Best of Family & Relationships
Best of Family & Relationships
"So Many Books, So Little Time!"
Exclusive Interview with
Tony Jeton Selimi
When did you start writing?
I think I began writing long before I called myself a writer. As a child, I was endlessly curious about people, nature, consciousness, suffering and why two human beings could experience almost the same circumstances yet create completely different lives.
Professionally, writing became much more serious after another major turning point around 2009. I had already survived illness, bullying, war, homelessness, funded my education and built a successful technology career. Yet when I received the redundancy letter, it forced me to ask: Why is this happening to me? Why is my worthiness linked to a paycheque? Why do major events show up every seven years in life and trigger fears, doubts, and make me question who I am when I have nothing to give? What have all these experiences actually taught me—and what good are those insights and lessons if I keep them only for myself?
These and many other questions eventually became A Path to Wisdom, published in 2014. Since then, every book has been another mountain: #Loneliness, The Unfakeable Code®, Fit for Purpose Leadership #3, Novum #10, A Path to Excellence, The Entrepreneur's Journey: Personal Growth for Business Success, and now Climb Greater Heights.
What makes writing your passion?
Writing allows me to turn pain into language, language into understanding, and understanding into choices that may change somebody's life. That fascinates me.
A conversation can transform one person. A keynote can reach thousands. A television interview can reach millions. But a book can sit beside somebody at three o'clock in the morning when no coach, teacher or friend is there.
I know what it feels like to have moments in life when you desperately need a different perspective. So I don't see books simply as products. I see them as portable mentors.
Somebody I may never meet could open Climb Greater Heights in London, New York, Dubai, Prishtina or a tiny village I have never heard of and suddenly realise: Perhaps my business setback isn't the end of my story. Perhaps it is raw material.
That possibility keeps me writing.
How long have you been writing?
I've been publishing formally for more than a decade. Still, I have been studying and documenting my insights on healing, spirituality, cognition, psychology, busienss, leadership, relationships, emotional intelligence, health, quantum physics, entrepreneurship, technology, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Stoicism, Buddhism, Kabbalah, comparative religions, neuroscience, and human behaviour for much longer.
My writing draws from several lives I've somehow managed to fit into one: growing up between North Macedonia and Bosnia, experiencing serious illness and adversity, living alone from age 14 in the capital Skopje where I went into one of the best mathematics schools, then moving to Croatia Zagreb, to continue my stidues at one of the best engineerign universitiies, then the civil war fell upon us and was concsipted into the Yugoslav army, surviving war, sleeping homeless in London, rebuilding myself in Britain, working three and a times up to five jobs for a decade to support the family in war zone and continue my universtiy studies at one of the best engineerign universities Unioversity ollege London where i graduated with honorus in Engineering and Organisational Behaviour, spending years in workign in information technology sector transforming departments, buildign teams, solvign technology solutions, managing front and back end , leadign billion pound technology upgrade and transformation programs, moving into entrepreneurship, filmmaking, speaking and tens of thousands of hours working directly with human beings.
That matters because I don't want to write theories that only behave beautifully on paper. I want ideas that can survive a boardroom, a marriage crisis, grief, bankruptcy, success, loneliness, ambition and Monday morning. Those are much tougher peer reviewers.
What was the feeling when you published your first book?
Surreal. When I held A Path to Wisdom, I wasn't merely holding a book. In some strange way, I was holding conversations with several earlier versions of myself.
The sick child.
The bullied teenager.
The nineteen-year-old sent into a war he didn't want.
The twenty-year-old arriving in London and later experiencing homelessness.
And the young man who still believed there had to be something meaningful on the other side of all that.
I remember thinking how extraordinary life is: the same hands that once carried fear can one day carry a book created from what the fear taught you.
That is why awards are lovely, but creation remains sacred to me. Publication wasn't evidence that I had "made it."
It showed that our past doesn't have to remain a prison. It can become a library.
What’s the story behind your choice of characters?
I primarily write transformational nonfiction, so my "characters" are human beings who I have had the opportunity to work with.
Sometimes they are versions of me. Sometimes anonymised experiences from decades of working with leaders, entrepreneurs, couples and professionals. Sometimes they are patterns of behaviour I have witnessed thousands of times in every business I worked in or was hired to transform.
The frightened achiever.
The billionaire who still doesn't feel enough.
The successful executive whose marriage is collapsing.
The brilliant entrepreneur hiding from visibility.
The person who has everything society told them to acquire yet cannot answer a devastatingly simple question: "Who am I without my achievements?"
Those are fascinating characters because they are all of us.
