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

There is a letter most of us keep meaning to write, and never do. Lindsay Hurty has spent her adult life writing the ones other people put off, and she makes a case that the part of a life we account for least carefully is the part that matters most.Lindsay is a Harvard-trained former high school English teacher who left the classroom for motherhood, started writing one line a day to her newborn daughter, and ended up building a practice around it. She co-founded Everwell, has designed and led more than 350 programs, and now helps people write legacy letters, launch letters, and life letters to the people they love. She came to this work through a story involving her eighth-grade math teacher, a mailbox, and a conversation that found her five years after he died.In this conversation, you’ll explore:The five types of letters she teaches, and the one most people have never heard of until someone diesWhat a dying teacher’s family learned about him from an envelope a 14-year-old left in their mailboxThe five-part

When Stanford physician Bryant Lin was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, a friend gave him one piece of advice about his own prognosis that he still credits with how he's lived every day since.Bryant Lin is a Clinical Professor of Medicine and Director of Medical Humanities and the Arts at Stanford, a fourth-generation physician who spent two decades in primary care before his own stage four diagnosis in 2024. He built a medical school class around his experience that drew coverage from the New York Times and CBS Mornings, and he's the author of Sunshine: An Exploration of Living When You Are Dying.In this conversation, you'll explore:The advice from a fellow doctor that changed how Bryant thinks about his own prognosis, and why he stopped looking at the numbers everyone else obsesses overA simple filter he now uses to decide which commitments are worth keeping, and what needs to goWhy he changed very little, even after learning how much less time he likely hadWhy he chose to teach a Stanford

The most accomplished women in Terri Cole's therapy practice kept describing the same private emptiness, and almost none of them could name where it came from. After nearly thirty years and a research group of 650 women, she has an answer that has very little to do with what you would expect. It’s about something called The Father Wound.Terri Cole is a licensed psychotherapist and the author of Boundary Boss and Too Much, whose new book Father Wound: Break Unhealthy Patterns to Reclaim Your Worth and Power is the first secular, science-grounded treatment of a subject she found almost nobody was writing about. She coined the term because she kept seeing it in her office with no name attached to it. For anyone in their forties or fifties who has done the work, checked the boxes, and still feels like something underneath is running the show, this conversation names the thing.What you'll explore in this conversation:The question Terri's own therapist asked about her ambition that reframed twenty years

The year-end review most of us attempt starts with goals and ends in self-criticism. Tiago Forte has run one every year since 2008, and he has come to treat goal setting as the last step of the process, almost an afterthought.Tiago is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Building a Second Brain and The PARA Method, which have reached more than half a million readers in over twenty-five languages, and his new book is Life in Perspective: The Art and Power of the Annual Life Review. Through Forte Labs, he has taught this practice to more than ten thousand students in over seventy countries. He is also, by his own description, someone who resists self-reflection and does it anyway, which makes him unusually useful on the question of how to start.The question Tiago offers the person whose year contained something they would rather not open, and the year his entire review became a single long walkWhy nearly everyone reaches for their work life first, and where he finds the actual source of most people'

Most of us treat anxiety as a malfunction to be fixed or medicated away, and the neuroscience points somewhere stranger. There is a narrow band, a razor's edge, where the same emotion stops running you and starts fueling you.Dr. Wendy Suzuki is a Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at NYU and the incoming Dean of its College of Arts and Science, a leading authority on neuroplasticity, and the author of Good Anxiety and Healthy Brain, Happy Life. Her TED Talk on exercise and the brain has been viewed more than 55 million times. What makes this one land is that she doesn't teach anxiety from the outside. She has lived with social anxiety since she was a kid at birthday parties, still feels it walking into a cocktail party, and built her science around it.In this Best Of conversation, you'll explore:The half of your nervous system nobody talks about, and the one lever you can consciously pull to switch it onWhat to do the morning after a 3 a.m. spiral that converts the worry into forward motio

Harlan Coben spent decades insisting his novels had nothing to do with his life. Then he went looking, and found his life inside every single one of them.With over 100 million books sold in forty-six languages and a run of number one Netflix hits including Fool Me Once, Missing You and I Will Find You, Harlan Coben is one of the most widely read storytellers on the planet. His new book, Plot Twist: Life, Craft, and the Messy First Draft, is both a memoir and a writing guide, because he can no longer separate the two. He is also, at this point, one of the most credible voices arguing that the creative work you keep postponing does not require a bigger life than the one you already have.In this conversation, you'll explore:The two-word question he has been asking since he was a kid, and how it turned a boring family hike into a global hitWhy he wrote three complete novels that nobody published, and flatly refuses to count them as failuresWhat incremental ambition means in practice, and the modest first goal

Every year you get your blood drawn, and someone circles a number that supposedly tells you your inflammation level. Turns out that number is barely more accurate than a coin flip. But, knowing how chronically inflamed you are is critical in preventing disease and slowing the age clock.David Furman directs the Stanford 1000 Immunomes Project and runs the Bioinformatics and Data Science Core at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, where he's spent over fifteen years studying how inflammation drives the diseases most of us start worrying about in our forties and fifties: heart disease, dementia, diabetes, cancer. He's the researcher behind the first published clock that can predict frailty seven years before it shows up, and along the way he's worked with NASA and SpaceX.What you'll explore in this conversation:Why the inflammation test your doctor already runs is barely more accurate than flipping a coin, and what David built to replace itThe everyday object sitting in a lot of living rooms right now that

We spend a lot of time weighing the cost of risking too much. Jimmy Chin has spent most of his life on the harder question, which is what it costs to risk too little, quietly, for twenty or thirty years, until the years are gone.Jimmy Chin is an Academy Award-winning director, a National Geographic photographer, and a New York Times bestselling author. He made Free Solo, Meru, The Rescue, and Nyad, he skied off the summit of Everest, and he lived out of the back of a Subaru from 21 to 28. Then he turned fifty, started looking at his life in chapters, and went looking for people who could tell him what success meant to them at the start and what it means to them now. Those conversations became his new book, Rules to Live By: How Extraordinary Lives Define What Really Matters.Here's what we get into:The question Jimmy says he has been asking since he was ten years old, and why the answer keeps moving while the question never doesWhat one of the world's great cellists realized in the middle of a technica

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