
36 Stratagems
⚔️ The 36 Stratagems - Explained
The 36 Stratagems are a list of ancient military stratagems that have been used by many successful individuals throughout history. This article and video...
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133 articles on the people, books and principles that shape a flourishing life.

36 Stratagems
The 36 Stratagems are a list of ancient military stratagems that have been used by many successful individuals throughout history. This article and video...

Bitcoin
This is an abridged version of one of the chapters from the excellent book, Bitcoin: The Future of Money? by Dominic Frisby, published in 2014.
History
Throughout history, mankind has always been interested in understanding how past events shaped our present. From studying the Roman Empire to...

Tax
This video is a fantastic story from the book, Daylight Robbery, narrated by the author himself, Dominic Frisby.
Diogenes
After it was agreed by a Greek general assembly to begin an expedition against Persia, Alexander the Great was proclaimed as their leader. Many Greek...

Julius Caesar
When he was a young man, Julius Caesar was travelling across the Aegean Sea to the Island of Rhodes, when he was accosted by pirates. These pirates...

Philosophy
One of the most advocated routines by the Stoics is to take time to look inward, examine, and reflect. The best times to do that? In the morning after...

Felix Dennis
When I was younger I worked with a colleague who was extremely good at what he did. Despite receiving lots of praise for the high standard of work he...

Philosophy
The philosophy of Stoicism was practised by people from all classes of Roman society. From slaves like Epictetus to high ranking advisors such as Seneca ....

Philosophy
Letters from a Stoic is a collection of 124 letters the philosopher Seneca wrote to his friend, Lucilius. They are packed full of wisdom and...

Philosophy
The ancient philosophy of Stoicism was practiced by people at the very top of society in the Roman empire, from powerful advisors to the very wealthy and...

Niccolò Machiavelli
When discussing whether it is better to be feared or loved, Machiavelli talks of two great military leaders: the Roman General Scipio Africanus and the...

Niccolò Machiavelli
In this essay we see Machiavelli highlighting how the Romans used a successful strategy in Greece to grow their empire.

Niccolò Machiavelli
This essay is about power. Specifically, how and when to acquire it and (just as importantly) when not to attempt to acquire it.

Niccolò Machiavelli
Here’s one of Machiavelli’s most controversial ideas, explained through the rise to power of two men — Agathocles and Oliverotto da Fermo.

Niccolò Machiavelli
This is Machiavelli’s version of “beast mode”, explained with the aid of some Greek mythology and an equal dose of both strength and cunning.

Niccolò Machiavelli
Machiavelli advised against staying neutral in a conflict, stating that decisive and bold action is required to gain (or stay in) power. In his eyes, many...

Niccolò Machiavelli
A key idea from The Prince is for a leader to “be on the spot”. In order to hold onto power, Niccolò Machiavelli states it is a vital tool. Here we will...


Sun Tzu
Sun Tzu said: What enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is...

Sun Tzu
In order to carry out an attack, we must have means available. The material for raising fire should always be kept in readiness. Laon, France, 986-987AD...

Sun Tzu
Sun Tzu said: The art of war recognises nine varieties of ground. When a chieftain is fighting in his own territory, it is dispersive ground. On...

Sun Tzu
Sun Tzu said: We may distinguish six kinds of terrain, to wit: (1) Accessible ground (2) entangling ground (3) temporizing ground (4) narrow passes (5)...

Sun Tzu
Sun Tzu said: We come now to the question of encamping the army, and observing signs of the enemy. Pass quickly over mountains, and keep in the...

Sun Tzu
When in difficult country, do not encamp. In country where high roads intersect, join hands with your allies. Do not linger in dangerously isolated...

Sun Tzu
Sun Tzu said: In war, the general receives his commands from the sovereign. Subutai, was Genghis Khan’s most astute and brilliant general. His great...

Sun Tzu
Sun Tzu said: Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of the enemy, will be fresh for the fight; whoever is second in the field and has to...

Sun Tzu
Sun Tzu said: The control of a large force is the same principle as the control of a few men: it is merely a question of dividing up their numbers.

Sun Tzu
Sun Tzu said: The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then wait for an opportunity to defeat the enemy.

Sun Tzu
Sun Tzu said: In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so...

Sun Tzu
When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardour will be damped. If you lay siege to a...

Sun Tzu
Sun Tzu said: The art of war is of vital importance to the State. Philip II of Macedon inherited a weak country but moulded his army into a formidable and...

