You wake up, gulp down your coffee while speed-reading the news, and half-listen to a podcast during your rushed morning commute. You spend your workday juggling tasks before finally returning home and sinking into the couch, your brain fried and your heart pounding.

If any aspects of this scene describe your typical day, you know what it’s like to rush through life. In The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, pastor and author John Mark Comer explores our cultural obsession with rushing and examines how it harms our relationships, health, sense of purpose, and spirituality. He argues that you can escape this culture of rushing by following the lifestyle of Jesus. In this guide, we’ll present Comer’s insights on how to stop rushing by deepening your Christian spiritual practice. You’ll learn how to carve out more time for your spiritual practice and enjoy slowing down your life. Along the way, we’ll compare Comer’s ideas to those of other scholars and offer additional steps you can take to stop hurrying.

Have you ever had an idea with the potential to change your organization, your city, or even the world? In The Voltage Effect, economist and professor John A. List offers his advice for how to take things from the small scale to the big stage, whether you’re an entrepreneur, an activist, or anyone else with a brilliant idea. To help you get started scaling your idea, List offers a set of red flags that signal you may have trouble scaling up, as well as offering a set of strategies designed to increase your idea’s chances of success.

In our guide, we’ll cover each of List’s red flags and strategies while also providing alternate perspectives on scaling, business management, and data science. Throughout the guide, we’ll also include examples that help illustrate why some ideas scale upward meteorically while others struggle to get off the ground.

If you’ve ever talked yourself out of choosing the right club or agonized over whether to try to muscle it over a water hazard, Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect is here to help. In this book, professional golf coach and psychologist Bob Rotella provides a framework for improving the mental side of your golf game. Rotella argues that controlling your thoughts, cultivating confidence, and strategizing effectively can have a bigger impact on your game than making changes to your swing.

In this guide, we’ll detail Rotella’s techniques for choosing the right thoughts, goals, and shots. Alongside Rotella’s recommendations, we’ll include the psychological context that informs Rotella’s approach, as well as compare and contrast his advice with other techniques from coaching and sports psychology.

Though most of us have a passing familiarity with the concept of Zen—enough to know that we’d probably like to have more of it in our lives—few of us really know what "Zen" means or could articulate how Zen Buddhism describes reality and human life. Philosopher Alan Watts explains the major principles and the history of Zen Buddhism in The Way of Zen.

First published in 1957, the book explains the schools of thought from which Zen originated, breaks down its most foundational principles, and describes how you can experience Zen in your everyday life. (Spoiler alert: Watts thinks that you don’t have to spend your days in meditation or contemplation to make it work!)

In this guide, we’ll examine what Zen is, uncover its principles, and describe how to begin experiencing it. We’ll also compare Watts’s interpretations of Zen ideas to other scholars’ explanations, and we’ll compare his ideas to other theories about how we perceive and experience the world.

In The Definitive Book of Body Language, communication experts and best-selling authors Allan and Barbara Pease argue that body language plays a key role in shaping interactions between people. The authors explain that during verbal interactions, people pay more attention to the facial expressions, gestures, and postures they see than the words they hear. Therefore, knowing how to interpret body language—and show the right body language—can help you communicate more effectively.

You’ll come away from this guide understanding:

• How your body language reflects and influences your emotions
• Why other people respond to you the way that they do
• How to adapt your body language to garner positive responses from others

We’ll also expand on the authors’ thoughts with psychological research, additional insights, and practical methods from other communication specialists and self-help practitioners.

Have you ever wondered what goes on in the life of a child star? It’s not always glamorous, and in some instances, it’s downright toxic. In her best-selling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, former child star Jennette McCurdy explores the ways in which her acting career and her entire identity are inextricably linked with her difficult, often traumatic, relationship with her controlling mother.

In this guide, we’ll discuss the psychological research that both explains the behaviors McCurdy describes and details their effects, particularly on children. In addition, we’ll compare McCurdy’s narrative of her life to other popular books that take a clinical approach to similar issues, including Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, Quit Like a Woman, and The Power of Vulnerability.

What do the food on your plate, the electricity that powers your home, and the plastic in everything from your clothes to your car have in common? They all require large amounts of fossil fuel.

In How the World Really Works, scientist Vaclav Smil argues that our current way of life relies so heavily on fossil fuels that the only way to reduce our dependence on them and slow down climate change is to do so gradually and at great expense. But we can’t engage in any intelligent discussion about how to solve the problem of climate change unless everyone has a shared understanding of how the world works.

In this guide, we’ll explore Smil’s ideas about the functioning of four critical aspects of our world: energy, food production, manufacturing, and the environment. Throughout the guide, we’ll compare Smil’s analyses to those of other experts and examine current research and potential solutions to the issue of climate change.

What’s the common thread among the world’s most successful business leaders? In Discover Your True North, business leadership educator Bill George argues that it’s not about being the most talented or the most charming person in the boardroom—it’s about being true to yourself and staying focused on your core priorities and values (your “True North”).

After analyzing interviews with 48 international business leaders about their career journeys, George distills their most salient insights into simple guidelines that anyone can follow to become a leader in their organization. In this guide, we’ll explain how to identify your core purpose and ethics by reflecting on your unique life experiences, common mistakes to avoid on your leadership journey, how to hone a team-oriented approach to leadership, and how to maintain a personal support system. We’ll also compare George’s recommendations to those of other business leaders and include tips for executing his guidelines.

According to author and lecturer Dale Carnegie, public speaking is the one skill that can bring you more success, opportunity, and fulfillment than any other. In Public Speaking for Success, Carnegie argues that as a skilled speaker, you'll be able to change people's hearts and minds, inspire action, improve your relationships, and advance your career. Most people fear speaking in public, but that’s only natural—and with Carnegie’s time-tested lessons, you can learn to overcome that fear, take the stage, and speak with confidence and poise.

Our guide is based on the updated 2006 edition of Public Speaking for Success (originally published in 1926). We share Carnegie’s essential teachings about why public speaking matters, how to overcome the fear of getting on stage, and how to craft and deliver a memorable speech. In commentary, we’ll explore how speech-giving has changed since Carnegie’s time and compare his ideas to those in two popular books on TED talks.

It’s easy to feel like you have to constantly be doing something. Social media declares that to be a good person, you have to pay attention to the right post or cause; you feel like your time is money and you have to constantly use it productively.

Understanding and resisting this mindset is the subject of professor and visual artist Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. According to Odell, the need to constantly do something derives from capitalism and is harmful to everyone. Using examples from art, history, and her own life, Odell recommends doing nothing—devoting time and attention to “non-productive” activities that deepen your connection with the world.

In this guide, we’ll define the “attention economy” and explain why you constantly feel pushed to be productive. We’ll also show how you can “do nothing” to take back control of your life and engage with the world in a deeper, more satisfying way. Through our commentary, we’ll explore some of the history and philosophy behind Odell’s ideas and offer practical ways you can implement her suggestions.