Introduction

This is a book about books. In the process it explores the lives of some remarkable people—inventors, scientists, business gurus, and political leaders—but it’s not just a book about people and their life stories. Rather it is a book about ideas—and inspirations. Because it turns out that the paths of many famous people start out with a particular book that inspired them when they were young. And so exploring these shared ideas, dreams, and inspirations is the heart of this book. Inspiration, in fact, is the thread that ties together individuals with characters and backgrounds as diverse as Jimmy Carter and Henry Ford, Jane Goodall and Barack Obama, Malcolm X and Judge Clarence Thomas.

Each chapter typically consists of two such famous people, each with their own extraordinary tale. The first person introduced is more historical, usually revealing the character and motivations of someone most of us have heard of without really ever knowing much about—like Thomas Edison or Malcolm X. Biographies like these reveal that life is truly stranger than fiction. Paired with each such figure is a more recent soulmate, someone different in many respects yet nonetheless linked across the years by a shared philosophy—and a love of books. And I think their inspirations can become our inspirations too.

Of course, there’s never been any shortage of sources of advice on the ingredients of success. Today, there are a veritable plethora of advisors and experts offering advice on how to get rich, be successful, and impress people. More than that, there are expensive business school and university courses promising pretty much the same, and last but not least, there are the books.

“When their advice is good, then the advisors, the professors, the entrepreneurs and the authors deserve to be celebrated, paid highly, and feted with garlands. When it is not so good, though, they deserve to be unceremoniously pickled, sawn in half, boiled, minced, and torn apart by chariots.” That’s the advice offered by the great Chinese strategist Sun Tzu in his classic work, The Art of War, written no less than 1,500 years ago! I’ve refreshed the translation slightly; and although the last line is pretty literal and maybe dates it a bit, the message itself is timeless: the search for wise advice goes back as long as there have been human societies, and this certainly played a key role in the working of the ancient Chinese imperial court.

Indeed, since the time of the ancient Chinese sages, the advice industry has ballooned. And as the penalties for giving dodgy tips in a book or offering up duff strategies to politicians have evidently been reduced, inevitably a lot of the stuff around now is rather useless. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that even as Sun Tzu warned people about bad advice, he joined the very same “books for self-improvement” industry by writing it down, if not exactly as a book at least as a bundle of bamboo strips. (In 1972, a set of such strips dating from the Han Dynasty was found in a tomb in Yinque Mountain in eastern China.) All of which just goes to show (you can’t get away from it) that books are the indispensable tools for success. And, however success may be defined, since surely most of us have hopes of achieving some aspect of it in life, the problem is a practical and strategic one: how to get from A to B. Books—whether reference tomes or fantasy fiction—are the indispensable tool for doing just that.

Take Warren Buffett, the business magnate, who I look at alongside John Rockefeller in chapter 8. The CEO of Berkshire Hathaway and investor nicknamed “the Oracle” for his uncanny knack for spotting money-spinning opportunities seems to read books like athletes practice for tournaments. When asked what he thought was the key to his own achievements, he is supposed to have pointed to a nearby pile of waiting hardbacks and said, “Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest.”

After all that reading, Buffett only has 20 percent of his day left for things like eating, driving to the bookstore, and maybe talking to journalists. We might think that a better life balance is perhaps struck by Bill Gates, founder of the huge computer company Microsoft, who is almost as rich and yet claims to read merely one book a week. A lot of them are business texts, although his personal blog, GatesNotes, features over 150 book recommendations for everything from scientific histories to novels and biographies to in-depth studies of social issues. The blog even offers short lists of beach reading, but even this is pretty serious stuff—books like The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins and What If by Randall Munroe. The subtitle of that last book is Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions.

But back to The Art of War. Both Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff, respectively the hugely successful CEOs of software giants Oracle and Salesforce, credit Sun Tzu’s work as the text that’s been most instrumental to their own careers. Ellison is considered one of the tech industry’s most combative figures, and, he says, he learned the art of mastering that anger from Sun Tzu and even advised his friend Benioff, “You’re angry? Ignore the anger.” As for Benioff, he liked the book so much that he even wrote a foreword for a 2008 reprint of the ancient classic. In this he reveals, “Since I first read The Art of War more than a dozen years ago, I have applied its concepts to many areas of my life. The tenets of the book provided me the concept to enter an industry dominated by much bigger players—and gave us the strategies to render them powerless. Ultimately, it is how Salesforce.com took on the entire software industry.”

