Oh, yes. In fact, it’s funny, because I’ve just sent a couple of friends a pair of novels, and one of the novels I’ve sent to a dozen people, and it will seem like a random choice to you, but it’s one of these books that, it’s just a miracle of a book. It’s called The Long Ships , and it’s by a Scandinavian historian. It’s a novel by a Scandinavian historian who only wrote one novel. I think his name is Frans Bengtsson, and he was a Viking historian, and he packed everything he knew about the Vikings into this wonderful comic novel. At the end of it, you feel like you were a Viking for 400 pages. It’s a piece of history that he just brings to life in this story. I hand that out all the time, partly because it is just an incredible pleasurable reading experience, and partly just to illustrate a point that you never know where great books are going to come from. There are lots of examples of people, even very late in life, a book just pops out of them, and it was their one book. The other book, my pandemic reading gift I’ve been giving to people, because it’s a perfect pandemic novel, is Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow , and it’s about a Russian aristocrat who, during the Revolution, he’s the kind of guy who was supposed to be shot, but because of certain qualities, he isn’t shot. Instead, they lock him up in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow, and he doesn’t leave for the next 50 years. So you were stuck inside this place, and it’s Eloise for Grownups , and just beautifully done, but it makes you, in this moment, it makes you see the possibilities of resourcefulness in a confined space. There are a bunch of books that I give to people, but those are the two that I’ve just recently, in the last week, sent to people.

Yeah, totally. Of course now, all my friends are having kids. I give kids books, but the one I give people that are trying to learn actively is Principles by Ray Dalio. It’s interesting actually. Someone gave me the PDF. It was a PDF before his book. Gave me the PDF and I skimmed over. I was like, “Oh, this is pretty good.” They were like, “No. I seriously think you’re going to love this.” For some reason, I didn’t get around to it for maybe a year-and-a-half, and then I read the actual book, and I was blown away. It’s both a guide to life, a guide to business, and also I think an insight into Ray and someone who’s built an amazing business. If you guys listening don’t know what he does, he runs a hedge fund called Bridgewater and he’s so much more than just a finance thinker, he’s also just a brilliant philosopher. I give that a lot because I think it’s a great guide to life.

The book that I gift most to people, because it has had a lasting impact on my psyche, is The Warrior Within: The Philosophies of Bruce Lee. I admire Bruce Lee for his physicality, of course, but more so for his deep philosophy, known as “Jeet Kune Do” or “the way of the intercepting fist.” The key element of Jeet Kune Do is its “formless form.” Bruce Lee rejected the rigid rules and structures of Kung Fu and other traditional fighting styles. Instead, he borrowed from several styles to create his own fluid, rapidly efficient technique that was all his. In The Warrior Within, John Little explains how Bruce Lee’s philosophy helped him overcome tremendous challenges and pain to become a man whose originality, intense belief, and commitment I’ve long admired.

I’m an Audible guy, so I never give a physical book to people, but something that’s come up a lot lately is this book, The Road Back to You , which is about the Enneagram. And I’ll just say up front, it’s written by a former preacher, and he’s got some religious tones. And that doesn’t really appeal to me, but I just found the descriptions of the Enneagram types to be just really spot on, especially the one of my type, type five. And yeah, it felt like reading my diary. And I’ve recommended it to a few other people who had similar experiences. And I had read a bunch about Enneagram before, and it was like, “Oh, this sort of fits. It sort of doesn’t.” And then, this one really spoke to me,