Well, other than Man’s Search For Meaning , which is probably my number one gift, recently, the last couple years there’s a book called The 100-Year Life . The 100-Year Life , written by a couple Brits, and it sort of says, “Imagine the future where the average person lives to 100. How is that going to change on a personal and societal basis?” It’s a really interesting, observational book. The Happiness Curve , which we talked about earlier. The U-curve of happiness is what we call it. The name of the book is by Jonathan Rauch, it’s called The Happiness Curve . That’s become a favorite to gift. I also love Danny Meyer the restaurateur. He’s got one of the best books on hospitality ever written, which is called Setting the Table .

Yeah, there’s a number one. I can’t stop talking about it. I’ve read it three times now. I will read it again soon, is Titan , the Ron Chernow book about

I’m very suspicious about recommending books to people because there’s the risk they might listen to what you say. And if you’re recommending to them the book that is not the most valuable next book they should read, in a sense, you’re wronging them. So I don’t give people books that often. One thing I try to encourage people to do is to read more about music and the arts, not a particular book. But I say take the creators you love, whoever, whatever they may be, and read about them. If it’s The Beatles, great. If it’s Beethoven, and really dig into what you might think of as your hobbies, but to read about them in an intense way. And just think about Beethoven. How did he manage his career? What were his productivity tricks, what did he do wrong? And think through some of the questions you’ve written and talked about at length, but in the context of your cultural heroes. If it’s like, what do I tell people to read most often? I am not myself religious, but usually I’ll tell my non-religious friends they ought to go read the Bible. It’s a wonderfully deep and brilliant book and most non-religious people, even most religious people, barely know it, or Shakespeare.

This question, I’m going to sound like a scientist here but one of the books that I’ve given out a lot is called The Craft of Scientific Writing . It’s certainly something that I’m working on but when I’ve gifted books, it’s often been either to a colleague or definitely new, up and coming people in the discipline of science. The way you write scientifically is obviously different from other writing. If you want to write scientifically but in a compelling way for individuals to try and translate the science into the lay public, for example, that’s really what I try to do with The One Minute Workout is boil the science down, write it in a compelling and accessible manner. Certainly I’ve had tremendous assistance from a colleague, Christopher Shogen who is just a tremendous writer. And we know we are on the right spot where I was happy from the scientific message, and Chris was happy with the writing, or at least the readability or the accessibility of the writing style. That’s a real challenge, of course. It’s an art as much as it is a science. So, a book like The Craft of Scientific Writing helps provide some tips there because if you’re a scientist coming up, you’re constantly writing. You’re writing grants, you’re writing papers and you want to convince people with the point that you’re making. You don’t want to bore them and you want to do it in a compelling manner. Tim Ferriss: