Clayton M. Christensen is the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. In addition to his most recent book, Competing Against Luck, he is the author of nine books, including several New York Times bestsellers The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution, Disrupting Class, and most recently 'How Will You Measure Your Life?'.&nbsp;
Christensen is the co-founder of Innosight, a growth-strategy consultancy; Rose Park Advisors, an investment firm; and the Christensen Institute, a non-profit think tank. In 2011 and 2013, he was named the world’s most influential business thinker by Thinkers50.

Clayton

Philip Hampson Knight (born February 24, 1938) is an American billionaire businessman. He is the co-founder and chairman emeritus of Nike, Inc., and was previously chairman and CEO of the company. As of October 3, 2022, Knight was ranked by Forbes as the 27th richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$35.2 billion. He is also the owner of the stop motion film production company Laika.&nbsp;
Knight is a graduate of the University of Oregon and Stanford Graduate School of Business. He was in the track and field club under coach Bill Bowerman at the University of Oregon, with whom he would co-found Nike. Knight has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to each of his alma maters, as well as Oregon Health &amp; Science University. He has donated over $2 billion to the three institutions.

Phil

Viktor Emil Frankl (26 March 1905 – 2 September 1997) was an Austrian psychiatrist who founded logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy that describes a search for treating life's meaning as the central human motivational force. Logotherapy is part of existential and humanistic psychology theories.
Logotherapy was promoted as the third school of Viennese Psychotherapy after those established by Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. Frankl published 39 books. He was a Holocaust survivor. The autobiographical Man's Search for Meaning, a best-selling book, is based on his experiences in various Nazi concentration camps.
After earning his M.D. in 1930, Frankl gained extensive experience at Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital, where he was responsible for Man's suicidal women. In 1937, he began a private practice, but the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938 limited his opportunity to treat patients. In 1940, he joined Rothschild Hospital, the only hospital in Vienna still admitting Jews, as head of the neurology department. Before his deportation to the concentration camps, he helped numerous patients avoid the Nazi euthanasia program that targeted the mentally disabled.
As head of the Neurological Department at the general Polyclinic Hospital, Frankl wrote Man's Search for Meaning over nine days. The book, titled initially A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp, was released in German in 1946. The English translation of Man's Search for Meaning was published in 1959 and became an international bestseller.
Frankl saw this success as a symptom of the "mass neurosis of modern times" since the title promised to deal with the question of life's meaningfulness. Millions of copies were sold in dozens of languages. In a 1991 survey conducted for the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, Man's Search for Meaning was named one of the ten most influential books in the U.S.

Viktor

Paulo Coelho is the author of "The Alchemist" born in 1947 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Being the author of 30 books that have sold over 320 million copies in 170 countries, he has become one of the most widely read authors in the world today.
Paulo Coelho has been a United Nations Messenger of Peace since 2007, and this has allowed him to continue to promote intercultural dialogue and to focus on the needs of children. He is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and the recipient of over 115 awards and honours, including the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the Grinzane Cavour Book Award, and the Chevalier de l’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur, to name a few.
Other titles include “The Pilgrimage”, “Brida”, "The Supreme Gift", “The Valkyries”, “By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept”, “Maktub”, “The Fifth Mountain”, “Manual of the Warrior of Light”, “Veronika Decides to Die”, “The Devil and Miss Prym”, “Stories for Parents, Children and Grandchildren”, “Eleven Minutes”, “The Zahir”, “Like the Flowing River”, “The Witch of Portobello”, “The Winner Stands Alone”, “Aleph”, “Manuscript Found in Accra”, “Adultery”, “The Spy”, “Hippie”. Also “Journey” guided journal. -- from the author's website

Paulo

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was born to an upper-class Roman family in A.D. 121 and was later adopted by the future emperor Antoninus Pius, whom he succeeded in 161. His reign was marked by a successful campaign against Parthia. Still, it was overshadowed in later years by plague, an abortive revolt in the eastern provinces, and the deaths of friends and family, including his co-emperor Lucius Verus.&nbsp;
A student of philosophy from his earliest youth, he was especially influenced by the first-century Stoic thinker Epictetus. His later reputation rests on his Meditations, written during his later years and never meant for formal publication. He died in 180 while campaigning against the barbarian tribes on Rome’s northern frontier.

