Good Life Project || Inspiration | Motivation | Happiness | Meaning | Success

Nicholas Epley studies how people misjudge each other, avoid conversations with strangers, and miss out on life-affirming relationships. It all started when he noticed something on a silent Chicago train that changed how he thinks about the strangers he avoids and the people he loves but never calls. The thing stopping him wasn't what he expected.Epley is a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he's spent over fifteen years studying why smart, socially wired people routinely misread each other. His research on human connection has appeared in the New York Times and on NPR, and he teaches an MBA course called Designing a Good Life. His new book is A Little More Social.What you'll explore in this conversation:Why the experiment that convinced Nicholas to talk to a stranger on a silent train started with him assuming it would go badlyThe specific belief researchers found sabotages more conversations than shyness, rudeness, or bad timing combinedW

She measured everything about her illness. The measuring turned out to be part of what kept her sick. Giorgia Lupi is an information designer and a partner at Pentagram in New York, and one of the few people alive who can take raw data and turn it into something you understand in your bones and feel in your body. In 2020, a mild COVID infection set off four years of long COVID, chronic fatigue syndrome, POTS, mast cell activation, and a level of disability that left her housebound, out of work, and eating eight foods for an entire year. Giorgia did what she does. She tracked every symptom, every test, every prognosis, and limitation. Then she published 1,374 Days, a visual op-ed in the New York Times built from her own symptom data, and readers with chronic illness wrote to say it was the first thing they could hand to the people who loved them.That, however, was just the beginning of a story of recovery that was about to take a wild, transformative turn. One that would find her rethinking her approach to mea

Shawn Achor spent twelve years at Harvard studying the science of belief and success, and his TED talk has been watched more than 25 million times. His new book, The Power of Beliefs, grew out of research with the NFL, NASA, and six Marine battalions at Camp Pendleton, and out of watching his own daughter fight for her life three months early.The 7 core beliefs that control much of our lives, without us knowing itWhy believing you’re alone in your effort can make hard things harder.The two small words that turn a hollow pep talk into a path to success.What a stranger's ten seconds on an escalator taught Shawn about the difference between mattering less and not mattering at all.A five-minute weekly habit Shawn's family calls the Memory DeLorean, and what it does to the story you tell about a hard season.How time-stress can make you abandon everything you believe is important.How to harness hidden beliefs to feel more alive and connected, and thrive in all parts of life.For anyone in a season where the ground f

Today, we’re introducing a new conversation format that we’ll be working into the mix called Good Life Jams. These sessions take on 2-3 hot topics and go deep. Today’s conversation partner is Leah Smart, a senior editor at LinkedIn, a writer and speaker, and the host of Everyday Better.The topics we’re digging into: When women earn more, the physical housework shrinks. The mental load doesn't move at all. What’s going on there? And why are self-help books crashing, while coaching is taking off? In this conversation, you'll explore:Why the most common fix for an overloaded household leaves the heaviest part completely untouchedThe question Leah's husband asked her about the word "good" that quietly reset her entire standard for running a homeWhat the data leaves out, and why the scorekeeping it invites can erode a long partnershipSelf-help book sales fell roughly 25% in a year while coaching grew about 15%, and what people are actually paying for insteadThe one thing a human can do that n

Martial artists spend years learning how to fall before they learn much of anything else. The rest of us just brace, then wonder why the landing does so much damage.This is a best-of conversation, first aired in 2023, and it has only gotten more useful with time.Mark Nepo is a poet and spiritual teacher who has been working in poetry and spirituality for more than fifty years. His book The Book of Awakening was a #1 New York Times bestseller, he has written twenty-six books translated into more than twenty languages, and he was named one of Oprah's SuperSoul 100. In his thirties, he was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma, and that experience runs underneath everything he writes about adversity, grief, and what it costs to stay open. He wrote Falling Down and Getting Up when his cancer years came flooding back during the pandemic. Since this conversation first aired, Mark has published The Fifth Season: Creativity in the Second Half of Life.What you'll explore in this conversation:Why aikido teaches studen

