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Below, J. Eric Oliver shares five key insights from his new book, How To Know Your Self: The Art & Science of Discovering Who You Really Are. Eric has been teaching at the University of Chicago for 20 years as a professor of political science. He has published six books and numerous scholarly articles on topics ranging from the obesity epidemic to the sources of conspiratorial thinking in American politics. He is also the host of the Knowing podcast. Whats the big idea? We suffer because we mistake the fluid process of being for a fixed identity. Flourishing begins when we learn to bring into alignment and balance the forces that shape the self. Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Eric himselfin the Next Big Idea App. 1. You are not a noun. You are a verb. For most of my life, I thought of myself as a fixed entity: This is me. These are my traits. This is who I am. I assumed I was essentially that same person who loved sugary cereal at age 8, fried chicken at 12, and tequila at 21, and who still loves those things now, even if my stomach disagrees. But this is an illusion. Neuroscience, physics, and Buddhism all agree: There is nothing fixed about usnot even close. Instead, we are processes. We are an ever-shifting swirl of molecules, emotions, passing thoughts, and the lingering echo of every person weve ever loved, disliked, or wanted to impress. The self is a process. More specifically, your self is all the ways the energies that animate you as a living being negotiate with reality. Unfortunately, like most negotiations in my life, I accepted the contract without reading the fine print. And so, much of myself is caught up in painful and unproductive feeling states. But the good news is that once you see yourself as a verb, not a noun, everything changes. You realize you are not stuck, even if your mind insists you are. Instead, you are continually unfolding and can be redirected in more positive ways. We are not broken things, but misaligned processes. 2. Our purpose in life is balance. When people ask about my purpose, I usually mumble something about being a better parent, writing a good book, or trying to make the world a better place. But the reality is that none of these activities really defines my life. They are disguises of what my lifes true purpose is: Optimizing this self. This notion is not as shallow or narcissistic as it first sounds. It starts with a key fact: At our core, we are living energy systems. Everything that we know as ourselvesour identities, thoughts, emotions, and so onare ways this living energy system within keeps going. The self is what keeps the flame of life alight, preferably without burning the house down in the process. This means balancing two basic imperatives of the self: Order: all the structures that organize our lives, from our cells to habits to calendars. Vitality: the energy that animates uswhat compels us to sing and dance or eat that second slice of cake. This is where balance becomes vital. A self with too much order is stifled and diminished, but a self with too much vitality is wasteful and incoherent. The secret to living well is finding the right balance between Order and Vitality at all layers of your being. Your moods, thoughts, and good or bad days all emerge from this balancing act. To optimize your life, you need to see and fix the things that throw you out of alignment. 3. Thoughts do not define you. I used to believe that my thoughts were everything. Every anxious rumination. Every petty judgment. Every catastrophic prediction about the futureall hard truths. But this was a delusion. Thoughts are more like mental weather that rolls in and rolls out. Your thoughts are not you. They are mental emissionsquick guesses that your brain makes to keep you eating better or stop you from walking into traffic. When you step back and watch your thoughts without always believing them, you gain a bit of freedom. Once I realized this, life became a lot lighter. I learned to ask myself, Is this thought helping anything? And a lot of the time, the answer was no. Sure, I might still wake up at 3 a.m., but Im no longer convinced that the world was ending because I hadnt replied to an email. When you step back and watch your thoughts without always believing them, you gain a bit of freedom. A little spaciousness. A moment of, Oh, look. Theres my anxiety talking again. How cute. Its surprisingly life-changing. 4. We are social beingsdown to our cells. Inside each of your cells live many tiny creatures called mitochondria. Technically, they are not the same species as you. They moved into our cells a billion years ago and never left. They also reveal a profound truth: We are not a singular person, but a collection of living beings. Our very essence is a social phenomenon. We live because of cooperation. We flourish because of connection. Our selves are not built in isolation. They grow in language, in culture, in relationships, and especially in the messy ones that involve stressful holidays, unmet expectations, or the occasional handwritten apology. I used to think I could solve myself privately, through solitary contemplation and discipline. Now I know better. The way I really grow as a person is through my relationships with others. Its where I find my sticking points, meaning the places where my self-processes are misaligned. As a social being, love is not optional. If you want to thrive, you must do it in community, whatever that means for you. As a social being, love is not optional. Friendship is not optional. Intimacy is not optional. Even conflict, when done kindly, can be a tool for growth. This is humbling, but also oddly comforting. We dont have to figure everything out alone. In fact, we shouldnt even try to. Balance is something we figure out together. 