William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare and Marcus Aurelius (the great stoic philosopher and emperor) have more in common than you might think. They share a recorded...

How They Succeeded
Born in New York in 1825, Darius Ogden Mills was asked a series of questions on success after 50 years as a leading banker, investor and philanthropist.

Frederick Ruckstull
Frederick Wellington Ruckstuhl was one of America’s leading sculptors, but it was not until he was 32 years old that he started that particular...

John Wanamaker
Born into a poor family, John Wanamaker started work at the age of seven, helping his father in a brickyard. After his father passed away when he was 14,...

Jacob Gould Schurman
Jacob Gould Schurman was a self-made-man whose career began at ten years of age working for his father on the family farm on Prince Edward Island in what...

Patrick Daniel
The world is a complex place we call home. The more you understand yourself and your environment – what you excel in, what you enjoy and what the world...

Mary E. Proctor
In 1893, Mary Proctor gave her first talk on astronomy. She had her doubts as to whether she would interest the audience but she overcame those doubts by...

Philip D. Armour
Philip Danforth Armour began life growing up on a farm in New York. His parents were of Scottish and English ancestry and he was brought up in a strict...

Helen Gould
Miss Helen Gould lived in a large country house overlooking the Hudson River. Despite being wealthy and upper class you would not know from her appearance...

Alexander Graham Bell
He is most known for his pioneering work on developing the telephone, but Alexander Graham Bell’s interest in transmitting speech led him to experimenting...

Marshall Field
The entrepreneur and self-made millionaire from the 19th century Marshall Field, is perhaps best known for creating the modern department store as we now...

Marco Polo
Soon after returning to Venice, Marco Polo was captured during a sea battle with the Republic of Genoa. In jail at the age of 44, he began to recount his...

Scott Berkun
Today, I’ll be reviewing Scott Berkun’s latest book, The Dance of the Possible , showing you how to foster your creativity, be more productive and inspire...

Hans Rosling
In this video, I’ll ask you three questions from Hans Rosling’s ignorance test to see if you are smarter than a chimpanzee. The Swedish academic, Hans...

Entrepreneurs
P.T. Barnum was an incredibly successful promoter and showman. He created and ran a travelling circus that was known as “The Greatest Show On Earth”. He...

Psychology
Gustave Le Bon was an expert in many different subjects from Medicine to Psychology to Physics. He is best known for his book, The Crowd: A Study Of The...

Psychology
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay is a study on crowd psychology and is extremely relevant to the present day,...

YouTube
Did you know YouTube was created by three former PayPal employees and was originally a dating site? YouTube was created by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and...

From a hobby in 2004 to over 1.8 billion monthly active users, here’s the story of Facebook. While he was at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg built websites as a...

Pinterest is a photo sharing website that is in the top 50 most popular sites in the world. However, the visual discovery tool began as just a dream. Ben...

spotify
When two people began working on an advertisement-based free service that allowed users to listen to all of the music in the world in 2005, it changed the...

snapchat
Snapchat is an image messaging and multimedia app originally created by three students from Stanford university. After a very slow start, it’s now hit...

dropbox
Dropbox is an internet hosting service, allowing users to store their files in the cloud. They gathered a million users just seven months after their...

Airbnb
Airbnb is the tale of how three men went from renting mattresses to a $30 billion company. In 2007, two housemates who were both designers, Brian Chesky...

Netflix
The Californian entertainment company Netflix began life by offering people the opportunity to rent a movie from home and receive it on DVD in the mail....

Uber
Uber is worldwide transportation company. It allows its users to press a button on their app and a taxi cab will turn up for them. Travis Kalanick and...

Instagram is the largest-growing social-media platform. It was a success right from the beginning with over a million users only two months after it was...

Entrepreneurs
Evan Carmichael is an entrepreneur who helps fellow entrepreneurs to succeed and prosper. His book explains the secret of how one word can transform you...

Bo Peabody
Bo Peabody is an entrepreneur. The first company he built, Tripod was the 8th largest website in the world before it was sold to Lycos for $58 million in...

Arnold Schwarzenegger
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...

Phil Knight
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...

Clive Thompson
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...

Marshall McLuhan
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...

Henry Ford
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...

Henry Ford
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...

Donald Trump
Until recently, Donald Trump was known more as a businessman than a politician. In the book “Propaganda” published in 1928, Edward Bernays said “Politics...

Patrick Daniel
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...