Marcus

Dale Breckenridge Carnegie (originally Carnagey until 1922 and possibly somewhat later) (November 24, 1888 – November 1, 1955) was an American writer and lecturer and the developer of famous courses in self-improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking, and interpersonal skills. Born in poverty on a farm in Missouri, he was the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, first published in 1936, a massive bestseller that remains popular today. He also wrote a biography of Abraham Lincoln, titled Lincoln the Unknown, as well as several other books.
Carnegie was an early proponent of what is now called the responsibility assumption, although this only appears minutely in his written work. One of the core ideas in his books iDale Breckenridge Carnegie (originally Carnagey until 1922 and possibly somewhat later) (November 24, 1888 – November 1, 1955) was an American writer and lecturer and the developer of famous courses in self-improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking, and interpersonal skills.
Born in 1888 in Maryville, Missouri, Carnegie was a poor farmer's boy, the second son of James William Carnagey, and his wife Amanda Elizabeth Harbison (b. Missouri, February 1858 – living 1910). In his teens, though still having to get up at 4 a.m. every day to milk his parents' cows, he managed to get educated at the State Teacher's College in Warrensburg. His first job after college was selling correspondence courses to ranchers; then, he moved on to selling bacon, soap, and lard for Armour &amp; Company. He was successful to the point of making his sales territory of South Omaha, Nebraska, the national leader for the firm.&nbsp;
After saving $500, Carnegie quit sales in 1911 in order to pursue a lifelong dream of becoming a Chautauqua lecturer. He ended up instead attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York but found little success as an actor, though it is written that he played the role of Dr. Hartley in a road show of Polly of the Circus. When the production ended, he returned to New York, unemployed, nearly broke, and living at the YMCA on 125th Street.&nbsp;
It was there that he got the idea to teach public speaking, and he persuaded the "Y" manager to allow him to instruct a class in return for 80% of the net proceeds. In his first session, he had run out of material; improvising, he suggested that students speak about "something that made them angry", and discovered that the technique made speakers unafraid to address a public audience.
From this 1912 debut, the Dale Carnegie Course evolved. Carnegie had tapped into the average American's desire to have more self-confidence, and by 1914, he was earning $500 - the equivalent of nearly $10,000 now - every week. Perhaps one of Carnegie’s most successful marketing moves was to change the spelling of his last name from “Carnegey” to Carnegie, at a time when Andrew Carnegie (unrelated) was a widely revered and recognized name.&nbsp;
By 1916, Dale was able to rent Carnegie Hall itself for a lecture to a packed house. Carnegie's first collection of his writings was Public Speaking: a Practical Course for Business Men (1926), later entitled Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business (1932). His crowning achievement, however, was when Simon &amp; Schuster published How to Win Friends and Influence People. The book was a bestseller from its debut in 1937, in its 17th printing within a few months.&nbsp;
By the time of Carnegie's death, the book had sold five million copies in 31 languages, and there had been 450,000 graduates of his Dale Carnegie Institute. It has been stated in the book that he had critiqued over 150,000 speeches in his participation in the adult education movement of the time.

Dale

Richard Phillips Feynman was an American physicist known for the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as work in particle physics (he proposed the parton model). For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman was a joint recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, together with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions governing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime and after his death, Feynman became one of the most publicly known scientists in the world.
He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb and was a member of the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. In addition to his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing and introducing the concept of nanotechnology (the creation of devices at the molecular scale). He held the Richard Chace Tolman professorship in theoretical physics at Caltech.