Well, there’s someone who evidently never misses the chance to promote his business. Nonetheless, even if he had not been content just plugging his own company, there really is a lot that can be learned from the book. The Art of War is considered the classic work on strategy—life strategies, business strategies, military strategies. Hundreds of books examining its insights have been published in many different languages, and its ideas have been applied to fiefs as diverse as business management and sports training.

You see, The Art of War is only superficially about military tactics; at its heart, it is about human values. And so too, ultimately, are all great books.

Or take Mark Cuban, also in the book-a-week club. He’s another investor, for a slightly different emphasis, who says that he reads for three hours every day, especially books about big ideas in politics and psychology. Cuban explains why in his own book, called How to Win at the Sport of Business. “I would continually search for new ideas. I read every book and magazine I could. Heck, three bucks for a magazine, twenty bucks for a book,” he wrote. “One good idea would lead to a customer or a solution, and those magazines and books paid for themselves many times over.” But he soon realized that while the information he was getting was publicly available, most people had simply never sought it out.

The notion of big ideas brings me to the reading habits of Elon Musk. Musk is a slightly different case again: a South African engineer who now makes rockets but originally made billions from the Internet payment service PayPal. He too is an avid reader, inspired as a child by epic fiction like Lord of the Rings and slightly less epic stuff too, like Asimov’s Foundation series, which centers on the fall of the Galactic Empire, and even the subversive and dryly witty Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. These are books read as escapism, as entertainment. Yet, for Musk, each and every one of them provided inspirational role models—heroes with ambitious strategies to save the world—just as more conventional biographies of great historical figures like Benjamin Franklin (also on his reading list) did.

It’s another take on the observation offered by Tom Corley, author of Rich Habits: The Daily Success Habits of Wealthy Individuals, that rich people (who Corley defines as those with an annual income of $160,000 or more and a liquid net worth of $3.2 million-plus) tend to choose educational books and publications over novels, tabloids, and magazines. Corley thinks successful people obsess over biographies and autobiographies of other successful people in order to glean guidance and inspiration. But hold on a minute. Back to that question of what it means to be “successful”: What do I mean—what does anyone mean—by that anyway?

I’m using the word “success” rather carefully in this book because there’s a well-established link between being successful and being rich and famous, but there’s also a less appreciated one between the belief that fame and wealth bring happiness and low self-esteem and depression. In fact, people who pursue life goals more effectively are not motivated by the pursuit of wealth and fame but by other life goals. These are people who, for example, want to explore the secrets of atoms, rather than people who think there is money to be made from physics. It’s a small difference, in a sense, but a vital one. Harry Kroto, who I look at in detail in chapter 7, a Nobel Prize winner and discoverer of the carbon atom shaped like a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome, illustrates just this. One of Kroto’s favorite books is Lord of the Rings, a work of pure imagination, and one of his favorite quotes from it is “All who wander are not lost.” After winning the prize and becoming quite a celebrity, Kroto spent his time not talking to business conferences for hefty fees but instead talking to young people in schools to try to communicate his vision of science as a voyage of discovery to be undertaken for its own sake.

Similarly, psychologists have found that people with a strong drive to become famous, or merely an all-consuming interest in those who are already famous, are likely to have deficiencies in their own language, learning, and thinking skills. Not here the ingredients of success! Celebrity worshippers tend to be moody, emotional, and neurotic, at least according to the British writer Paul Martin in a book called Making Happy People. Martin goes on to make an interesting connection between celebrity worship and what he calls “a more fundamental desire to emulate successful individuals.” According to this theory, which, like the best theories, on its face appears to be only common sense, we are evolutionarily disposed to take note of the successful individuals in our group, partly to learn from their behavior and partly to share their success. However, as Martin also says, the “malignant shadow of social comparison” is dissatisfaction with our own opportunities, activities, and indeed physical selves.

