I´m currently reading Richard Branson´s book Screw It, Let's Do It, a book that offers some great lessons. Here is a list which condenses Richard´s philosophy into 20 short inspirational insights and business advices.

Picture by Andrew Eccles via Whitezine.

Inc. magazine interviewed 37Signals Jason Fried about his typical workday. I love Jason´s approach in running the business and some of his philosophies. In todays rather hectic lifestyle it´s refreshing to hear someone like Jason, prefering to use the expression "less is less" instead of "less is more":

You could sum up Jason Fried's philosophy as "less is more." Except that he hates that expression, because, he says, it still "implies that more is better." Fried prefers "less is less.":

We rarely have meetings. I hate them. They're a huge waste of time, and they're costly. It's not one hour; it's 10, because you pulled 10 people away from their real work. Plus, they chop your day into small bits, so you have only 20 minutes of free time here or 45 minutes there. Creative people need unstructured time to get in the zone. You can't do that in 20 minutes.

Jason´s picture by Chris Strong.

I haven´t posted anything for a very long time, but now it´s time to get back on track. To start slowly, I´d like to link to an article that a friend sent me some time ago, Worry, a Powerful Driver by former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and an investment banker Robert E. Rubin. It´s a good read about how to deal with challenging experiences and also a good reminder not to underestimate yourself.

After graduation, I sent a tongue-in-cheek letter to the dean of admissions at Princeton, to which I had not been accepted four years earlier. "I imagine you track the people you graduate," I wrote. "I thought you might be interested to know what happened to one of the people you rejected. I just wanted to tell you that I graduated from Harvard summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa." The dean wrote me back, "Thank you for your note. Every year, we at Princeton feel it is our duty to reject a certain number of highly qualified people so that Harvard can have some good students too."