"In a world stupefied by quick fixes and easy answers, Elizabeth Weingarten delivers a smart and urgent wake-up call."--Daniel H. Pink
"An interesting, insightful, and surprisingly reassuring read."--Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and Hidden Potential
Journalist and applied behavioral scientist Elizabeth Weingarten charts a new path to embrace the questions of our lives instead of seeking fast, easy answers.
What do you do when faced with a big, important question that keeps you up at night? Many people, understandably, seize answers dispensed by "experts," influencers, gurus, and more. But these fast, easy, one-size-fits-all solutions often fail to satisfy, and can even cause more pain.
What if our questions--the ones we ask about relationships, work, meaning, identity, and purpose--are not our tormentors, but our teachers? Inspired by 150-year-old advice from Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke and backed by contemporary science, Elizabeth Weingarten offers a fresh approach for dealing with these seemingly unsolvable questions. In her quest, Weingarten shares her own journey and the stories of many others, whose lives have transformed through a different, and better, relationship with uncertainty.
Designed to inspire anyone who feels stuck, powerless, and drained, How to Fall in Love with Questions challenges us to unlock our minds and embark on the kind of self-discovery that's only possible when we feel most alive--that is, when we don't know what will happen next.
Elizabeth Weingarten is a journalist and applied behavioral scientist who works at the intersection of science and storytelling. She has worked at The Atlantic, Slate, and Qatar Today, and was managing editor of Behavioral Scientist. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, the Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, and Time. She lives in Northern California with her husband and son.
"A brave, powerful and insightful book that wonderfully combines personal narrative, the stories of others and scientific research into a celebration of the value of continuing to find and ask questions. The surest sign that something is wrong in your life is if you've run out of questions." -- Barry Schwartz, visiting professor at Hass School of Business, U.C. Berkeley, and author of The Paradox of Choice and Practical Wisdom
"At this moment of high anxiety and uncertainty about the future and just about everything else, Elizabeth Weingarten's captivating and timely book shows that the hopeful way out is through not only asking the right questions but learning to patiently sit with them rather than grasp for easy answers. Using her own intensely personal story and that of the soulful poet Rainer Maria Rilke as touch points, Weingarten takes readers on a fascinating journey through history, philosophy, and science to discover that falling in love with the big questions and embracing uncertainty can lead to greater clarity and richer lives." -- Brigid Schulte, New York Times-bestselling author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time