Which book do you recommend most often to others, and what makes you pass it on?

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.

It was not long after Kenneth Arrow's path-breaking study of social choice, Social Choice and Individual Values, was published in New York in 1951, that my brilliant co-student Sukhamoy Chakravarty drew my attention to the book and to Arrow's stunning "impossibility theorem" (this must have been in the early months of 1952). Sukhamoy too was broadly attracted by the left, but also worried about political authoritarianism, and we discussed the implications of Arrow's demonstration that no non-dictatorial social choice mechanism may yield consistent social decisions.

Unfortunately, I don’t. My wife now reads fiction. I don’t have the time to read fiction. My wife reads the fiction and summarizes it to me, but I wish at one point I’ll have time again to read fiction. It is a luxury I cannot afford right now.

Read Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the tasks you think are impossible. You will particularly hate the advice to write first thing in the morning, but if you can manage it, it might well be the best thing you ever do for yourself. This book is about becoming a writer from the inside out. Many later advice manuals derive from it. You don’t really need any others, though if you want to boost your confidence, “how to” books seldom do any harm.

A book also pushed me to become a medical doctor. I was deeply inspired by Torao Tokuda, a physician who founded a hospital group in the 1970s that tried to revolutionize the Japanese medical care system.

In Ge Hong's A Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies (肘后备急方), I noticed one sentence "A handful of Qinghao immersed in two liters of water, wring out the juice and drink it all" (青蒿一握, 以水二升渍, 绞取汁, 尽服之) when Qinghao was mentioned for alleviating malaria fevers. Most herbs were typically boiled in water and made into a decoction before taken by the patients. This unique way of using Qinghao gave me the idea that heating during extraction might have destroyed the active components and the high temperature might need to be avoided in order to preserve the herb's activity.

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.

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.

At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matheson. I also recently read Sapiens by a guy named Harari. And I’m going to give that thing over and over again to everyone I know.

Definitely. I would say the top three books that I tend to give as gifts, the first one would be a book that’s written by Dennis Hoff called The Art of the Pimp . It, literally, talks about his journey, how he ended up getting the Bunny Ranch, and a lot of the intimate details in relationship to sex in Nevada. For anybody that’s interested in what I do, wanting to learn a little bit more about the industry, that is always the first book I give is this is kind of your handbook, as it were, to the world of legal sex in Nevada. The second book that I give out most frequently is to my co-workers. It would be The 48 Laws of Power . A lot of the ladies haven’t had the opportunity or haven’t been exposed to that book. And so, I think that it’s a great tool to get into the hands of women and get that positive thinking going, that energy that that book really tends to encapsulate. And the third book is kind of an interesting one. It’s a book called Memoirs of a Geisha . It speaks as to the life of a woman who ended up being a geisha in Japan during the World War II era who was kind of purchased from her family and unwillingly brought into this very foreign world that could not be any more different than what her life was like. The reason why I tend to recommend this book for other people is that there’s this incredibly beautiful, humanistic element in the way that she describes. The author uses language that is very, very rich and colorful. And it sits you into that time and place where you smell the fish in front of you. You hear the sound of the shamisen that she’s playing. You can really immerse yourself into that world and kind of get a sense of what things were like, at that time.

Yeah. Tim and I have talked about this a little bit. So, for me, books are all about the moment and the emotion that I’m in and the person I’m giving it to is in. and so, I can’t tell you that there’s one book that has predominated how I give because I love books, and I love to give books. And I carry books around. Even today, I brought two books for you to autograph that I’m giving away. So, there’s an act of giving. And a book is a wonderful way to convey something to another person. Books that I’ve loved giving away, Norman McClain’s A River Runs Through It . I read that book in so many different ways, in so many pieces. It totally influenced my life in terms of fly fishing and finding magic in words and that quiet space. He also wrote that book when he was 71 years old. Kind of only the really big book he wrote. It was at 71. And you think about all of this sort of bullshit about creative genius being in the young and all of that. As you get older, you start appreciating it. If Norman could do it at 71, maybe I could do it not quite at 71 yet. Another book I really liked, a more recent book, is Stanley McChrystal’s Team of Teams . Completely different reason. Just a really clever, smart book about how to organize businesses and enterprises for today’s world. And he takes this experiential army in Afghanistan and brings it over to sort of your life or my life and makes it kind of relevant and meaningful. I found it very influential. I’ve given away quite a few copies of James Nester’s book, The Deep, which you might have read, right. You’ve read his book.

