I know I am going to stir some feathers but I didn't like reading The Lean Startup one bit. What's more, it took me months to finish the book. The truth is, Eric Ries is clearly an admirably talented entrepreneur, inventor and manager, but his writing reminded me of US management textbooks I was never fond of at university. Fortunately, The Lean Startup wins in substance over style, so fear not, The Lean Startup evangelists, I eagerly join your club.

Plenty has been written in praise of The Lean Startup, so to make my contribution worthwhile, I am going to make it personal. Here are my top 5 lessons learned with lesson 5 being very special indeed: it's about Life Tonic.

Lesson 1: The least important thing in every start-up is … your big idea
Many people out there think that business success depends on one original idea. For starters, most successful businesses aren't that original, but they are good at what they do, they understand their market and continuously adapt to serve their target client base. I am writing this, sitting at Leon, a food chain, which took full advantage of the gap in the market for healthy, tasty, responsibly-sourced fast food. More importantly, it's not the idea but the execution that reigns supreme. As Eric Ries puts it, "Only 5% of entrepreneurship is the big idea, the business model, the whiteboard strategising and the splitting up of the spoils. The other 95% is the gritty work that is measured by innovation accounting: product prioritisation decisions, deciding which customers to target or listen to, and having the courage to subject a grand vision to constant testing and feedback."

Lesson 2: How to find demand for your product? (Hint: don't ask your friends)
Wouldn't it be great to publish a book about kiwi community in London? If you are having this conversation with your mum, your flatmate or your lover, they'll probably say "great idea". Even if you ask your wider circle "Would you pay £10 for a book about kiwi community in London?", you won't get any valuable feedback because saying "sure, why not" and taking your credit card out are two different things. 

However, setting up a Facebook page "Kiwis in London", building up an audience, then writing a first chapter, publishing it via a sign-up link and encouraging prospective fans to read it, then generating a conversation will give you a better idea. "Click here to read the first chapter of Kiwis in London - it's free!" is a great tool to assess potential appetite and test whether it's worth going ahead with the project. Incidentally, I've just discovered that Kiwis in London Facebook page already exists. All they have to do now is to come up with a prototype product and test it..!

Lesson 3: I'd swap angel investors for early adopters any day
When I announced to a friend of mine that I am going to quit my job to start my own thing, he said: "Great, I'd love to invest in you!". You might think that's fantastic, but there is something more important than start-up capital and that's early adopters. These are the real angels of the start-up world, because they will take a leap of faith in you and then will spread out the word about you, generating that important word-of-mouth. Think of all the apps that "made it" - they are all obliged to the early adopters for downloading them, trying them and introducing them to their network. Prove your model first, then seek capital to grow your business.

Lesson 4: Failing quickly is a good thing
Ultimately, The Lean Startup model is all about starting small, learning big, testing your proposition in the market and adapting to the feedback you're receiving. You can spend 6 months building up your business plan and doing market research, stuck in "analysis paralysis", invest money, hire a team, then launch your product and spend 6 more months, convincing yourself "it takes time", whereas what you should be doing is following your "baby" with a magnifying glass, set tests and learn from the results. 

And if your prototype project fails? Bravo! That's a result, isn't it? Now, what went wrong? And why? In fact, Eric Ries recommends asking "Why" five times to get to the bottom of the problem and find a way to fix it. 

Clearly, if you start small and launch quickly, if your first prototype fails, you can rapidly tweak your proposition and march onwards.

Lesson 5: What does it mean for Life Tonic?
This is my favourite bit. Life Tonic did everything by The Lean Startup book. The idea wasn't original: I was very much inspired by Alain de Botton's School of Life. I launched quickly, created "prototype products" to see what the market thinks and didn't over-commit in money terms. I built the website myself, a friend created a logo for me. 

Life Tonic hasn't worked out in its original model, putting together talks and workshops in London. I have not sold enough tickets and learned a painful lesson about "bums on seats". 

