Somewhere between the ninth and eleventh centuries, in halls warmed by firelight and shadowed by war, a Norse skald set down one hundred and sixty four verses spoken in the voice of Odin himself. He called it the Hávamál, the Sayings of the High One. It was not a hymn and it was not a myth. It was survival counsel, the kind a father might give a son before sending him out into a hostile world: how to enter a stranger's hall without getting killed, how to spot a false friend before he ruins...

Every day your mind makes thousands of judgements before you are even aware a decision has been made. It decides who to trust in the first three seconds of a conversation, whether a plan is safe enough to try, and whether a nagging doubt about a colleague's motives deserves a second thought or should be dismissed outright. Most of us go through this process on autopilot, trusting the verdicts our minds hand down without ever asking how they were reached. Cultivating Metacognition: A Primer...

You know cool when you see it. Try to define it and the thing evaporates. David Tuffley's The Essence of Cool spends twenty chapters catching that elusive quality anyway, arguing convincingly that cool is not a genetic lottery or a pose borrowed from a magazine, but a learnable skill grounded in something far more useful than style: a particular relationship to pressure.The book opens with the central paradox that governs everything that follows. You cannot become cool by ...

Most people who write reports for a living were never actually taught how. They learned to write at school and university, where the only reader who mattered was a lecturer obliged to read every word, and then walked straight into a workplace where nobody is obliged to read anything at all. David Tuffley's Guide to Effective Report Writing exists to close that gap, in a short, dense, entirely practical handbook built for people who need to write well at work, not for people who wa...

What happens when I die? is the question every human being asks, usually in private, sometimes in the middle of the night, and almost always without receiving a satisfying answer. In this compact and startlingly direct book, David Tuffley PhD turns to one of the oldest and most sophisticated accounts of dying ever compiled, the Bardo Thodol, better known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and distils its wisdom into a guide a modern reader can actually use.Rather than tre...

There is a particular silence that follows a good koan. Not the silence of failing to understand, but the silence of a mind that has just met something it cannot out-argue. Ask a philosopher to define enlightenment and you will get paragraphs. Ask a Zen master and you might get a cup of tea poured until it overflows the saucer, or a single unanswerable question about the sound made by one hand. That is the territory David Tuffley PhD maps in this quietly disarming collection of a hundred c...

Most of us have felt it before, even if we never had a word for it. A moment on a clifftop when the line between you and the sea seemed to dissolve. A strange spaciousness that opens in the small hours when the city sleeps. The sudden, unaccountable rightness of watching a child lost in play. The Japanese call this satori, the flash of intuitive insight in which the felt separation between you and everything else falls away, and something larger and calmer looks out through your eyes. Chri...

In a Brisbane bookshop sometime in the 1970s, a slim volume practically jumped off the shelf into David Tuffley's hands. It was the Tao Te Ching, and what he found inside changed the direction of his thinking for the next fifty years. Tao Te Ching: Lao Tzu's Timeless Classic for Today is the result of that lifelong engagement, a fresh rendering of the oldest book still in print anywhere in the world into language a twenty-first century reader can actually use.Written aroun...

This eBook allows you to grasp the basic principles of Buddhism in just a few minutes.Much has been written about Buddhism and how to practice it. Readers will have no difficulty finding hundreds of books on the topic. It simply focuses on the essence of Buddhism, as expressed in the Four Noble Truths and the Eight-fold Path. It is what the Buddha first talked about after he became enlightened – this is what makes it the essence.Reading this eBook should not conflict with y...

Almost everyone carries a quieter, harsher voice than the one they use with other people. Raising Your Self-Esteem is written for that voice, and for the person who has spent years believing what it says.David Tuffley opens with a claim that sets the tone for everything that follows: high self-esteem is not a privilege to be earned, it is the ordinary birthright of every person, and the negative self-talk so many of us live with is not proof of some inner flaw but a treata...

Intelligence, in the popular imagination, is a single number, fixed at birth and largely out of your hands. David Tuffley's Becoming More Intelligent argues that this picture is not just incomplete but actively unhelpful, and builds a genuinely practical case, chapter by chapter, for a richer and far more actionable understanding of what a mind can do.The book's foundation is the psychologist Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, the now well-established idea ...

Every traveller has stood in a queue that stretched around a city block, watching the clock, wondering whether the view from the top will be worth the wait, and suspecting, somewhere beneath the fatigue, that there might be a better way to see the world. The Artful Traveller: The Flâneur's Guidebook begins with that suspicion and turns it into a philosophy.David Tuffley takes as his starting point the nineteenth century Parisian Flâneur, Baudelaire's idle wanderer of the b...