Lately, I’ve liked there’s a woman named Bronnie Ware. She wrote a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying . And she was a hospice nurse who had spent time with people in the last 90 days of their life. And she would learn like what their regrets were. Or, sometimes, she’d learn what their happiness was. So, there was an example of this woman who was from a super rich family, and she decided to marry an artist. And the family excommunicated her. And she’s like 32 years old. She gets cancer, and she dies. And she hasn’t heard from her family in years. And her mom comes to her, at the end, and says, to be honest, I was just jealous. You were living life on your own terms. And I’ve got all of these obligations. I don’t even like my life that much. And I was just kind of pissed off that you could go marry some artist and be this happy. And I realized how wrong I was. But this woman who is dying says I have no regrets. I got to be with the person I wanted to be with. And I would have loved to have lived longer, but nobody knows how much time they’re going to have. At least I got to have the time that I got the way I wanted to have it, the best I knew how. And then, they would have another person who the opposite was true. They would be dying, and they’d say, “Promise me, Bronnie, that you will not live life according to other people’s thinking because I lived my whole life trying to please other people.” “And if I could have it over again, I wouldn’t do that.” And so, she does a great job of having the example of the person who did it well with no regrets, and the person who is like fuck, I’m dead now, and if I could do it over again, I’d do it different. And so, it’s motivating to say, gosh, how am I measuring up against those five things? And so, I like that book because it kind of takes people out of the here and now and kind of forces you to confront a broader set of issues. Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I think that, for me, in the last few years, I’ve had a lot of friends pass away in the last two years or so, including Terry Laughlin, rest in peace, who is in this book just a few weeks ago. And I found it really, in an odd way, reaffirming to familiarize myself with death and grief and grieving in almost a preemptive way. One of my favorite people, I’m sure you’ve spent time with him, Matt Mullenweg, incredible entrepreneur, but first and foremost, just a beautiful human being, and he lost his father in a very unexpected way. And he recommended On Grief and Grieving to me. And I think it’s a very useful exercise to familiarize yourself with the details of death and people passing. Mike Maples: And I learned a lot of this from Julie who is the love of my life and puts up with me. And she’s helped all of these people who have had cancer. And so, as a result, she ends up seeing a lot of people pass. And I think more than anybody, she taught me that, in the last bit of time you have, all of the shit falls away. All of the expectations, all of the external stuff. And so, you just hope that when that time comes, you’re like I did the best I could. I did it the way I could. And so, that’s why I find that book helpful. It’s not because I’m preoccupied with dying. I hope I live a long time. But it’s like when the time comes, I want to say I did it my way. I did the best I could. I honored the gift. So, that’s a good book. And there’s business books, too, but we’ll do that some other time.

I regularly give books to other people, and up until recently, the book that I have most regularly gifted is Sheryl Sandberg’s book Option B because it’s closely related to the work that I do, and Sheryl is the most inspiring woman that I know. I really respect her. She’s on my executive council. I love her book Option B on healing and building a new future. I feel very spoiled that Sheryl wrote the forward to my own book, which is called A Second Chance . So, now, the book that I’m gifting even more than Option B is my own book, A Second Chance .

There is one in particular. It’s called Atlas Shrugged , which is my favorite book.

I guess, through life, it’s Catcher in the Rye . I love that book. I read it at four different times in my life. Teenager and later.

The book I’ve probably gifted the most is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning , since I’m 16.

I’ve listened to your podcast so many times and I wanted – what my answer previously was and what I recommend all the time is Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University , which is a practical book.

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.

I read a lot. I think there are some really poor books at the airport, I really do. For me, I like more of a practical application book. I like a book like Mark Cuban’s Sport of Business. I Like it because it gets me fired up. I like it because it’s a real story from a real guy, just saying it like it is and it’s easy reading. It’s not so analytical and things like that. So that’s the book I like.

Good question. I’ve heard you ask this before, and I didn’t think you were going to ask me, and I should have been prepared for this. I’m a huge, avid reader. I truly believe – and I tell every person I train – is that one of the biggest reasons – the difference between where you are and where you want to go is knowledge. Read as much as you can. So, that’s a tough question. I think The Alchemist is a big one. I’ve loved that book for a very long time. The Bible is a big one, but I’ll give you an off-the-wall one, which is called The Slight Edge . Have you ever heard of that one?