung Brotherhood (esoteric Sufi brotherhood) Henry Miller (novelist) Esalen Institute (retreat center in Big Sur) Bittersweet, by Susan Cain (book) Leonard Cohen (songwriter) Ludwig Wittgenstein (philosopher) The Deviate theme music comes from the title track of Cedar Van Tassel's 2017 album Lumber. Note: We don't host a “comments” section, but we're happy to hear your questions and insights via email, at deviate@rolfpotts.com.

“In solitude, I often feel closer to the people I care for than when they're in the same room.” –Pico Iyer In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Pico talk about how the best travels are often counterbalanced with a kind of stillness, in which one can find one’s “best self” (3:00); Pico’s decades-long experiences with monks in a California monastery, the benefits of a “childlike attitude” toward life, and how “fire” can be a metaphor for spiritual life (12:00); how Pico’s solitude is informed by, and in conversation with, nature (22:00); Pico’s engaged relationship with spiritual communities, even though he is not religious (30:00); the “counterculture” spiritual tradition that grew up around Big Sur, California, and the power of longing (39:00); and how solitude can be a gateway to other people (47:00). Pico Iyer (@PicoIyer) is a novelist, essayist, and author. His newest book is Aflame: Learning from Silence. Notable Links: Pico Iyer on what Japan can teach us about life (Deviate episode 73) The Vagabond’s Way, by Rolf Potts (book) Henri Nouwen (writer and theologian) New Seeds of Contemplation, by Thomas Merton (book) The 14th Dalai Lama (spiritual leader) The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen (book) Richard Powers (novelist) Desert Fathers (early Christian hermits and ascetics) Sign of Jonas, by Thomas Merton (book) Days of Heaven (1978 film) 4′33″ by John Cage (musical composition) New Camaldoli Hermitage (hermitage in Big Sur, California) Rigveda (ancient Indian collection of hymns) The Woman Lit by Fireflies, by Jim Harrison (book) Sarmoung Brotherhood (esoteric Sufi brotherhood) Henry Miller (novelist) Esalen Institute (retreat center in Big Sur) Bittersweet, by Susan Cain (book) Leonard Cohen (songwriter) Ludwig Wittgenstein (philosopher) The Deviate theme music comes from the title track of Cedar Van Tassel's 2017 album Lumber. Note: We don't host a “comments” section, but we're happy to hear your questions and insights via email, at deviate@rolfpotts.com.

In this special episode on gratitude, you'll hear life lessons from the great minds of Dr. Nicole LePera, AJ Jacobs, Martha Beck, Susan Cain, and Cory Allen. Throughout these conversations, we explore practical ways to incorporate gratitude into our daily lives, overcome common obstacles to feeling grateful, and use gratitude to enhance our relationships and overall well-being. You'll find a fresh perspective on gratitude, moving beyond simple platitudes to explore how we can cultivate a deeper, more meaningful sense of appreciation in our lives. Key Takeaways: Grasping the power of gratitude when grounded in the present moment Practicing detailed expressions of gratitude to deepen our appreciation Balancing gratitude with acknowledgment of life's challenges is crucial Cultivating wonder that naturally lead to feelings of gratitude Viewing gratitude as a state of being, rather than just a tool, to provide a solid foundation for navigating life's ups and downs Feeling overwhelmed by holiday stress or the pressure to make everything perfect? Or maybe it's the loneliness this season can bring. Either way, you're not alone—and this year can be different. Join us for a free online webinar on Sunday, December 10, at 12 PM Eastern to learn a simple habit that can help you let go of stress and find peace, steadiness, and genuine connection. Give yourself this gift of support and clarity for the season. Sign up here. For full show notes, click here! Connect with the show: Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPod Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Follow us on Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We revisit a conversation with bestselling author Susan Cain, renowned author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking and Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. We also talk about why we should be the one to make the plan, and a listener suggests a hack for making it easier to use online recipes. Links: The Quiet Life: A Journal by Susan Cain  Get in touch: podcast@gretchenrubin.com Visit Gretchen's website to learn more about Gretchen's best-selling books, products from The Happiness Project Collection, and the Happier app.  Find the transcript for this episode on the episode details page in the Apple Podcasts app.  To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why do we like sad music or that poignant feeling that comes from attending a funeral? Author Susan Cain talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about her book Bittersweet and the seductive and sometimes deeply satisfying power of melancholy.

