A refreshingly honest reminder of what the path to business success really looks like … It’s an amazing tale — Bill Gates

This is a review of Phil Knight’s book Shoe Dog, the story of how he built Nike. If you’re thinking of starting your own business, read this book. It teaches you that you don’t necessarily need talent or people skills or business acumen. So what do you need to cope with problems that you never imagined or planned for? You need three things — belief in your idea, friends, and the ability to keep going no matter what.

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This is a review of the a16z Podcast with Marc Andreesen and Sonal Chokshi interviewing Andrew McAfee.

This podcast starts out talking about the Industrial Revolution and Capitalism. It then wends its way to a heart-breaking story about the death of thousands of whales in the 1950's, followed by some brilliant ideas for solving pollution in emerging economies. Finally it explains why everything you know about GMO, and about nuclear power, is wrong.

These widely disparate ideas are actually closely linked, and while I can’t dissect the whole podcast, I’ll cover the following:

• the Industrial Revolution that hurt the earth
• …

This is a review of Ben Horowitz’s book. It’s a book about culture, but doesn’t use businesses with successful culture as examples. He uses radical examples like prison gang leaders and the most famous conqueror in history, Genghis Khan.

In his book, Ben asks ‘What is culture?’ — it’s not dogs in the office and yoga classes, it’s not the values, personality or the priorities of the CEO, so what is it?

He says it’s in the answers to these questions:

• Can this phone call wait til tomorrow?
• Can I ask for a raise before my annual review?
• Do I…

This is a review of ‘How Much Is Enough? Making Financial Decisions That Create Wealth and Well-being’ by Arun Abey & Andrew Ford. I was surprised by the first part of the book — The Bridge of Well-being — it seems that the things that you think make you happy, often don’t.

Don’t you just love that feeling you get when you’ve spent time meditating? You get an aura of calmness, clarity and your stress levels are lower. My favourite app is Headspace — I use it at least once a day (I love Andy’s voice). Until recently. For the last two weeks, I’ve been actively avoiding it. After finishing the series on Sleep, I decided to move on to Acceptance. And I hate it. I’ve even reduced my meditation time from 20 mins to 10 mins, just so I can finish it quickly and move onto another series. …