The bottom line is that success is about intrinsic motivation and rewards, not about extrinsic goals. It’s about finding something that you enjoy doing for its own sake, that you think is worth doing in itself, and not about strategies based on sacrifices now for rewards down the line. Reading for success, for example, should not be undertaken only as a means to an end but instead should be valued because the right sort of reading is itself stimulating and empowering. Contrast the vast pile of books that Buffett is contentedly munching through with the 80 percent or so of UK workers who equally cheerfully reported to researchers that they had undertaken no work-related learning at all in the recent past. The reason that they didn’t read? They enjoyed other things more. But the point such respondents miss is this: discovering new things and obtaining new insights can be both exhilarating and stimulating. Successful people are often those who found this out early on in life.

In exploring the life stories of such people, I’ve found that behind many great tales of achievement lies much more than a collection of smart tactics. Beliefs and values guide grand strategies too. But it’s not always the same plan or strategy, which, if you think about it, shouldn’t come as a surprise. If there really were just one recipe for success, well, everyone would be using it already. No, the thing that unifies these disparate approaches is that they all provided for their owners a kind of conceptual grid onto which a wide range of day-to-day creative, scientific, or business practices are able to develop and grow. For Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google, for example, the grid was Charles Darwin’s notions of natural mutation and iteration. With Henry Ford, the man who pioneered the assembly line, the grid was an obscure, ethereal theory of life as a sequence of reincarnations. And for both Oprah Winfrey and Steve Jobs, the grid was existentialist ideas about the pursuit of authenticity. In all these cases, a grand, indeed often philosophical, theory meshed perfectly with a practical business strategy. I explore the life stories of all these remarkable people in this book.

This flexible interplay between the theoretical and the practical aspects of ideas is illustrated by two dramatically different cases: those of Jane Goodall and Walt Disney. Goodall is the inspirational anthropologist whose work living with and closely observing chimpanzees and other primates in Africa revolutionized our understanding of both these rare and endangered animals and ourselves. Goodall, who I look at in detail in my first chapter, admits that the germ of her future research lay in two children’s books about animals: Doctor Dolittle and The Jungle Book.

As for Walt Disney (who I do not look at in further detail), the mention of The Jungle Book immediately creates a link to the magic worlds brought to life in his animated films. But there the similarities end, as Disney was a committed social conservative and self-proclaimed God-fearing American patriot who openly admired fascist philosophers and even created his own totalitarian micro-republic originally called the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT). This later became a very different kind of escapist utopia called Disneyland, but even so, under the glittering surface, Big Brother was omnipresent, exerting an iron control. In Disneyland, homes belonged to the state. Long fingernails and long hair for male employees were punishable, and even the emotions that must be worn on their faces at all times were stipulated! And yet, the same philosophy also helped Disney to inspire his staff, to see the power of branding and marketing, and to grow from a struggling artist to a great filmmaker and entertainment visionary.

But let’s get back to the present. Rest assured the aim is not to send you off to the library to dig out books on twentieth-century fascist philosophers—or indeed to push any particular kind of books on you. Rather, I want to do something different and more direct by focusing on the big ideas that lie behind some of the world’s great personal stories. Skills will—the philosophical ideas often—still be part of it, and amazing insights too, but the vital ingredient of guiding strategies and framework beliefs will be given the attention I think they richly deserve but rarely get.

So this book has two big goals: first, to restate the power of books in an era when words are cheap, and second, to provide examples of people who’ve found in books the inspiration to achieve great things. Because after all my research, the one habit I’ve found successful people have in common is a very simple one, and it’s easily copied. They read a lot.

Here, in a nutshell, is the key to the relationship between innovators and books. Many people read books, but only a few search them for ideas—and then use them. It might be called the difference between active and passive reading. Active reading, reading for ideas, is an approach that amazingly few people use (or at least use properly), yet it is one that’s proven its worth time and again.

