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Arnold Schwarzenegger has led an extraordinary life. Arriving in America as an immigrant at the age of 21, he went on to dominate bodybuilding, before switching to movies and then again transitioning into politics. Born in Austria in 1947, he grew up in a farming village. His father was a police officer and extremely strict with Arnold and his elder brother. He enforced discipline and training for his sons, who regularly completed chores from a young age and later played sports and exercised. They even had to earn breakfast by doing sit-ups.

Phil Knight was a 24-year-old man who had just returned home to Oregon after graduating with a master’s from Stanford and serving in the US Army for a year, but he still felt like a child. The straight-laced young man was good at running, very good in fact, but not quite elite level. It was on one of his morning runs where he thought about his crazy idea that he’d formulated in Stanford Business School and decided to work on it and keep going until he achieved it.

One benefit of reading a wide variety of books is that you come across words that you’ve never heard of before. Take the name of this channel for instance. I discovered the word Eudaimonia when learning about Greek philosophy. It translates loosely as human flourishing or simply “happiness”, but it is not a word I’d ever heard used in conversation. As a result, if I was to talk about it with a friend, there would have been a chance I would have mispronounced the word. So, what do you do to make sure you can pronounce a word correctly? You can consult YouTube.

Marshall McLuhan was a visionary, far ahead of his time. The Canadian was a philosopher and professor but could perhaps be best described as a communications theorist. The book is actually called “The Medium is the Massage” due to a mistake from the typesetters, but when McLuhan saw the error, he loved it and kept it as it was. Perhaps this was because McLuhan thought media “massage” the brain to behave in particular ways.

Born on a farm in Michigan on 30th July 1863, as a youngster seeing all the hard, manual work taking place on the farm drew Henry Ford into mechanics. He got an apprenticeship at a machine shop and after completing it, concentrated on designing and developing a steam engine that could pull a plough or wagon. It was only when he realised that people were more interested in travelling on the roads than working on farms that he switched his focus to road cars.

Henry Ford was the founder of the Ford Motor Company, which now employs over 200,000 people and is the fifth largest automaker in the world. Ford founded his company in 1903 and wrote his autobiography, “My Life and Work” after running the company for nearly two decades. In the introduction, Ford outlines some principles of the service that his company performs. Each of these principles can be applied to starting and successfully running a YouTube channel today.

Until recently, Donald Trump was known more as a businessman than a politician. In the book “Propaganda” published in 1928, Edward Bernays said “Politics was the first big business in America… business has learned everything that politics has had to teach, but politics has failed to learn very much from business methods of mass distribution of ideas and products.” However now in 2016, I believe Donald Trump has learnt these lessons from his time as a businessman and they have helped him become the next President of the United States of America.

World War II destroyed Europe. Indeed, for most of its history, Europe was in a state of war. After the war ended, European statesmen came together to re-imagine a new kind of Europe, one that would promote peace and stability. The foundation that was built wasn’t perfect, but it was a step into imagining a new future that deviated from Europe’s previous history. Despite its flaws that are prone to happen with any new foundation, over 60 years later despite current turmoil that puts the European project into question it is still standing and has brought peace to the European continent as it was never before possible. It would have been impossible without imagination.

Jack Ma is an English teacher turned Internet entrepreneur who founded the Chinese e-commerce company called Alibaba. It is the Amazon of the East, but it has more impact on the retail sector of China than its rival has in the USA. More people make purchases on Alibaba’s websites per year then there are people in the United States of America. Alibaba is a dominant force today thanks to what Jack Ma describes as the “Iron Triangle” – strength in e-commerce, logistics and finance.

When Niccolò Machiavelli lived in exile, he was working on his political treatise that he hoped would land him a position within the Florentine government. Every evening, he sat down to write, inspired by his own experiences and ideas from ancient philosophers. In his book The Prince, he wrote down his impressions of how the world actually worked. “Since my intention is to say something that will prove of practical use to the inquirer, I have thought it proper to represent things as they are in real truth, rather than as they are imagined,” he introduced his readers, “Many have dreamed up republics and principalities which have never in truth been known to exist.” Machiavelli understood through the study of ancient political thought and his observation of his contemporaries. He understood that you need to adjust the sail before you can change something.