Climb Greater Heights is ultimately not about building a bigger company.
It is about building a human being capable of carrying a bigger business vision without being crushed by its weight. It's about transforming adversity into advantage. Turning expertise into authority. Converting success into lasting significance.
What annoys you the most in pursuing a writing career?
When writers are encouraged to manufacture certainty instead of exploring truth.
We live in an age where algorithms reward simplification. "Five hacks." "Three secrets." "Do this and become successful."
Human beings are more magnificent—and more complicated—than that.
I have spent decades studying behaviour precisely because the answer is rarely simply "think positive".
Fear may contain information. Failure may contain direction. A void may reveal a value. Resistance may be protecting an identity that once kept you safe.
I want publishing to remain a place where complexity can breathe.
And I would love more authors to understand that marketing a book is not beneath them. If your ideas can genuinely serve humanity, learning how to communicate them is part of your responsibility. Climb Greater Heights was written for those who want a comprehensive roadmap to address every area of business and implement a proven, tested 12-Step Growth Accelerator Methodology in every aspect of business, continuously.
That is a subject I particularly enjoy teaching authors and thought leaders.
How do you get over the “writer’s block”?
I interrogate it.
Instead of asking, "Why can't I write?", I ask:
What am I unwilling to say?
Sometimes writer's block isn't a lack of ideas. It is fear wearing respectable clothing.
Fear of judgement.
Fear of inadequacy.
Fear of succeeding beyond your current identity.
Fear of finally saying something that changes how people see you.
I also change environments, walk, research, speak ideas aloud, work on another chapter or return to the reader I want to serve.
When you stop trying to impress the imaginary critic in your head and start speaking to the real human being who needs the message, words often return.
My training in engineering and human behaviour has taught me something valuable: resistance isn't always an enemy.
Sometimes it is a door.
Ask it what it is guarding.
We all know the writer’s path is never easy, what makes you keep going? What advice would you give to new authors?
Stop asking whether everybody will like your book.
Ask whether somebody needs it.
Those are very different creative standards.
If ten people dislike your writing but one person reads a chapter and decides not to give up on their dream, relationship, health, company or life—was writing it worthwhile?
For me, yes.
My advice: become obsessed with service before status.
Study deeply. Live before you preach. Build evidence. Develop your own intellectual property rather than echoing someone louder. Learn storytelling. Learn business. Learn media. Learn AI. And most importantly, learn yourself.
The book market doesn't need another imitation.
It needs the perspective only your particular combination of scars, curiosity, knowledge, love and experience can produce.
Write that book.
If you could go back in time and talk to your younger self, what would you say?
I would find that young Tony in London during one of his darkest nights and sit beside him.
I wouldn't give him a motivational speech.
I would simply say:
"Do not confuse where you are with who you are."
This pavement is not your identity.
This loneliness is not your future.
The people who dismissed you do not possess the pen that writes your next chapter.
One day, some of the things you currently want to erase from your life will become the very experiences through which you help others understand theirs.
And then I would probably tell him:
"Keep studying. Keep loving. Keep going. And buy property in London earlier."
Wisdom should occasionally come with financial hindsight.
Do you read your book reviews? How do you deal with the bad ones?
Yes—but I don't outsource my identity to them.
A useful review is data.
A cruel review is information about the reviewer.
And occasionally a bad review reveals something I genuinely need to improve.
The maturity is knowing the difference.
When somebody critiques the work thoughtfully, I listen. When somebody simply throws emotional debris from the internet, I don't need to build a house with it.
One principle I teach leaders applies equally to authors:
Feedback should inform your evolution, not determine your worth.
Hundreds of ratings and reviews appear across my books, and naturally not everybody sees the world as I do. That is healthy. A book that challenges assumptions should generate conversation.
What is the feeling when you get a good review?
Gratitude.
Especially when the reviewer looks beyond the methodology and recognises the human intention behind it.
Recently, independent reviewers have described Climb Greater Heights as a framework for connecting values, purpose, leadership and sustainable growth. The book has subsequently been recognised across several literary competitions, including being named first-place Nonfiction by BooksShelf in July 2026.
But the messages that remain with me longest often aren't trophies.
They are sentences like:
"Tony, I finally understood why I kept sabotaging myself."
Or:
"Your book gave me the courage to start again."
An award recognises the book.
A transformed reader reveals why you wrote it.
Have you ever incorporated something that happened to you in real life into your novels?
Almost everything I write begins somewhere in lived experience.
I don't write novels—at least not yet—but my nonfiction is deeply autobiographical.
