The book that I have gifted the most often, you would not expect this of me, but it’s called Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World .

I love that you asked that question that way because it really puts it in a different perspective. It’s like not what your favorite book is, it’s what you’ve given as a gift, which I thought about a little bit this morning. And it’s so clear. I have an immediate answer, and then, I had to think why did I do that. But I think, when I was younger, and still to this day, I sometimes gift a book of poetry by Adriane Rich called A Dream of Common Language , which was a book she wrote in the late ‘70s. And she’s a poet that – I was trying to think why was that book so important to me. And it’s really funny. When I read Cheryl Strayed’s Wild that was one of the books that was most important to her that she had as she hiked the Pacific Rim. Tim Ferriss: That’s right. I totally forgot about that. Liz Lambert: Yeah. I gift a lot Slouching Towards Bethlehem , a book by Joan Didion, which is a collection of essays that I love that book so much. It is a lot about the kind of writing Joan Didion is doing. And those essays are both of the time. There’s one that’s about John Wayne, about California. But there’s also this collection of personal essays she does. One is called On Keeping a Notebook that I go back to again and again, and I share a lot. Tim Ferriss: On Keeping a Notebook

You know, the one that you mentioned, the Seven-Day Weekend , as with many other books, is a good place to poke around also inside your own head and to look for some insights. When I wrote the book originally, Brazil was still a relatively closed, elite environment for businesspeople, etc. Obviously because the book has sold a good quantity, most people had read it and I kept giving autographs to taxi drivers and so on so it was a very small microcosm I was living in. I remember the second occasion this happened to me, which was being stopped on the street and somebody saying, “You know, I read your book and it changed my life.” And they would go off and quote somebody else’s book entirely. When this happened the second time, I said shit, this is not about me at all. So, let me stop right here. And of course at that point there were all kinds of campaigns for me to run for mayor, and for president, and become Brazil’s Trump. Because people get lost along the way and they start believing in their own bullshit. The interesting thing here, going back to the issue of the book, was it’s when you come across an insight which was already yours and you see it in writing, that’s when you say this book changed my life. But real insight is where you go there and you say geez, I never thought of that, and there is some of that; it has to add to something that you believe in or that jives with your moment. So, I think putting too much weight and too much importance on something that you got out of someone doesn’t remind us that this intuition and this insight was growing inside you already; you were just waiting for some clarification of it. But that kind of answers the second bit. I had talked for several years at the Sloane School at MIT and I had a group of MBAs. This was always a very fun group and I used to go there in the fall quarter. I’d tell them: look, this is what you have to read to understand business and organizations. I was obliged to make this available on the MIT site and the books that were there were Marco Polo’s Travel, one book, a Kafka parable, a Jung book on synchronicity and so forth. These kinds of books – and Kafka I think is extraordinary – give you an enormous insight into the people who are doing things and why they’re doing things, rather than the whole set of how-tos. When you run away from the how-tos into the issue of how do you get to real wisdom, we’ve been at this for a long time. We’ve been in this agricultural era, then we were in the industrial era, then we were in the information age and we were in the knowledge age. But we don’t get any closer to the age of wisdom, and something is terribly wrong for a population and the humanity that has been around for so long and doesn’t get closer to wisdom. When you think about organizations and I ask you to show me one democratic organization or business environment in the world, or to find one wise company as a company, these are all almost impossible to find. So, to answer your question, I would say the books that stop to think about why the heck do we do the things that we do which are in Kafka and Freud or in Jung or in Thoreau; I think those will answer the business world much closer than people think. When they say oh, great, that’s all good and well but that’s all philosophy and all airy-fairy and touchy-feely but I need to get down to answer this: how come, which people, how, and so forth. But this process I think is much, much stronger from a philosophical point of what makes you want to get up in the morning and how you let the other people around you do what they want to do how they want to do it, and get out of their way. That is a philosophical issue that I think would solve a lot more issues if people went from that filter onwards, you know?

The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks is probably the book I've gifted the most, and the one I've recommended the most of any other book. And also, Conscious Loving for Couples, because you asked that question earlier. Conscious Loving, I think, is a fantastic book for couples who are wanting to get more connected, is another one I've gifted a lot. And those are the two that come top of mind.