Just one [trapeze] class made me realize that underneath my mind’s chatter, my body has everything under control if I’m willing to take the plunge and fly.
Soman Chainani is a detailed planner, filmmaker, and New York Times best-selling author. Soman’s debut fiction series, The School for Good and Evil, has sold more than a million copies, has been translated into more than 20 languages across six continents, and will soon be a film from Universal Pictures. A graduate of Harvard University and Columbia University’s MFA Film Program, Soman began his career as a screenwriter and director, with his films playing at more than 150 film festivals around the world. He was recently named to the Out100 and has received the $100,000 Shasha Grant and Sun Valley Writers’ Fellowship, both for debut writers.
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?
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. I read this slim little book before any new creative project and it lights a torchfire inside me. The crisis with all creative work is that it requires us to trust that generative voice inside us while also silencing the negative ones. It’s so easy to mix them all up and end up quietly abandoning our ambitions. (It’s why I became a pharmaceutical consultant at 21 years old, selling Viagra instead of writing fantasy like I do now.) Half drill sergeant, half Zen voodoo master, Pressfield shot me out of my stupor and taught me the meaning of creative discipline.
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. The greatest work of fiction I’ve ever read, with the simplest theme: All of us come with baggage and wounds and pain; all of us. But recognizing that common, human bond is what helps us transcend that pain.
Ego is about who’s right. Truth is about what’s right.
Mike Maples JR. is a partner at Floodgate, a venture capital firm that specializes in micro-cap investments in startups. He has been on the Forbes Midas List since 2010 and named one of Fortune magazine’s “8 Rising Stars.” Before becoming a full-time investor, Mike was involved as a founder and operating executive at back-to-back startup IPOs, including Tivoli Systems (IPO TIVS, acquired by IBM) and Motive (IPO MOTV, acquired by Alcatel-Lucent). Some of Mike’s investments include Twitter, Twitch.tv, ngmoco, Weebly, Chegg, Bazaarvoice, Spiceworks, Okta, and Demandforce.
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?
The Top Five Regrets of the Dying by Bronnie Ware Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus Living Forward by Michael Hyatt and Daniel Harkavy How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen
How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours?
When I was in college, I was rejected by the fraternities that I was interested in, so I ended up helping to start one. The fraternities that said no are no longer on campus, and the one I helped start turned out to be among the absolute best.
Buddhists observe that we’re all on fire. It’s so beautiful to sometimes tune in and see the flickering.
Graham Duncan is the co-founder of East Rock Capital, an investment firm that manages $2 billion for a small number of families and their charitable foundations. Before starting East Rock 12 years ago, Graham worked at two other investment firms. He started his career by co-founding the independent Wall Street research firm Medley Global Advisors. Graham graduated from Yale with a BA in ethics, politics, and economics. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves as co-chair of the Sohn Conference Foundation, which funds pediatric cancer research. Josh Waitzkin calls Graham “the tip of the spear in the realms of talent tracking and judgment of human potential in high-stakes mental arenas.
What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?
I wear a SubPac M2 Wearable Physical Sound System while I commute on the subway to my office, and sometimes while I work at my desk. The system lets you feel the vibration of music through your body. Music producers, gamers, and deaf people are the primary users. I find the full-body experience of music makes listening to music or even a podcast more of an immersive somatic experience rather than just a conceptual head thing.
If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say and why? Are there any quotes you think of often or live your life by?
We need a new diversity—not one based on biological characteristics and identity politics but a diversity of opinion and worldviews.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a women’s rights activist, champion of free speech, and best-selling author. As a young girl in Somalia, she was subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM). When forced by her father to marry a distant cousin, she fled to Holland and claimed political asylum, working her way up from being a janitor to serving as an elected member of the Dutch parliament. As a member, she campaigned to raise awareness of violence against women, including honor killings and FGM, practices that had followed her fellow immigrants into Holland. In 2014, Ayaan gained international attention following the murder of Theo van Gogh, who had directed her short film Submission, a film about the oppression of women under Islam. The assassin left a death threat for her pinned to van Gogh’s chest. This tragic event is chronicled in her best-selling book, Infidel. She is also the author of Caged Virgin, Nomad, and most recently the bestseller Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now.
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?
Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, first published in 1945. I’d often give this to my politician friends when I was in politics, and now I give it to students. One of the biggest lessons for me from this book is that so many bad ideas that lead to authoritarian consequences begin with good intentions. This is timeless wisdom.
I used to resent obstacles along the path, thinking, “If only that hadn’t happened life would be so good.” Then I suddenly realized, life is the obstacles. There is no underlying path.
Janna Levin is the Tow Professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University, and has contributed to an understanding of black holes, the cosmology of extra dimensions, and gravitational waves in the shape of spacetime. She is also director of sciences at Pioneer Works, a cultural center dedicated to experimentation, education, and production across disciplines. Her books include How the Universe Got Its Spots and a novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, which won the PEN/Bingham Prize. She was recently named a Guggenheim Fellow, a grant awarded to those “who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship.” Her latest book, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, is the inside story on the discovery of the century: the sound of spacetime ringing from the collision of two black holes over a billion years ago.
