Recommended Reading

Thanks for your interest in the final volume of the Common Sense Wisdom trilogy, The Physics of Life. I wrote these books for people who were looking for some insights and inspiration as they navigate the ups and downs of everyday personal and professional life in an effort to chart their course forward.

Drawing upon more than 30 years of experience advising senior executives around the world and almost a decade living and working in Central and Eastern Europe, Pepper de Callier, Founder of The Prague Leadership Institute, shares what he has found to be the most powerful force behind career success.

Common Sense Wisdom is a little book with a big message about life and the important transitions, challenges and changes planned or unplanned that we all must face from time to time.

"As a Man Thinketh" is a literary essay by James Allen, first published in 1902. In more than a century it has become an inspirational classic, selling millions of copies worldwide and bringing faith, inspiration, and self healing to all who have encountered it. The title comes from the Bible: "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." -- Proverbs, chapter 23, verse 7.

Never have two such important world figures collaborated in a biography: Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937), the original philosopher-president who founded Czechoslovakia in 1918, and Karel Capek (1890–1938), the leading Czech writer of the time.

Sydney Finkelstein, a distinguished professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, carried out a six-year study of leadership failure, the largest of its kind. After hundreds of interviews with insiders at top companies that got into major trouble—such as GM, Mattel, and RiteAid—Finkelstein figured out the common causes behind failures in wildly different types of companies.

In this candid and personal account, Vineet Nayar—HCLT’s celebrated CEO—recounts how he defied the conventional wisdom that companies must put customers first, then turned the hierarchical pyramid upside down by making management accountable to the employees, and not the other way around.

In this fascinating and far-reaching book, Newsweek science writer Sharon Begley reports on how cutting-edge science and the ancient wisdom of Buddhism have come together to reveal that, contrary to popular belief, we have the power to literally change our brains by changing our minds.

Carl Sagan muses on the current state of scientific thought, which offers him marvelous opportunities to entertain us with his own childhood experiences, the newspaper morgues, UFO stories, and the assorted flotsam and jetsam of pseudoscience.

One of the best and most important pieces of epic poetry from human history, predating even Homer's Iliad by roughly 1,500 years, the Gilgamesh epic tells of the various adventures of that hero-king, including his quest for immortality, and an account of a great flood similar in many details to the Old Testament's story of Noah.