Jack Ma
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...

Patrick Daniel
When Niccolò Machiavelli lived in exile, he was working on his political treatise that he hoped would land him a position within the Florentine...

Patrick Daniel
As recently as 1800, China was on equal footing with the Western world. In fact, for 18 of the last 20 centuries, China’s GDP was the largest in the...

Plato
In his book, The Republic, Plato presents his allegory of the cave to compare the effect of education on our nature. Despite being written over 2000 years...

Patrick Daniel
“It is in vain, sir,… there is no peace,” he shouted standing upright, one hand in an elevated position. “The war is actually begun!” Patrick Henry,...

Theodore Adorno
The German philosopher and sociologist, Theodor Adorno was a critic of what he described as the culture industry, which is the term he used to describe...

John Locke
Consider the following scenario… You've just finished creating your latest YouTube video and shared it with the world for all to see. Soon afterwards you...

Social Media
Technology has introduced both positive and negative impacts on society as a whole. It has made our lives easier but has also made people lazier. Social...

Aristotle
The Greek philosopher Aristotle was a student of Plato, who in turn was a student of Socrates. He was a teacher of Alexander the Great and is seen as one...

focus
Being able to focus is a key capability when it comes to high productivity. When asked “what was the most important factor in their success through...

Jeff Bezos
Before I started this YouTube channel, I watched several videos that gave some great advice on how to start and grow a channel, but one question I had...

Philosophy
How can we control our anger in the modern world? Perhaps Seneca’s wisdom can help us. Seneca was a stoic philosopher who acted as a tutor and advisor to...

Bruce Lee
Bruce Lee changed the perception of Chinese culture in the western world and helped to popularise martial arts. Lee was a superstar with fans all over the...

Carl Sagan
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who...

Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl was born in 1916 and was named after the famous Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen, who successfully reached the south pole five years...

Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs is a man who revolutionised six different industries (PCs, Animated films, Music, Phones, Tablets and digital publishing). This is the story of...

Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin wrote this book specifically for his children, with no intention of it ever being released to a wider audience. However, it was published...

Innocent Drinks
So I recently listened to a podcast where Richard Reed was interviewed. Richard founded the Innocent Drinks Company, which went from a fledgling start-up...

John D. Rockefeller
Seen by many as the richest person in modern history, John D. Rockefeller made his fortune in the oil business and used his wealth to fund numerous...

Peter Jones
Peter Jones is a serial entrepreneur. He has been successful in the telecommunications and publishing industries among many others. Here are this tycoon’s...

Theo Paphitis
Theo Paphitis’ life has been a true rags-to-riches story. Much of his success can be attributed to his twelve business success rules. Reduce the risk When...

The social media giant Twitter had humble beginnings. It was formed by four co-founders: Ev, Noah, Jack and Biz. Evan Williams was 25 when he moved to...

Albert Einstein
If you ask somebody to name a genius, the first name that would come to many people’s mind is Albert Einstein. As well as being one of the greatest...

Walt Disney
Walt Disney was born on the 5th December 1901 in Chicago but his first memories are of the farm that his family lived on in Missouri, as his family moved...

Yuri Gagarin
On the 12th April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to ever travel into outer space. He was 27 years old at the time and would only live...

Harley-Davidson
In 1901, 20-year-old William S. Harley designed a small engine to be used on a bicycle. He and his childhood friend, Arthur Davidson, worked on the motor...

Nikola Tesla
This book is about a man many have called the father of the modern world. His imagination led him to dare to dream about inventions that for many seemed...

Wordpress
When Scott Berkun accepted the job offer to become the 58th employee at Automattic, he did so under the proviso that he could write this book about his...

Eric Schmidt was the CEO of Google for ten years. He became the CEO in 2001. At that point it was a successful three year old internet start-up, but was...

Derek Sivers
Derek Sivers started a hobby that a decade later turned into a business that he sold for $22 million. Unusually for an entrepreneur, when Sivers decided...

Entrepreneurs
This book show us how one builds companies that create something new. It came about when Peter Thiel was teaching a course in Stanford in 2012. One of his...

Richard Branson
Sir Richard Branson has strived for success as a businessman and in his life in general. In this book he shares nine tips on how to achieve your goals and...

Management
Today is a time of immense and unprecedented opportunity. Gone are the days where you are stuck having to do the same job that your father did. You can...

History
Born on 2nd October 1869 in Porbandar, at school Gandhi was very shy and a mediocre student. At the age of 13 he was married as a Hindu. He goes on to...