Jonathan sits down with Scott Harrison, charity: water founder, for a wide-ranging reflection on his 20-year mission to bring clean water to everyone on earth. Scott revisits the original spark, the scale of the problem, the storytelling strategy that helped build the movement, and the personal tension of leading a global nonprofit while raising a family. We discuss the long game of solving a problem that is both massive and solvable, why generosity is often unlocked through story rather than statistics, and how Scott thinks about balance, legacy, and “the work with no end.”Key topics:Scott looks back on the early days of charity: water and the energy of the original nightclub fundraiser that launched the organizationThe scale of the mission has grown to more than $1 billion mobilized, 216,000 projects across 29 countries, and about 700 million people still without clean waterStorytelling, not statistics, is the core tool charity: eater uses to overcome apathy and make distant suffering feel personalThe

Susan Bratton has spent over two decades teaching people the passionate lovemaking and intimate communication skills that sex education (and life) never covered. At 42, after eleven years of marriage, she had never had an orgasm from intercourse, and her husband was already having an affair to cope with it. What actually turned things around wasn't couples therapy. It was something else entirely, and it changed how she teaches everyone who's come to her since.Susan is the author and publisher of 44 books and programs on lovemaking, sensual communication, and what she calls regenerative intimacy, reaching more than 1.5 million people worldwide. She's become one of the most trusted, least censored voices teaching people how sex actually works in the body, at every age. This conversation is guest-hosted by acclaimed author and coach Cynthia Morris.What you'll explore:The three different things people lump together under "low libido," and why untangling them changes what you actually need to fix.Why Susan stopped

Somewhere in the past few years, you did something you love, with someone you love, for the very last time. And you had no idea when it happened. This solo episode is about why we cruise through our most meaningful endings, and why that might actually be the best possible news about how you've been living.In this deep-dive solo, Jonathan Fields unpacks an idea he calls unmarked lasts, the everyday endings that slip past without ceremony, starting with a story about fifteen years of chairlifts with his daughter and the ordinary Sunday that unceremoniously closed an era. It's a conversation built for anyone in their 40s, 50s, or beyond who has started to notice that the archive of things that ended is getting fuller, and wonders if they should have been paying better attention.In this episode, you'll explore:Why the baby book has a page for every first and not a single page for the lasts, and what that asymmetry does to usThe structural reason you cannot catch a casual last while it's happening, no matter how p

Every villain is the hero of their own story. That line opens part two of Jodi Picoult's thirtieth novel, and she'll tell you it's also how most of us get through any given day, or life.Picoult is the number one New York Times bestselling author of thirty novels, including My Sister's Keeper, Small Great Things, and Wish You Were Here. Her new one, Hollow Bones, arrives right around the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and centers on a woman whose entire career is built on preparing for catastrophe, who gets blindsided anyway. For three decades, Picoult has done her research by climbing all the way inside other people's lives, including people whose beliefs she can barely stand to sit across from, and a good part of this conversation is about how and why she does that, how it impacts her own life, beliefs, and approach to storytelling. We explore:What thirty years of living inside other people's heads has actually cost her, including the nightly ritual one narrator forced on her before she could face her own familyTh

Bizarre fact, if you tell people you’re genuinely happy being single, they don’t believe you. You, in fact, may be among the doubters when it comes to your single-at-heart friends. Bella DePaulo has spent more than three decades studying what happens when someone is genuinely, unapologetically happy being single, and one thing keeps showing up in her data. People don't believe them. In studies where participants read identical biographies, differing only in one line, single or married, the single people who said they were happy were assumed to be exaggerating. The married people were taken at their word.Bella is a social psychologist (Ph.D., Harvard) and the author of Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life. Her TEDx talk on what no one tells you about single people has been watched more than 1.8 million times, and The Atlantic has called her America's foremost thinker and writer on the single experience. She's been writing the Living Single blog at Psychology Today sinc

