Doing Life A Pragmatist Manifesto

About the Book

This is a book about how and why people “do life” as they do. It is as well a book
about how people could or should think about doing life for the benefit of their own
well-being and that of the people they associate with.
It is a book about how our feelings and our thinking interfere with how we could be
doing the life we dream of. It is a book about the mistakes we make in doing life, and
how we could avoid those mistakes.
It is a book about what causes us to be the way we are. It is a book about why we
often can’t do life as we wish. It is about the personal dragons that stand in our way.
And it is about how the real world outside of us can frequently frustrate even our
best intentions.
It is about ramping up for doing life, and then trying to understand why our lives so
often turn out in ways we had neither anticipated nor desired. It is about how getting
involved with others means our lives are forever altered. It is about why that could be
a good thing or a bad thing, and how to best figure that out in advance.
It is a book about frustration and regret, about pleasure and pain. It is about
participating in life’s trials and tribulations by choice.
It is the kind of book you can use to maximize your choices about doing life as you
would have it done, and about mastering the influences of what happens in the world
around you.
It is about undoing the life you have in order to be able to do life the way it should
be done.

About the Author

Lee Thayer is a scholar and writer known around the world for his many years of research and publications on the human condition. He has taught or lectured at many of the most prestigious universities in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and China. He has been a Fulbright professor in Finland, a Ford Foundation Fellow at Harvard, and was twice awarded a Danforth Foundation Teacher Award for excellence in his teaching. His background is in music (composing and arranging), the humanities, engineering, and social and clinical psychology. He was one of the founders of the field of communication as a university discipline, and is a Past President of what was at that time the largest association of human communication scholars in the world. He was also the founding editor of the influential journal Communication, which was devoted to pragmatic insights into the human condition by the top thinkers in the world. His early work consisted of 14 books of research on the connection between communication and the human condition. More recently, he has summarized his long life of research into all matters human and social in such books as Communication: A Radically New Approach to Life’s Most Perplexing Problem, two collections of essays, On Communication and Pieces: Toward a Revisioning of Communication/Life. The present Doing Life; A Pragmatist Manifesto is a summary of his innovative perspectives on this subject for past 60 years. There is also his proposed alternative to the reach of biological evolution into the social sciences, Explaining Things: Inventing Ourselves and our Worlds. He lives in Western North Carolina with his artist/wife Kate Thayer. He is also renowned for his current work as a CEO coach of choice.