CW
Chip Wilson

Canadian businessman

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here
For me, Atlas Shrugged was massive for me, to read that again when I was 18, I mean, I know nothing about US politics and I [couldn’t] care less about the Tea Party and all the way that people — because I had no context that it was a philosophy, I just thought it was a book. When I read through the book and I really got about how to make a quality product, how to treat people really well, how not to let the naysayers say you can’t do it, or that if you do make your money, “Give me part of that money because why should you have it all?” type of thing. I didn’t really get it until I was about 52 or 53 and I read the book again and I recognized what an incredible impact that it had on my life. And I think it falls part and parcel with that good to great. What is good and what is great? And do you want to do — did I possibly want to live a life of being good at something? No, I want to be great, because on my deathbed, why would I want to know what good looks like? I want to know what great looks like.

Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 21 May 2021 source ↗

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Daniel Pink American non-fiction writer
Yeah. Oh, yeah. So, they’re probably books that you’ve – I mean, it might have been books that you’ve covered in your show here. So, one of them is Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, one of the greatest things ever. I come back to that advice so many different times, it’s the same even in the Pink household, where we’ll just say – like one member of my family would say to the other who’s struggling, “Okay, bird by bird. Bird by bird.” And so, I am a huge – and I stumbled into this book – I remember where I got this next book, I got it in the airport in San Francisco, in the bookstore in the SFO. And for some reason, I picked it up because it had this really weird cover. But one of the first editions of The War of Art by Steven Pressfield had this kind of silvery cover to it. And I bought that book in – I think it was a campus bookstore in SFO, just because it’s – I went, “Oh, it’s silver cover, and it’s really short.” I got it and it was like, “Oh, my god. I can’t believe how good this book is.” And so, I have even have a little sign on my desk here that says, “Beat the resistance.” So, I’ve given that book a out a lot too. So Pressfield and Lamott. And then – man, I have to say, Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is up there too. Less – I’ve given that out less, but that’s a hugely important book for me.
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 26 June 2018 source ↗
Rita Levi-Montalcini Neurobiologist; Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 1986
Ever since adolescence, [my elder sister Anna] has been an enthusiastic admirer of the great Swedish writer, the Nobel Laureate Selma Lagerlöf, and she infected me so much with her enthusiasm that I decided to become a writer and describe Italian saga "à la Lagerlöf". But things were to take a different turn.
Recorded Laureate-written autobiography for Les Prix Nobel, Nobel Prize Outreach, 1 December 1986 source ↗
Andrew Huberman American neuroscientist and podcaster
Yeah, well, I love poetry and it’s almost cliche now to say this because so many people like his work, but I think David Whyte’s work is just beautiful and is a wonderful kind of entry point to poetry. I’m also a big Wendell Berry fan. He’s written a lot about farming and the natural world. And I’ve never met him, but I’m a huge Wendell Berry fan. I’ll sometimes give Wendell Berry books as gifts. The book that I think is perhaps, at least to me, the most beautiful book of all is Longitude by Dava Sobel about the history of the discovery of timekeeping at-ocean, which is not a trivial problem to solve. And it’s just a beautiful story of how scientists, or in this case a particular scientist, merged the quest for a technology with a scientific problem with adventure, and going out on boats and risking one’s life for the sake of science is something that resonates with me a bit. And it’s a beautiful, short book, and it’s very accessible to anybody, whether or not you have a background in science or not, and she’s absolutely a wonderful writer. And so that’s the one I gift most often.
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 8 July 2021 source ↗
Bill Gates Co-founder of Microsoft; co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
I read Stephen Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature a few years ago and got to talk to him about it after, which was a lot of fun. I reviewed it for my blog, Gates Notes, because I wanted other people to read it, love it, and hopefully learn from it the way I did. It's probably my favorite book and the one I recommend most often.
Recorded TIME interview, 2017 source ↗

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