Richard

The bestselling Russian-born American author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, was also a playwright, screenwriter, and philosopher, in addition to being a novelist. She is also directly associated with the development of the philosophical system she called “Objectivism.”
Ayn Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on February 2, 1905. A brilliant child, by the age of six, Rand had taught herself to read. She held a keen interest in literature, and by the time she was nine, Ayn Rand had already decided to become a fiction writer. Very much inspired by the works of Victor Hugo, Rand liked to imagine herself as a European writer. She discarded the mysticism and collectivist cultures of Russia in her writings. During her high school years, Ayn Rand was a supporter of the Kerensky Revolution. However, she condemned the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. To escape the fights and riots, Rand’s family moved to Crimea, where she completed high school. Here, Rand was introduced to American history for the first time in their last year of high school. Impressed by what she studied, Rand immediately took America as a model nation of freedom. When her father’s pharmacy was confiscated after the communist victory, Rand’s family suffered a difficult period of poverty and starvation.
Upon return from Crimea, Ayn Rand began studying courses on history and philosophy at the University of Petrograd. She graduated in 1924. The collapse of free inquiry and the takeover of the university by communist thugs affected Rand’s life as much as it did everybody else’s. The only pleasure in Rand’s life during this era of depression was watching Viennese operas and Western films and dramas. Pursuing her interests, in 1924, Rand gained admission to the State Institute for Cinema Arts, where she studied screenwriting. When she was granted permission in 1925 to travel to the United States to visit relatives on a short trip, Rand took it as an opportunity not to be missed and vowed never to return. After spending six months in Chicago with her relatives, Rand obtained an extension to her visa, after which she went to Hollywood to pursue a career in screenwriting. In 1929, Rand married actor Frank O’Connor and remained his wife for fifty years until his death.

Eric Ries is an entrepreneur and author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Business, published by Crown Business. He graduated in 2001 from Yale University with a B.S. in Computer Science. While an undergraduate, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content.&nbsp;
He later co-founded and served as CTO of IMVU, his third startup. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech. In 2008 he served as a venture advisor at Kleiner Perkins Caufield &amp; Byers before moving on to advise startups independently. Today he serves on the board of directors for Code for America and on the advisory board of a number of technology startups and venture capital firms.
In 2009, Ries was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. In 2010, he was named entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School and is currently an IDEO Fellow. The Lean Startup methodology has been written about in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Inc., Wired, Fast Company, and countless blogs. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Tara.

Eric

Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D., is widely regarded as one of the world's leading researchers in the fields of personality, social psychology, and developmental psychology. She has been the William B. Ransford Professor of Psychology at Columbia University. She is now the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her scholarly book Self-Theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development was named Book of the Year by the World Education Fellowship. Her work has been featured in such publications as The New Yorker, Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, and she has appeared on Today and 20/20. She lives with her husband in Palo Alto, California.
Dweck was born in New York. Her father worked in the export-import business, and her mother in advertising. She was the only daughter and the middle sibling of three children. In her sixth grade class at the P.S. 153 elementary school in Brooklyn, New York, students were seated in order of their IQ. Students with the highest IQ scores could erase the blackboard, carry the flag, or take a note to the principal's office. She said in a 2015 interview, "On the one hand, I didn't believe that a score on a test was that important; on the other hand, every student wants to succeed in the framework that's established. So looking back, I think that glorification of IQ was a pivotal point of my development."

Carol

David Epstein is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World and of the New York Times bestseller The Sports Gene, both of which have been translated into more than 20 languages. (To his surprise, the latter was purchased not only by his sister but also by President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.)&nbsp;
He was previously the host of Slate‘s popular “How To!” podcast and a science and investigative reporter at ProPublica. Prior to that, he was a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, where he co-authored the story that revealed Yankee's third baseman Alex Rodriguez had used steroids.&nbsp;
His writing has been honored by an array of organizations, from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, to the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Center on Disability and Journalism, and has been included in the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. His story “Following the Trail of Broken Hearts,” on sudden cardiac death in athletes, was chosen as one of the top 100 stories of the last 100 years by Columbia Journalism alumni.

