Dear Friends, In a year of small steps forward and some steps back, we are profoundly grateful for all of you— the authors, readers, editors, agents, and publishers we have had the honor of learning from and working with. You always remain our greatest teachers. In that spirit, we’d like to share twelve essential lessons we’ve learned this year that we’ll be carrying into 2022.
1. Our Most Important Relationship Is With Our Inner Voice Mental well-being was on everyone’s minds as we re-entered the world. And, thanks to people like Simone Biles, Naomi Osaka, and others, we are beginning to end the social stigma of talking about mental health. Thanks to psychologist Ethan Kross and his international bestselling book Chatter, we now have the tools to turn our inner critic into our inner coach. From distanced self-talk to organizing our outer clutter for our inner clarity, Chatter gives us the resources to focus on what we can control. 2. How We Die Can Teach Us How To Live We don’t have to have a near-death experience to learn how we want to live our lives. Dr. Bruce Greyson, Professor Emeritus of Psychi
3. The Time To Take Care Of Your Brain Is NOW
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner is part of a wave of progressive DAs in power for the first time, committed to creating a system that actually works for the people it is supposed to represent. For the People makes the compelling case that transforming criminal justice is the most important civil rights movement of our time and can be achieved if we’re willing to fight for the power to make change. 5. Trees Are Wired For Collaboration And Communication, And So Are We In Finding The Mother Tree, forest ecologist Suzanne Simard taught us that the forest is alive and connected: that the trees perceive, respond, connect, protect, share, and converse. Suzanne’s New York Times Bestselling memoir (soon to be a feature film starring Amy Adams) is a riveting account of her personal journey to understand the intelligence and communication of trees.
6. An Awakened Brain Is Our Greatest Buffer Against Depression In The Awakened Brain, Dr. Lisa Miller, a New York Times Bestselling author and Founder and Director of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute at Columbia University, shows us that spirituality is not only a fundamental human experience that tran
7. We Are Missing 50% Of Our Lives—But We Don’t Have To Our ability to pay attention is unreliable when we’re under stress. In neuroscientist Amishi Jha’s Peak Mind, she takes us on a journey through her cutting-edge research with elite soldiers and first responders, revealing how mindfulness training helps us to be more successful and satisfied. We did her 12-minute-a-day practice and felt enormous benefits like a reduction in our ever-looming pandemic brain fog, and a strengthening of our focus.
7. Hope Is Our Greatest Survival Trait
8. There Is A Wildness In All Of Us Seeing the ways we are connected to nature, and understanding our place in the macrocosm of our world, is more important than ever. In the heart-wrenching stories that make up the unforgettable
9. All Disruption Is Personal
In The Future We Choose, now out in paperback, Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, the architects of the Paris Climate Agreement, showed us the two worlds we are choosing between, taught us the three mindsets that we need to face the future, and the ten steps all of us can take to confront climate change.
This year marked the release of the never-before-seen footage shot over five days at His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s residence in Dharamsala for The Book of Joy. The film, Mission JOY: Finding Happiness in Troubled Times, invited us to join these mischievous luminaries (the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu) and taught us how to live with joy in the face of life’s inevitable challenges. 12. Our Individual Survival Depends On Our Collective Survival This was such a monumental year—grappling with the effects of the pandemic, political turmoil, natural disasters, and rejoining our friends and families after so much isolation. Many of these books helped us to find moments of joy, and it was our honor and privilege to share them with you. Our motto has long been: Genius is a collaborative process. This year we recognized all the more how much of our survival as a species and global community is a collaborative effort as well. We don’t know how we would have gotten through the year without you. Thank you. We look forward to sharing another year of creativity, connection, and change in 2022. In celebration of the season, we are making donations in your honor to the Equal Justice Initiative, The Second Harvest Food Bank, The Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, Protect the Sacred, and The Tibetan Children’s Village. Wishing you a healthy and hopeful New Year, |