How to Disagree Better by Julia Minson (The skill nobody teaches you, but everybody needs)
Be honest: when's the last time you actually looked forward to a conversation with someone you strongly disagree with? If you're like most people, the answer is "never" — and according to Julia Minson, you're not alone. She opens How to Disagree Better with a striking claim: the average person would rather sit in a dentist's chair than spend twenty minutes talking to someone they fundamentally disagree with. That line alone made me pick this book up. What kept me reading was everything that came after it. What It's About Julia Minson is a behavioral scientist and Harvard Kennedy School professor who has spent decades researching what she calls "the psychology of disagreement" — how people actually engage (or fail to engage) with opinions that differ from their own. In How to Disagree Better , she distills that research into a genuinely counterintuitive idea: trying to win an argument is one of the most reliable ways to lose the relations...