I think a lot of them will probably be in the cooking space. Definitely On Food and Cooking . I’ve gifted that a lot. My career starts with that book in many ways. There wouldn’t be any of this modern cooking movement without Harold’s book, I don’t think. There certainly wouldn’t be modernist cuisine that played a big role in my career without that book. So I’ve gifted that a lot because I think it’s relevant and I think for a certain type of individual, it’s the kind of book that every time you open it up, you see something. You’re like, “I didn’t even know that was there; that’s super cool.” And you read something and go, “The world is way more interesting than I thought.” I think I’ve gifted Michel Bras’s Essential Cuisine quite a bit, although it’s hard to do now because I think it’s out of print in English and quite expensive. The other book I found myself gifting a lot lately is an out-of-print book on thermodynamics called The Second Law . It was written by an Oxford physical chemistry professor named P.W. Atkins. That book is just a phenomenal, casual, infographic-laden read on how the world works from an energy perspective. I found that so incredibly useful in trying to understand how to do something, how to make something work, whether something’s even possible. It’s frequently my bullshit detector. When somebody’s trying to convince me some technology or some idea has merit, I very quickly come back to just sketching out the kind of thing I did for that email, where it’s like, let me just see – with knowing nothing about the subject, if I can just sketch out the basic ideas of how much energy is going to be involved or consumed or if I assume limitless capacities, does this make any sense ever? So many things sound good, but just don’t pass muster as soon as you start looking at the world that way. You’re like, “Well, that’s clearly just a waste of everybody’s time and we should just stop and go do this thing over here,” which at least you’re not having to invent new physics or violate the laws of physics to go do it.

There’s one book I’ve given the most in my life, which is a book called – well, there are several now that I think about it. There’s a book by Timothy Wilson called Strangers to Ourselves , which is one of the loveliest, most insightful books about social psychology that I ever read. And I give that a lot to people. And every time I meet, and really, I’m always meeting people who work in retail, particularly I always send them, particularly if they’re Jewish, I send them a book called The Merchant Princes . It’s a book about the great Jewish retail families of America. So in the 19th century, all of these people come over from Europe who have experience in the garment trade or retailing. And an extraordinary number of the early 20th century/late 19th century department stores pop up around America are founded by Jewish immigrants from Europe from, literally, you go to any town in America, the traditional department store is from one of those families. Well, a guy, and I’ve forgotten his name, wrote a book about those families, and it’s called The Merchant Princes , and it’s fantastic.

When I was 16 years old, I read the book from Hans Selye. Hans Selye is a Canadian scientist, but he was Hungarian so his book was translated to Hungarian. His mantra was that you have to focus on things that you can change. Many young ones are giving up because they can see that their friends or their colleagues are advancing, and it seems that they do less and somehow, they get higher salary and promoted. I told that if you notice that then you already took away your attention what you can change. Because you cannot change that.

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Min d used to be one that I would recommend years ago. So it depends on, on the time and who the person is. But I think more recently talking about performance, when I’m working with clients, there’s a book called The Three Laws of Performance . That’s a really good one.