Allison Aubrey walked into a longevity lab expecting a great story. She walked out believing she was failing at key parts of her own life. After 25 years as one of NPR's most trusted health and science reporters, Aubrey agreed to a battery of tests meant to measure her biological age, and the results rattled her enough to send her on a curiosity tour, looking for answers that had nothing to do with biology. What she found became her new book, Your Turn, a reframing of the years between 50 and 75 as a third turn, the part of life where, against every expectation, a hidden surge of energy and purpose becomes possible. In this conversation, Jonathan and Allison get into the moment a lab technician's offhand comment sent her into a spiral, the recurring dream that a professional dream analyst helped her decode, and the real reason she finally stepped away from the newsroom rhythm she'd built her 25-year identity around.You'll hear how she distinguishes passion from purpose from simply mattering, and why one

Angela Duckworth on why grit is only half the story. Acclaimed researcher Professor Angela Duckworth returns to unpack a bigger idea behind grit: your environment matters as much, if not more, than your mindset. Jonathan and Angela Duckworth explore how situation, peers, mentors, and culture shape the thoughts you have, the effort you can sustain, and the kind of person you become.They also dig into the practical question of change: if you want a different outcome, how do you stop blaming yourself and start redesigning the conditions around you?Key topics:Angela Duckworth reframes grit as part of a larger system, arguing that the "inside game" and the "outside game" are linked.She explains why high achievers often think in more positive, productive ways, and why those thoughts are strongly influenced by the situation they are in.The conversation breaks down the three-box model: situation, thoughts, response.Angela and Jonathan discuss how emotions and behavior fit into that model, and how feedback loops can c

Most of us think good decisions happen in the moment. Shane Parrish says they’re already decided before you sit down. And most of them end up being bad, because you waited too long to make them good.Shane Parrish spent years inside Canadian intelligence, making real-time decisions where the stakes were other people's lives, long before he founded Farnam Street and The Knowledge Project podcast. He's the author of Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results, and has quietly become the person elite investors, athletes, and Silicon Valley leaders turn to when a single decision carries outsized weight.In this conversation, you'll explore:Why the position you're in before a decision matters more than the decision itself, and how Warren Buffett almost never finds himself in a bad oneThe four hidden "defaults" that hijack your thinking before you noticeThe three-word phrase Shane uses with his own kids to defuse an argument before it escalatesWhy "doing your best" almost never happens in the

Priya Parker comes back to argue that the fights you're avoiding aren't threatening your closest relationships; they're the only thing that can save them.Priya Parker is a facilitator and strategic advisor who has spent two decades helping churches, companies, and families fight better, not less. She's the acclaimed author of The Art of Gathering and her new book, The Art of Fighting, and she's spent her career inside the rooms where groups either fall apart or find their way back to each other.What you'll explore:Why "conflict is not sin," and how a moral hangover from that idea keeps good relationships stuck in surface-level peaceThe concept of "relational longing," the pulse underneath a fight that tells you whether it's worth havingPriya's three-phase framework for a healthy fight, and the one question that unlocks the middle phaseThe "we're not a" clause: a phrase to listen for that reveals what a group is actually trying to becomeWhy giant sequoias can't reproduce without fire, and what that means for f

Most women don't hear about perimenopause until they're already deep into it, sometimes a decade in. This week, guest host Karen Walrond talks with OB/GYN and Generation M author Dr. Jessica Shepherd about the actual, gradual shape of that transition, the real math behind hormone therapy decisions, and why nearly 40% of a woman's life happens after menopause even begins. It's less a symptom checklist than a new starting point for the next several decades.What you'll explore:The gas-tank way to picture where you actually are between reproductive years and menopauseWhy symptom severity has almost nothing to do with how "together" you otherwise areThe difference between the "symptom bucket" and the "longevity bucket" in deciding on hormone therapyWhy perimenopause itself splits into an early, mid, and late phase, and why the late phase is the window with the most protective upside for starting hormonesWhat the SWAN study found about how menopause symptoms differ by race, and why that matters long-termIf you've b

