The Path: A New Way to Think About Everything

The Sunday Times Top 10 and International Bestseller:
Ancient Chinese philosophy for modern life from Harvard's most popular professor

The first book of its kind, The Path offers a profound guide to living well through making small changes to our everyday routines. Covering subjects from decision-making to relationships, it shows how actions from greeting others and playing with children to running meetings can be opportunities to become happier and more productive.

The authors show that we live well not by "finding" ourselves and slavishly following a grand plan, as so much of Western thought would have us believe, but rather through a path of self-cultivation and engagement with the world. Believing in a "true self" only restricts what we can become - and tiny changes, from how we think about careers to how we talk to our family, can start to have powerful effects that will open up constellations of new possibilities.

Professor Michael Puett's course in Chinese philosophy has taken Harvard by storm. In The Path, he and journalist Christine Gross-Loh make this timeless wisdom accessible to everyone for the first time.

Michael Puett is Professor of Chinese History at Harvard and has lectured widely at the world's leading universities. His course in Chinese philosophy is among the most popular at Harvard and in 2013 he was awarded a Harvard College Professorship for excellence in undergraduate teaching. This is his first trade book. Christine Gross-Loh has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic and the Huffington Post. She has a PhD in East Asian history from Harvard and is the author of Parenting without Borders.