Every smart person and stable person I know both walks and meditates. The app Headspace is a fun way to start. Try and do it every day. But I suggest not doing it while you are walking … for now.

Jimmy Fallon is an Emmy Award- and Grammy Award-winning comedian. He is known for his work as a cast member of Saturday Night Live and as the host of the late-night talk show The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. He is the author of several books, including Your Baby’s First Word Will Be DADA, and his latest, Everything Is Mama. Jimmy lives in New York City with his wife, Nancy, and their two daughters, Winnie and Franny. If you’d like to see him flying on top of my feet (seriously), check out tim.blog/jimmy.

What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?

If I gave one to an adult, it would be Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. I read it while spending ten days in the ICU of Bellevue hospital trying to reattach my finger from a ring avulsion accident in my kitchen. It talks about the meaning of life, and I believe you come out a better person from reading it. The lines I took from it are: “There is no exact answer to the question ‘what is the meaning of life.’ It’s like asking a chess master ‘what is the best move in the world?’ It all depends on what situation you are in.” It also reinforced the belief, that which does not kill me makes me stronger. If you read it, you’ll get more from it.

The books I give most now are children’s books, since I’m going to more and more parties for kids (I have a two-and-a-half- and a four-year-old). I think of the ones I loved as a kid—ones that stuck in my head. One is The Monster at the End of This Book by Jon Stone.

When two extreme opinions meet, the truth lies generally somewhere in the middle. Without exposure to the other side, you will naturally drift toward the extremes and away from the truth of the matter.

For two decades, Anne Duke was one of the top poker players in the world. In 2014, she bested a field of 234 players to win her first World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelet. The same year, she triumphed in the $2 million winner-take-all, invitation-only WSOP Tournament of Champions. Prior to becoming a professional poker player, Annie was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship to study cognitive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Annie regularly shares her observations on the science of smart decision-making (applied to much more than poker) on her blog, Annie’s Analysis, and has shared her poker knowledge through a series of best-selling books, including Decide to Play Great Poker and The Middle Zone: Mastering the Most Difficult Hands in Hold’em Poker (both co-authored with John Vorhaus). Annie’s latest book, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts, focuses on strategies for great decision-making.

What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”?

First, seek out dissenting opinions. Always try to find people who disagree with you, who can honestly and productively play devil’s advocate. Challenge yourself to truly listen to people who have differing ideas and opinions than you do. Stay out of political bubbles and echo chambers as much as possible. Feel good about really hearing those who disagree with you. Try to change your mind about one thing every day.

When I was younger, it’s not like I was “ungrateful,” but I never stopped to take the time to reflect on everything I had going for me. Now I do a gratitude practice every morning.

Turia Pitt is one of Australia’s most admired and widely recognized figures. In 2011 at age 24, Turia was an ex-model fitness junkie and successful mining engineer when she was caught in a freak firestorm while competing in a 100 km ultramarathon in Western Australia. She was choppered out of the remote desert, barely alive and suffering from full thickness burns to 64 percent of her body. Surviving against overwhelming odds, Turia came back stronger than ever. Turia completed the Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii, in late 2016 and later wrote her memoir Everything to Live For: The Inspirational Story of Turia Pitt. Her popular TEDx Talk, “Unmask Your Potential,” details her incredible story of triumph over adversity.

What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are books that have greatly influenced your life?

My personal favorite book is The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester. A canal digger (William Smith) ended up creating the first geological map of England and Wales. You would think that this would earn him accolades and honors, but instead, he was accused of heresy and ended up in prison. Having said this, I know that most people aren’t as fascinated by geology as I am (I used to be a mining engineer), so I try and give them a book based on their interests.

One distraction I’ve learned to avoid is consuming media that’s just telling me things I already know and agree with.

Julia Galef is a writer and speaker who focuses on the question, “How can we improve human judgment, especially on complex, high-stakes decisions?” Julia is the co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, a nonprofit that runs workshops on improving reasoning and decision-making. Since 2010, she has hosted the Rationally Speaking podcast, a biweekly show featuring conversations with scientists, social scientists, and philosophers. Julia is currently writing a book about how to improve your judgment by reshaping your unconscious motivations. Her TED Talk, “Why You Think You’re Right—Even If You’re Wrong,” has more than three million views.

