The Best of 2025: An Unbiased*, Universal* and Comprehensive* guide
*My favourite things of the year: Books, podcasts, ideas, people, videos, music, etc.
Part recommendations, part year in review, part shout-outs to inspirational people, and hopefully interesting or useful to some of you. These things made an impact on me in 2025, though they weren’t necessarily made this year.
Books
2025 was a year of change and transition. I became a father and left a company i’d spent over a decade building, and I’m now looking ahead intentionally to what's next. My reading was often aimed at helping with these transitions.
I spent a few months focused on creativity and direction. First up was the theory. Art and Fear is helpful in labelling the nagging fears in our would-be creative heads and making me feel less like ‘it’s just me’, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants To Be is a short, helpful jolt to JFDI and What Art Does by fast-becoming-my-hero Brian Eno is a fun and serious take on what creativity is. All are short, easy reads well worth picking up if you’re also in the market for creative motivation.
In search of inspiration, I then sought out creative people telling their stories in their own words (and voices - I listened to all 3 of these. If you know what each of their voices sound like you’ll understand).
Good Pop, Bad Pop from Jarvis Cocker and Miracle & Wonder from Paul Simon are both enchanting and inspiring, and well produced - I think i’d have missed out if I read rather than listened to either.
It feels to me like effort and trying hard are becoming cool again after years in the wilderness, and listening to Mike Skinner talk about how intentional, studious and hard working his creative process is in The Story of The Streets felt really exciting.
While firming up the direction I wanted to take early on in the year I read a few books on the subject of direction and designing your life and career. The two highlights were I Could Do Anything If Only I Knew What It Was and Designing Your Life. Both were helpful in trying to figure out where to point my attention next. TL;DR: planning is great, but go out and actually try stuff.
Seeking inspiration from founders, The Whole Story (John Mackey’s account of founding and growing Whole Foods) was the standout of the business biographies I read this year, telling a story of huge vision in a positive industry, a tonne of grit and a little regret. Little Black Stretchy Pants (on the birth of Lululemon) and Never Enough (Andrew Wilkinson’s story from Barista to Billionaire) each had interesting bits but probably not enough to recommend wholeheartedly.
Outside of creativity and business, I found Die With Zero a great reminder of what really matters in life, what doesn’t, and how that might impact decision making. A few of the anecdotes and stats stuck with me and are likely to impact how I live - for example, did you know that the average age of someone receiving an inheritance payment in the US is 60?
Things took an unexpected turn on a sunny spring day at the beach when my friend recommended the not-at-all hopeful or cheerful Nuclear War: A Scenario. The book covers a hypothetical situation in which nuclear weapons are used in today’s day and age in painstaking (and supposedly quite accurate) second-by-second detail. A really gripping and interesting book that led to some particularly sombre thinking. Can’t we all just get along?
Around the same time I found a copy of Hiroshima in a charity shop. It’s a stunning (in a very bad way) account of the aftermath of the bomb dropped in 1945. Some of the vivid scenes of the hours and days after the atrocity will stay with you forever.
Health, wellness and fitness-wise I enjoyed Scattered Minds to give some softer, more understanding tools for ADHD challenges. Both What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Born To Run were enjoyable reads during marathon training for different reasons - with ‘What I Talk About..’ giving the warm and fuzzies and ‘Born To Run’ making a marathon feel a bit small fry by telling the story of people on the other side of the world who run 100 miles in sandals like it’s nothing.
On the ‘Holy Sh*t, I’m a Dad Now’ side of things, the Parenting Hell audiobook was funny company for 3am February efforts to get our newborn back to sleep. Your Baby, Week by Week was recommended by a bunch of Dad friends. I dutifully read each week’s chapter between nappy changes and found it pretty pragmatic advice.
Writing
Starting with some pals wrote some awesome things this year: Evgeny’s Unconditionally Human helped me think about AI, how to use it, how to worry less about it and how to build for a world where it’s ubiquitous - with a smattering of enlightenment chat. Hector's Unplugging is a gift to all of us in its transparency and authenticity and was particularly supportive for me as I navigated some health challenges of my own. I re-read (and shared with friends) Greg Dickinson’s beautiful account of his solo honeymoon multiple times.
