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.

I love that you asked that question that way because it really puts it in a different perspective. It’s like not what your favorite book is, it’s what you’ve given as a gift, which I thought about a little bit this morning. And it’s so clear. I have an immediate answer, and then, I had to think why did I do that. But I think, when I was younger, and still to this day, I sometimes gift a book of poetry by Adriane Rich called A Dream of Common Language , which was a book she wrote in the late ‘70s. And she’s a poet that – I was trying to think why was that book so important to me. And it’s really funny. When I read Cheryl Strayed’s Wild that was one of the books that was most important to her that she had as she hiked the Pacific Rim. Tim Ferriss: That’s right. I totally forgot about that. Liz Lambert: Yeah. I gift a lot Slouching Towards Bethlehem , a book by Joan Didion, which is a collection of essays that I love that book so much. It is a lot about the kind of writing Joan Didion is doing. And those essays are both of the time. There’s one that’s about John Wayne, about California. But there’s also this collection of personal essays she does. One is called On Keeping a Notebook that I go back to again and again, and I share a lot. Tim Ferriss: On Keeping a Notebook

There’s one book that I’ve given 40 copies away probably. And it’s called Reminiscence of a Stock Operator. And for anyone who wants to be a trader or an investor, this is the Bible. It was written in 1932 by a guy who was, at that time, maybe the world’s greatest speculator. Jesse Livermore is the fictional character. And what’s crazy about it is you can read it today in 2020, and it literally is still the Bible. And so every great trader annotates it, tears pages out of it. I used to be able to tell when people would come to interview to work and they’d say, “I really, all I care about is trading.” And I was like, “Well, tell me two books you’ve read about trading.” “Oh, I haven’t read any books.” And I was like, “Okay, here’s a book. Go read it and come back when you’ve read it. But you’re not getting a job, because you lied. Because you lied to me because you really didn’t care that much about trading if you’ve never read a book on it.” But that’s the book. And there’s a terrible anecdote or afterword to it is that two years after he wrote the book, the guy committed suicide because he just couldn’t take the — he lost his fortune yet again. But he put every rule that you need to — you know, the discipline side of it is all in that book. And it’s a quick read; you can read it in three hours.

Yeah. So in financial markets, I really like this somewhat obscure book called The Aspirational Investor by this guy, Ashvin Chhabra, who runs Jim Simons’ family office. Jim Simons started Renaissance Technologies, which is the dominant quant fund.

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. That book changed my life, blew my mind. If you’re going to read that book, take it slow in my opinion.