5. Living well means recognizing your imbalances, and letting them go. Most of us secretly believe in a moment of transcendence: If I get the perfect job If the kitchen remodel ever finishes If my partner would just load the dishwasher correctly then I will be calm, wise, and fulfilled. But transcendence doesnt work like that. Living well is both simpler and more difficult than we usually believe. First, you have to see your imbalancesthe places where you are rigid, afraid, lonely, or exhausted. Recognizing them can be difficult because your mind will keep insisting that these reactions are essential to your survival. But most of the time, they are not. They are merely habits that we keep around even if they arent serving us well. Once we can ee our thoughts and feelings this way, they no longer dominate us. But then comes the harder part: letting them go. Not by force, but by curiosity, courage, and care. Three things help: Tend to your basics. Sleep, relationships, food, and meaningful work are all essential. You cant build a thriving self on a collapsing foundation. To find your optimal balance, you first need to locate the right footing. This means taking care of your bodys basic needs. Direct your attention. Wherever your attention goes, your experience follows. We need to find ways to control our minds better. Meditation, journaling, and yoga are useful tools for doing this. They all reveal our mental machinery and help cultivate mindfulness. Engage your emotions with gentleness. Our emotions arent verdicts. Theyre signals. If we treat them as teachers instead of emergencies, they lose their power to dominate us. When you can sit with your feelings and muster some calm detachment, a radical change happens. What emerges is not a flawless, transcendent self, but a softer, wiser relationship with the person you already are. Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea app. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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Companies have never had more tools to measure engagement, yet employees have never reported feeling more disconnected. Its one of the defining paradoxes of modern work: Engagement scores are the obsession of many organizations, yet loneliness, turnover, and team friction are rising. People are completing their tasks but not always experiencing the relationships that make work sustainable, creative, or truly human. Engagement measures motivation, whereas connectedness assesses whether people can work effectively together over time. Many researchers and thinkers have named the forces shaping the future of work. Jonathan Haidt, in The Anxious Generation, highlights how todays workforce arrives with higher baseline anxiety and weaker social muscles, shaped by smartphone-centered adolescence and a decline in face-to-face interaction. Sociologist Allison Pugh, in The Last Human Job, argues that the only irreplaceable work humans will do in the future is relational, involving empathy, attunement, and presence, the distinctively human capacities that AI cannot replicate. Given all this, why are organizations still leaning so heavily on engagement surveys, tools that were built decades ago for a radically different world of work? Because engagement has historically been a useful signal. However, in todays context, it is insufficient. Engagement indicates whether people are motivated, whereas connectedness indicates whether people can thrive. When Engagement Worked and Why It No Longer Does Theres a reason engagement became the gold standard of workplace metrics. According to Kevin Kruse, a serial entrepreneur and best-selling author, engagement reflects the emotional commitment employees feel toward their organizationthe psychological spark behind discretionary effort. Engaged employees often deliver higher productivity, better customer service, and stronger alignment with the company’s purpose. For years, engagement surveys have helped leaders understand motivation at scale. In the industrial, colocated workplaces for which they were designed, engagement was a reasonable proxy for performance. But motivation is no longer the primary bottleneck. The bottleneck is relational capacity: peoples ability to work together, navigate conflict, build trust, and collaborate across distance and difference. Today, an employee can be engaged with their tasks while feeling profoundly disconnected from their team. They can care about the mission yet feel invisible in meetings. They can exceed goals while having no one at work they can confide in. High engagement can sit atop fragile relational foundations. In hybrid and distributed work, it often does. Engagement indicates whether people are enthusiastic, while connectedness indicates whether an organization is healthy. Why Engagement No Longer Matches the Moment The central challenge facing leaders is not effort, its isolation. The U.S. Surgeon