Virgin Books

Ask More Questions, Get More Answers Don't Be Normal, Don't Be Ordinary Say Yes More Than No! Work Hard & Be Nice to People It's usually the simple truths that provide the most profound answers. Discover inspirational aphorisms and sound advice for the real world from graphic artist Anthony Burrill, inspired by his best-loved and most iconic typographic prints. With wise words on getting things done, success, creativity, difficult decisions, motivation, work, collaboration and happiness, this refreshing, life-affirming guide is the perfect gift or 'manual for all those needing a little inspired encouragement.' Wallpaper Work Hard & Be Nice to People is a re-worked and re-packaged paperback edition of Make it Now! with some new material.

Improving your life is much easier than you think. Whether it's losing weight, sleeping more, or restoring your work/life balance - the secret is to start small. For years, we've been told that being more healthy and productive is a matter of willpower: that we should follow the latest fad and make constant changes to our lifestyles. But whether in our diets, fitness plans or jobs, radical overhauls never work. Instead we should start with quick wins - and embed new, tiny habits into our everyday routines. The world expert on this is Silicon Valley legend BJ Fogg, pioneering research psychologist and founder of the iconic Behaviour Design Lab at Stanford. Now anyone can use his science-based approach to make changes that are simple to achieve and sticky enough to last. In the hugely anticipated Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg shows us how to change our lives for the better, one tiny habit at a time. Based on twenty years research and his experience coaching over 40,000 people, it cracks the code of habit formation. Focus on what is easy to change, not what is hard; focus on what you want to do, not what you should do. At the heart of this is a startling truth - that creating happier, healthier lives can be easy, and surprisingly fun.

Unleash your inner artist and learn to draw with `queen of colouring' Johanna Basford. In this beautiful, accessible guide Johanna shares the fun, simple, no-skills-needed secrets to creating your own flora, fauna and fantasies inspired by her bestselling and beloved colouring books. With step-by-step exercises, inspiring prompts and plenty of pages to colour, let your creativity run wild. How to Draw Inky Wonderlands invites you to develop your personal drawing style and master creating marvellous creatures and landscapes using only the pen or pencil in your hand and the wildest reaches of your imagination.

How did the Mob evolve from a disorganised gang of uncouth killers into the deadly 'international corporation' it is today? Tracing its beginnings as an underground society which sprang up in Sicily, to the Mob which went on to run organised crime throughout Italy and America, William Balsamo - great-nephew of the original godfather - and George Carpozi Jr draw on two decades of research to tell the true story of the most mythical and misunderstood criminal organisation in history.

Are you fed up losing at family board game nights? Do you want to learn how to destroy the competition? Get the inside tips from preposterously overqualified experts on how to win a range of common family games, board games and more. * A mime artist tells you how to do the best charades * A mathematician tells you how to win Connect 4 * A professional racing driver tells you how to take corners in Scalextric * A Scrabble champion reveals his secrets * A game theorist tells you what properties to buy in Monopoly in order to bankrupt and embarrass your competitors. This is a must read for anyone who takes games too seriously and for bad losers everywhere.

Every startup needs capital, and ambitious startups seek it on Sand Hill Road - Silicon Valley's dream street for entrepreneurs. That's where you'll find the biggest names in venture capital, including the famed VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, where lawyer-turned-entrepreneur-turned-VC Scott Kupor serves as managing partner. Whether you're trying to get a new company off the ground or scale an existing business to the next level, you need to understand how VCs think. Secrets of Sand Hill Road is the first book that shows you exactly how VCs decide where and how much to invest. It will help you get the best possible deal and make the most of your relationships with VCs. You'll learn, for instance: -- Why most VCs typically invest in only one startup in a given business category -- Why the talent you need most when raising venture capital is your storytelling ability -- How to handle a 'down round', when you have to raise funds at a lower valuation than in your previous round -- Why bridge financing (reopening your last round to existing investors) is generally a bad idea -- What to do when VCs get too entangled in the day-to-day operations of your business -- Why you need to build relationships with potential acquirers long before you decide to sell Filled with Kupor's firsthand experiences, insider advice, and practical takeaways, Secrets of Sand Hill Road is the guide you need to turn yourstartup into the next unicorn.

