Over the years, I have found a few resources for developing personal productivity that I love. My top picks include Getting Things Done by David Allen, the classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, and Learning How to Learn Barbara Oakley (I recommend the Coursera course). I'm tempted to add Tiny Habits to this list.

Definitely. I would say the top three books that I tend to give as gifts, the first one would be a book that’s written by Dennis Hoff called The Art of the Pimp . It, literally, talks about his journey, how he ended up getting the Bunny Ranch, and a lot of the intimate details in relationship to sex in Nevada. For anybody that’s interested in what I do, wanting to learn a little bit more about the industry, that is always the first book I give is this is kind of your handbook, as it were, to the world of legal sex in Nevada. The second book that I give out most frequently is to my co-workers. It would be The 48 Laws of Power . A lot of the ladies haven’t had the opportunity or haven’t been exposed to that book. And so, I think that it’s a great tool to get into the hands of women and get that positive thinking going, that energy that that book really tends to encapsulate. And the third book is kind of an interesting one. It’s a book called Memoirs of a Geisha . It speaks as to the life of a woman who ended up being a geisha in Japan during the World War II era who was kind of purchased from her family and unwillingly brought into this very foreign world that could not be any more different than what her life was like. The reason why I tend to recommend this book for other people is that there’s this incredibly beautiful, humanistic element in the way that she describes. The author uses language that is very, very rich and colorful. And it sits you into that time and place where you smell the fish in front of you. You hear the sound of the shamisen that she’s playing. You can really immerse yourself into that world and kind of get a sense of what things were like, at that time.

Ever since adolescence, [my elder sister Anna] has been an enthusiastic admirer of the great Swedish writer, the Nobel Laureate Selma Lagerlöf, and she infected me so much with her enthusiasm that I decided to become a writer and describe Italian saga "à la Lagerlöf". But things were to take a different turn.

Other than the Oh the Places You'll Go which seems to be a you-must-give-it-to-all-college grads, and How to Cook Everything, which I love giving to people moving out on their own the first time, I think I've probably gifted Geek Love more than anything else.

On the one hand, we have people that say the aid system is so broken we need to throw it out. And on the other we have people who say the problem is that we need more aid. ... Both sides are right. And the problem is that neither side is listening to the other. Even more problematic, they're not listening to poor people themselves.