Generals 2023 Advisory called loneliness a public health epidemic, noting that the workplace is one of the primary places where adults seek connection. Hybrid work has weakened casual social ties, while digital communication has reduced emotional nuance. Younger workers, raised in online ecosystems, often arrive less practiced in conflict resolution, spontaneous dialogue, and relational risk-taking, all core ingredients of high-functioning teams. Employees may be engaged but unable to speak candidly, trust teammates, navigate differences, ask for help, or integrate into a cohesive whole. As Moe, a workplace culture expert and bestselling author, often says: People thrive when they feel seen, not just surveyed. Engagement surveys werent designed to measure visibility, they were designed to measure satisfaction, and satisfaction does not predict resilience. What Connectedness Actually Measures Connectedness is not a vibe, it is a measurable set of relational conditions that determine whether people can do complex, interdependent work together. We define connectedness as The degree to which people feel seen, supported, trusted, and in meaningful relationships with the humans they rely on to do their work. Connectedness captures dimensions that engagement simply doesnt: 1. Relational Trust. Do people believe their colleagues have their backs? Trust is a well-established predictor of team performance and psychological bravery. 2. Belonging. A sense of belonging reduces turnover risk, buffers stress, and improves collaboration. Deloitte reports that 79% of employees surveyed said fostering belonging was important to organizational success, and 93% agreed belonging drives organizational performance. 3. Psychological Bravery. Can employees disagree productively? Tell the truth? Take interpersonal risks? Bravery is what fuels innovation and healthy conflict. 4. Purpose and Meaning. Clarity of purpose is not a strategic artifact, it is relational glue. It helps employees understand not only what they do but also why they matter. 5. Network Strength and Collaboration Flow. This reflects how well people work together across teams, not just how they feel about the organization in the abstract. 6. Feeling Seen. Employees do not require perfection, but they do require recognition of their humanity: their story, their needs, their contributions. Allison Pughs research underscores this point: These relational dimensions are the very aspects of work that machines cannot automate. The irreplaceable human contribution, she writes, is connection itself. Connectedness Predicts Performance Better Than Engagement Does Why is connectedness more predictive than engagement? Research across organizational psychology, sociology, and network science consistently shows that connected teams: Innovate more easily Recover from setbacks faster Handle conflict with less damage Execute complex work with fewer delays Experience lower burnout and turnover Googles Project Aristotle famously found that psychological safetya relational variablewas the top predictor of team effectiveness, beating out individual talent and skill mix. In hybrid and in-person work, it is the strength of relationships, not individual sentiment scores, that determines the speed of collaboration, cross-functional problem-solving, and execution resilience. Engagement fuels effort while connectedness fuels performance. How Leader Can Start Measuring Connectedness Today This is where leaders typically ask: Okay, but how do we measure something as intangible as connectedness? Heres a practical playbook from our combined work: 1. Quarterly Connection Pulses. Short, frequent surveys with questions such as: Do you feel connected to the people you work closely with? Do you have someone at work you can be real with? Does cross-team collaboration feel trusting and safe? 2. Relationship Network Mapping. Organizational network analysis, a method of mapping networks in organizations, can identify bottlenecks, isolated individuals, and overloaded super-connectors. 3. Leader Relational Credibility Index. A relational 360: Do people feel seen, supported, safe, challenged, and understood by their leaders? 4. Collaboration Friction Score. Identify where function-to-function trust is breaking down, even when engagement is high. 5. Belonging Gaps. Identify individuals who are enthusiastic but invisible, the group most vulnerable to burnout and turnover. 6. Monthly Meet-Ups. Replace or refine annual performance reviews with regular, meaningful two-way dialogue between the people leader and the employee. These tools shift leaders from watching scores to watching stories, the lived relational realities within their teams. To build connected organizations, leaders must shift from driving engagement to designing relational ecosystems and from motivating individuals to strengthening networks. In Tonys work designing relational leadership experiences, we call this creating Campfires of Connection: intentional spaces where people can speak bravely, listen deeply, and reconnect with the purpose behind their work. In Moes research, this is the Heart Habit of leadership: showing up with curiosity, presence, and attunement so people feel truly seen. In a world where isolation is rising and trust is fraying, connectedness is a strategic capability, and its time leaders start measuring what matters most.
