Emotional Success

The Power of Gratitude, Compassion, and Pride

By: David DeSteno

Narrated by: Dan Woren

Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins

Publisher's summary

A string of best sellers have alerted us to the importance of grit - an ability to persevere and control one's impulses that is closely associated with greatness. But no book yet has charted the most accessible and powerful path to grit: our prosocial emotions. These feelings - gratitude, compassion, and pride - are easier to generate than the willpower and self-denial that underpin traditional approaches to grit. And, while willpower is quickly depleted, prosocial emotions actually become stronger the more we use them. These emotions have another crucial advantage: they're contagious. Those around us become more likely to apply them when we do.

As this myth-shattering book explains, prosocial emotions evolved specifically to help us resist immediate temptations in favor of long-term gains. Originally, they enabled us to build lasting relationships with other people, and they still do that brilliantly. But they can also be adapted to strengthen our bonds with our own future selves - who will benefit most from the grit we need to succeed in life. No matter what our goals are, Emotional Success can help us achieve them with greater ease and deeper satisfaction than we would have thought possible.

©2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc. (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Life changing

This theory of using emotional drivers is extremely powerful, and David Desteno bases all of the ideas on research studies. If you are interesting in improving yourself or others, read this book. It is a beautiful twist from the idea that you just need to develop grit to work harder and more successfully. Tapping into compassion, pride, and gratitude works better and is more enjoyable for everyone

Very Boring Narration

I found the ideas pretty engaging, but the narration honestly had me falling asleep. Can’t really recommend it

Best book I've read in awhile!

The practical value of the concepts in this book to increase the level of happiness and success for individuals and communities cannot be overstated. I loved this book!!!

compilation of psychological tests

If you're looking for some summary, tips and conclusions, you won't find it here. The only reason I finished this book was because I was interested in different tests author described to illustrate gratitude, pride, shame and other emotions.
This could be used though to support some academic articles or thesis.

Narrator was too slow for me. Listened to 1,40x speed and it was still digestible, but way much faster and saved couple of hours.

editing is a bit off in the pausing.

Editing is a bit off in the pausing. Not terrible, but sometimes I wonder if my audio has cut out. Then it resumes.
interesting take on how to form upward spiral via gratitude, compassion, and pride

Our country could learn from this

The research and examples presented are quite eye opening and extremely relevant to the US current circumstances. Every great presenter/speaker speaks of ‘gratitude’ as one of the corner stones of their success. But as the author points gratitude and authentic human connection will go along way

Read it

great research and crucial topic. I am certain most of us look past the role of emotion and diminish it's value to momentary sensation rather than attributing correct value to it's power

a cornerstone of a new paradigm

this book builds the bridge between psychology and permaculture in a way that might not even be obvious to the author.
highly recommend to all those who wish they could live in a world with more heart and less brain, even when they know these are just anatomical analogies.

Great new different perspective!

It is very interesting how they are able to measure gratitude and compassion. It seems like the next level of studying human behavior and human nature. I believe we still don’t know a lot about human nature, social creatures, and the mind. This is definitely another level.

It's a good book, too bad the narration isn't.

The narrator gose up and down with his voice, trying to maybe not sound monotonic, but by doing so he also doesn't sound so human, changing the intonation without any relation to the text and making it very difficult to enjoy the listening.