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

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

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:

Oh, that I can answer. So, each of the last two years I’ve given one book to a bunch of people. And this year, it’s a book by Robert Wright called Why Buddhism is True . And it’s a story about mindfulness and about the science of Buddhism and the current neuroscienc, about how our minds work, making the argument that the things people have said about mindfulness, meditation, and the way it changes your capacity to empathize with other people and to break out of the tribalism that we’re all locked into, the things that Buddhism has said about that turn out to be scientifically correct. And here’s a story about why. Wonderful book. Robert Wright is one of the smartest writers I’ve ever read. His book Nonzero is among my five favorite books of all time. So, that book came out recently, and I gave that to my closest friend and my family. The year before, I gave a book by Larissa MacFarquhar called Strangers Drowning which is a story about people who make extraordinary moral choices like the choice to adopt 23 children and bring them into your lives, who just make crazy choices and why they make those choices. And Larissa is one of the smartest writers at the New Yorker. Everything she writes is absolutely brilliant, and the book is brilliant to get into ten discreet chapters about people who make choices like that. So, I gave Larissa’s book last year and Robert Wright’s book this year. Tim Ferriss: Thank you.

That’s sort of pushed Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) into the now number three spot, just ahead probably of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! It’s weird, isn’t it? It says something about us, the books we like to give people, doesn’t it? You thanked Michael Pollan at the end of your interview or maybe it was somewhere in the midst of it, but I thought it was at the end of the interview for writing the book that he did because you said it was the book you wanted to read and that you wish you could have written, but you’re no slouch yourself when it comes to writing books. Is there anything that if Michael hadn’t had done that and you would have been writing that book in addition to all the stuff we’ve talked about today, is there anything else that you would have included in that book that wasn’t included? He’s a tough act to follow.

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 .

Over the years, I have found a few resources for developing personal productivity that I love. My top picks include Getting Things Done by David Allen, the classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, and Learning How to Learn Barbara Oakley (I recommend the Coursera course). I'm tempted to add Tiny Habits to this list.

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

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.

Well, there are two different ones. There’s Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, which invariably shows up on these lists of 100 books you should read before you die, which really had a big impact on me, and I’ve spoken about it at Sequoia founder events. I’ve given it to many people. I just think the book is amazing in terms of helping clarify what it is that motivates you and what drives you, “What is your purpose,” because we are not really driven by monetary rewards or pleasure by itself. So, that, to me, is a fantastic book. The other one is an annual series called America’s Best Science and Nature Writing , and it’s this collection of about two dozen articles from American publications, written for a lay audience across a range of topics. It could be, “What’s the latest insights from physics and astronomy,” to, “What’s happening in genetics,” “What’s happening with anthropology,” or things like that. I mean, it’s absolutely fascinating.

All right, I'm going to give you two, because they're kind of categories to it. I'd say the first one underneath this health and human performance realm, Diagnosis and Treatment of Movement Impairment Syndromes. It's a Shirley Sahrmann book that I think is landmark. I mean it's decades old, super impactful. Kind of reads like stereo instructions, so you're going to go through a page at a time. But Sahrmann is still a practicing physical therapist at Wash U in St. Louis.