While giving advice on things young people worry about such as friendship, love and work, comments about history, literature and the arts make this a book that encourages us to think about what it means to live as a “person of the 21st century”. American high schools have welcomed it for classroom use for the hints given by Ikeda a man who has conducted dialogues on various topics with prominent persons of letters, thinkers, artists and scholars around the world to the question of “how we should live”.