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I write about books, business, habits, and ideas that age well — the kind of insights that compound over time.

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Latest Articles

  • Avoiding Complacency: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang on Resilience and Future-Proofing

    Avoiding Complacency: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang on Resilience and Future-Proofing

    Complacency kills companies. It’s why legendary coach Nick Saban preached against it for decades. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang felt the same way. He knew avoiding complacency would keep Nvidia alive. One way Jensen fought complacency was by building resilience. He believed resilience mattered more than intelligence. Another driver of success, in Jensen’s view, is using pain…


  • Leadership Lessons: Jeff Bezos on Change When Critics Are Right

    Leadership Lessons: Jeff Bezos on Change When Critics Are Right

    Some leaders avoid criticism. Jeff Bezos treated it like a mirror—leadership lessons to be learned at every turn. Ernest Holmes once wrote, “Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.” Bezos believed that idea at scale—experiment boldly, fail intelligently, obsess over customers, and be willing to change…


  • Day One Mindset: Jeff Bezos on Keeping Your Company Alive

    Day One Mindset: Jeff Bezos on Keeping Your Company Alive

    It’s Always Day One.” – Jeff Bezos Make it Cost Less Jeff Bezos built Amazon on a simple discipline: obsess over the customer. That obsession revealed itself most clearly in Amazon’s fixation on lowering costs—a cornerstone of the Day One mindset. “It’s always better to have lower costs,” Bezos said in Amazon Unbound—a line that could…


  • Building Moats: How the Amazon Flywheel Reinforces Itself

    Building Moats: How the Amazon Flywheel Reinforces Itself

    “The most important thing [is] trying to find a business with a wide and long-lasting moat around it… protecting a terrific economic castle with an honest lord in charge of the castle.” – Warren Buffett Warren Buffett’s castle-and-moat metaphor captures one of business’s most enduring ideas: build systems that protect themselves. Jeff Bezos did exactly that…


  • October Reading List: 5 Best Books I Read in October 2025

    October Reading List: 5 Best Books I Read in October 2025

    October was an excellent reading month. I finished five incredible books in my October reading list—all tied together by a single theme: entrepreneurship. The first book was Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike. Phil Knight’s story is a masterclass in grit and vision—how a scrappy shoe startup became one of the most…


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Michael McHugh
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