The School of Life

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About The School of Life

The School of Life is a global organisation helping people lead more fulfilled lives. It is a resource for helping us understand ourselves, for improving our relationships, our careers and our social lives - as well as for helping us find calm and get more out of our leisure hours. They do this through films, workshops, books and gifts - and through a warm and supportive community. You can find The School of Life online, in stores and in welcoming spaces around the globe.

The School of Life Press was established in 2016 to bring together over a decade of research and insights from The School of Life's content team. Led by founder and series editor Alain de Botton, this is a library to educate, entertain, console and transform us.

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Titles By The School of Life

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What They Forgot to Teach You at School Mar 18, 2021

by The School of Life

( 8 )

$9.99

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 foreign languages.

But why, despite all the lessons we sat through, were we never taught the really important things that dominate and trouble our lives: who to start a relationship with, how to trust people, how to understand one's psyche, how to move on from sorrow or betrayal, and how to cope with anxiety and shame?

The School of Life is an organisation dedicated to teaching a range of emotional lessons that we need in order to lead fulfilled and happy lives - and that schools routinely forget to teach us. This book is a collection of our most essential lessons, delivered with directness and humanity, covering topics from love to career, childhood trauma to loneliness. To read the book is to be invited to lead kinder, richer and more authentic lives - and to complete an education we began but still badly need to finish. This is homework to help us make the most of the rest of our lives.

Other Formats: Audible Audiobook , Hardcover

Great Thinkers: Simple Tools from 60 Great Thinkers to Improve Your Life Today (The School of Life Library) Aug 4, 2016

by Alain de Botton , The School of Life

( 320 )

$9.99

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 us today.

We've worked hard to make the thinkers in this book clear, relevant and charming, mining the history of knowledge to bring you the ideas we think have the greatest importance to our times. This 480-page book contains the canon of The School of Life, the gallery of individuals across the millenia who help to frame our intellectual project - and we have succeeded if, in the days and years ahead, you find yourself turning to our thinkers to illuminate the multiple dilemmas, joys and griefs of daily life.

Other Formats: Hardcover

Stay or Leave: How to remain in, or end your relationship Jan 6, 2021

by The School of Life

( 45 )

$9.99

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? Does someone 'better' actually exist? 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?

All these questions typically haunt our minds as we weigh up whether to stay or go. With no axe to grind or ideology to promote, Stay or Leave walks us gently through our options, opening our minds to perspectives we might not have considered.

This book 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.

Other Formats: Hardcover

How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity (Work series) Jan 24, 2020

by The School of Life

( 163 )

$5.99

We know that our minds are capable of great things because, every now and then, they come out with a brilliant idea or two. However, our minds are also unpredictable, spending large stretches of time idling or distracting themselves. This is a book about how to optimise these beautiful yet fitful instruments so that they can more regularly and generously produce the sort of insights and ideas we need to fulfil our potential and achieve the contentment we deserve. Among other things, we learn how to grasp fragile and flighty thoughts before they disappear through anxiety and fear; at what times of day to try to work and for how long; how to make use of our boredom and instincts, and how to overcome timid and predictable approaches to the largest problems. The result is an operating manual to that most wondrous, though intermittent and always baffling, organ: the human mind.

Other Formats: Paperback

How to Find the Right Words: A guide to delivering life's most awkward messages Feb 4, 2021

by The School of Life

( 29 )

$5.99

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 adore them); or that their music is too loud...

Often, out of embarrassment, we just stay quiet. Occasionally we explode. And, typically, we stumble about, looking for the right words – dreading that we didn’t find them and thereby causing more hurt than we should.

This is a book to help us locate the best possible words to get across a range of life’s most difficult messages. In 20 case studies drawn from relationships, friendships, work, our families and interactions with strangers we are gently shown what we might – in an ideal world – find ourselves saying to make our intentions known while causing minimal harm.

We laugh, we recognise our troubles – and we’re introduced to a range of deeply empathetic ways to navigate some of our most acute social dilemmas.

Other Formats: Hardcover

Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind Jun 11, 2020

by The School of Life

( 125 )

$9.99

A guide to our anxious minds; offering a route to calm, self-compassion and mental well-being.

Far more than we tend to realise, we're all in private deeply anxious. There is so much that worries us across our days and nights: whether our hopes will come true, whether others will like us, whether the people we care about will be OK, whether we can escape humiliation and grief...

