This is the 10% Happier man. I believe that was the phrase he used. And I also believe he did not

mean this as a compliment. He observed that because of my conditioning in this individualistic

culture, I had come to view success in a limited way, really just in terms of money and power.

And the skills that I had honed in this regard were what the psychologist called eye skills, meaning they were all

about myself, you know, how to work hard, how to hone my craft, how to stick up for myself.

And I was lacking, according to the shrink, use skills, you know, skills that involved other people like

communication, collaboration, compassion. And I want to add here that this is not gooey or gauzy stuff, U skills.

As the Wharton organizational psychologist and best-selling author, Adam Grant, has often argued,

these days in the workplace, character skills, in other words, you skills, are more important

than cognitive skills, eye skills. Anyway, I bring all this up because it was in this spirit that I got interested in the work of a writer named Mia Birdsong, who is my guest today.

Mia has some provocative ideas about rethinking success, independence, individualism, and the American dream.

For her, the real keys are relationships and community, i.e.

U skills.

I want to say just early and often here, I'm aware that words like relationships and

community can come off as soft or cliched or anodyne or meaningless.

That's the way they came off for me for many, many years.

But there is a growing body of research and thought that strongly suggests that these are actually the critical

skills for health, for happiness, and, as I mentioned before, for success. So in this conversation,

we talk about how to build community, what it looks like in Mia's life community, mutuality as a concept versus reciprocity, how to build community, what it looks like in Mia's life, community, mutuality as a concept

versus reciprocity, how to work with resentment and rejection in community, the etymological

connection between friendship and freedom, I find that fascinating, the transformative power

of asking for help, something many of us struggle with, why she thinks the idea of bootstrapping

...