How do successful people become even more successful? Almost all effective people share a common trait – they set detailed goals, and plan the amount of effort they require to put into any project they wish to start. They leave no stone unturned in the process, and live by the DIY – do-it-yourself formula. Success in life requires more than an academic qualification; it requires strength of character and a will to be different. In this book you will read real life stories and incidents that offer valuable messages, inspired by the life of a man who believed in himself. This is not an autobiography but the clear essence of success in life.

'The smaller you are, the quicker your heart beats. But it doesn't matter what size your heart is, we all only get an average of about two billion beats over our lifetime. It's just a pump at the end of the day, right?' Seventeen-year-old Asha is a rebel, inspired by historical revolutionaries and unafraid of pointing out the hypocrisy around her - but less sure how to actually dismantle it. Her younger sister, Bettina, wide-eyed and naive, is just trying to get through the school day without having her pocket money nicked. With essays to write, homework to do, and bus journeys home, the two sisters meet every afternoon, outside the school gates, to tackle the injustice of the world. Sonali Bhattacharyya's play Two Billion Beats is an insightful, heartfelt coming-of-age story and a blazing account of inner-city, British-Asian teenage life. It was originally presented in the Inside/Outside season, livestreamed from the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, before receiving a production there in this full-length version in 2022, directed by Nimmo Ismail.

How science is opening up the mysteries of the heart, revealing the poetry in motion within the machine. Your heart is a miracle in motion, a marvel of construction unsurpassed by any human-made creation. It beats 100,000 times every day—if you were to live to 100, that would be more than 3 billion beats across your lifespan. Despite decades of effort in labs all over the world, we have not yet been able to replicate the heart’s perfect engineering. But, as Sian Harding shows us in The Exquisite Machine, new scientific developments are opening up the mysteries of the heart. And this explosion of new science—ultrafast imaging, gene editing, stem cells, artificial intelligence, and advanced sub-light microscopy—has crucial, real-world consequences for health and well-being. Harding—a world leader in cardiac research—explores the relation between the emotions and heart function, reporting that the heart not only responds to our emotions, it creates them as well. The condition known as Broken Heart Syndrome, for example, is a real disorder than can follow bereavement or stress. The Exquisite Machine describes the evolutionary forces that have shaped the heart’s response to damage, the astonishing rejuvenating power of stem cells, how we can avoid heart disease, and why it can be so hard to repair a damaged heart. It tells the stories of patients who have had the devastating experiences of a heart attack, chaotic heart rhythms, or stress-induced acute heart failure. And it describes how cutting-edge technologies are enabling experiments and clinical trials that will lead us to new solutions to the worldwide scourge of heart disease.

Precious Souls: A journey into the inspiring lives of special children and their families, is a first of its kind effort to understand the world of children with special needs and create awareness among people about their small requirements. There are 24 lives in the book and all are replete with grim determination -- so unlike us they are, but so courageously they live. Precious Souls calls for each reader to give nothing, but share all the love that they have whenever they see a special child. Equal share of your love, confidence and support should also go to their parents, who nurtured their special child, without losing hope. Even though they have seen surroundings with healthy children, when they look home, they have found a certain incompleteness, but they never lost courage, and fought the battle with destiny, emerging victorious. Their profoundness is worth ounces of admiration. The book explores disappointments and triumph in a narrative manner; the author telling each life as it went on during his interaction with the families. The style gets the reader involved as if he or she is seeing the child or their parents right in front of them. Late Dr A P J Abdul Kalam was so touched by the subject that he even wrote the foreword for the book. To give a glimpse of a few stories, the book narrates the life of ten-year-old Diwakar Bhaskar who is diagnosed with Maple Syrup Urine Disease (MSUD), a metabolic disorder passed down through families in which the body cannot break down certain parts of proteins. But he trounced his disorder and found his calling in painting, drawing works of art which has a rare balance of colour and sensitive strokes. An example is the logo of the Precious Souls, which the author has used to mark the immense talent in each of the special children featured in the book. Then there is thirty four-year-old S Sushmitha Danabalana, who had developmental delays compared to other children, when born. Now, she is independent and part of her salary goes to sponsoring the education of a differently-abled student. She has even won the Karnataka State Women's Achievement Award. The book tells the tale of 15-year-old Adithya Venkatesh, who suffers from from Pervasive Developmental Delay (PDD), a type of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) that slows down the ability to perceive things. But with classical music he has awed everybody and his penchant for music has been removing all barriers he faces on a daily basis. With these 24 lives, the author has managed to bring out the true essence of life - nobody is perfect, and in the pursuit of perfection, we all are on the same road. It is necessary of all of us to get together and encourage children with disabilities and lend support in the form of understanding their families. Together, we can bring a change in their lives, a message crystal clear through Precious Souls. The author, Dr Anantha Krishnan M, is a seasoned aerospace and defence journalist in India. A disciple of Dr Kalam, he is currently entrusted with the task of carrying forward a digital initiative of the former President, Billion Beats. He also spearheads Inspired Indian Foundation (IIF), a movement for unsung heroes. His first book A Different Spirit, is a moving biography of wheelchair athlete Malathi K Holla. Similar to his first book, the author has pledged part proceeds from the book for the activities of IIF.

