Alain de Botton:
Emotional Education in the 21st Century

"There is no shortage of good ideas in the world. [...] The thing we can't do is make good ideas powerful. And the world will only change when the lovely ideas we have become powerful." [00:24]

"We are too focused on the idea and not focused enough on the implementation." [01:03]

"The world does not change through books. A book cannot on its own change anything." [01:27]

... yet it can be part of your strategy to achieve visibility and hence make an idea "powerful".

"The only way in which change comes is when people group together and start institutions." [01:34]

"Religion has been the most powerful institution that has spread ideas through the world. [...] There's only one machine in this world that has ever educated people really powerfully and that's religions." [02:39]

... but has it done so with fear or using fear?

"Culture can replace Scripture [...] and its because of that dream that we are here today. We are the heirs of that deam. People who believe that culturecoming here together this is a church. it's a church but without God." [04:04]

"We are not allowed to bring the suffering heart to culture. [...] You are not allowed to bring your deeper self." [05:03]

"Why? Because elite culture has the view that life is basically quite simple. All you need to do in life is separate yourself from your parents, grow up, maybe start a relationship with someone new, find a job that you love, watch the onset of mortality in your parents' generation" [05:19]

"Secular culture, the way it's currently arranged is not enough. The way we're teaching things the way we teach art and culture is not enough. We're not doing it properly. [06:27]

There are two reasons really why we live and where we invest our hopes in there are two things we really live for. The first one is love and the second one is work. Those are the two modern dreams. [06:36]

"We are alone with our problems. We do not have a structure to give guidance and this is a huge problem in the modern world. There are great answers in books, but the answer is sitting on the library shelves." [07:52]

"My recommendation is really a new system of education but one of the things is would teach is emotional intelligence and well-being. [...] We need to raise people who understand themselves, who know what to do with our anxieties, who know how to run a relationship. These are parts of the art of living." [08:06]

"We have given up on the idea that education should be part of the art of living." [08:29]

"Religions are obsessed with the idea that we forget everything. That's why all religions tell us to repeat things all the time." [08:53]

"We are very forgetful. Our minds are full of brilliant ideas but unless someone says Oh think about that idea today, we will forget." [09:19]

"We have privatized the inner life and that's why they are full of things that we love to do and that we like to think about but that we don't give any time to in a structured way in a busy world. This is a major failing of the modern world." [10:14]

"What do religions use art for? Its propaganda. [...] Its propaganda for the beliefs of the religion. [...] it is essentially a giang program of advertising." [10:49]

"The most important things are not systematically addressed through any artistic process and this is a desperate weakness of modern society." [11:23]

"Let's get the artists working in the name of psychology our own psychology in the same way as for hundreds of years artists worked in the name of theology." [12:23]

"The media is the teacher. [...] For most of your life you will be educated not in a classroom but by the media." [12:39]

"What have we done to surrender the minds of our children, the minds of the population at large to a mechanism of transmission which is so obviously shallow. We need to get more serious about the ideas we put in other people's heads." [14:05}

"The way that you make money is to serve the needs of the human beings." [14:37]

"There are two ways that you can serve a human being: You can either serve their desires or their needs." [14:42]

"The really big money is being able to sell things to people that they really need." [14:59]

"We do not know yet how properly to make businesses that will sell people the deepest things that they need." [15:16]

"At the moment psychotherapy is a joke. It's run by strange people with odd accents from their bedrooms. This should not be the case." [16:01]

"We should make the best ideas powerful and that means harnessing them to the engines of capitalism." [16:08]

"We have a problem of transmission, not a problem of intellectual discovery. We've done the intellectual discovery. We need to make ideas powerful in the world." [16:32]

"Art is advertising for the most important ideas in the world. It currently isn't but is should and can be." [17:17]

"We need to remake capitalism to serve not desires but needs in a way that will be profitable." [17:26]

Alain de Botton

Emotional Education

Marketing for Psychologists/Coaches