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    Summary of David Brooks's The Social Animal
    Summary of David Brooks's The Social Animal
    Summary of David Brooks's The Social Animal
    Ebook26 pages27 minutes

    Summary of David Brooks's The Social Animal

    By IRB Media

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    Get the Summary of David Brooks's The Social Animal in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book.Original book introduction: With unequaled insight and brio, New York Times columnist David Brooks has long explored and explained the way we live. Now Brooks turns to the building blocks of human flourishing in a multilayered, profoundly illuminating work grounded in everyday life. This is the story of how success happens, told through the lives of one composite American couple, Harold and Erica. Drawing on a wealth of current research from numerous disciplines, Brooks takes Harold and Erica from infancy to old age, illustrating a fundamental new understanding of human nature along the way: The unconscious mind, it turns out, is not a dark, vestigial place, but a creative one, where most of the brain's work gets done. This is the realm where character is formed and where our most important life decisions are made-the natural habitat of The Social Animal. Brooks reveals the deeply social aspect of our minds and exposes the bias in modern culture that overemphasizes rationalism, individualism, and IQ. He demolishes conventional definitions of success and looks toward a culture based on trust and humility. The Social Animal is a moving intellectual adventure, a story of achievement and a defense of progress. It is an essential book for our time-one that will have broad social impact and will change the way we see ourselves and the world.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIRB Media
    Release dateFeb 5, 2021
    ISBN9781638153184
    Summary of David Brooks's The Social Animal
    Author

    IRB Media

    With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

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      Book preview

      Summary of David Brooks's The Social Animal - IRB Media

      Summary

      of

      David Brooks’s

      The Social Animal

      The Hidden Sources of Love, Character,

      and Achievement

      Table of Contents

      Overview

      Key Insights

      Key Insight 1

      Key Insight 2

      Key Insight 3

      Key Insight 4

      Key Insight 5

      Key Insight 6

      Key Insight 7

      Key Insight 8

      Important People

      Author’s Style

      Author’s Perspective

      Overview

      The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (2011), explores the role the unconscious mind plays in shaping the course of an individual’s life. Author David Brooks uses a narrative construct borrowed from eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau to summarize and analyze humanity’s working understanding of cognitive and social development. He constructs a fictional couple, Erica and Harold, and tells the reader their life stories, using research from sociology, psychology, and neuroscience to explain their virtues and vices.

      Harold and Erica aren’t the brightest people, nor the wealthiest, but they found success in their professional and social lives because they developed rich unconscious minds and fierce inner drives. A rich unconscious mind and access to good social systems do not define a life’s trajectory. However, those factors are general predictors for the quality of life an individual will experience.

      Before Harold was even born,

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