We are paradoxical creatures who long to be happy while creating our own suffering.

• We worry about things we have no control over.
• We whine about not being understood while casting a critical eye on others.
• We self-righteously and stubbornly defend our entrenched opinions despite ambiguous, even contradictory evidence.
• We aspire to goals we lack the discipline to achieve.
• We struggle to adapt to a complex world that we ourselves created.

Our thinking and feeling are often poorly matched to the reality of human life today.

• We oversimplify complex challenges.
• We’re overconfident in our oversimplified judgments.
• We overreact to small, unimportant stuff.
• We are torn by competing desires within ourselves.
• We search for meaning in the wrong places.

We haven’t yet mastered our neuron-packed brains whose design features can morph into design flaws.

• The cognitive design features of our brains have always served our survival. But they evolved in a world that is different than today’s.
• So the features become flaws in a need of a fix.

But there are fixes that make it easier…

Fixes that offer complexity of thinking to match the complexity in our lives.

• Cognitive scientists and philosophers have come up with powerful strategies to fix each of our cognitive design flaws.
• These fixes all depend on reducing our reliance on the default ways of thinking and reacting that make being human hard.
• The underlying mechanism that enables all of the strategic fixes goes by many names (e.g., metacognition, mindfulness); Ted refers to it as “The Space Between.”
• The Space Between represents the ultimate human paradox: only by escaping ourselves can we make it easier to be human.
• Ted’s focus is educating and guiding people to leverage this space for improved decision-making and overall well-being.