Donald Trump
Before vying to become President of the United States of America, Donald Trump wrote a book nearly thirty years ago that became one of the most successful...

Emperor Norton
In the year 1818 an emperor was born. Not so strange you may think. But this self-proclaimed emperor was a penniless oddball who became a local celebrity...

Tigers
This story begins in December 1997 in Primorye, a forested and mountainous region in South East Russia. It is an area where Siberian tigers reside and a...

Wojtek the Bear
Wojtek was a Syrian brown bear found in Iran and adopted by soldiers in the Polish Army. He was later officially enlisted as a soldier of the Polish...

Sport
This book is about a journey. A journey that begins by the author asking his doctor why his foot hurts. He ran two to three miles every other day and the...

John McAfee
John McAfee is an American computer programmer and a 2016 US presidential candidate. He developed the first commercial anti-virus program, which bore the...

Vassilis Palaiokostas
He’s known as the Greek Robin Hood and is currently a fugitive who has escaped twice from a high-security prison by helicopter. Despite being a criminal,...

Leo Major
How did one man liberate a whole city from occupation by an army? It sounds like something from a Rambo film but this scenario actually occurred during...

Colonel Sanders
I’m sure many of you know who Colonel Sanders is and that he founded Kentucky Fried Chicken, but in this video you’ll learn that his road to success was...

Ray Kroc
Ray Kroc is the man who turned McDonald’s from a single restaurant into the fast-food giant it is today. His family did not have much money growing up but...

Blake Mycoskie
In 2006 Blake Mycoskie was a 29 year old entrepreneur. He founded his first company when he was 19 and ten years on he was taking a break from his fourth...

Douglas Bader
Douglas Robert Steuart Bader was born on 21st February 1910. He and his older brother, Derick, often argued when they were youngsters, with Douglas...

Napoleon
Napoleon Bonaparte was powerful for only a decade and a half but his impact lasted until near the end of the 20th century, nearly 200 years after he died....

Andre Agassi
Even at the age of seven years old, Andre Agassi hated tennis. His father used to make him return 2,500 balls a day on the tennis court, that’s nearly a...

Helen Keller
Helen Keller was born in Alabama, USA on 27th June 1880. As a youngster she was a fast learner, speaking words at 6 months old and walking on the day she...

Plato
The philosopher Plato was born in Athens in 427BC and died about 80 years later in 347BC. His parents were both Athenians and he had two brothers and a...

Ronda Rousey
Ronda Rousey has been fighting her whole life. On the day she was born on 1st February 1987, she had the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck and had to...

Alexander the Great
Alexander the Great was born in 356BCE, he became king of Macedonia a mere twenty years later, reigning until his death in 323BCE. Once he was the king,...

Jeff Bezos
The idea for Amazon came to fruition in 1994. Over 20 years later the company employs over 90,000 people and has become one of the most well known...

Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography was written in two parts, the first was composed as a letter to his son. The second half was penned several years later...

Edward Snowden
Glenn Greenwald is a former law and civil rights attorney. He is now a journalist and author. His first communication from Edward Snowden was on 1st...

Elon Musk
Elon Musk has long since entered the consciousness of the general public. Back in early 2012 people started to take notice. One of his companies had just...

Vladimir Nabokov
Before I begin with my book summary, I’d like to start with a disclaimer. Rather than just watching this summary, I would highly recommend reading the...

Malcolm X
Malcolm Little was born on 19th May 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska. His mother was born in Grenada in the West Indies and his father was a Baptist minister whose...

Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill was born in Blenheim Palace on 30th November 1874. His father was an English politician, however despite eventually having the same job,...

Sam Walton
Sam Walton built a business which now has over 11,000 stores in more than 28 countries. How did he build the world’s largest company in terms of revenue,...

Jerry Weintraub
Jerry Weintraub was an actor, producer, promoter and agent: a true self-made philanthropist. His book “When I stop talking, you’ll know I’m dead”...

Edward Bernays
Edward Bernays persuaded women to smoke. He convinced the public that bacon and eggs were the true all-American breakfast. He also facilitated the...

Felix Dennis
I’ve heard many people in the past say to me that they have thought of a mind-blowingly great idea that will make them rich. Some of the ideas have indeed...

Felix Dennis
Bill Gates has been one of the richest men in the world for several years. Elon Musk has founded several large companies including PayPal which was sold...
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