Your brain does not have to decline with age. Recent research reveals that for most people, staving off cognitive decline or dementia is more about lifestyle, especially in your 30s to 50s, than age or genetics. And, amazingly, retirement might be the single biggest danger zone for your brain health.Neuroscientist Dr. Tommy Wood has spent his career studying what actually predicts a declining brain, and the answer has almost nothing to do with age. It's what happens the day you stop being challenged, especially the day you retire. This week: why the smartest, most accomplished people you know may be the ones most at risk, and the two-part check you can run at your next doctor's visit that sets the stage for the next fifty years.What you'll explore:Why age-specific dementia rates have quietly been falling for decades, even as headlines warn of a coming epidemicThe real difference between forgetting a name (a retrieval problem) and never actually experiencing it in the first place (an encoding problem), and why

Every night, while you're asleep, your brain runs a cleaning cycle that clears out the kind of toxic buildup linked to Alzheimer's and dementia. And, with age, most of us sleep less. We are shortchanging the benefits without ever realizing how much control we actually have over sleeping longer, and better.Dr. Rebecca Robbins is an Assistant Professor in Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Sleep Scientist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, where her research spans sleep's relationship to cognitive function, cardiometabolic health, and long-term brain health. She's published more than 100 peer-reviewed studies, co-authored Sleep for Success!, and her work is exactly the kind of research most of us never hear about until someone frames it the way she does here.In this conversation, you'll explore:Why sleep really does shift around age 38 to 40, and what that shift does and doesn't mean for youThe neuroscience discovery of the brain's overnight "wash cycle," and what Dr. Robbins's own eight-ye

You can have a genuinely excellent self-care practice, the meditation, the training, the tracked sleep, the nutrition, and still be using every bit of it to avoid the one question that actually needed asking.In this episode, I turn the mic on myself. After 14 years and thousands of conversations about what it takes to live well, I trace the year my own "robust" wellness practice, meditation, training, nutrition, connection, everything, ended in a stress-induced medical diagnosis at the exact moment I'd have called myself the most dialed-in version of my life. Turns out, you cannot self-care your way out of a fundamental misalignment in a core area of your life. So, today, we’re exploring:The real distinction between self-care that restores you and self-care that just makes a misaligned life more bearable, or worse, hides what actually needs your true attention.Three 90-second tests, duration, imagination, intensity, that tell you honestly which one you're runningThe five places structural misalignme

We've been calling it a loneliness epidemic and treating it like a mental health problem. NYU developmental psychologist Niobe Way says that's the wrong diagnosis, and she has almost 40 years of data on teenage boys to make her case.Niobe Way has spent nearly four decades running longitudinal studies with teenagers, tracking the same kids from middle school into adulthood. Her research on boys, friendship, and masculinity has made her one of the go-to voices on loneliness, connection, and what's actually driving rising rates of depression, anxiety, and violence among young men, along with similar struggles with girls. And, these all tend to follow us well into adulthood. Her latest book is Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture.In this conversation, you'll explore:Why mental health is a symptom, not the root problem, and what Way calls "social health" insteadThe moment, around age 15, when boys start hiding their feelings in publicWhy boys learn to sacrifice the relationship to prot

What if the kindest thing someone told you about your pain was that it didn't have to mean anything?Marisa Renee Lee has spent her career inside other people's grief and her own. She's the bestselling author of Grief Is Love, a former deputy director in the Obama White House, and now CEO of Beacon Advisors. Her new book, Waiting for Dawn, comes out of her own experience with chronic illness, and it argues against nearly every wellness cliché about turning pain into purpose.In this conversation, you'll explore:Why Marisa refuses to promise anyone that their suffering serves a purpose, even her own family's"Gray grief": a name for the grief that has no end date, no diagnosis, and no cultural scriptThe difference between identity (what you built) and essence (what's still there when it's gone)Why she calls hope a discipline, not a feeling, and what that looks like on the worst daysHow her family held onto hope through her aunt's most devastating loss, and what happened afterIf you've ever felt ashamed for not fi