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.

Alain de Botton

Susan Quilliam

Roman Krznaric

Shane Parrish

Damon Young

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Books By The School of Life

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The School of Life: An Emotional Education Sep 24, 2019

by The School of Life , Alain de Botton

( 75 )

$9.99

Emotional intelligence affects every aspect of the way we live, from romantic to professional relationships, from our inner resilience to our social success. It is arguably the single most important skill for surviving the twenty-first century. But what does it really mean? One decade ago, Alain de Botton founded The School of Life, an institute dedicated to understanding and improving our emotional intelligence. Now he presents the gathered wisdom of those ten years in a wide-ranging and innovative compendium of emotional intelligence which forms an introduction to The School of Life. Using his trademark mixture of analysis and anecdote, philosophical insight and practical wisdom, he considers how we interact with each and with ourselves, and how we can do so better. From the reigning master of popular philosophy, The School of Life: An Emotional Education is an essential look at the skill set that defines our modern lives.

Other Formats: Hardcover

Great Thinkers: Simple Tools from 60 Great Thinkers to Improve Your Life Today Aug 4, 2016

by The School of Life Press

( 118 )

$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

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

by The School of Life

( 1 )

$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

Calm: Educate yourself in the art of remaining calm, and learn how to defend yourself from panic and fury. Sep 21, 2016

by The School of Life

( 44 )

$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

On Confidence Jul 30, 2017

by The School of Life

( 85 )

$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: Hardcover

Relationships Dec 2, 2016

by The School of Life

( 82 )

$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: Hardcover

How to Overcome Your Childhood Jun 19, 2019

by The School of Life

( 25 )

$6.99

To an extraordinary and even humbling extent, who we are as adults is determined by events that happened to us before our fifteenth birthday. The way we express affection, the sort of people we find appealing, our understanding of success and respectability, our approach to work and money… all have a habit of being decisively shaped by events in childhood.
This isn’t to say that we have to remain prisoners of the past; it simply means that in order to liberate ourselves from our histories, we first have to become fully aware of them.
This is a book about such a liberation. It acts as a guide to the influence of childhood on our adults selves, as well as to the way we can – through understanding – move on from some of the more unhelpful aspects of our early family dynamics.
We learn about the way that character is formed, about the concept of ‘emotional inheritance,’ about the formation of our concepts of being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ - and the impact of parental styles of love on the way we choose adult partners. We learn too about how we might evolve emotionally and, in particular, how we may sometimes need to have a breakdown in order to have a breakthrough.
The tone throughout is gentle, wry and humane. We are left with a powerful sense that building up an emotionally successful adult life is possible so long as we reflect with sufficient imagination and compassion on what happened to us a long while back.

Other Formats: Hardcover

Self-Knowledge (Essay Books) Sep 27, 2017

by The School of Life

( 71 )

$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: Hardcover

A Replacement for Religion Oct 22, 2019

by The School of Life

( 3 )

$6.99

Many of us find ourselves in the odd situation of not believing in religion – but nevertheless being interested in having a spiritual life. We may enjoy religious art and architecture, music and community, and even some of the rituals – while being unable to believe in divine commandments or the existence of a higher being.

This book is about those feelings and what we might do about them. The School of Life is a secular organisation fascinated by the gaps left in modern society by the gradual disappearance of religion. We’re interested in how hard it is to find a sense of community, how rituals are dying out and how much we sometimes crave the solemn quiet you find in religious buildings, as well as the comfort offered by the belief in a deity.

This book lays out how we might absorb the best lessons of religion, update them for our times and incorporate them into our daily lives and societies – without taking on the theological or doctrinal elements. This book tries to rescue some of what remains wise and useful from all that no longer seems (to many of us) to be quite true.

Other Formats: Hardcover

How to Find Love Aug 23, 2017

by The School of Life

( 43 )

$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

Big Ideas for Curious Minds: An Introduction to Philosophy Jan 3, 2019

by The School of Life , Anna Doherty

( 113 )

$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

The Meaning of Life Feb 27, 2019

by The School of Life

( 12 )

$5.99

To wonder too openly or intensely about the meaning of life can seem a peculiar, ill-fated and faintly ridiculous pastime. It can seem like a topic on which ordinary mortals cannot make much progress. In truth, it is for all of us to wonder about, define and work towards a more meaningful existence.
This book presents a range of areas in which we might seek the meaning of life, including love, family, friendship, work, self-knowledge and nature. We learn why certain things feel meaningful while others don’t, and consider how we might introduce more meaning into our activities.

Other Formats: Hardcover

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