One theme from 2025’s reading was reducing screentime/increasing real time. How to end your extremely online era from Tommy Dixon, this piece on Aeon from Bruce Hood, a Professor of Developmental Psychology and An Existential Guide To: Making Friends from The Shadowed Archive hit the spot. Sneaking in with days to spare, Derek Thompson’s 26 ideas for 2026 are thought-provoking - and some of the graphs referenced are a little unnerving.
Oliver Burkeman’s advice to Navigate by Aliveness in a May edition of his newsletter was a useful jolt that became a mantra for me, as was The Best Things in Life Don’t Make Themselves Happen from Raptitude. Both The Pathologization Pandemic and To Have Deeper Conversations, Try Being More of an Asshole are worth being provoked by. Oh, and Freya India seems to never miss. As a newly minted girl-Dad, I’m excited for her book in the new year.
Art & Music
It’s been awesome watching from the sidelines as the amazing Euan Roberts continued to make huge waves this year, collaborating with Gucci (!) and PSG (!). If you don’t know Euan’s work yet, now’s the time.
On the music front, Derek Gee’s Solid Air conversations were both heartwarming and a great source of new (to me) music. The Maccabees return was special for me, an education for my wife and frustratingly irrelevant for my friends :( . This playlist on shuffle has powered hours and hours of writing, researching and desk work.
People
In trying to spend less time on screens, there’s theoretically less time being influenced but there were some people who broke through this year. I was inspired by both Ollie Marchon and Lottie Whyte, both building seriously impressive businesses in Health & Fitness at the same time as nurturing young families and keeping themselves (very) fit. Josh Baker’s multi-hyphenated approach to life excelling as entrepreneur, DJ and athlete has been cool to follow along with. There’s a theme to some of those I was most inspired by in 2025: creative, connected, healthy entrepreneurs.
Two other pals really inspired me this year while documenting their journeys; Mike Pallett sharing the story of moving his family down to some lovely land (with lots of work to do) in beautiful East Sussex, and the HAGT project from Liam Klimek building an amazing community around skateboarding.
Best Of The Rest (Things & Misc.)
Like the rest of the world, I’m playing around with AI. (Hopefully) like most of the world, I kind of feel like i’m falling behind and kind of feel like it might all be a bit of a bad idea for the world. But here we are.
I’ve found Gemini and ChatGPT really effective as two health sidekicks with huge context on me. I’ve given them both full access to my goals, health challenges, supplement and exercise routines, environmental data, day to day, blood test results, and data from Apple Health and Oura. They’ve both been useful when making decisions on health, fitness and navigating chronic health challenges.
They’ve shined brightest when fed transcripts from conversations with doctors for second opinions. I’ll be sharing in-depth guides for a few health & fitness use cases for LLMs in the new year - subscribe if you’re interested.
I really enjoyed using Consensus.app whenever I found myself getting excited to try a new supplement/health gadget/protocol. It’s an easy, structured way to search through and understand scientific literature. It saved me from spending money on shiny but ineffective supplements more than once this year. Example below
A fun family-friendly AI recommendation: bringing old family photos to life using Veo-3.
Away from AI, a recommendation to 10x how many of the ‘I should read that later’ articles and essays you actually read next year without using a phone or laptop screen: get a second hand Boox Tab Ultra e-reader and install Instapaper and Substack on it. Any interesting articles I see during inevitable periods of distraction get saved to Instapaper with their browser extension and all newsletters get auto-forwarded over there without showing up in my inbox.
Everything is on the Boox ready to read in bed/on the train. I still prefer the real thing for books, but I’m loving this setup for shorter reads. It took a while to land on the Boox Tab Ultra and find a cheap second hand one - but you can probably achieve the same thing with any android e-ink tablet.
Two recommendations that chipped away at unwanted screen time this year: using a Brick religiously and setting up colour filters (black and white) as a shortcut on Mac. I still feel like i’m losing the war here - it’ll continue to be a focus for 2026.
As I’m on the journey to founding my next company(s?), I rewatched YC’s How To Start a Startup series. Still feels super relevant, still motivating, still rooted in simplicity: Build Something People Want.
That’s about it. Here’s to another year of reading, connecting, building and being.