War is there.
Homelessness is there.
Love is there.
Loss is there.
Entrepreneurship, identity crises, financial setbacks, corporate life, reinvention and decades spent watching people wrestle with ambition, relationships, wealth, health and meaning are all there.
Climb Greater Heights was explicitly born from that intersection of lived adversity, business experience and transformational work. As I explained in another author interview, the "story behind the story" is fundamentally my life.
But I don't share hardship to attract sympathy.
I share it to ask:
If something meaningful can be created from this, what might you create from yours?
Which of your characters you can compare yourself with? Did you base that character on you?
The 'climber'.
Not because he has reached the summit, but because he keeps discovering another 'mountain' he needs to climb and conquer.
That is the misconception behind achievement: people imagine successful people eventually arrive.
I haven't.
Every new level has introduced me to another version of myself I need to evolve into.
A bigger mission demands greater emotional capacity.
Greater wealth demands greater stewardship.
Greater visibility demands greater responsibility.
Greater technology demands greater humanity.
That is one of the central ideas behind Climb Greater Heights: the strategy capable of producing your next chapter may require an identity different from the one that produced your last.
You don't merely climb 'mountains'.
'Mountains' remake climbers.
What do you think, the book cover is as important as the story?
The cover is the handshake.
The content is the relationship.
You need both.
We make incredibly rapid visual judgements, and whether authors like it or not, books live in competitive attention markets.
A powerful cover should create a question before a reader reads a sentence.
But excellent packaging cannot rescue weak thinking.
Eventually the reader opens the book.
Then the author has nowhere to hide.
Interestingly, Climb Greater Heights has itself been recognised as a finalist in Chanticleer's nonfiction cover-design awards—something I value because my work increasingly teaches authors and leaders that authority is an ecosystem: substance, positioning, presentation and service need to reinforce one another.
Do you connect with your readers? Do you mind having a chat with them or you prefer to express yourself through your writing?
Absolutely.
Readers are the heartbeat of writing.
I enjoy conversations at book fairs, author conferences, keynotes, media interviews and events because a reader will sometimes interpret a paragraph in a way even the author never anticipated.
That is magical.
At the same time, I maintain healthy professional boundaries. Deep transformation cannot responsibly happen through three sentences in a social-media message. There is a difference between giving inspiration and providing professional advisory work.
I want readers to engage with the books, question them, disagree with them, apply the exercises and share what changes.
Because reading should not simply give us more information.
The greatest books leave us unable to return completely to the person who first opened them.
How do you feel when people appreciate your work or recognize you in public?
Grateful—and slightly amused.
Part of me still remembers arriving in Britain as a young man trying to survive. So when somebody recognises me from a book, documentary, television programme, keynote or TEDx talk, there can be an almost cinematic collision between past and present.
My TEDx talk on humanity and artificial intelligence has now been viewed more than a million times. I have also had the privilege of participating in more than a thousand television, radio and podcast interviews over the years.
But recognition creates responsibility.
I never want visibility to mean simply, "Look at me."
I want it to mean:
"Look at what might also be possible for you."
Who is your favorite author? Why?
It would be difficult for me to choose one.
Different authors have accompanied different stages of my development.
Viktor Frankl and Paulo Coelho explored meaning in suffering and the human journey. Dr John Demartini profoundly influenced my exploration of values and human behaviour. Tony Robbins, Brian Tracy, and Jack Canfield showed how transformational ideas could become practical systems. I've also always been fascinated by thinkers and creators such as Einstein, Nikola Tesla and others who stretched humanity's imagination beyond accepted boundaries.
I don't read merely to agree with authors.
I read to have my thinking disturbed.
The best book is sometimes the one that ruins a perfectly comfortable belief.
What’s the dream? Whom would you like to be as big as?
I don't want to become another author.
The world already has them.
The dream is to become more fully Tony J. Selimi and make that contribution useful on a scale far beyond me.
My long-standing mission has been to influence the lives of a billion people positively.
Books are part of that architecture, alongside education, films, leadership development, artificial intelligence, advisory work and speaking.
But "big" interests me less than significant.
You can become famous without becoming useful.
You can become wealthy without becoming fulfilled.
You can gain followers without creating leaders.
I would rather build work that somebody is still applying when nobody remembers how many followers I had.
That, to me, is legacy.
Would you rewrite any of your books? Why?
Every author who continues evolving could rewrite every book.
That's the beautiful torture of authorship.
When I reread earlier work, I sometimes see a sentence and think, Tony, we could have made that considerably shorter.
Then I smile because that book captured the consciousness I had at that moment.