'Groundbreaking' Amy Cuddy, bestselling author of Presence 'A roadmap for innovators, entrepreneurs and those seeking new avenues for exploring and reimagining the future' Deepak Chopra Musicians are masters of innovation, constantly finding new ways to adapt to accelerating change and staying ahead of the beat. ------------------------------------------------------------------- In Two Beats Ahead, Michael Hendrix and Panos Panay demystify the artistic process of some of the greatest creative minds of our time and reveal what they can teach us about creativity. Drawing from first person interviews, you'll learn the secrets of collaboration from Beyoncé and Pharrell Williams, grasp the value of experimentation with Radiohead and Imogen Heap, learn how to prototype with Jimmy Iovine, hear why Justin Timberlake thinks you should 'dare to suck', understand the power of reinvention from Gloria Estefan, and the art of producing from T Bone Burnett and Hank Shocklee, co-founder of Public Enemy. A musical mindset is a revolutionary framework for creating and innovating in a dynamic world. Two Beats Ahead shows you how ------------------------------------------------------------------- 'Inspiration for anyone looking to expand the reach of their creativity' Tim Brown, author of Change By Design 'Based on their course at Berklee, Michael and Panos show that a musician's perspective, much like a designers perspective, can unlock inspiration and innovation, no matter who you are' David Kelley, founder of IDEO and the Stanford d.school

The secret history of our most vital organ: the human heart. The Man Who Touched His Own Heart tells the raucous, gory, mesmerizing story of the heart, from the first "explorers" who dug up cadavers and plumbed their hearts' chambers, through the first heart surgeries -- which had to be completed in three minutes before death arrived -- to heart transplants and the latest medical efforts to prolong our hearts' lives, almost defying nature in the process. Thought of as the seat of our soul, then as a mysteriously animated object, the heart is still more a mystery than it is understood. Why do most animals only get one billion beats? (And how did modern humans get to over two billion, effectively letting us live out two lives?) Why are sufferers of gingivitis more likely to have heart attacks? Why do we often undergo expensive procedures when cheaper ones are just as effective? What do Da Vinci, Mary Shelley, and contemporary Egyptian archaeologists have in common? And what does it really feel like to touch your own heart, or to have someone else's beating inside your chest? Rob Dunn's fascinating history of our hearts brings us deep inside the science, history, and stories of the four chambers we depend on most.

A crisis is coming for everyone who uses math and science. For decades now, the classical model of probability (the indifference principle and the Gaussian distribution) has been breaking down and revealing its limitations in fields from economics to epidemiology. Now a new approach has revealed the underlying non-classical principle behind all these 'anomalous' laws: — Pareto’s law of elite incomes — Zipf’s law of word frequencies — Lotka’s law of scientific publications — Kleiber’s law of metabolic rates — the Clausewitz-Dupuy law of combat friction — Moore’s law of computing costs — the Wright-Henderson cost law — Weibull’s law of electronics failures — the Flynn Effect in IQ scores — Benford’s law of digit frequencies — Farr’s law of epidemics — Hubbell’s neutral theory of biodiversity — Rogers’ law of innovation classes — Wilson’s law of island biogeography — Smeed’s law of traffic fatalities The general law behind all these particular laws (and countless others) is the "decline effect". As a system ages or grows in size, the rules of probability subtly change. Entropy increases, rare items become rarer, and average performance measures decline. The human meaning of a decline may be positive (decreasing costs, falling epidemic mortality) or negative (lower customer loyalty, decreasing efficiency), but the mathematical pattern is always the same. The implications are enormous, as these examples show: All epidemic diseases decline in infectiousness and in lethality. HIV-AIDS went from a highly infectious, 95-percent fatal disease, to a survivable condition with a latency of decades. COVID-19 went from a death rate of 7 percent in early 2020, to under 2 percent in 2022. Hereditary dynasties around the world declined smoothly in lifespan, from hundreds of years to tens of years. When democracies replaced monarchies, the decline (in spans of party control) continued.