Blogs

What Japan’s Ikigai Can Teach the World About Finding Purpose — According to Science In the prefecture of Okinawa, Japan, there are more people over the age of 100 per capita than almost anywhere else on earth. The Okinawans have been studied extensively by epidemiologists, gerontologists, and longevity researchers who want to understand what they are doing differently. The usual suspects — diet, exercise, genetics — have been...

How to Practise Mindfulness When You Hate Sitting Still You have tried it. Probably more than once. You downloaded the app, found a quiet corner, set a timer for ten minutes, closed your eyes, and attempted to focus on your breath. For approximately forty-five seconds, it went reasonably well. Then your mind remembered seventeen things that needed doing, your leg started itching, you became acutely aware of how...

The Happiness Industrial Complex: Why the Wellness Industry Doesn’t Want You to Flourish The global wellness industry is worth $5.6 trillion. Let that number sit for a moment. $5.6 trillion. More than the GDP of Japan. More than the combined GDP of every country in sub-Saharan Africa. A number so large it has become almost meaningless — except for what it implies. It implies that the project of...

The New Parent’s Guide to Emotional Wellbeing: What No One Tells You Nobody warned you about the 3 AM ceiling. You know the one. The baby is finally, mercifully asleep — and you are lying in the dark, staring upward, too tired to sleep, too wired to rest, running a loop of thoughts that oscillates between profound love and quiet terror. You are responsible for a person who...

Why the Most Important Subject at University Has No Textbook Yet Every university in the world teaches calculus from a textbook. The textbook has been refined over centuries. It has exercises at the end of every chapter. It has been translated into dozens of languages. Professors can assign it, students can study it, examiners can test it, and everyone involved can be confident they are engaging with a...

What Google, Patagonia, and SAP Know About Happiness That Most Companies Still Don’t In 2007, Google hired its first Chief Happiness Officer. The role had no precedent in corporate history. There was no job description template, no established competency framework, no industry benchmark for what a person in this position should actually do. What there was, instead, was a conviction — held by Google’s leadership, drawn from emerging...

The African Philosophy of Ubuntu and What It Teaches Us About Collective Flourishing There is a phrase in the Nguni Bantu languages of southern Africa that has no precise equivalent in English, though dozens of translations have been attempted. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. Person is a person through other persons. Or: I am because we are. Or, in the version that Archbishop Desmond Tutu — who spent decades explaining...

Flow State, Focus, and Flourishing: What Peak Performance Looks Like From the Inside There is a particular quality of experience that almost every high performer describes, across wildly different fields, in almost exactly the same language. The surgeon who loses track of time in the operating theatre. The programmer for whom three hours pass in what felt like twenty minutes. The musician who finishes a performance and cannot...