Remember all those examples of successful people dropping out of school or forgoing a formal education? (Check out how many people in this book fit in that category!) Less often noted is that many of these taught themselves, primarily from books But forget any idea of simply reading the same books that made other people great—far less checking Facebook groups or immersing yourself in the Sunday papers. No, the tricky aspect is that it is not just any old reading that will do; we must read books that speak directly to our aims and aspirations, our dreams and illusions.

And don’t even try to count on your daily reading of social media posts. Real reading is different. A good book may well be the product of tens of thousands of hours of thinking and research—quite different from the hasty cut-and-paste encouraged by the relentless churn of the Internet and news cycle.

In the chapters that follow, I’ll be taking a close look at some iconic examples of people who have been inspired by books that they read, often when they were young. I’ll pick out the key sections or ideas in the texts that they themselves mention, and sometimes I’ll suggest those that they just seem to embody. Each chapter will identify two great readers—one typically very well-known, even iconic, figure from recent history and the other a more contemporary figure but definitely someone we might wish to learn from. I’ll also sum up the books themselves, partly in the main text but also through book boxes—like the one below for Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. In the process, I hope you’ll discover—or rediscover—some of the reasons why books are an open and waiting doorway that can take you anywhere you wish to go.

THE ART OF WAR
AUTHOR: SUN TZU
PUBLISHED: CIRCA 700–800 CE

Historians aren’t sure when the book was written or even who wrote it, although traditionally it is credited to a Chinese military leader known as Sun Tzu. However, like many other Chinese classics, it is more than likely that the book is really a compilation of generations of Chinese theories and teachings on military strategy—but it’s not just that. The lessons of The Art of War apply across all areas of life, from businesses seeking strategic advantage to individuals looking for wise advice on the conduct of their daily lives. And it does so because the advice in it is very wise and still resonates with readers today.

It is said that, for more than a thousand years, rulers across Asia consulted the text as they plotted their military conquests. However, it did not reach the Western world until the end of the eighteenth century, when a Jesuit missionary called Jean Joseph Marie Amiot translated the book into French. (Some historians believe that the French emperor Napoleon then became the first Western leader to follow its teachings.) It was finally translated into English in 1905 under the title The Book of War. Ever since then, it’s sold pretty well too, but it is claimed that things really took off in 2001, when the television mobster Tony Soprano told his therapist that he’d been reading the book. After that, the book was in such demand that Oxford University Press had to print twenty-five thousand extra copies.

The Art of War offers specific battle strategies—for example, one tells commanders how to move armies through inhospitable terrain, while another explains how to use and respond to different types of weapons—but they also give more general advice about conflicts and their resolution. Rules like “He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight” and “Victory usually goes to the army who has better trained officers and men” can be applied to all kinds of disagreements and challenges.

The book also offers practical strategies for success, such as, “War is a game of deception. Therefore feign incapability when in fact capable; feign inactivity when ready to strike; appear to be far way when actually nearby . . . When the enemy is greedy for gains, put out a bait to lure him; when he is in disorder, attack and overcome him; when he boasts substantial strength, be doubly prepared against him; and when he is formidable, evade him. If he is given to anger, provoke him. If he is timid and careful, encourage his arrogance. If his forces are rested, wear them down. If he is united as one, divide him. Attack when he is least prepared.”

However, perhaps one of The Art of War’s most important and counterintuitive messages (although very much in keeping with Taoist principles of yielding) is that warfare is considered something essentially undesirable and to be avoided. Sun Tzu writes, “Those who are not fully aware of the harm in waging war are equally unable to understand fully the method of conducting war advantageously.” Instead, “he who is skilled in war subdues the enemy without fighting. He captures the enemy’s cities without assaulting them. He overthrows the enemy’s kingdom without prolonged operations in the field . . . This is the method of attacking by stratagem.”

Above all, the text emphasizes the importance of not only morale but morals too. It advises rulers very firmly to “find out which sovereign possesses more moral influence, which general is more capable, which side has the advantages of heaven and earth, which army is better disciplined, whose troops are better armed and trained, which command is more impartial in meting out rewards and punishments, and I will be able to forecast which side will be victorious.”