I don't want to erase him.
A Path to Wisdom belongs to one stage of my evolution. The Unfakeable Code® belongs to another. A Path to Excellence belongs to another. Climb Greater Heights reflects decades of accumulated understanding about behaviour, business, authority, entrepreneurship and leadership.
I am currently writing the 12th anniversary edition of A Path to Wisdom. Just doing that makes me realise the growth I myself and thousands of clients have achieved. I have received hundreds of client testimonials from clients I have helped for more than a decade. Books are intellectual photographs.
You shouldn't Photoshop every picture simply because you've aged.
Sometimes the value lies in seeing the evolution.
If you could switch places with any author – who would that be?
Nobody. I love who I am and who I'm becoming.
I would happily borrow their libraries, though.
Every human being pays a price for their particular wisdom, and I wouldn't want somebody else's success without also inheriting the experiences that produced it.
I'm interested in studying remarkable people—not becoming them.
We lose enormous amounts of human potential trying to replicate somebody else's blueprint.
Take principles.
Study mastery.
Learn relentlessly.
But then ask the much more difficult question:
What can only come through me?
That is where original work begins.
What would you say to the “trolls” on the internet? We all know them – people who like to write awful reviews to books they’ve never read or didn’t like that much, just to annoy the author.
Thanks for boosting algorithmic engagement.
I believe Gen Z calls that "free marketing."
More seriously, disagreement is welcome.
Dehumanisation isn't.
If you've read a book and disliked it, say why. Intelligent criticism improves literature.
If you've never read it and need somewhere to discharge anger, I hope whatever is hurting inside you eventually receives better attention than another person's Amazon page.
I've worked with human behaviour too long to take every attack personally.
People often speak from unintegrated pain.
I don't need to absorb it. Nor do I need to return it.
What would you say to your readers?
Don't admire the mountain.
Climb it.
Underline the book. Argue with me. Write in the margins. Complete the exercises. Test the principles. Adapt them.
And when life inevitably gives you a chapter you didn't order, remember:
Adversity is not always evidence that life is against you. Sometimes it is revealing capacities you haven't yet needed to build.
If Climb Greater Heights helps you increase your income but destroys your health, relationships or soul, you have misunderstood me.
Build success.
Build wealth.
Build influence.
Build exceptional businesses.
But build a human being capable of enjoying what they create.
Otherwise, the summit can become another form of loneliness.
Share a bit about yourself – where do you live, are you married, do you have kids?
London is home, although my work takes me around the world.
I share my life with my partner, and I deeply value the people I call family—biological and chosen.
I also protect parts of my private life.
One of the strange contradictions of modern visibility is that people can know your books, your ideas, your struggles and your interviews, yet still not know the quiet human being making coffee in the morning.
We need both.
Public contribution and private sanctuary.
You cannot give everything to the world without keeping somewhere inside yourself that remains home.
What is your day job if you have one?
I sometimes joke that I don't have a job.
I have a very elaborate curiosity problem.
My work sits at the intersection of human behaviour, strategic advisory, entrepreneurship, leadership, technology, wealth creation and personal transformation.
Before entering this field, I spent more than fifteen years working on major technology-transformation programmes. Today I advise CEOs, entrepreneurs, investors, leaders, professionals and high achievers; speak internationally; write; educate; make films; and develop methodologies designed to help people transform how they lead, live and create. My public biography records more than 39,000 hours of advisory, coaching, mentoring and training work.
So when conference organisers ask what I speak about, my simplest answer is:
the human being behind performance.
Because every business problem eventually meets human behaviour.
And now AI makes that conversation more urgent than ever.
What are your hobbies? What do you do in your free time?
Curiosity is probably my most expensive hobby.
I love reading, research, travelling, writing, nature, food, meaningful conversations, film, exploring cultures and learning across disciplines that aren't normally invited to sit at the same table—neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, spirituality, economics, artificial intelligence, physiology, leadership and human behaviour.
I'm fascinated by patterns.
Put me somewhere beautiful with a notebook and a question nobody has satisfactorily answered, and I'm quite happy.
I also value time with the people I love.
Perhaps that sounds simple, but after spending much of my life studying achievement, I've discovered one of the greatest luxuries is presence.
Success makes very little sense if you are never present enough to experience it.
Did you have a happy childhood?
Parts of it were beautiful.
And parts were extremely painful.
I grew up around family, farming, animals, bees, food and enterprise. Those experiences gave me wonderful lessons about nature, responsibility and service.
