Library

Things that have shaped how I see the world.

Named as influences and a reading list, not as lineage and not as authority. I read them, I practise inside some of them, and I test the rest against an ordinary life.

Spirituality The traditions and the teachers.

Vedanta. Yoga. Tantra. Zen. Tao. The Upanishads and the Gita read slowly, the way Easwaran taught them to be read.

Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj, the direct path. Alan Watts, Ram Dass, Adyashanti, Thich Nhat Hanh, Yogananda, Eknath Easwaran. Huxley and Osho, read with the same care and more argument.

The question underneath all of it: who am I? And the householder’s answer to what to do meanwhile: keep the job, the family, the ambition and the practice, and refuse to make any one of them the audience for the others.

Building Companies, ownership, the long hold.

Seth Godin, on being remarkable and on the smallest viable audience. Simon Sinek, on starting with why. Owner-operated businesses with history, good people and messy systems, and the gap between what a thing is and what it could become.

Communication Listening, framing, the table.

Chris Voss, on tactical empathy and what the person across from you actually needs. Godin again, on the story a customer tells themselves. The conviction that a clear idea travels and a trapped one is nearly useless.

Design Seeing the user, cutting the rest.

David Kelley, on design thinking and starting from the person. Steve Jobs, on the ruthless cut. Confusion treated as the designer’s fault, never the user’s.

Living The small change, the daily sit.

Leo Babauta, on the smallest change. Sitting, daily. Reading the source texts slowly. A weekly reset: what mattered, what happened, what gets next week.

The four aims of a complete life: purpose, prosperity, joy, freedom. Held at once, not in sequence.
Be, live, create, serve.
Own yourself. Find your inner guru.
Centre everywhere, circumference nowhere.