'I can't help that my music shows who I am in this moment, what I'm drawn to, what I'm wondering about. I don't want to help it. What you hear in the words, what you feel in those songs - that's what I was feeling when I wrote them. I want you to see me, just like I want to see you.' Justin TimberlakeIn his first book, Justin Timberlake creates a characteristically dynamic experience, one that combines intimate reflections and observations on his life and work, with hundreds of candid photographs from his personal archives. He looks back on his childhood and his very early love of music, and reveals the inspiration behind many of his songs and albums. He explores his internal songwriting process, and his collaborations with other artists and directors. He also reflects on who he is, examining what makes him tick, speaking candidly about fatherhood, family, close relationships, struggles, and his search to find an inner calm and strength. This is the Prince of Pop as you've never seen him before.

Change is the only constant. Learn to be a change-maker. In Imagine It Forward, Beth Comstock, the former vice chair of GE, describes her twenty-five year efforts to be an instigator of change at every level of business. When she first moved from NBC to parent company GE in 1998, she was ignored as a woman in a man's world, treated as an outsider because she didn't have a business background, and ignored as a mere PR person. But CEO Jeff Immelt realized even then that the industrial giant, like so many businesses, had to change fast in order to stay relevant in a world where Google, Facebook, and an explosion of internet companies were transforming how goods and services were marketed, made, and sold. In a deeply personal journey filled with practical takeaways from two plus decades of initiating change at the top levels of one of the largest corporations in the world, Comstock lays out the challenges, opportunities, tools, and practices needed to embrace change, whatever industry you are in, and make it part of every management decision.

Get ready to make history better... on the second try. Imagine you are stranded in the past (your time machine has broken) and the only way home is to rebuild civilization yourself. But you need to do it better and faster this time round. In this one amazing book, you will learn How to Invent Everything. Ryan North -- bestselling author, programmer and comic book legend -- provides all the science, engineering, mathematics, art, music, philosophy, facts and figures required for this challenge. Thanks to his detailed blueprint, humanity will mature quickly and efficiently - instead of spending 200,000 years stumbling around in the dark without language, not realising that tying a rock to a string would mean we could navigate the entire world. Or thinking disease was caused by weird smells. Fascinating and hilarious, How To Invent Everything is an epic, deeply researched history of the key technologies that made each stage of human history possible (from writing and farming to buttons and birth control) - and it's as entertaining as a great time-travel novel. So if you've ever secretly wondered if you could do history better yourself, now is your chance to find out how.

Be curious, and take the time to get it. Benamran's on a mission to provide us all with a much deeper understanding of the world we live in. For him, science is about stories and characters. Why, for instance, did pirates wear eye patches? That's all to do with how the retina processes light. Pirates running down to the gun deck would have no time to let their eyes get used to the dark, so they kept one eye gun-deck ready. Be curious, and with Bruce as your guide, you'll learn how to question things, how to be mindful of the scientific wonders that surround our daily lives. Embrace the principles of thermodynamics, electromagnetism, classical mechanics and relativity and you'll see the world in a different light.

Available in bookshops for the first time, the internationally acclaimed time management system that has been used by millions, written by Francesco Cirillo, creator of the Pomodoro Technique. We all face the same problem: we're constantly busy but we never seem to get anything done. We know we should focus on the task in hand, but it feels impossible with so many distractions and demands on our time. We all need The Pomodoro Technique. This deceptively simple tool, now being used by more than 2 million people around the world, helps us regain control and achieve our goals. It transforms both work and home life by splitting days into 25-minute `pomodoros', which focus our minds and make us far more productive. Drawing on more than two decades of refinement and thinking, this powerful little book will teach you how to . . . -Work with time-Eliminate burnout-Manage distractions-Create a better work/life balance. . . all using only a pen, some paper and a timer. Start now - and join the Pomorodo revolution. Fully updated edition with exclusive material on teamwork - to make you and your team more dynamic than ever.

How do you see women? And how do they see themselves? In her role as Head Strategist at the world famous advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, author Rachel Pashley decided to find out. In a global survey orchestrated over five years, over 8,000 women responded, aged seventeen to seventy across 19 countries. The results make fascinating reading. Working with the results, Pashley defines four key 'female tribes: Alphas (focusing on achievement and career); Hedonists (focused on pleasure and self-development); Traditionalists (women whose chief focus is home and children); Altruists (women who focus on community and environment). She also asked about women's values and measures of success. Interestingly, those with more assertive values came from India and Saudi Arabia, while measures of success the world over did not necessarily include marriage or children. As women become more and more empowered, politically and economically, it is clear that their lot is changing across the globe. This book will prove essential reading to all those who seek to better understand women's dreams, ambitions and goals.