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E-Commerce
Since the Trump administration deployed 2,000 immigration officers to Minneapolis a few weeks ago, childcare workers have been on high alert. Immigration officers have shown up at childcare centers across Minnesota, leaving many childcare workers scared to show up for work. Childcare providers, who have long faced funding challenges and staffing shortages, are now being forced to figure out how to protect their workers while continuing to provide an essential service to families. Today, many of these centersat least 50 providers, according to the childcare coalition Kids Count on Ushave shut their doors to participate in an economic blackout across the state that is being called the Day of Truth and Freedom. The collective action is intended to protest ICEs presence in the state, by halting all economic activity for the day. For childcare workers, there is a lot on the line: A viral YouTube video that made the rounds in December put a target on their backs, alleging that Somali-run daycares were committing fraud and misusing public funding. The video has since been debunked, but the damage was done: The Trump administration issued a freeze on $10 billion in federal funding for childcare and social services in Minnesota, along with four other states. (A federal judge has temporarily blocked the freeze for the time being, and the states in question have brought a lawsuit against the Trump administration.) From the beginning, childcare and the ICE operation were very closely tied, says Meredith Loomis Quinlan, the director of childcare at advocacy group Community Change. There’s threats of these frozen funds, and at the same time their colleagues are getting targeted by ICE. These childcare providers have really stood togetherand the childcare movement of parents and providers are a really core [part] of what’s happening right now in Minnesota. Many of them feel it is essential that they fight back against both ICE and the looming threat of a funding freeze. Thats why Kayley Spencer and Megan Schmitz, directors at a childcare center in northern Michigan, decided to close their daycare for the day. We have connections all around the state, [and] other providers and families are experiencing this very real heaviness around being scared to go to school, being scared to go to work, and being scared to leave their houses, Schmitz says. We needed to show solidarity, and that we won’t stand for our neighbors and families and other providers being targeted in that way. While their staff has not been directly targeted thus far, they have fielded questions about how the center would navigate any encounters with ICE and introduced protocols accordingly. That is something as a childcare provider that I never thought I’d have to come across, Schmitz says. What if they do show up now? So having those protocols in place was really important for us, to make our staff feel secure in coming to work. This day of action is also intended to call attention to the federal funding freeze, which could leave many childcare providers struggling to keep their doors open. We’re operating on razor thin margins, Spencer says, noting that their center has six families who rely on childcare assistance from the state. If you lose those six familieseven oneyou’re at risk of permanent closure. Access to childcare allows countless parents to stay in the workforce, and closing for the day is not a decision that providers take lightly. Spencer and Schmitz were candid about why they felt it was important to participate and why collection action was critical at this moment. Were very transparent with our families about how this is not just an isolated incident, Schmitz says. We are in the collapse of childcare if we do nothingand we’re already at severe risk of that every single day, and this is just another way to not give childcare [providers] the funding and the resources that they so badly deserve and need. Spencer and Schmitz say they had the support and understanding of many families they serveand a number of them who are small business owners closed shop for the day in solidarity, as well. [As] providers, our only goal is to provide safe spaces for these childrenand now they’re being targeted, and it’s not okay, Schmitz says. This is such a small way of us showing support, but we knew we had to do it. These actions have also extended beyond Minnesota, as childcare workers around the country are finding ways to show their support. Community Change works with grassroots organizations in many states that are hosting events or taking other actionsfrom protesting ICE facilities to closing their centers in solidarityto draw attention to what is happening in Minnesota. Meanwhile, childcare providers and advocates in Minnesota are continuing to put pressure on Republican lawmakers to preserve the federal funding that is so crucial for centers to keep serving families. People might feel hopeless or afraid right now, but there are so many ways to show up for our neighbors and for each other, Loomis Quinlan says. So we’re just trying to encourage more people to join our movement.
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E-Commerce
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