Non-Business Book: Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

Aurora! Eclipse! Awe has been pretty available lately.

And that's actually a great thing for our brain chemistry, for our society, and potentially for our teams.

When I give talks on awe, I define it as something that makes you go "wow." Something that reminds you that things are bigger or more complicated or nuanced or rich than you've been assuming. In other words, something that blows all your cobwebby cognitive biases out of the way.

This is good if you need creative teams, fresh ideas, new approaches. If you need team members who hear and respect each other and are operating at the edge of their inventive capacity, you need team members who are regularly experiencing awe.

In our studies, people who find more everyday awe show evidence of living with wonder. They are more open to new ideas. To what is unknown. To what language can’t describe. To the absurd. To seeking new knowledge. To experience itself, for example of sound, or color, or bodily sensation, or the directions thought might take during dreams or meditation. To the strengths and virtues of other people. It should not surprise that people who feel even five minutes a day of everyday awe are more curious about art, music, poetry, new scientific discoveries, philosophy, and questions about life and death. They feel more comfortable with mysteries, with that which cannot be explained.

In my talks, people are initially very uncomfortable with the idea of awe. It sounds a little . . . primitive, like they must admit they don't know things to experience it. They think of it as an emotion of ignorance.

But then we talk about eclipses, and the astronaut overview effect, and I show them electron microscope pictures of fly feet (seriously. Google this). We go for walks and find leaves and look at them as if we were toddlers, reveling in the veins and the edges. We pick up cool rocks. We watch clouds.

And then we come back into their conference rooms and brainstorm and they have more ideas and more connections. They are better, brighter, teams. Their minds are full of dopamine and oxytocin and serotonin all at once (awe gives us all three). Awe is the best, and this book is a fun way into it.