Keeping the Weight Off, Rewiring Your Brain with Psychedelics, and Finding Strong Male Role Models

The Hacker’s Diet was written by John Walker, founder of software company Autodesk. This is an engineer’s approach to weight loss, described in terms of control systems, feedback loops, measurement noise reduction, and practical problem-solving.

With so many contradictory theories of weight loss out there, this book cuts out the bull — it’s about calories in and calories out, period. If you’re fat, you’re fat because your eating control system is broken. Learn the sane way to track your weight daily, why the first few days of dieting are the hardest that dieting will ever be, and what you have to do to maintain your ideal weight for the rest of your life.

Positive behavior change is one of the most persistent challenges of personal growth—and in How to Change, Katy Milkman draws from the latest research and presents a powerful strategy for creating lasting change. She argues that real behavior change comes from a deliberate, scientific understanding of how human nature gets in our way and how we can leverage it to our advantage.

Milkman, an economist and professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, explains how to tailor solutions to your specific challenges, subvert common human failings, and cement lasting change. In this guide, we’ll detail her evidence-based approach to behavioral change and discuss her “playbook” for overcoming human foibles ranging from a lack of self-confidence to forgetfulness and procrastination. In commentary, we’ll look at adjacent perspectives on behavioral change from books such as Atomic Habits, Nudge, Awaken the Giant Within, and Hooked.

Does it sometimes feel like everybody else has life figured out except you? Rachel Hollis, author of Girl, Wash Your Face, wants you to know that’s a lie. Life is messy and complicated for everyone, but once you understand that you are in control of your life, you can begin to live with passion, joy and confidence.

Aimed at women who feel overwhelmed and unworthy, Girl, Wash Your Face examines 20 lies that can hold you back from becoming who you were meant to be. Hollis details her own mistakes, traumas and life lessons, and shares with readers the strategies she used to overcome these lies and find true happiness.

In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson argues that we are frustrated in life and feel like failures because we value and prioritize the wrong things, thanks in part to society’s emphasis on positive thinking, over-involved parents, and our susceptibility to superficial social media messages. This leads us to pursue emotional highs that don’t lead to lasting happiness.

The solutions are counterintuitive and include: be wrong, fail, tolerate feeling bad, accept pain, practice rejection. Because we can’t care equally about everything, we need to prioritize and focus on what brings us happiness and meaning. In other words, we need to carefully choose what we give our f*cks about.

The book draws from several established philosophies (Stoicism, Existentialism, and Buddhism), and we’ll expand and clarify the book’s messages by tracing their origins to these schools of thought. We’ll also explore some of the psychology behind what motivates people’s decisions, and why we’re driven to give so many f*cks about so many unimportant things.

Why is it so hard to change who we are? Why do we get stuck in the same old patterns of unhappiness and lack of fulfillment? In Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, Joe Dispenza suggests that it’s our habits that keep us from growing and creating the life we want, and he offers a detailed guide on how to get rid of those habits and replace them with habits that move us toward our ideal selves. Dispenza is a best-selling writer with a Doctorate of Chiropractic degree who has extensively studied such fields as neuroscience and cellular biology.

In our guide, we’ll explore how our habits determine our lives, how we can change them, and what our new selves will be like. We’ll also examine the science underlying Dispenza’s ideas and compare them to other authors’ ideas on self-improvement and changing our habits.

Positive behavior change is one of the most persistent challenges of personal growth—and in How to Change, Katy Milkman draws from the latest research and presents a powerful strategy for creating lasting change. She argues that real behavior change comes from a deliberate, scientific understanding of how human nature gets in our way and how we can leverage it to our advantage.

Milkman, an economist and professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, explains how to tailor solutions to your specific challenges, subvert common human failings, and cement lasting change. In this guide, we’ll detail her evidence-based approach to behavioral change and discuss her “playbook” for overcoming human foibles ranging from a lack of self-confidence to forgetfulness and procrastination. In commentary, we’ll look at adjacent perspectives on behavioral change from books such as Atomic Habits, Nudge, Awaken the Giant Within, and Hooked.

The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy offers simple tips on achieving success and living the life of your dreams. The idea is similar to compound interest in finance - small, everyday decisions add up to huge returns over time.

While the concept is simple, that doesn't mean it's easy. Hardy presents six strategies for successfully and carefully directing your choices to shape your destiny in a positive direction and offers a plan of action for improving your results.

Positive behavior change is one of the most persistent challenges of personal growth—and in How to Change, Katy Milkman draws from the latest research and presents a powerful strategy for creating lasting change. She argues that real behavior change comes from a deliberate, scientific understanding of how human nature gets in our way and how we can leverage it to our advantage.

Milkman, an economist and professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, explains how to tailor solutions to your specific challenges, subvert common human failings, and cement lasting change. In this guide, we’ll detail her evidence-based approach to behavioral change and discuss her “playbook” for overcoming human foibles ranging from a lack of self-confidence to forgetfulness and procrastination. In commentary, we’ll look at adjacent perspectives on behavioral change from books such as Atomic Habits, Nudge, Awaken the Giant Within, and Hooked.

Most people think that happiness comes after success, and that success comes after hard work. But we’ve had the equation all wrong: Happiness isn’t the result of success—it’s the cause of it. In The Happiness Advantage, author Shawn Achor introduces this formula for success, based on research in neuroscience and the relatively new field of positive psychology. Achor offers insight as a leading expert on the connection between happiness and performance and the founder of a research and consulting firm that optimizes people’s achievement through positive psychology.

This book explains the benefits of happiness—from increased creativity to improved health—and how a positive mindset can change your personal and professional life. In addition, Achor provides strategies for adopting a positive mindset, remaining optimistic in the face of adversity, and raising your happiness baseline.