For the better part of the last year, I’ve been working on a book with a young man who grew up in a Lutheran home but now identifies as an atheist. The book is intended to be a dialogue, to explore what we each believe, why, how we came to those beliefs, and how we bridge our differences in an increasingly pluralistic world. It’s been an incredibly fun project, as Ryan and I have a fair amount in common, both love candid and challenging conversations, and because, frankly, he’s a really great person to work with. But it’s also been quite challenging, as he raises questions for me that I haven’t, quite honestly, had to think about...

In recent weeks we’ve considered happiness from a variety of perspectives: what makes us happy, what doesn’t, and why we’re so bad at distinguishing between the two. Sometimes the insights offered have been surprising: turns out that getting more stuff or making loads of money doesn’t make us happy, while giving money away does. In this TEDTalk, Dan Pink — author of one of my favorites books in recent years, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future — offers another surprise: contrary to popular wisdom, we are rarely motivated or made happy by the traditional rewards and carrots of...

This is the third post on reclaiming the power of saying “I don’t know.” In the first I suggested that when we can’t admit when we don’t know the answer, but always have to come up with one, we’re far more likely to give inaccurate information and, perhaps worse, fail to seize opportunities for learning. In the second post I suggested that we might encourage each other to admit when we have things to learn by considering the possibility that intelligence isn’t simply a measure of the stuff you know but of the stuff you know you don’t know, and therefore are eager to learn. Today I want to offer one more thing: that reclaiming...