The Master Key System by Charles F. Haanel. I have read hundreds of personal development books, but this is the one that clearly showed me how to visualize, contemplate, and focus on what it was I truly wanted. It revealed to me that we only get what we desire most, and to apply myself with a laserlike focus upon a goal, task, or project. That in order to “have” you must “do,” and in order to “do” you must “be” — and this process is immediate. Although it takes time for these desires to manifest in our material world, you must see the thing you desire as completed, finished, and real, now. The better you can do this, the more you can accomplish. I have bought several copies of this book and distributed it to family and friends. I also reread it probably once a month to keep my vision clear.

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.

Oh, yes. In fact, it’s funny, because I’ve just sent a couple of friends a pair of novels, and one of the novels I’ve sent to a dozen people, and it will seem like a random choice to you, but it’s one of these books that, it’s just a miracle of a book. It’s called The Long Ships , and it’s by a Scandinavian historian. It’s a novel by a Scandinavian historian who only wrote one novel. I think his name is Frans Bengtsson, and he was a Viking historian, and he packed everything he knew about the Vikings into this wonderful comic novel. At the end of it, you feel like you were a Viking for 400 pages. It’s a piece of history that he just brings to life in this story. I hand that out all the time, partly because it is just an incredible pleasurable reading experience, and partly just to illustrate a point that you never know where great books are going to come from. There are lots of examples of people, even very late in life, a book just pops out of them, and it was their one book. The other book, my pandemic reading gift I’ve been giving to people, because it’s a perfect pandemic novel, is Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow , and it’s about a Russian aristocrat who, during the Revolution, he’s the kind of guy who was supposed to be shot, but because of certain qualities, he isn’t shot. Instead, they lock him up in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow, and he doesn’t leave for the next 50 years. So you were stuck inside this place, and it’s Eloise for Grownups , and just beautifully done, but it makes you, in this moment, it makes you see the possibilities of resourcefulness in a confined space. There are a bunch of books that I give to people, but those are the two that I’ve just recently, in the last week, sent to people.

I have gifted your book a lot. It wasn’t The 4-Hour Workweek . The book of yours that I gifted to anyone was The 4-Hour Body . I just thought there were so many great little hacks in there. Some of them