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Crowdsource Your Reading List From People You Admire
What should you read next? Whatever books shaped the people you most admire and respect.
When I was a teenager, I began a habit that would change the course of my entire life. I don’t mean to overstate it — it was simple, just a question I would ask the people I met — but without it, I’m not sure who I would have turned out to be.
Every time I would meet a successful or important person I admired, I would ask them: What’s a book that changed your life?* And then I would read that book. (In college, for instance, I was lucky enough to meet Dr. Drew, who was the one who turned me on to Stoicism.)
Who I asked the question to first, or how I came to the habit, I can’t recall, but the results stayed with me. I can reel off the titles of the books that came out of it like they are tattooed on my body:
- 48 Laws of Power
- Meditations
- Autobiography of Malcolm X
- History of the Peloponnesian War
- What Makes Sammy Run?
- Man’s Search for Meaning
The question that produced these books as answers was not borne of idle curiosity. It was my way of cutting through a personal conundrum, which…
