How to Think More Effectively
A guide to identifying, nurturing and growing our insight and creativity for more effective thinking. We know that our minds are capable of great things because, every now and then, they come out with a very brilliant idea or two. However, our min...
The School Of Life
This is a book about everything you were never taught at school. It's about how to understand your emotions, find and sustain love, succeed in your career, fail well and overcome shame and guilt. It's also about letting go of the myth of a perfect life in order to achieve genuine emotional maturity. Written in a hugely accessible, warm and humane style, The School of Life is the ultimate guide to the emotionally fulfilled lives we all long for - and deserve. This book brings together ten years of essential and transformative research on emotional intelligence, with practical topics including: - how to understand yourself - how to master the dilemmas of relationships - how to become more effective at work - how to endure failure - how to grow more serene and resilient
The School of Life: Collected Essays
The School of Life: Collected Essays
School of Life: Relationships
A book to inspire closeness and connection, helping people not only to find love but to make it last. Few things promise us greater happiness than our relationships - yet few things more reliably deliver misery and frustration. Our error is to sup...
School of Life: Calm
A guide to developing the art of finding serenity by understanding the sources of our anxiety and frustrations. Almost all of us wish we could be calmer; it is one of the distinctive longings of the modern age. Across history people have sought ad...
The School Of Life - Stay Or Leave
Whether we should stay in or leave a relationship is one of the most consequential and painful decisions we are ever likely to confront. What makes the issue so hard is that there are no fixed rules for judgement. How can we tell whether a relationship is 'good enough' or plain wrong? How do we draw the line between justified longing and naivety? Is sex vital or could it be foregone? Does someone 'better' actually exist? How much should the feelings of children be counted (and what might they be in the long term)? Could one's partner change, perhaps with therapy, or should one assume that who they are now is who they will always be? This paperback edition walks the reader gently through their options and opens their mind to perspectives they might not have considered. It aims to take the reader towards a time, presently hard to imagine, when the choice will no longer feel so agonising. Using its lessons, we can understand ourselves deeply, consider our options, minimise our regrets and find the way ahead.
Status Anxiety
THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER From one of our greatest voices in modern philosophy, author of The Course of Love, The Consolations of Philosophy, Religion for Atheists and The School of Life - Alain de Botton sets out to understand our unive...
Consolations of Philosophy
THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER One of the most influential voices in modern philosophy - the author of The Course of Love, Religion for Atheists, The Art of Travel and The School of Life Alain de Botton presents a one-stop shop for solving...
School of Life: On Failure
A reassuring guide on how to overcome failure, teaching us that we can learn to fail well This is a hopeful, consoling, gentle book about failure. Our societies talk a lot about success, but the reality is that no one gets through life without fai...
The School Of Life Guide To Modern Manners
Modern life is full of minor but acute dilemmas: we get stuck at a gathering with someone unusually boring and wonder how to move on without causing offence; in the course of introducing one friend to another, we realise that we have forgotten one of the party's names; we run into an ex while on an early date with a new partner; we spill red wine across a host's sofa... Such dilemmas might - at one level - seem desperately insignificant. But they actually belong to some of the largest and most serious themes in social existence: how can you pursue our own agenda for happiness while at the same time honouring the sensitivities and wishes of others; how can you convey goodwill with sincerity; how can you be kind without being supine or sentimental? It is often confusing to know how to act around others and navigate social situations. This book features twenty case-studies on common social dilemmas and our possible responses to them, contributing to a new and original philosophy of graceful conduct.
The School of Life Guide to Modern Manners
A guide to confronting modern social situations with confidence and grace.
Couple's Workbook
Therapeutic exercises to help couples nurture patience, forgiveness and humour. Here is a workbook containing the very best exercises that any couple can undertake to help their relationship function optimally; exercises to foster understanding, p...
Simpler Life
Exploring ideas around minimalism, simplicity and how to live comfortably with less. The modern world can be a complicated, frenzied and noisy place, filled with too many options, products, ideas and opinions. That explains why what many of us lon...
