Articles
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
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Focus on the Variable You Can Control: Adrian Newey, Colin Chapman, and Formula One
Big gains in performance don’t come from piling on more inputs. They come from a focus on the variable you can control and likely overlook. The ones that others are unwilling to test, or simply don’t understand. Formula One looks like a sport about speed, money, and horsepower. That’s the surface story. Beneath it, the…
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Ask Why, Then Wow Customers: Tony Hsieh Zappos Lessons
Repetition leads to mastery, but only if you’re repeating the right questions. It’s one of the quieter Tony Hsieh Zappos lessons in Delivering Happiness. At Zappos, repetition showed up as asking why again and again. Hsieh wanted to understand why they were building what they were building. Another lesson Tony Hsieh emphasized was deceptively simple:…
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Tony Hsieh Zappos Lessons: How Zappos Was Built
The Zappos business model, selling shoes online, looks obvious in hindsight. But the real Tony Hsieh Zappos lessons come from how it was actually built—through iteration, mistakes, and deliberate choices. Founder Tony Hsieh learned a few lessons building Zappos. One: learn by doing, not overplanning. Two: never outsource your core competency. Three: invest time, money,…
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Happiness Before Success: What Zappos’ Tony Hsieh Taught Me About Freedom
Tony Hsieh founded Zappos, an online shoe company that Amazon eventually bought for over a billion dollars. Before that, he co-founded Link Exchange, an ad network Microsoft bought outright. Somewhere between these two exits, Hsieh arrived at a counterintuitive conclusion: happiness before success mattered more to him than anything else. Delivering Happiness is deceptively simple…
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2025 Reading List: My 52 Best Books of 2025
What a rewarding and fulfilling reading year this has been. I hit my goal of reading at least 50 pages a day, and along the way, I also permitted myself to stop reading books that didn’t hold my attention. The result is a 2025 reading list I’m proud of—one that spans history, business, philosophy, sports,…
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