I am honored that the Cape Cod Chronicle featured my upcoming book, Taking Stock: 10 Life and Leadership Principles from My Seat at the Table, both in their print newspaper and on their website late last week.

Here are some key excerpts from the published article.

Peter J. de Silva’s debut is the non-fiction book Taking Stock: 10 Life and Leadership Principles from My Seat at the Table (Gravitas Press, 2023), which took him 18 months to write.

Inspiration for this new leadership book

“I was inspired by a desire to share with others the lifetime of experiences I have enjoyed in both business and life,” de Silva said in an email interview last week. He has distilled the experiences into 10 core principles that “helped me to successfully navigate sometimes choppy personal and professional waters.” He believes the 10 principles can help others, especially aspiring leaders, finance industry professionals and, interestingly, the community of people who inherited Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) disease that results in abnormalities in the nerves that supply the extremities. He also believes Christian leaders can profit from the book.

The experiences in our lives create a mosaic that allows us to take stock of where we’ve been, how we got there, and what we want to do next

de Silva believes that everyone’s life is a mosaic. His mosaic and his book “may sometimes seem like a collection of unrelated experiences — pieces of glass, some bright and vibrant, some dark and brooding,” but together they make something “beautifully textured, unique, and personal.”

The harsh challenges of CMT (Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease) and his career

He recollects the harsh challenges caused by CMT and other illnesses that led to surgery and lengthy recoveries when he was young.

“CMT not only affected my choice of a career, but it also led to choices in how I presented myself throughout that career and in my personal relationships,” he writes.

As far as his career, he has had a “seat at the table with some of the financial industry’s most iconic leaders during many industry crises.” These include the 1999 dot com bust, the 2008 financial crisis, the pandemic and the rise and fall of the discount brokerage industry.

Book availability

Taking Stock will be available on March 23 through Amazon and other online stores.

• Published on our blog with express permission by Cape Cod Chronicle