Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was a Hungarian-American psychologist and one of the founders of positive psychology, a field built on the then-unfashionable question of what makes life good rather than merely bearable. He spent decades at the University of Chicago and later at Claremont Graduate University. His research method was as influential as his findings. Using experience…
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Dan Ariely is a behavioural economist at Duke whose books — “Predictably Irrational,” “The Upside of Irrationality,” “The Honest Truth About Dishonesty” — made the field accessible to a general audience. His own origin story is relevant: a severe burn injury as a teenager left him hospitalized for years, and watching how nurses made decisions…
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Professor Tali Sharot runs the Affective Brain Lab at University College London and MIT, and she studies something uncomfortable: how our beliefs resist evidence. Her first book, “The Optimism Bias,” documents how consistently humans overestimate good outcomes for themselves — we expect to live longer, divorce less, and succeed more than the base rates allow.…
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Dr. Eyal Doron is an Israeli psychologist, researcher, and author based at Reichman University, where his work focuses on creativity, education, and the psychology of thinking. He writes and speaks widely on how schools and parents inadvertently train creativity out of children, and what it would take to do the opposite. His central argument is…
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Eran Katz is an Israeli author and lecturer who holds a Guinness World Record for memorizing and reciting a 500-digit number after hearing it once. He’s built a career demonstrating that extraordinary memory is a trained skill rather than a genetic gift, and teaching the techniques behind it. The methods are ancient and surprisingly learnable.…
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Flow is the state Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified when he asked thousands of people, at random moments, what they were doing and how they felt. The answer that emerged: people’s most rewarding experiences came not from relaxation but from total absorption in demanding activity — time distorting, self-consciousness disappearing, action and awareness merging. The conditions are…
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A century after Freud, the fair question isn’t whether he was right — he often wasn’t — but what survived. He was a Viennese neurologist who invented psychoanalysis and handed us a vocabulary for the inner life that we still use without noticing: repression, denial, projection, the Freudian slip, the unconscious itself. What held up:…
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Steve McConnell is the author of “Code Complete,” widely regarded as one of the most useful books ever written about the actual craft of writing software, along with “Rapid Development,” “Software Estimation,” and “More Effective Agile.” His focus is construction — the unglamorous daily practice of building software well. Two of his themes travel far…
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Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist and a founder of humanistic psychology, which he positioned as a “third force” against the behaviourism and psychoanalysis dominating mid-century thought. Both, he argued, had built their models by studying damage. He wanted to study people who were flourishing. His hierarchy of needs is one of the most recognized…
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Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” has sold tens of millions of copies and remains the most durable framework in the leadership genre, largely because Covey built it around character rather than tactics. His core distinction is between the personality ethic — technique, image, quick fixes — and the character ethic of…
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