Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day by Daniel Goleman and Cary Cherniss
At least once a year (sometimes twice if we become inspired as we have in 2024), CSU Writes hosts a book club conversation. The selected book is almost always a recent release, and it is always relevant to our researchers, scholars, students, and staff who comprise our community of writers at CSU.
This fall our book selection is by the psychologists who coined the term emotional intelligence decades ago, Daniel Goleman and Cary Cherniss. Their new book, Optimal, answers the question all knowledge workers must grapple with today: How do we sustain performance, while avoiding burnout and maintaining balance?
Optimal provides us with a clear, easily read, and thorough response: a method and guide to develop an “inner architecture of having a good day.”
More about CSU Writes Book Club:
While open to all on campus, CSU Writes’ book club selections often focus on the conditions in which we write in academe. The connection to “writing” in our selected texts may, thus, be overt as in the spring semester’s choice of Sönke Ahern’s How to Take Smart Notes (our spring 2024 selection). Or the connection to writing may be implicitly discussed in our book club selection, as in the advice about meaningful productivity in Oliver Burkeman’s 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals or Lee McIntyre’s How to Talk to a Science Denier. All our selected books hold relevance for how we work and communicate best as writers.
This semester’s book, Optimal, addresses how we each might find meaning and fulfillment in our daily lives. Consider that for nearly all of us at CSU, more than half of our waking hours will be spent connected to campus and to our work or to our studies with colleagues. Many of our waking hours will be spent with our fingers to keyboards—writing emails, reports, papers, manuscripts, proposals and more. Optimal provides methods to “build the inner architecture of having a good day,” even as (or perhaps because) we write. If you are part of a research or unit team, Optimal provides invaluable organizational methods to support high-level team performance.
You can register at the CSU Writes website on the Book Club page.
In support of our CSU readers, we can provide books to those who might not otherwise be able to participate. We have 10 copies of Optimal to be distributed on a first come, first served basis.