025 - John Vespasian, International Author of 11 Books on Rational Living

Offering an alternative to positive thinking, John Vespasian has created a genre of books around rational living. Vespasian is the author of 11 books and has lived in Germany, Italy, France, Spain and The Netherlands. He has turned his international background and his interest in history into a breed of personal-development books that emphasize rationality, resilience, and learning from real-life examples. His books contain the wisdom he has accumulated through decades of research.    “It's all about learning from other people's successes and mistakes, and figuring out how to apply those principles to your own life. In every book, I go through biographies and historical events with the goal of extracting from them lessons we can use right now."   His books include  “When everything fails, try this” (2009),  “Rationality is the way to happiness” (2009),  “The philosophy of builders” (2010),  “The 10 principles of rational living” (2012),  “Rational living, rational working” (2013),  “Consistency: The key to permanent stress relief” (2014),  “On becoming unbreakable” (2015),  “Thriving in difficult times” (2016),  “Sequentiality: The amazing power of finding the right sequence of steps” (2017), “Undisrupted: How highly-effective people deal with disruptions” (2019), and "Asymmetry: The shortcut to success when success seems impossible" (2020).   Find his books here: http://bit.ly/JohnVespasianBooks

Fresh Blood - John Vespa [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to Fresh Blood, a podcast about killing it in the age of age-ism, where we prove that new blood does not necessarily equal young blood here to discuss what it takes to have continued success through life. I'll be your host Jolie downs. With over 20 years of executive recruiting experience, I've learned how much we can grow and be inspired by other people's stories. [00:00:25] I'm excited to share that with you. Here on fresh blood. [00:00:32] Thank you for joining us today on fresh blood today, we are speaking with John . He is the author of 11 books about rational living. He has turned his international background and his personal interest in history into a breed of personal development books that emphasize rationality, resilience and learning from real life examples. [00:00:54] His latest book was recently published "Asymmetry, the Shortcut to Success. [00:01:00] When Success Seems Impossible", John, thank you so much for joining us on fresh blood. Please tell us a little bit more about your path to becoming a published author. I'd love to hear how you ended up becoming a writer and then, how you found success in this field. [00:01:15] And it's a very interesting story I have to say because the reason why I started to write, it was now 11 years ago, was out of pure frustration. I have to say that I'm a voracious reader in areas  like history, personal development, psychology marketing, personal finance, where I read a lot and at a certain point I cannot find the kind of books I wanted to read. [00:01:41]Especially on personal development. I wanted to find books that are very practical, very factual very low key. I'm not so much in favor of this positive thinking fashion we have now. So I started to write the kind of books I could not find. And I have been doing now this for 11 [00:02:00] years. [00:02:00]My books are useful in the sense that they reflect my passion for history, my passion for personal development. So what I try to do in in each book is to go through really that history and of biographies of different people in different centuries, different countries, different professions to try to extract practical lessons. [00:02:22] That we can use today in the 21st century. So this is what I've been doing for the last 11 years. And I have to tel