The Book of Life is an ever evolving book that aims to be the curation of the best and most helpful ideas in the area of emotional life. Think of it as the brain of the school of life and one of our new favorite books.
It’s called The Book of Life because it’s about the most substantial things in your life: your relationships, your income, your career, your anxieties.
There’s always been a longing to gather the important things in one place. Some of the appeal of a Bible or the collected works of a big name author is the sense that amidst all the chaos and disparate sources of knowledge, someone has taken the trouble to distill, to compress, to say what is essential. In a world overflowing with information, what we most need is curation. The Book of Life aims to be the curation of the best and most helpful ideas in the area of emotional life.
Ultimately, life is only 500,000 hours long so we have to make sure the ideas we need don’t get lost – or take too long to find.
The Book of Life redraws the sense of what a book is. Up to now, books have been the most ambitious way in which ideas are presented. But they have suffered from serious limitations: they’ve had only one author; they’ve usually been written over a relatively short period of time. And once they’ve been finished, they can’t be changed (even if the author gets a great new idea). They have also been largely restricted to words, images being too expensive and film impossible.
The Book of Life is being written by many people over a long time; it keeps changing and evolving. It is filled with images and films as well as texts. By floating online, it can grow a bit every day or so, as new things come along and it can be equally accessible all around the world, at any time, for free.
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