But something interesting came out of that experience: Life Tonic's newsletter subscription base keeps growing as does its social media presence. Through my writing for Huffington Post, I've been invited to review the forthcoming Russian Art and Culture week in November, guest blog for The Steeple Times and was interviewed by the national newspaper in Belgium. 

"Every entrepreneur eventually faces an overriding challenge in developing a successful product: deciding when to pivot and when to persevere", writes Eric Ries. 

"Are we making sufficient progress to believe that our original strategic hypothesis is correct, or do we need to make a major change? That change is called a pivot: a structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy and engine of growth".

And so I've decided to pivot in two ways:

• I've converted Life Tonic into an editorial content site, changing its strategy to focus on building up content and readership. I will be inviting guest authors to contribute original articles and act as an editor-in-chief. 
• I've decided to focus on my original "brainchild" (a hideous word, coming to think of it), Ladies Who Impress. It's a women's forum, celebrating female role models through live events and stories of inspiring women I meet every day. Here my mission is to build up a global community, so if you are not yet receiving Ladies Who Impress newsletters, please subscribe here and join the tribe!

I now have two new websites, I have tweaked to reflect the change of direction, with both businesses not only reflecting what I've learned in the past 4 weeks, but also making the most of my own talents and strengths. Once again, the idea is to try this new vision, test it, learn, adapt and pivot again, if necessary.

I hope my personal lessons made a good read. If so, do share your thoughts or questions below.

Last week I was talking to a friend of mine who is an actress. She said to me that what she really wants is a 9 to 5 office job.

At first, I was shocked. Having recently left a corporate job myself, I could not understand her. But, of course, it makes sense. Our values and preferences change over time, so whilst I have been craving freedom and an entrepreneurial adventure, she is looking for security and stability after years of freelance lifestyle.

This brings me to the point that people soul-searching for their ultimate career goal often do not get very far. In his book Screw Work Let's Play, John Williams argues that asking yourself to determine your lifetime calling is more likely to keep you stuck rather than propel you to take a step in a direction towards a happier life and fulfilment.

"There is no way to know what you'll want in ten years' time because you won't be the same person you are now. What you do in your next step will take you in directions you would never have predicted and reveal new aspects of yourself you're not even aware of right now." 

Another friend of mine invests private equity money into feature films. He used to be a banker, structuring commodity derivatives. At some point in his career he came across an opportunity to apply his expertise in structuring transactions to projects in the film industry. I doubt that he ever planned to feature as executive producer of several independent UK films.

At some stage in your life you might want to climb a corporate career ladder, but once you've had that experience, you might want to work for yourself or join a start-up. 

"Each experience builds on the last and it's impossible to tell in advance where the next one will lead you. If you ignore whatever is your current itch, you won't get to find out just what interesting places it might take you."

Let me assure you - the headline above is not a blunder. I am dead serious. Men do need female role models and here is why.

There is no shortage of men in the public eye. They dominate the media. Turn on the radio or TV, pick up a newspaper or launch a news portal on the internet and there you have it: important men gathered in St. Petersburg in order to decide whether to launch war on Syria. Men like playing war games. Men got together at the Madison Square Garden to watch ice hockey and agree a $130 billion deal. Men like power. Men play football and score goals. Men like scoring points.

Of course, power-hungry, war-playing, point-scoring women do exist but they don't make role models, at least not in my books. The women I find inspiring are different. They are successful yet grounded. They achieve their goals but admit challenges along the way. They are good, really good at what they do but they are humble about it. They make the most of what they have. They care.

In June I interviewed an Olympic gold medal winner Katherine Grainger about her rowing career. She talked about her triumph at London 2012, but she was also admirably open about her disappointment at coming second at the previous Olympic Games in Beijing. She talked about feeling devastated for months, before deciding to start training again. She also talked about appreciating the Beijing experience for what it taught her and how it prepared her for the next four years of training. Such sincerity is rare but it's very powerful in how it makes you feel differently about your own lows.
Last October I spoke to Marianne Elliott, a much accoladed theatre director, in front of a live audience of about 70 women at a Ladies Who Impress event. She talked about feeling nervous before every single premiere, no matter how flawless the rehearsals. Elliott even said that she never quite believed she could pull it all off before a play finally came together on stage. She admitted that her male colleagues at the National were usually a lot more confident and self-assured. I am not surprised. But surely it is OK to feel nervous, to be so invested in a project that its success is personal and affects your every fibre?

