Influencing Works

TOGETHER: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World

By Vivek Murthy (19th and 21st Surgeon General of the United States)

In this book, Vivek Murthy demonstrates how modern society has created multiple risk factors for people to become lonely throughout the course of their lives. Murthy describes how finding connection in a group, being able to speak our truths to others, and finding meaning by supporting the development of others are powerful antidotes to loneliness and strong boosters to human well-being. PATHS workshops are designed to bring a group of people together over a long period of time to foster connection, trust, and an ability to show one’s true self. In these workshops, we struggle together and learn how sanitized and curated realities are damaging our psychological well-being.

THE POWER OF NOW: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment By Eckhart Tolle

Since its publication in 1997, this book has been enormously helpful to literally millions of people. Although it is a guide to enlightenment and most of us do not have this as a personal goal, PATHS uses THE POWER OF NOW for its exceptional ability to help us understand our minds. THE POWER OF NOW points out that we are not our minds. Our minds are powerful tools we should ideally be skilled at using only when we need them. But the tools have taken us over and most of us believe we are our minds (“I think therefore I am”), at great cost to our own well being. We don’t need to become enlightened to gain great liberation from learning the specifics of how our minds can be ruling our lives and the ways to work to change this. This knowledge can lead to significantly increased skill to maintain presence, peace, and joy in our lives.

LOST CONNECTIONS: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions

By Johann Hari

Internationally renowned journalist, Johann Hari, spent four years gathering the best research and talking to the world’s top experts in order to understand his own 13-year long struggle with depression. His conclusion is that, as a society, we have become disconnected from important things that are basic necessities to human psychological health. Prominent among these are: connection to other humans, connection to healthy values, connection to nature, and connection to meaningful employment. While PATHS workshops cannot alleviate all of the nine potential causes of depression Hari identifies, they are designed to powerfully address the causes listed above and to equip participants with skills to guard against their risks in the future.

PRINCIPLES

By Ray Dalio

Ray Dalio, as the founder of what is probably the world’s largest hedge fund, is a very unlikely inspiration for a nonprofit like PATHS. But his book PRINCIPLES certainly is a key influencing work for us. In PRINCIPLES, Dalio promotes the idea that each of us needs to listen carefully to the internal messages within us as well as the external messages we receive from the world in terms of feedback to what we put out into the world. Through careful attention to these two information flows we can develop our own set of principles that are uniquely suited to us and to what we want to do and achieve in the world and with our lives. The structure of PATHS workshops has been designed to allow for a lot of opportunity for participants to reflect on what their principles might be. Additionally, Dalio’s promotion of the huge value of direct and honest feedback is a cornerstone of PATHS culture and also a key element of the curriculum.

THINK AGAIN: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know

By Adam Grant

In this book, Adam Grant quotes musician and master persuader Daryl Davis saying, “We are living in space-age times, yet there are still so many of us thinking with stone-age minds.” In truth, all of us are stone age thinkers some of the time but THINK AGAIN is all about how important it is that we learn to give up the idea that we “know” anything ever. Reality is very complex, our understanding of it is always developing, and the world is changing at an increasing pace. All of this means we need to become more and more humble in the way we think, learn, unlearn, and relearn in an ongoing cycle. When we have this kind of openness, humility, and constant curiosity, our minds will be much better suited to the times we are living in. PATHS culture, workshop structure, and curriculum are dedicated to developing this kind of mindset.

THE PASSION ECONOMY: The New Rules for Thriving in the Twenty-First Century

By Adam Davidson (co-founder of NPR’s Planet Money)

Adam Davidson outlines how the 2Oth century economy rewarded people who learned a given set of skills and settled down to produce consistent outcomes for companies over decades of stable employment. This was a contract in which the worker traded boredom and consistency for valuable security. But with the high mobility and high technology of the 21st century, all the security was lost, leaving workers with highly replicable skillsets vulnerable to exploitation and job loss. Davidson points out that in a world in which automation is set to take over more and more low and medium skill work there is a joyful and meaningful way for people to make themselves valuable by doing the exact opposite of what previous generations were always advised. In today’s world, you become valuable by following your own specific set of curiosities and passions and developing them into a service that is specific enough that it cannot be replicated or automated by anyone who is not as passionate about these things as you are. There will only ever be a small market for your offering, but the people and organizations who need what you do will be prepared to pay well. PATHS workshops are not dedicated to producing young entrepreneurs, but they are focused on giving people space, skills, and structures to help them reflect upon what strange parts of life are most fascinating and passion-inducing to them. Whether these reflections lead them to start a business, a protest movement, a family, or become a teacher is very much up to them.

GRIT: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

By Angela Duckworth

Psychologist Angela Duckworth has made it her mission to study character development in children. In this highly acclaimed work, Duckworth explains how individuals can use exploration to develop interests and, over time, turn them into an enduring passion. Ultimately an enduring passion, a top-level goal, is the main factor in making a person highly gritty and persistent. The tricky thing is that people don’t just spring from the womb with ready-made passions. As Duckworth chronicles, creating environments in which people can explore freely enough, but also with enough structure, to develop strong interests that might later develop into passions is key to supporting the development of grit and perseverance. PATHS workshops are designed to provide structure and guidance to allow participants to test and explore all the interests of the group. Developing and honing personal interests would be done primarily outside of the workshop time but would be consistently supported by workshop problem solving and goal-setting discussions.

IRRESISTIBLE: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping us Hooked.

By Adam Alter

The sleeve of the book says it so well: “Welcome to the age of behavioral addiction - an age in which half of the American population is addicted to at least one behavior. We obsess over our emails, Instagram likes, and Facebook feeds; we binge on TV episodes and YouTube episodes; we work longer hours each year; and we spend an average of three hours each day using our smartphones. Half of us would rather suffer a broken bone than a broken phone, and Millenial kids spend so much time in front of screens that they struggle to interact with real live humans…..Adam Alter, a professor of psychology and marketing at New York University, tracks the rise of behavioral addiction and explains why so many of today’s products are irresistible…….their extraordinary and sometimes damaging magnetism is no accident.”

In this book, Alter explains the human psychology that is being hacked by huge tech companies to keep us using their products and their platforms. By arming us with this knowledge and understanding, Alter gives us the key to developing realistic, reliable, and healthy personal relationships with technology we need and want to use. It’s as if he is giving us a safety guard to put on a very handy but dangerous power tool we own. PATHS workshops will expose participants to the key understandings from this excellent text while involving them in a discussion about what they have discovered about technology in their lives. Once participants are armed with all this information a further robust dialogue will invite them to consider what kinds of safety guards they choose or do not choose to put in place around technology in their own lives.