From New York Times-bestselling author Nick Bilton comes a true-life thriller about the rise and fall of Ross Ulbricht, aka the Dread Pirate Roberts, the founder of the online black market Silk Road. In 2011, Ulbricht, a 26-year-old libertarian idealist and former Boy Scout, launched "a website where people could buy anything anonymously, with no trail whatsoever that could lead back to them." He called it Silk Road, opened for business on the Dark Web, and christened himself the Dread Pirate Roberts (after the Princess Bride character). The site grew at a tremendous pace, quickly becoming a $1.2 billion enterprise where you could buy or sell drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, guns, grenades, and poisons. The Silk Road soon caught the attention of the Feds, who embarked on an epic two-year manhunt for the site's proprietor. Ulbricht, in the meantime, struggled to maintain control of his double life and his marketplace, which he originally started to prove that legalising drugs could make society safer. He gradually abandoned his libertarian ideals to rule Silk Road with increasingly authoritarian force. At one point, he engaged the services of hired hit men to take out employees he felt had wronged him. Soon, some of the Federal agents who were supposed to be hunting for Ulbricht were lured into the dark world and switched sides to join him. This is a true-life thriller about ambition gone awry, spurred on by the defining clash of our time: the new world of libertarian-leaning, anonymous, decentralised web advocates and the old world of government control, order, and the rule of law. Bilton's dazzling rendering and gift for narrative make for an endlessly fascinating drama.

Forget everything you thought you knew about being your best. It's not about your own skills or talents. Instead, real success in work and life comes from your connections and relationships - the teams you build around you, the friends you make - and getting the best out of them. You hugely amplify your own potential by helping others around you to realise theirs. A TED talk star with over 16 million views, Shawn Achor is one of the world's leading experts on happiness and personal success - and author of the positive psychology classic The Happiness Advantage. Now, in this game-changing guide to greatness, he demolishes the myth of single individual achievement. With powerful stories, cutting-edge research and exclusive insights from Fortune 100 leaders, he shows how only by working with others will you ever reach your Big Potential.

'A fast-paced, highly readable history of one of the defining companies of our time. If you're interested in Snapchat, or just plain mystified by it, you must read this book' -- Brad StoneWould you turn down three billion dollars from Mark Zuckerberg?When he was just twenty-three years old, Evan Spiegel, the brash CEO of the social network Snapchat, stunned the world when he and his co-founders walked away from a three-billion-dollar offer from Facebook: how could an app teenagers use to text dirty photos dream of a higher valuation? Was this hubris, or genius?In How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars, Billy Gallagher takes us inside the rise of one of Silicon Valley's hottest start-ups. Snapchat began as a late-night dorm room revelation before Spiegel went on to make a name for himself as a visionary CEO worth billions, linked to celebrities like Taylor Swift and his fiancee, Miranda Kerr. A fellow Stanford undergrad and fraternity brother of the company's founding trio, Billy Gallagher has covered Snapchat from the start. His inside account offers an entertaining trip through the excess and drama of the hazy early days with a professional insight into the challenges Snapchat faces as it transitions from a playful app to one of the tech industry's preeminent public companies. In the tradition of great business narratives, How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars offers the definitive account of a company whose goal is no less than to remake the future of entertainment.

Bake your way through the classics from Jane Eclair to Tart of Darkness, Banana Karenina and On the Rocky Road, Flapjack and the Beanstalk, Nineteen-eighty Petit Fours and many more! The most novel way to get to grips with the classics, Scone with the Wind features 75 delicious literary inspired recipes. Arranged by genre, enjoy biscuits and cakes, puddings and pies from romance and comedy through to horror and science fiction, and discover fun, edible versions of your favourite books. It includ es witty introductions and amusing illustrations throughout, baking essentials and themed menus for book clubs, parties and afternoon teas. The ultimate treat for book (and cake) lovers! Recipes include: Breakfast at Tiffins, Whoopie Pies and Prejudice, Key Lime and Punishment, Captain Corelli's Madeleines, To Kill a Battenberg, Finnegan's Cake, Vanity Fairy Cakes, Middlemarshmallows, Eton Mess of the D'Urbervilles, Life of Pecan Pie, Alone in Berliner, Lord of the Mille-feuilles, The War of the Viennese Whirls, James and the Giant Peach Cobbler, Much Ado About Muffins, The Cherry Pie Orchard, Scone with the Wind and more!