David Brooks Links Emotional Intelligence to Success

2012-12-04 83

David Brooks Links Emotional Intelligence to Success
The New York Public Library - Celeste Bartos Forum New York Public Library
David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bobos in Paradise, has long explored and explained the way we live. Now, Brooks turns to the building blocks of human flourishing in a multilayered, illuminating work grounded in everyday life.This is the story of how success happens. It is told through the lives of one composite American couple, Harold and Erica -- how they grow, push forward, are pulled back, fail, and succeed. A scientific revolution has occurred -- we have learned more about the human brain in the last thirty years than we had in the previous three thousand.The unconscious mind, it turns out, is most of the mind -- not a dark, vestigial place but a creative and enchanted one, where most of the brain’s work gets done. This is the realm of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, personality traits, and social norms: the realm where character is formed and where our most important life decisions are made. The natural habitat of The Social Animal.