40: Nick Epley
About Nick
Nick Epley, the John Templeton Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Faculty Director of the Roman Family Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Aside from his professorial duties, Nick is a bestselling author and an award-winning researcher whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Wired, NPR, and many others. He’s been named a "professor to watch" by the Financial Times, one of the "World's Best 40 under 40 Business School Professors" by Poets and Quants, and one of the 100 Most Influential in Business Ethics by Ethisphere, among many other honors.
Nick’s class at Booth, “Designing a Good Life,” is one of the most highly rated and sought after classes at one of the most highly rated and sought after business schools in the country. At a grad school known for its quant focus, students have come to love the class where principles include “doing good feels surprisingly good.”
Perhaps this is because Nick understands one of the most important life lessons – it’s not all about the numbers. The real KPIs are harder to quantify: good conversations, meaningful relationships, a career you love, making an impact. And, as Nick teaches his students, there isn’t much of a trade-off between self interest and social interest.
It’s a refreshingly atypical perspective, but Nick is a refreshingly atypical educator. Growing up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in a family full of farmers, Nick fell in love with the outdoors at an early age. He played football in college but, fortunately for the thousands of students whose lives he would positively impact, he broke his nose in his first game and decided that academics might offer a more promising – and less violent – future career than the offensive line.
After earning a PhD in psychology from Cornell, Nick began his teaching career at Harvard. His first day was September 12, 2001. Needless to say, lecturing was not top of mind, and he and his PhD seminar students sat around the table… and just talked, processing their emotions in the wake of the terrorist attacks. It was this vulnerable, down-to-earth, real-world approach to education that got Nick voted one of Harvard’s Favorite Professors three years in a row.
And although Nick hasn’t found himself on the gridiron of late, the father of five has maintained his love for the outdoors, turning his suburban Chicago home into an urban farm with fruit trees, a large garden, a flock of chickens, and a large family to help tend it all. So, when he’s not teaching behavior, you might find him feeding chickens, splitting wood, and picking fruit.
And that’s Nick’s way of living a well-designed life: teaching others about perspective while maintaining a healthy one himself.