"Decisions, Courage, and Action" By Robert Plank

 

Credit: Decisions, Courage and Action

Overview

What have you been putting off until you feel ready?

Maybe it's a project you keep restarting, a conversation you're avoiding, or a trip you've promised yourself for years. Meanwhile, the work piles up, other people need answers, and waiting has started to feel suspiciously like a decision.

Decisions, Courage, and Action brings together ten authors with real stories and practical approaches to making decisions, leading people, and finishing what matters. Compiled by Robert Plank, this collection explores what you can do when fear, exhaustion, competing demands, or rapid change make the next step difficult.

Rita Ainsworth recalls looking at her advertising dashboard and suddenly being unable to make sense of familiar numbers. Mitch Slater describes receiving a million-dollar check as a young financial advisor and discovering what another person's trust required of him. WL Gertz returns to poetry after roughly fifty years, with a reminder to stop postponing the experiences you want to have.

Alongside these stories, you'll find ways to help your team think for themselves, communicate through change, and build physical strength through repeatable practice. Donna Blevins explains how finishing three small tasks can get stalled work moving. Robert Plank's Five Little Boxes approach starts with the finished outcome and works backward to a step you can take today. 

For entrepreneurs, managers, creators, and anyone reconsidering what comes next, this book offers ideas you can put to work while you're still figuring things out. Credit: Robert Plank; Decisions, Courage and Action.

The book is a healthy collaboration of multiple contributors and authors.

Peak Human By Johan Norberg

Credit: Peak Human 

 Overview

Golden ages are marked by periods of spectacular cultural flourishing, scientific exploration, technological achievement and economic growth: Ancient Greece gave us democracy and the rule of the law; out of Abbasid Baghdad came algebra and modern medicine; and the Dutch Republic furnished us with Europe’s greatest artistic movements. As such, each has unique lessons to teach us about the world we live in today. But all previous golden ages have proven finite, whether through external pressures or internal fracturing. 

In Peak Human, acclaimed historian Johan Norberg examines seven of humanity’s greatest civilizations—ancient Athens, the Roman Republic, Abbasid Baghdad, Song China, Renaissance Italy, the Dutch Republic and the Anglosphere—and asks: How do we ensure that our current golden age doesn’t end? Credit: Peak Human; Cato Institute.

Curiosity Redefines the Limits

Credit: Curiosity Redefines the Limits

Overview 

In Curiosity Redefines the Limits, business leader and innovator Rod Adkins delivers a compelling roadmap for turning life’s questions into fuel for growth, leadership, and impact. From his early days as a precocious child in Miami to the executive ranks of IBM and influential roles on global boards, Rod’s journey proves that curiosity isn’t just a trait—it’s a strategy. This insightful book combines personal storytelling with actionable insights to help readers harness curiosity in every chapter of life. Whether you’re facing career decisions, navigating adversity, or redefining what success means to you, Curiosity Redefines the Limits will inspire you to ask better questions, stay open to learning, and lead with purpose. Credit: Amazon; Rodney Adkins.

Roll The Calls

Credit: Roll The Calls, Ari Emanuel

Overview

Ari Emanuel has long been one of the most influential people in the world, but he’s also something of a mystery. Part of the reason is Emanuel’s job description. As Hollywood’s best-known super-agent—the inspiration for Ari Gold in the classic TV drama Entourage—he’s paid to speak for his A-list clients, not himself. Now, for the first time, the agent, the mogul, the fero­cious power broker, speaks for himself, about himself, and about the game of life—often at the top of his lungs. In Roll the Calls, his take-no-prisoners memoir, Eman­uel tells the incredible stories behind the signings and fir­ings, the triumphant mergers and nasty breakups, the hard-won victories and crushing mistakes. Read more here. Credit: Penguin Random House.

A World Appears By Michael Pollan

Credit: A World Appears

 

Overview

 

When it comes to the phenomenon that is consciousness, there is one point on which scientists, philosophers, and artists all agree: that it feels like something to be us. Yet the fact we have subjective experience of the world remains one of nature’s greatest mysteries. How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would a scientific investigation of our inner life look like, considering we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of the sea? In A World Appears, Michael Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness, bringing radically different perspectives - scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic - to see what each can teach us about this central fact of life. Read more here. Credit: Michael Pollan.

Imagination Library

Credit: Imagination Library

Celebrating Books and Reading 

 In honor of legendary American singer and artist Ms. Dolly Parton, fans and avid book lovers are welcome to learn more about the Imagination Library. 

Learn more about Dolly Parton here. 

#learning #education #mission #community #global 

#imagination #goals #success 

No One Succeeds Alone

 

Credit: No One Succeeds Alone

Overview

No one expected a dreadlocked fifteen-year-old who cared more about his DJ business than his homework to grow up to become one of the youngest-ever White House fellows, create multiple nonprofits, and found a multibillion-dollar company. But Robert Reffkin, raised by an Israeli immigrant single mother, disowned by his maternal grandparents for being Black, and abandoned by his father, has always defied the odds. Read more here. Credit: Robert Reffkin.

The Banker Who Made America By Richard Vague

 

Credit: The Banker Who Made America

Overview

If you haven't followed the money, chances are you don't know the real story of America and its Revolution. Nothing gives a clearer insight into this history than the life of early America's dominant merchant trader, first bank president, and first central banker, Thomas Willing. In this book, Richard Vague shows how Willing bankrolled, and in the process helped save, the Revolution and then fundamentally shaped the financial architecture of the young Republic. So powerful was Willing that President John Adams complained that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton were governed by him. Yet at a decisive moment in Willing's life he voted against independence, as conflict between Pennsylvania's moneyed elite and the emergent lower and middle classes embroiled the politics of 1776 in bitter class conflict. This dynamic would continue after independence, as Willing and his associates attempted to tame the democratic forces unleashed by revolution and thereby set up a tension that has never stopped shaping US politics. Read more here. Credit: Richard Vague.