I recently interviewed Ashley Stahl about her new book, You Turn, a book about getting unstuck, discovering your career direction, and designing your dream job.

To learn how to discover your most authentic career path with Ashley Stahl, click here.

Posts you may have missed:

Hindsight Bias: Why You Make Terrible Life Choices (Letter — December 9, 2020)

Ashley Stahl is a counter-terrorism professional turned career coach, speaker, and, most recently, author of You Turn, a book about getting unstuck, discovering your career direction, and designing your dream job. Through her two viral TEDx talks speeches (here and here), her online courses and her podcast, she’s been able to help clients in 31 countries discover their best career path, upgrade their confidence, and land more job offers. Her writing appears in a monthly career column in Forbes, and her articles have also been featured in the Wall Street Journal, CBS, SELF, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and more.

Nir Eyal: Why did you write this book?

Ashley Stahl: This book has been living inside of me since I was a kid, and it wasn’t until now that I felt I had a comprehensive body of work to share with readers on how to discover their most authentic career path. This is the book for anyone who feels like something’s missing at work, or even if they feel like they hate their job and don’t know what else is out there for them. The narrative uses my personal career journey as a tool to educate readers on an 11 step framework they can use to unlock their most effective skill set for the workforce, explore their core values, and learn about jobs they didn’t even know existed. While I started my career in counterterrorism at the Pentagon, I soon realized — like many people do — that after all the hard work I put in, I chose the wrong career for me. The methodology I share in the book is what got me so clear on who I am and where I belong in my career, and this is a gift I want to give readers, too. We spend 90,000 hours of our life at work — that’s two-thirds of our waking time on this planet. I want to help readers make that time at work truly count. …

In my work as a behavioral designer, I come across important stories on how psychology influences our behavior. Every week, I share my round-up of the most important stories at the intersection of psychology, technology and business. I hope you enjoy them!

You’re Not Meant to Be Happy … and That’s a Good Thing (Medium) Happiness is temporary but the pursuit of our values provides long-lasting benefits.

A new study has found being angry increases your vulnerability to misinformation (PsyPost) Human memory is prone to error — and new research provides evidence that anger can increase these errors.

We Track Steps & Calories for our Health. Why Don’t we Track our Drinks, Too? (Elephant Journal) Setting ourselves up for healthier drinking habits is one of the most game-changing choices we can make to improve our overall health. …

A few weeks ago I saw this chart, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it:

According to this data, the average working American spends more than two hours watching TV per day, and has more than four hours per day of overall leisure time.

Yet, everyone I know is constantly saying “there aren’t enough hours in the day” to get stuff done.

Really? Both things can’t be true: we can’t have four hours of leisure per day, yet also have too few hours for doing important stuff.

“Well, there aren’t enough hours in the work day,” you could clarify.

But as I discuss in my book Indistractable, we spend hours upon hours distracted by pseudowork (checking email unnecessarily, having too many meetings, corporate politicking, etc). …

I recently interviewed David Burkus about his new book, Leading from Anywhere: The Essential Guide to Managing Remote Teams.

To read my interview with David Burkus, click here.

Posts you may have missed:

Hindsight Bias: Why You Make Terrible Life Choices (Letter — December 9, 2020)

Happiness is a myth — at least if you look at it the way most people do.

Most people see happiness as something they can have under certain conditions, for example:

• Having lots of friends
• Living in a beautiful place
• Getting recognized for accomplishments

Whatever they’re chasing, they’re constantly running on a script that goes, “If only I had _____, then I could be happy.”

Almost everyone follows this pattern, even though we should know better.

After all, we know money can’t buy happiness. We’ve seen how celebrities, seemingly on top of the world, fall victim to all kinds of problems and seem anything but happy. …

In my work as a behavioral designer, I come across important stories on how psychology influences our behavior. Every week, I share my round-up of the most important stories at the intersection of psychology, technology and business. I hope you enjoy them!

David Burkus: The One Thing Remote Leaders Need to Know (NirAndFar) I recently interviewed David Burkus about his new book, Leading from Anywhere: The Essential Guide to Managing Remote Teams.

You Don’t Know Your Values. Here’s Why That’s Hurting You (Medium) We need to understand, define, and understand our values if we want to live with personal integrity.

Ineffective ‘learning styles’ theory persists in education (ScienceDaily) A study shows that teaching to the ‘learning styles’ of students is an ineffective approach. …

David Burkus is a speaker, business thought-leader, professor, and best-selling author. His TedX talk, “Why You Should Know How Much your Coworkers Get Paid” has been viewed over 2 million times. He teaches courses on organizational behavior, creativity and innovation, and strategic leadership at Oral Roberts University where is an associate professor. He writes regularly for Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Psychology Today. I recently interviewed David about his new book, Leading from Anywhere: The Essential Guide to Managing Remote Teams.

Nir Eyal: Why did you write this book?

David Burkus: To some extent, all of my work thus far has been focused on using psychology to help individuals and teams do their best work. And the past year has put up some big roadblocks for most people to do that best work. One of the big ones has been the forced work-from-home experiment millions of people have been living (and working) through. At the same time, this shift in the way we’re working, and collaborating isn’t new…just the scale of it is. Remote teams have been around for a long time. At the same time, a new reality has set in that, whenever it’s safe to bring everyone back to the office, we’re not all going to come back. …