How to Overcome Your Childhood
When trying to deal with our current troubles and anxieties, it can be deeply irritating to be asked to consider our childhoods. They happened so long ago; we can probably barely remember, let alone relate to, the little person we once were. But o...
How to Travel
An original and comprehensive look at what it is we seek when we set off on an adventure abroad - and at how we can travel better, so that our experiences overseas become truly transformative and memorable. Going travelling is one of the few thing...
Big Ideas for Curious Minds
Children are, in many ways, born philosophers. Without prompting, they ask some of the largest questions about time, mortality, happiness and the meaning of it all. Yet too often this inborn curiosity is not developed and, with age, the questions ...
More Exciting Life
One of the things we all deeply crave, and all richly deserve, is a more exciting life. We know well enough that many things have to be routine, hard and a little bit boring. But we also rightly sense that, if only we can find a way, our lives cou...
What They Forgot to Teach You at School
We probably went to school for what felt like a very long time. We probably took care with our homework. Along the way we surely learnt intriguing things about equations, the erosion of glaciers, the history of the Middle Ages, and the tenses of f...
Who Am I?
One of the trickiest tasks we ever face is that of working out who we really are. If we're asked directly to describe ourselves, our minds tend to go blank. We can't just sum ourselves up. We need prompts and suggestions and more detailed enquirie...
Emotionally Intelligent Office
Stress and mental ill health currently costs the UK economy upwards of £30 billion a year. Modern businesses continue to place huge emphasis on technical training, yet a lot of what determines the success or failure of organisations has nothing to...
Self-Knowledge
In Ancient Greece, when the philosopher Socrates was asked to sum up what all philosophical commandments could be reduced to, he replied: 'Know yourself'. Self-knowledge matters so much because it is only on the basis of an accurate sense of who w...
On Confidence
The difference between success and failure often hangs on a fascinatingly small and elusive concept that our standard education system never touches: confidence. This is a guidebook to what confidence consists of, why we lack it - and how we can a...
School of Life: On Mental Illness
We accept without shame that most organs in our bodies might at some point develop problems - and could need a bit of help. We should not make an exception of our minds. Our lives are so complicated and so filled with burdens, we should be complet...
Varieties of Melancholy
This is a book that celebrates the most neglected but valuable emotion we can feel: melancholy. Melancholy isn't depression or anger or bitterness, it's a serene, accepting, gentle, wise and kindly response to the difficulties and occasional miser...
Screen-Free Fun
Whether we're big or small, it can be hard to get away from our screens. Most children spend between five and seven hours a day looking at some form of screen - and most grown-ups spend twice as much time. Screens promise endless entertainment, bu...
How to Find the Right Words
Life constantly requires us to give other people some hugely awkward messages: that we don't love them anymore; that we do love them (though we're not meant to); that they smell a bit; that they're fired; that we're furious with them (though we ad...
What Is Culture For?
Our societies frequently proclaim their enormous esteem for culture. Music, film, literature and the visual arts enjoy high prestige and are viewed by many as getting close to the meaning of life. But what is culture really for? This book proposes...
Heartbreak
Almost no one gets through life without, at some point, having their heart broken. Advice at such a dark moment tends to focus on letting time do the healing. But there is also a vital role for understanding and perspective. We sometimes make our ...
Dating
Dating might seem a trivial and relatively inconsequential part of love, but it is in fact key to getting into the kind of relationship that can last and help us flourish. The process we call dating sits on top of some of the largest themes of lov...
Great Thinkers
The Great Thinkers is a collection of some of the most important ideas of Eastern and Western culture - drawn from the works of those philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, artists and novelists whom we believe have the most to offer to ...
Joys and Sorrows of Parenting
Being a parent can be one of the sources of our greatest joys. It is also - intermittently - the cause of some of our deepest sorrows. It is likely that we will spend at least some of the time in despair and confusion, wondering whether it really ...