I'm Bringing My Columbia Course to You

I could not be more excited about this. The Science of Living Well — eight live weeks, starting July 8.

Okay, I’m genuinely thrilled to announce this one.

This summer, I’m bringing my popular Columbia course — The Science of Living Well — out of the university and straight to you!

The most common email I get goes something like this: “I wish I could take your course. Is there any way someone outside the university could?” For years the answer was no. So I’m finally doing the thing people keep asking for. I’m teaching it live, online, outside the ivy walls.

Here’s the structure: Eight weeks, one live 90-minute session every Wednesday, starting July 8. It’s built on humanistic psychology and the science of well-being and self-actualization, and we move through the essential human needs: security, growth, mindfulness, healthy self-esteem (not the narcissistic kind), connection, love, creativity, purpose, and the peak and transcendent experiences that remind you what it means to feel fully alive.

But the part my students kept coming to office hours about wasn’t the lectures. It was the Growth Challenges. Every week pairs the science with one small, real-life experiment that gets you out of your comfort zone and helps you grow as a whole person. Because here’s the dirty secret of self-help: The shift doesn’t come from just reading the books, it comes from actually doing something with what you know. So that’s how the whole course is built. You don’t just learn it. You live it.

This whole thing is live. We’re in a room together. There’s a group of people doing the work alongside you (we call everyone “Transcenders”, affectionately), and former students tell me that part mattered as much as anything I said. There will also be an additional group coaching session each week with one of our world-class faculty members.

It's $395 to register early, through Sunday, June 28. After that it's $497, and there are a few financing options at checkout if you need them. Which, for the record, is a lot less than four years of Ivy League tuition — same professor, none of the student debt.

And if the timing’s not right, genuinely no worries. Everything I write here stays free, always. But if you’ve ever finished one of these essays thinking “I’d love to actually go deep on this with him” — well, this is the deep version. I’d love to have you in the room.

— Scott