101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think

Brianna Wiest (born 1992) is an online essayist, motivational writer, and poet. She studied professional writing at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, graduating in 2013, and was the editor of the student newspaper there. Initially, her degree was intended to lead to a career in the publishing industry. The viral success of her online publications during and after her studies led instead to a writing career. Her publications center around popular psychology, mindfulness, relationships, reflection, and self-improvement. After 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think was published as a collection of online essays in 2016, she has written other self-help content as books, including The Mountain Is You (2020) and The Pivot Year. Her books have sold over one million copies worldwide.

Because this book is mostly written in first person, Wiest’s creates a voice that is present throughout and presented as “hers.” Although inevitably a narrative construct, Wiest’s use of the self links her writing directly to her personal experience (or her experience as projected in the essays). Wiest emphasizes the importance of perseverance, which she links to her personal experiences of rejection and directional change in her career. She has also expressed a longstanding interest in meditation. Through this practice, she was exposed to ideas related to mindfulness and Buddhism. She credits meditation for giving her the mental clarity and emotional awareness required to be a writer, especially one who writes about purpose, self-esteem, love, relationships, and other internal topics. This interest is reflected in many of the essays in 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think, where she discusses approaches such as meditation, Zen Buddhism, and mindfulness in ways that are approachable for a general audience.

As a late “millennial” (a person born between the years 1981 and 1996), Wiest grew up with the internet, which has influenced her writing style and audience and is the source of her popular exposure. Wiest’s career continues to thrive on the internet. On Instagram, she has nearly one million followers, and her books are promoted by readers on TikTok. As a writer whose career took off online, it makes sense that her content reflects the nature of the internet. Her pieces are short and easy to consume, mirroring the nature of social media, and she writes for a young Western audience, primarily in the United States. The concerns and lifestyles reflected in her essays show that her target audience is primarily American, urban-dwelling professional women in their twenties (much of the book’s advice is directly targeted to this age bracket). In other words, her essays are written for people like her (in 2016, she was 24). Her essays, while offering advice, do not ask the reader to abandon the digital world but to negotiate with the realities of the digital experience.