Most Replayed Moment: What Women Really Want In A Man! Don’t Do This On A First Date!

Many of us are glued to our smartphones, tablets, and laptops, to the point that we’ve lost control of how we spend our time and attention. We feel overpowered and exhausted by the multitude of digital tools at our fingertips, including smartphones and tablets, websites, addictive apps, and social media platforms. Meanwhile, tech companies continue to invest major resources into making their products and services addictive so that we’ll continue scrolling and tapping.

This book explains how you can transform your tech habits by adopting digital minimalism, which aims to maximize the benefits of technology and avoid the pitfalls by identifying your values and determining how to use technology to support them. Learn how tech companies use human psychology to make their apps addictive, how likes and comments are weakening your relationship, and why trading your smartphone for a dumb phone could change your life.

Do nonstop digital alerts, notifications, and texts make it feel as though your digital devices control you rather than the other way around? Here are 10 practical ways to change your autopilot response to these stimuli intended to hijack your attention. (Shortform’s Quick Help gives you options for conquering things you struggle with.)

We often feel pressured to be as productive as possible, striving for intense, uninterrupted concentration—but what if being laser-focused isn’t just unrealistic, but detrimental? In Attention Span, Gloria Mark suggests that attention isn’t limited to binary states of focus or distraction, but that there are multiple types of attention, all of which have value—even time spent doing mindless work or letting your mind wander.

Mark draws from decades of research on how the human brain spends its mental energy, the many ways we become distracted, and how our capacity to focus fluctuates. In this guide, we’ll explore Mark’s different modes of attention, how digital media acts to break our concentration, and how Mark says we can reclaim our attention from the distractions of the modern world. We’ll also look at what other experts say affects attention, how to direct it, and whether distractions are something you can control.

In The Daily Laws, Robert Greene argues that we lead our lives guided by false beliefs: We believe that chasing money will make us happy, that others always have our best interests at heart, and that our flaws are smaller than other peoples’, among other things. However, because these beliefs aren’t based in reality, they leave us unhappy and unfulfilled. To stop being led astray and made miserable by these false beliefs, Greene writes that we must become more attuned to reality—to the ways the world actually works and how people actually behave. He provides a lesson for each day of the year on how to reconnect with reality and thus become happier and more fulfilled.

The Daily Laws is a compilation of core maxims from five of his other books, including The 48 Laws of Power and The Laws of Human Nature. Throughout the guide, we’ll compare Greene’s insights with those found in other books, such as Scott Young’s Ultralearning and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, and provide actionable suggestions on how you can apply his lessons to your life.

Personal charisma and likeability are important for many different areas of life, from career success to navigating family and relationships. And at times, it can feel like you’re either born with it or without it—but this isn’t true. In reality, charisma is a skill like any other. In How to Become a People Magnet, motivational speaker and life coach Marc Reklau explains how you can improve your charisma and social abilities. His lessons are based on one main principle: People are mainly interested in themselves and what they can get from you. If you keep this in mind and tailor your conversations around it, you’ll start getting along better with others.

This guide covers Reklau’s main strategies for making positive first impressions, forming deeper connections, and persuading people. In our commentary, we’ll cover some of the psychology behind his advice and offer alternate perspectives on charisma and social success.

Love and desire aren’t driven by the same things. In fact, sometimes their ingredients are polar opposites. The ingredients for a loving, stable relationship are commitment, intimacy, and egalitarianism, while the ingredients for desire are mystery, distance, risk, and playfulness. Throw in some external pressures such as cultural messages and parenthood, and it might seem impossible to have a good erotic life within a long-term relationship.

Mating in Captivity looks at what makes up our individual sense of desire and our desire for our partners. Although desire and love may have some fundamental contradictions, there are ways to balance the clashes, and ways to manage extra-relationship stresses.