But childhood also brought illness, bullying, discrimination and experiences no child should have to navigate. Later came war and displacement.
So I resist dividing childhood into "happy" or "unhappy."
Human lives are rarely one colour.
There was love and pain.
Belonging and isolation.
Wonder and fear.
Perhaps that complexity eventually became my greatest education in human behaviour.
When you spend childhood asking why humans hurt one another, adulthood can become a search for how humans heal, evolve and lead differently.
Is there a particular experience that made you start writing?
Not one.
It was accumulation.
Illness whispered something.
War shouted something.
Homelessness taught something.
Corporate success contradicted something.
Love revealed something.
Loss stripped something away.
And eventually I realised that life had been dictating chapters long before I realised I was writing a book.
My clients added another dimension. Sitting with thousands of human beings through some of their most private fears and greatest ambitions taught me that beneath different accents, bank accounts and titles, human beings ask remarkably similar questions:
Am I enough?
Am I loved?
What am I here to do?
Why am I afraid?
What happens if I fail?
And sometimes the scarier question:
What happens if I succeed?
I write because those questions deserve better than slogans.
Do you have unpublished books? What are they about?
Far too many.
My problem has never been a shortage of books. It's having enough lifetimes to write them.
Some of the book projects I've spoken about publicly are about how to overcome adult tantrums, what to do after the first time you meet someone and secure a great date, the art of building legacy life and busienss in the age of AI, the identity evolution, origins of life, mindset for meaningful relationships in the age of AI, etc.- all exploring why extraordinary birth-given abilities often remain buried beneath conditioning, comparison, fear, trauma, judgments, and fake identity.
I'm also developing further work on AI leadership, wealth creation, healing in the age of AI and humanoids, next stages of human behaviour, AI-powered identity, leadership blocks, AI prompting, and the evolution of consciousness and symbiotic relationship with humanoids.
Increasingly, I'm interested in one enormous question:
As machines become more intelligent, what must human beings become?
That conversation will define education, healthcare, leadership, relationships and civilisation itself.
My 2017 TEDx talk explored that territory early.
We're no longer discussing a distant future.
The future has entered the room.
What do you think should be improved in the education of our children? What do we lack?
We educate children to pass examinations while often leaving them spectacularly unprepared to understand themselves.
Every child should learn financial literacy, emotional regulation, critical thinking, relationship skills, entrepreneurship, media literacy, AI literacy, nutrition, communication, conflict resolution and how their own mind works.
Teach them how to question information without becoming cynical.
How to fail without concluding they are failures.
How to disagree without dehumanising.
How to use AI without surrendering thinking.
How to build wealth without worshipping money.
How to love without abandoning themselves.
How to recognise manipulation.
How to discover their values.
Education should not merely prepare children to enter the economy.
It should prepare them to become wise enough to shape civilisation.
That is a conversation I would gladly bring to schools, universities, governments, leadership forums, and global conferences.
If you were allowed 3 wishes – what would they be?
First, that every child grows up knowing their dignity is not determined by birthplace, ethnicity, wealth, sexuality, religion, disability or somebody else's prejudice.
Second, that humanity learns to use AI, robotics and emerging technologies to magnify wisdom rather than merely magnify power.
And third, that a billion people discover that their greatest wounds do not have to become inherited wounds passed to the next generation.
Imagine what happens economically, politically, medically and socially when human beings stop exporting unresolved pain into families, organisations and nations.
Perhaps that sounds ambitious.
Good.
History rarely moves because somebody wished smaller.
What is your favorite music?
I choose music less by genre and more by what it awakens.
Sometimes I want something contemplative that opens space for thought.
Sometimes cinematic music that makes a blank page feel like humanity is about to colonise Mars.
Sometimes music connected to my Balkan roots brings an entirely different part of me alive.
That is the extraordinary thing about music: it bypasses the board meeting in our rational mind and goes directly into memory, emotion and physiology.
A song can return you to a person, country or moment faster than almost anything else.
Words explain experience.
Music sometimes becomes it.
Share a secret with us 🙂
Here is one.
Underneath the awards, books, businesses, interviews, clients and stages, I think part of me is still writing to the boy who once felt unseen.
I tell him:
I see you.
Perhaps that is why my work has always been about human potential.
Because when somebody truly sees what is inside another human being—beneath fear, masks, status, mistakes and conditioning—something extraordinary can happen.
They begin seeing it too.
And maybe that is the real reason I write.
Not to persuade people to become Tony Selimi.
Not even to persuade them to become "successful."
But to help them meet the person waiting underneath everything they were told they had to be.
And then?
Climb from there.