With Valentine's Day approaching, here's an interesting letter I got recently, applying to both men and women:

Hi Dr. Ali,

I just bought and read your book on my Kindle this weekend and as a 28-year-old Persian girl born in America, was wondering how you think your principles would...

When I first wrote The Tao of Dating for Women, its subtitle was How to Embrace Your Inner Goddess and Find the Fulfillment You Deserve. Aside from not rolling trippingly off the tongue, I found that many women took issue with the word goddess. Whether it set an impossible...

Meet my friend Michelle -- a beautiful, sophisticated and exceptionally intelligent 30-year-old woman in New York City. Men are falling all over her left and right, but not too many of them can go toe-to-toe with her. Every once in a while, though, a keeper comes along. That's when she...

For 8 years now, I've been running HUGS for THUGS / Enter to Grow in Wisdom, a sendoff event for rising Harvard freshmen. One of the biggest pieces of advice that I dispense to them is to take language classes. Universities generally do a fantastic job of teaching...

I believe that smart, fabulous, successful, attractive women like yourself deserve fulfilling, deliriously happy love lives. Sometimes, though, unintentional behaviors ruin one's chances in courtship.

In compiling this list, I'm speaking as an author who's been on the receiving end of hundreds of guys' letters on their dating woes --...

In the last installment of this article, we covered the first three items on the checklist. To recap, they were:

1) Do not say yes if you're deeply in love.
2) Do not marry a man you've known less than 18 months.
3) Get a prenuptial...

On my birthday, I had a strangely pertinent thought: what's the probability of being born?

In a recent talk at TEDx San Francisco, Mel Robbins, a riotously funny self-help author, mentioned that scientists estimate the probability of your being born at about one in 400 trillion.

I'm happy to report that I'm riled up again. This is a good thing, because it makes me do useful stuff, like finishing books and writing this here article.

It's not a good thing because usually what gets me riled up is a good woman stuck in a bad spot.

He's been an employee, he's been a boss, he's been a consultant to some of the biggest companies in the world, and he's seen it all. In his new book Workarounds that Work: How to Conquer Anything that Stands in Your Way at Work, Russell Bishop provides something...

People often ask me about what I'm really good at. And I don't blame them -- when you're this talented, it's hard to cite just one thing. Mastery of French and Szechuan cuisine, speaking 37 languages, raising award-winning yaks, climbing every major peak on Earth and Mars, creating bunnies out...

Russell Bishop shares an inspiring story from his new book "Workarounds that Work: How to Conquer Anything that Stands in Your Way at Work." A young aerospace engineer is caught in a dilemma: whether to listen to the world's leading expert, who tells him his prototype is unworkable,...

A little while ago I caught up with Prof Gary Small of UCLA to get a story or two from his new book The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head: A Psychiatrist's Stories of His Most Bizarre Cases which he co-wrote with his wife Gigi Vorgan. He...

Last year, three undergraduates from Cornell committed suicide. Another from Yale leapt from the top of the Empire State Building. Yet another from Bard College and five high-schoolers from elite Palo Alto high schools also took their own lives.

It seems tragic that these bright, promising students, after having dodged...

For the past seven years, I've been running an event for the local Harvard Club where recent graduates of Harvard College give their best advice to freshmen about to leave for school -- on academics, extracurriculars, social life and career planning. We just held it last weekend --...

There have been a number of excellent books on happiness published in the past few years, and I have been consuming them avidly. Not only do I use their principles to help my students and hypnotherapy clients lead happier lives, but I also enjoy applying the principles to my own...

Just now, I was about to hop on my bike to go to my usual 4 p.m. yoga class in the neighborhood when I was gripped by this incredible reluctance, almost like a force holding me back. For some unfathomable reason, I just didn't want to go. But I talked...

On a sunny day here in Santa Monica, I was driving down the street when I noticed a police car on the other side of the road.

Of course, this means that I came to a complete stop at the stop sign, well behind the limit line, let all pedestrians...

I went to a talk a couple of weeks ago by a psychologist who said that battered wives go back to the abusing husband on average 7 times, even when social services has already intervened and set everything up for her to leave for good.

Seven times. To...

I just got back from the cornucopia of new books and authors that is Book Expo America 2010, North America's largest publishing fair. Of the thousands of books published each year, only some make it to BEA, even fewer get any notice, and only 16 made it to this slideshow...

I just returned from my trip to Book Expo America 2010, the largest publishing fair in North America, which was spectacular. It's the one annual date I will not break: several days of swimming amongst books with people who care about books. Basically, crack for my brain.

It's my...