Too often, we bottle up our anxieties or try to avoid looking at them directly. We are ashamed of how worried we are and end up feeling isolated and yet more worried. None of this is necessary. Anxiety is deeply normal and, like so much else that troubles our minds, it can be understood and brought under our control. We all deserve to wake up every day without a sense of foreboding.

This is a guide to anxiety: why we feel it, how we experience it when it strikes and what we can do when we come under its influence. Across a series of essays that look at the subject from a number of angles, the tone is helpful, compassionate and in the best sense practical.

We have suffered for too long under the rule of anxiety. Here at last is a pathway to a calmer, more compassionate and more light-hearted future.

Other Formats: Hardcover

Relationships (The School of Life Library) Dec 2, 2016

by The School of Life

( 310 )

$9.99

Few things promise us greater happiness than our relationships – yet few things more reliably deliver misery and frustration. Our error is to suppose that we are born knowing how to love and that managing a relationship might, therefore be intuitive and easy. This book starts from a different premise: that love is a skill to be learnt, rather than just an emotion to be felt. It calmly and charmingly takes us around the key issues of relationships, from arguments to sex, forgiveness to communication, making sure that success in love need never again be just a matter of luck.

Other Formats: Audible Audiobook , Hardcover

Big Ideas for Curious Minds : An Introduction to Philosophy Dec 7, 2020

by The School of Life

( 805 )

$9.99

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 fall away.

This is a book designed to harness children's spontaneous philosophical instinct and to develop it through introductions to some of the most vibrant and essential philosophical ideas of history. The book takes us to meet leading figures of philosophy from around the world and from all eras - and shows us how their ideas continue to matter.

The book functions as an ideal introduction to philosophy, as well as a charming way to open up conversations between adults and children about the biggest questions we all face.

Other Formats: Hardcover

On Confidence (Essay Books) Jul 30, 2017

by The School of Life

( 278 )

$5.99

The difference between success and failure often hangs on a concept that our standard education system never touches: confidence. On Confidence walks us around the key issues that stop us from making more of our potential.
We hear about the impostor syndrome, the wisdom of imagining the great in their bathrooms, and what Nietzsche and Montaigne (among others) have to tell us about resilience and courage. We often stay stuck with the level of confidence we have because we regard being confident as a matter of good luck. In fact, the opposite is true: confidence is a skill based on ideas about our place in the world, and its secrets can be learnt.

Other Formats: Audible Audiobook , Hardcover

Self-Knowledge (Essay Books) Sep 27, 2017

by The School of Life

( 309 )

$5.99

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 we are that we can make reliable decisions – particularly around love and work. This book takes us on a journey into our deepest, most elusive selves and arms us with a set of tools to understand our characters properly. We come away with a newly clarified sense of who we are, what we need to watch out for when making decisions, and what our priorities and potential might be.

Other Formats: Audible Audiobook , Hardcover

Calm: Educate yourself in the art of remaining calm, and learn how to defend yourself from panic and fury. (The School of Life Library) Sep 21, 2016

by The School of Life

( 171 )

$9.99

Few life skills are as neglected, yet as important, as the ability to remain calm. Our very worst decisions and interactions are almost invariably the result of a loss of calm - and a descent into anxiety and agitation. Surprisingly, but very fortunately, our power to remain calm can be rehearsed and improved. We don't have to remain where we are now: our responses to everyday challenges can dramatically alter. We can educate ourselves in the art of remaining calm not through slow breathing or special teas but through thinking. This is a book that patiently unpacks the causes of our greatest stresses and gives us a succession of highly persuasive, beautiful and sometimes dryly comic arguments with which to defend ourselves against panic and fury.

Other Formats: Hardcover

How to Find Love (Essay Books) Aug 23, 2017

by The School of Life

( 174 )

$5.99

Choosing a partner is one of the most consequential and tricky decisions we will ever make, and the cost of repeated failure is immense. How to Find Love explains why we have the ‘types’ we do, and how our early experiences give us scripts of how and whom we love. It sheds light on harmful repetitive patterns and the extent to which we are not always simply choosing people who can make us happy. We learn the most common techniques we use to sabotage our chances of fulfilment and why, despite their costs, we unwittingly engage in them. The book provides a crucial set of ideas to help us make safer, more
imaginative and more effective choices in love.

Other Formats: Hardcover

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