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The question

Which book reshaped how you think, and in what way?
KB
Keith Black

Neurosurgeon; chair of neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here
I remember reading The Making of a Surgeon when I was in probably about the sixth or seventh grade. And that was a book that kind of got me focused, I think, on the career path. And I remember, one thing in there I still remember is that you can always tell you’ve really arrived as a surgeon when the nurses in the hospital ask you to be their physician.

Academy of Achievement recorded interview, American Academy of Achievement, 4 May 2001 source ↗

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Oliver Sacks Neurologist and writer
The first biography I read — I think the first scientific biography — was Madame Curie . And my mother, who was a surgeon, worked at the Marie Curie Hospital. She’d met Marie Curie, who was one of her great heroines. And reading the book, I think, was the first portrait of a scientist and the romance of a scientific life.
Recorded Academy of Achievement recorded interview, American Academy of Achievement, 17 June 2000 source ↗
Albie Sachs Anti-apartheid lawyer; Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa
I’d been introduced to Freud through all this because I couldn’t understand why is it so difficult to be brave. There was something inside me that wanted to collaborate all the time with the people who wanted to destroy me, and I was searching for it, and I found there was a thing called the unconscious that everybody has. And you’ve got to be in touch with the unconscious to understand a lot of your behavior. And I read through volume after volume after volume of the collected works of Sigmund Freud.
Recorded Academy of Achievement recorded interview, American Academy of Achievement, 3 July 2009 source ↗
John Vervaeke Professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of Toronto
I picked What Is Ancient Philosophy? by Pierre Hadot. That book, and philosophy as a way of life. And this is where Hadot brings out that philosophy is not primarily about the propositional. It’s not primarily about declarative discourse. Philosophy is a way of life in which you’re training skills, states of mind, perspectives, traits of characters, and those are all the components of virtue.
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 25 February 2023 source ↗
Anthony Kennedy Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1988–2018
I think fiction is very important because it gets us into the mind of a person. Hamlet is a tremendous piece of literature. You know Hamlet better than you know most real people. Do you know the reason? Because you know what he’s thinking. And this teaches you that every human has an integrity and an autonomy and a spirituality of his own, of her own, and great literature can teach you that.
Recorded Academy of Achievement recorded interview, American Academy of Achievement, 3 June 2005 source ↗

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Question What counsel would you give your twenty-year-old self — and what should they ignore? Time & hindsight
If you want to do something, one of the smartest things that you can do is go find someone that’s done it and to try to get them to show you how they did it, to show you where the potholes are. What are the right steps to get there? ... And not just in terms of where to go to school, but what are the things that are really tough that you have to overcome, and how did you overcome it.
Recorded Academy of Achievement recorded interview, American Academy of Achievement, 4 May 2001 source ↗

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