How to lead 4000 lives

Before Breakfast

iHeartPodcasts

Self-improvement, Education

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 24 July 2025

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Even when life is limited, literature expands horizons

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is an IHeart podcast.
0:04.2	Run a business and not thinking about podcasting.
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0:07.5	More Americans listen to podcasts than adds supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora.
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0:15.7	Learn how podcasting can help your business.
0:17.4	Call 844-844-I-Hart.
0:25.9	Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of IHart Radio. Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's tip is to use literature to expand your horizons,
0:41.0	especially if you are in a phase of life where your opportunities for bigger adventures are
0:46.8	limited, books can be a portal to other experiences and can make life feel fuller, no matter what else is going on.
0:58.6	Today's tip comes from Shigeiro Oishi. He's a psychology professor at the University of Chicago
1:05.1	who studies well-being, and he's the author of the book Life in Three Dimensions, How how curiosity, exploration, and experience make a fuller, better life.
1:16.5	Recently on the Happiness Lab podcast, Oishi described a bookseller,
1:21.2	who said that he had read 4,000 books, so he had led 4,000 lives.
1:33.4	I love that. When we step inside a book, or for that matter,
1:39.5	watch a really good movie, or a play, we can be transported to another person's experiences,
1:47.0	thoughts, and feelings. For a while, we live where they live. What happens to them, happens to us.
1:55.2	We step inside their experiences and share their emotions. Whatever the specifics of your daily life,
2:03.1	you can add what Oishi calls psychological richness by reading. As he puts it, this lets you broaden your life by proxy. Your life is not only as big as the experiences you yourself have. Your life expands
2:11.1	to encompass the experiences you read about, too. I find this a comforting thought, particularly as I ponder how much of the world and how many
2:20.8	experiences most of us will never have. I will never be a professional ballerina or opera singer
2:27.9	or basketball player, but I can read the memoirs of people who have had these careers and see what their lives are like.
	...

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