In February this year I asked Anna Hansen, the patron chef of The Modern Pantry, about her plans for the future. On the one hand, she felt pretty settled running one successful restaurant and having published The Modern Pantry Cookbook to critical acclaim. On the other hand, she wanted to consider opening another restaurant in order to give an opportunity to her brilliant, loyal, hard-working team to make their own money and build status among London's restaurateurs. I would say that such business and team ethics is an example to follow.

Inspiring female role models are not just successful in what they do, they are also compassionate, down-to-earth, honest about their vulnerabilities and kind. It is time for men to start paying attention.

Last week I received a Tweet offering me to discover tips on how to lose 22 lbs within 29 days. At the same time Facebook ran a side ad promising me to get flat abs thanks to a secret diet pill. Both were unsolicited, ludicrous and irrelevant.

Don't get me wrong: I am very much interested in being healthy and looking well, but fad diets and mythical pills, promising me a magical transformation overnight or so? No, thank you. I want sustainable lifestyle, looking after myself but enjoying food and wine too.

Today finding the right approach to balanced lifestyle isn't easy. The media, be it periodicals or the internet, are notorious for feeding us latest diets, allegedly responsible for the fortunate looks of this or that celebrity. Television is flooded with sometimes baffling adverts of over-processed yet supposedly healthy products such as cereals or sugary yogurts. Finally, each year a new dieting manual climbs bestselling charts as consumers are desperately looking for a nutritional programme that works for them.

I thought I was well aware when I was "being good" and when I was "treating myself", but the recently repeated BBC series Rip Off Food managed to surprise me. In one episode consumers were asked to guess which bowl of cereal contained more sugar. The choice was between Bran Flakes and muesli. I thought that because of dried fruit the answer would be muesli but it turned out that Bran Flakes was the "winner", containing 20% sugar. 

More surprisingly, an expert interviewed later in the programme, criticised processed cereal but advocated low fat milk. Unfortunately, this particular myth alluding that low fat products are healthier for consumption seems to be unfathomable. Indeed, consumers at large appear unaware that skimming milk also takes away good nutrients present in milk or other "full-fat" products in the first place; what's worse, "low-fat" products are sometimes bulked up with emulsifiers but how could chemicals be better than natural fats is a question worth asking. Fats in general are unfortunately subject to "bad press" as if trans fats found in fast food and fats found in oily fish and vegetables are the same thing. 

"Fats are not just good for us but essential", writes Hattie Ellis in her thought-provoking, easy to follow book What To Eat?. "All our cell membranes need a bit of waxy fat to stop dehydration." Moreover, Ellis explains exactly why trans fats, invented to be convenient for mass manufacturers, are bad for us: "the body can't process this new food property and, what's more, it actively prevents you from metabolising good fats". 

Ellis's guidebook into the world of food is a rare find as most books on nutrition tend to propagate latest sensational discoveries, only to be displaced the following year by the next dieting "breakthrough". What To Eat is practical and entertaining, it asks ten "chewy" questions such as "What is the best breakfast", "Should I eat like a caveman?" and "Does any diet work". A knowledgeable food writer, she advocates a "proper shift in thinking about eating good food rather than prescriptive "healthy eating"", home cooking, seasonal food shopping and variety.

However, what works for a freelance writer cooking for a family may not work so well for a commuter or a frequent business traveler. Sometimes reading a mind-opening book poses more questions. At the end of the day, everyone is different and has different habits. It appears we all have our own hot-burning questions, and I want to grill a dietician!

What's your hottest burning question about food? Let me know!