And so you should feel free to take more risks, because the mathematics of risk taking is such that the more risks you take, the less critical each one becomes because you're succeeding at more of them.
We spend pretty much the vast majority of our waking hours working, not all of us and not all of us traditionally.
But one of the things that we tend to focus on so little is the actual environment that we create in which to do our work.
Turns out that that environment and so many of the factors that go into it, the culture, the physical setting, all sorts of things, make a profound difference in the way that we not only experience the work we do, but the way we live our lives.
That's the conversation that we're going to dive deep into with today's guest author of the best place to work, Ron Friedman.
I'm Jonathan Fields.
This is good life project.
I want to dive into your current work, and you got some fascinating stuff in your recent book, but I want to dive into your journey also because you're doing some really fascinating research.
So tell me just sort of your general field of what do you do now?
What do you explore?
What are the burning questions that really light you up?
Well, I'm really interested in ways that we can take existing research and make it applicable to our everyday life, whether it be in the workplace or outside of work.
But there's just so much information that psychologists have studied over the last few decades that just hasn't made its way into popular culture.
And in large part, it's because if you are busy and you have a real job, you don't really have time to pore over academic journals.
It's just not a realistic thing for you to do.
And then even if you were to have that time, making sense or making the findings applicable is not something that is immediately obvious.
And frankly, it's not a priority for a lot of academics.
And also, I mean, academic research is not written for laypeople to be able to understand.
In fact, from my understanding from people that I know in academia, it's written almost expressly for the opposite intent.
It's like if a layperson can read your research report, eyebrows get raised within academic colleagues.