When Steve Jobs started Apple and started growing it, he got to a point where Apple was no longer a startup but was becoming a corporate entity. To Steve's credit, he knew that mentally he was still a CEO of a startup and not ready to be a CEO of a corporate entity. Hence Steve…

“To listen well is to figure out what’s on someone’s mind and demonstrate that you care enough to want to know. It’s what we all crave; to be understood as a person with thoughts, emotions, and intentions that are unique and valuable and deserving of attention. Listening is not about teaching, shaping, critiquing, appraising, or…

The most important step we will take as human beings to reverse the climate crisis is to get to net zero emissions by 2050. A few years ago, it was hard to even visualise a path to doing this. For the first time, thanks to the International Energy Agency, we have an excellent illustration of…

Derek Sivers once shared a powerful post on drama – his notes from a talk by the late Kurt Vonnegut. Kurt Vonnegut explained why people have such a need for drama in their life. He said:  “People have been hearing fantastic stories since time began. The problem is, they think life is supposed to be like the stories.”…

Matt Ridley is one of those uncles you would like to visit because you know you are guaranteed to hear hilarious and insightful stories. I firstly encountered Matt Ridley through his very humorous TED talk titled: When Ideas have Sex. So you can imagine by the title that you are in for an interesting talk,…

Scott de Martinville, a French printer, began taking a hobbyist’s interest in the physics and anatomy related to sound. Since the 1500s, scientists had concluded that sound waves travel via the air and also travel four times faster via water. They had also figured out the anatomy of the ear and how it “received” sound. …

I always take my girls to the movies, and because they are young, we always watch animation. No matter which animation movie we watch, I always enjoy them, especially Pixar/Disney movies. Great Pixar/Disney movies operate at two levels. The story, characters, and visuals works for the kids. The humour in the dialogues works for the…

Every business that flies starts not with the best idea, the biggest budget or better marketing, but with the story of someone who wants to do something and can’t. We do not change the world by starting with our brilliant ideas, our dreams, we change the world by helping others to live their dreams. The…

The introduction was enough to prompt me to pause and reflect.  Below is a somewhat long excerpt, but well worth reading in full: __________________________________________ We chatted.  She told me about her job.  I told her had I had been involved for many years with the global justice movement – “anti-globalization movement,” as it was usually called in…

I started reading Blue Ocean Shift by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne and I found this paragraph to be inspiring and hopeful: _________________________________________________ "For us, as business scholars, the world we aspired to help advance wasn't one defined by competing and dividing up markets or the globe, where one's gain comes at the expense…

Richard Feynman on the process of looking for a new law: “Now I’m going to discuss how we would look for a new law. In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First, we guess it. Then, we compute– well, don’t laugh, that’s really true. Then we compute the consequences of the…

I heard a refrain the other day about someone who passed away before their time: “He/she used to exercise and lead a healthy life. Sometimes you wonder, did all of that help?” I have heard similar refrains in the past. There are many quotes around smoking from the years it was in vogue. An example…