Leanne Morgan was going to quit her career as a stand up comic and start a hardware store (with a cheese wheel, no less!) before she had her major break in comedy. Making the decision to invest in herself one last time opened the doors to an incredible season and newfound success in the comedy world. Jen, Amy, and Leanne get candid when talking about what it means to be the best version of themselves in their second act of life, and when success comes later, why it can be better than having all your dreams come true at once.  Topics discussed include: Behind the scenes of Leanne's viral success at 51 Why being yourself is always the best answer to any problem How handling criticism at their ages is so much easier to deal with The cornbread drama — do you add sugar or not? Also; don't miss Jen and Amy's discussions before the interview on Taylor Swift drama and FOMO! * * * Thought-Provoking Quotes: "Use humor to get through hard times. I think it's the best thing that can ever happen to anybody is to be able to laugh through the bad times and to forgive themselves." - Leanne Morgan "I want [women] to know it is never too late...you're the best you've ever been. You're the smartest you've ever been. It is the best time in your life. It is the best time to start a business. It is the best time to go back to school. I just want women to know that." - Leanne Morgan Resources Mentioned in This Episode: What in the World? by Leanne Morgan - https://www.leannemorgan.com/book Quiet by Susan Cain - https://susancain.net/book/quiet/ For the Love Podcast Episode ft. Jim Gaffigan - https://bit.ly/3Ximuij Leanne's Interview with Hallerin Hilton Hill - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14xdJyhnLuc You're Cordially Invited - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14xdJyhnLuc Leanne Morgan at the Grand Ole Opry - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFYMFOok5s4 Guest's Links: Leanne's Website - https://www.leannemorgan.com/ Leanne's Twitter - https://twitter.com/leannecomedy Leanne's Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/leannemorgancomedy Leanne's Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/leannemorgancomedy Connect with Jen! Jen's website - https://jenhatmaker.com/ Jen's Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker Jen's Twitter - https://twitter.com/jenHatmaker/ Jen's Facebook - https://facebook.com/jenhatmaker Jen's YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/user/JenHatmaker The For the Love Podcast is a production of Four Eyes Media, presented by Audacy.  Four Eyes Media: https://www.iiiimedia.com/ To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is a two-for-one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited.The episode features segments from episode #98 "The 'Wizard' of Hollywood, Robert Rodriguez" and #358 "Susan Cain — How to Overcome Fear and Embrace Creativity."Please enjoy!Sponsors:AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://drinkag1.com/tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)ExpressVPN high-speed, secure, and anonymous VPN service: https://www.expressvpn.com/tim (Get 3 extra months free with a 12-month plan)LMNT electrolyte supplement: https://drinklmnt.com/Tim (free LMNT sample pack with any drink mix purchase)Timestamps:[06:08] Notes about this supercombo format.[07:12] Enter Robert Rodriguez.[07:39] Journaling as a crucial component of personal and professional life.[15:01] Keeping crew morale high during a project.[16:16] The magic that happens when creativity truly clicks.[20:47] How applied creativity dissolves the separation between work and play.[23:01] The legendary financing of El Mariachi.[25:56] From Bedhead to an unexpected big break.[30:57] Overcoming budgetary and technological constraints.[34:54] Maintaining momentum when lack of resources is no longer a creative driver.[39:33] Enter Susan Cain.[40:04] What initiated Susan's lifelong fear of public speaking?[43:09] How Susan's TED Talk opportunity arose, and its initial reception.[44:06] Introvert strategies for group dinners.[46:45] Reflecting on my sixth-grade self.[47:58] How Susan overcame her fear of public speaking.[50:35] Even seasoned speakers get nervous before TED Talks.[52:15] Susan's progression to becoming a global public speaker.[54:08] Common traits of effective teachers and coaches.[55:45] Susan's pre-speaking engagement rituals.[57:16] Public speaking as a skill multiplier.[57:57] How Toastmasters and chihuahuas helped me overcome speaking fears.[1:00:50] Preparation for my own TED Talk.[1:02:21] Adam Grant's crucial pre-TED assistance.[1:04:00] The importance of rehearsing before live audiences.[1:04:49] My current level of nervousness before public speaking.[1:07:36] Time pressure in TED Talks.[1:08:51] Public speaking as a force multiplier and therapy.[1:11:32] Susan's techniques for relieving worry.[1:12:57] Susan's transition from law to writing.[1:16:07] Necessity vs. creativity in making a living.[1:18:10] Susan's timeline and process for writing her first book.[1:20:20] Susan's current writing process.[1:21:05] Susan's note-taking and organization.[1:24:16] Preferences for writing software.[1:26:19] Susan's enjoyment of the writing process.[1:27:05] Susan's preferred writing time.[1:28:07] Susan's writing schedule and break routine.[1:29:49] Night vs. morning writing and procrastination tactics.[1:31:51] Recommended books and resources on writing.[1:35:26] Serendipitous meetings that enabled first books.[1:40:16] Distinguishing introversion from shyness.[1:44:02] Books Susan frequently gifts.[1:45:09] My first meeting with Sam Harris.[1:47:37] Experiences with loving-kindness meditation.[1:49:24] Comparative effects of different meditation types.[1:55:35] Susan's billboard.[1:56:45] Advice for deep connection with others.[1:57:33] Susan's love for bittersweet music.[1:59:44] Parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim's email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim's books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.