How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours?
Failure is highly underrated. There’s an anecdote about Einstein I only came across very recently. In 1915 he thought gravitational waves—ripples in the shape of spacetime—were the most important consequence of his general theory of relativity. He reversed himself a couple of years later, claiming they did not exist. He goes back and forth like this for a bit. Several years on, he submits a paper for publication asserting they do not exist. Somewhere between acceptance and going to press, he slips in an entirely new manuscript that says they do. A friend warns, “Einstein, you have be careful. Your famous name will be on these papers.” Einstein laughs. “My name is on plenty of wrong papers,” he says. In the 1930s he declares he does not know if gravitational waves exist but it is a most important question. In 2015, 100 years after Einstein first proposes their existence, a massive billion-dollar experimental undertaking records gravitational waves from the collision of two black holes over a billion years ago, waves emitted long before humans emerged on the Earth. We discourage failure and by doing so we subtly discourage success.
I started out basically imagining I was writing for a stadium full of replicas of myself—which made things easy because I already knew exactly what topics interested them, what writing style they liked, what their sense of humor was, etc.
Tim Urban is the author of the blog Wait But Why and has become one of the Internet’s most popular writers. Tim, according to Fast Company, has “captured a level of reader engagement that even the new-media giants would be envious of.” Today, Wait But Why receives more than 1.5 million unique visitors per month and has over 550,000 email subscribers. Tim has gained a number of prominent readers as well, like authors Sam Harris and Susan Cain, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, TED curator Chris Anderson, and Brain Pickings‘ Maria Popova. Tim’s series of posts after interviewing Elon Musk has been called by Vox‘s David Roberts “the meatiest, most fascinating, most satisfying posts I’ve read in ages.” You can start with the first one, “Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man.” Tim’s TED Talk, “Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator,” has received more than 21 million views.
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?
The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand, because of the two main characters in the book—Howard Roark and Peter Keating. Neither of the characters is like a real person—they’re both too one-dimensional and extreme. But to me, if you put them together, you get each of us. Roark is a totally independent reasoner. He reasons from first principles—the base facts at the core of life like the limits of physics and the limits of his own biology—and uses that information only as the building blocks of his reasoning to construct his conclusions, his decisions, and his life path. Keating is the opposite—he is a totally dependent reasoner. He looks outward and sees contemporary values, social acceptance, and conventional wisdom as the core facts, and then does his best to win the game within those rules. His values are society’s values and they dictate his goals. We’re all like Roark sometimes and Keating other times. I think the key to life is to figure out when it makes sense to save mental energy and be like Keating (I’m super conforming in my clothing choices because it’s not something that’s important to me) and when in life it really matters to be like Roark and reason independently (choosing your career path, picking your life partner, deciding how to raise your kids, etc.).
We spend far too much time complaining about the way things are, and forget that we have the power to change anything and everything.
Bozoma Saint John is the chief brand officer at Uber. Until June 2017, she was a marketing executive at Apple Music after joining the company through its acquisition of Beats Music, where she was the head of global marketing. In 2016, Billboard named her “Executive of the Year” and Fortune included her in their “40 under 40” list. Fast Company has included Bozoma on its list of “100 Most Creative People.” Bozoma was born in Ghana, and she left the country at 14 with her family to immigrate to Colorado Springs.
What are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?
I love Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Her writing style is incredibly poetic and complex. She doesn’t “allow” any laziness in reading her work; so beyond the incredible story, I learned to take my time to absorb the characters, and to reread passages when there was so much to unpack. It was also the book I asked my late husband to read when he dropped his pickup line to get to know me better. Our first date was a book review—and clearly he passed with flying colors. Two months later, he presented me with a painting of his interpretation of the book as a birthday gift. I knew then that I wanted to marry him. Anyone who could take his time to read, comprehend, and interpret Toni Morrison’s work, based on my recommendation, was someone I wanted to spend significant time with. That experience taught me that when people care, they’ll go beyond the extra mile to understand you. So Toni Morrison helped me set a high bar.
Matt Ridley is a prominent author whose books have sold more than a million copies, between translated into 31 languages, and won several awards. They include The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue, Genome, Nature via Nurture, Francis Crick, The Rational Optimist (one of the most recommended books by others in this book), and The Evolution of Everything. His TED Talk “When Ideas Have Sex” has been viewed more than two million times. He writes a weekly column in The Times (London) and writes regularly for The Wall Street Journal. As Viscount Ridley, he was elected to England’s House of Lords in February 2013.
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?
Two books that have greatly influenced my life are The Double Helix by James D. Watson and The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. What fascinates me about these books is how they revolutionized the telling of scientific stories while themselves breaking new scientific ground in the elucidation of the secret of life. Read these two books and you will get a great answer to a question that has baffled mankind for millions of years: What is life? Watson’s “nonfiction novel” was an astonishing literary achievement, and it was about the greatest scientific discovery of the 20th century. Dawkins’ “stranger-than-fiction” argument turned evolutionary biology on its head and was written like a great detective story.