In the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life?

When something goes badly, I don’t automatically assume I did something wrong. Instead I ask myself, “What policy was I following that produced this bad outcome, and do I still expect that policy to give the best results overall, occasional bad outcomes notwithstanding?” If yes, then carry on!

The reason this habit is so important is that even the best policies will fail some percent of the time, and you don’t want to abandon them (or beat yourself up) as soon as one of those inevitable failures pops up.

The single most important distinction in life … is to distinguish between an opportunity to be seized and a temptation to be resisted.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks is an international religious leader, philosopher, award-winning author, and respected moral voice. He was awarded the 2016 Templeton Prize in recognition of his “exceptional contributions to affirming life’s spiritual dimension.” Rabbi Sacks has been described by HRH The Prince of Wales as “a light unto this nation” and by former British prime minister Tony Blair as “an intellectual giant.” Since stepping down as the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth—a position he held for 22 years—Rabbi Sacks has held a number of professorships at several academic institutions including Yeshiva University and King’s College London. He currently serves as the Ingeborg and Ira Rennert Global Distinguished Professor of Judaic Thought at New York University. Rabbi Sacks is the author of more than 30 books. His most recent work, Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence was awarded a 2015 National Jewish Book Award in America and was a top ten Sunday Times bestseller in the UK. Rabbi Sacks was knighted by Her Majesty The Queen in 2005 and made a Life Peer, taking his seat in the House of Lords in October 2009.

What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?

Leadership on the Line by Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky, because it is the most honest book I have ever read on leadership, and you can tell that by the book’s subtitle, Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading. It’s deeply honest, and a book that I give to everyone, so they know exactly what they’re letting themselves in for if they choose to be a leader.

I’d rather give an understated good recommendation: be interdisciplinary … the interactions between [fields] tend to very often inform strategic and protocol decisions.

Vitalik Buterin is the creator of Ethereum. He first discovered blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies through Bitcoin in 2011, and was immediately excited by the technology and its potential. He co-founded Bitcoin magazine in September 2011, and after two and a half years looking at what the existing blockchain technology and applications had to offer, wrote the Ethereum white paper in November 2013. He now leads Ethereum’s research team, working on future versions of the Ethereum protocol. In 2014, Vitalik was a recipient of the two-year Thiel Fellowship, tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s project that awards $100,000 to 20 promising innovators under 20 so they can pursue their inventions in lieu of a post-secondary institution.

In the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life?

The largest one is probably understanding how to interpret things that other people are saying in situations where their goals do not fully align with yours. A common rookie error that inexperienced leaders make is always agreeing with the last person they talked to; this takes a while to get past, though it becomes easy once you get exposed to enough people who contradict each other. A good general strategy is reasoning counterfactually: if someone tells you that X is true, ask yourself—(i) what would they say if X really is true, and (ii) what would they say if X is false? If the answer to (i) and (ii) is “they will say roughly what they just said now,” then their words provided you with exactly zero information. In general, know when it’s really important not to take people’s words at 100 percent face value.

A good friend of mine once said: “It’s really easy to say what you’re not. It’s hard to say what you are.” … Anybody can talk about why something’s bad. Try doing something good.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is an actor whose career spans three decades, and ranges from television (3rd Rock from the Sun) to arthouse (Mysterious Skin, Brick) to multiplex (Inception, 500 Days of Summer, Snowden). He made his feature screenwriting and directorial debut with Don Jon (Independent Spirit Award nomination, Best First Screenplay). He also founded and directs HITRECORD, an online community of artists emphasizing collaboration over self-promotion. HITRECORD has evolved into a “community-sourced” production company that publishes books, puts out records, produces videos for brands from LG to the ACLU, and has won an Emmy for its variety show HitRecord on TV.

What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessing. This book is about what it means to take something someone else has created and make it your own. He’s a legal scholar, and he’s talking about intellectual property laws, copyright, fair use, etc., but he’s also quite insightful about the creative process in general. Our culture puts such a premium on the notion of originality, but when you really examine just about any “original” thought or work, you find it’s a composite of previous influences. Everything’s a remix. Of course, there’s such a thing as being overly derivative, but I tend to mostly value sincerity over originality. I think I perform better when I focus less on being original and more on being honest.