David

Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist. His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness of social injustice, an intense opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language, and a belief in democratic socialism. In addition to his literary career, Orwell served as a police officer with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922-1927 and fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War from 1936-1937. Orwell was severely wounded when he was shot through his throat.&nbsp;
Later the organization that he had joined when he joined the Republican cause, The Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), was painted by the pro-Soviet Communists as a TrotskyEric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist. His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness of social injustice, an intense opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language, and a belief in democratic socialism.&nbsp;
In addition to his literary career Orwell served as a police officer with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922-1927 and fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War from 1936-1937. Orwell was severely wounded when he was shot through his throat. Later the organization that he had joined when he joined the Republican cause, The Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), was painted by the pro-Soviet Communists as a Trotskyist organization (Trotsky was Joseph Stalin's enemy) and disbanded. Orwell and his wife were accused of "rabid Trotskyism" and tried in absentia in Barcelona, along with other leaders of the POUM, in 1938.&nbsp;
However by then they had escaped from Spain and returned to England. Between 1941 and 1943, Orwell worked on propaganda for the BBC. In 1943, he became literary editor of the Tribune, a weekly left-wing magazine. He was a prolific polemical journalist, article writer, literary critic, reviewer, poet, and writer of fiction, and, considered perhaps the twentieth century's best chronicler of English culture. Orwell is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949) and the satirical novella Animal Farm (1945) — they have together sold more copies than any two books by any other twentieth-century author.&nbsp;
His 1938 book Homage to Catalonia, an account of his experiences as a volunteer on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, together with numerous essays on politics, literature, language, and culture, have been widely acclaimed. Orwell's influence on contemporary culture, popular and political, continues decades after his death. Several of his neologisms, along with the term "Orwellian" — now a byword for any oppressive or manipulative social phenomenon opposed to a free society — have entered the vernacular.

George

Frank Herbert (1920-1986) created the most beloved novel in the annals of science fiction, Dune. He was a man of many facets, of countless passageways that ran through an intricate mind. His magnum opus is a reflection of this, a classic work that stands as one of the most complex, multi-layered novels ever written in any genre. Today the novel is more popular than ever, with new readers continually discovering it and telling their friends to pick up a copy. It has been translated into dozens of languages and has sold almost 20 million copies.
As a child growing up in Washington State, Frank Herbert was curious about everything. He carried around a Boy Scout pack with books in it, and he was always reading. He loved Rover Boys' adventures, as well as the stories of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and the science fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs. On his eighth birthday, Frank stood on top of the breakfast table at his family home and announced, "I wanna be an author." His maternal grandfather, John McCarthy, said of the boy, "It's frightening. A kid that small shouldn't be so smart." Young Frank was not unlike Alia in Dune, a person having adult comprehension of a child's body. In grade school, he was the acknowledged authority on everything. If his classmates wanted to know the answer to something, such as about sexual functions or how to make a carbide cannon, they would invariably say, "Let's ask Herbert. He'll know."

Frank

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer and philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. From 1925 to 1945, Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a Fellow of Pembroke College, both at the University of Oxford. He then moved to the same university to become the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and a Fellow of Merton College.&nbsp;
He held these positions from 1945 until his retirement in 1959. Tolkien was a close friend of C. S. Lewis, a co-member of the informal literary discussion group The Inklings. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972. After Tolkien's death, his son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. Together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, these form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda and Middle-earth.&nbsp;
Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the term legendarium to the more significant part of these writings. While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the great success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings led directly to a popular resurgence of the genre. This has caused him to be popularly identified as the "father" of modern fantasy literature—or, more precisely, of high fantasy.
Tolkien's fantasy books on Middle-earth, especially The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, drew on many influences, including his philological interest in language, Christianity, mythology, archaeology, ancient and modern literature, and personal experience. His philological work centered on studying Old English literature, especially Beowulf, and he acknowledged its importance to his writings. In addition, he was a gifted linguist, influenced by Germanic, Celtic, Finnish, and Greek languages and mythology.

J.R.R.

George Burr Leonard (b. 1923) was an American writer, editor, and educator who wrote extensively about education and human potential. He was President Emeritus of the Esalen Institute, past-president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, President of ITP International, and a former editor of Look Magazine. He was also a former United States Army Air Corps pilot and held a fifth-degree black belt in aikido.
Leonard was a co-founder of the Aikido of Tamalpais dojo in Corte Madera, California. He also developed the Leonard Energy Training (LET) practice for centering the mind, body, and spirit. Leonard died at his home in Mill Valley, California, on January 6, 2010, after a long illness. He was 86 years old.

Hermann Karl Hesse was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. His best-known works include Francis of Assisi, Demian, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game, each exploring an individual's search for authenticity, self-knowledge, and spirituality. In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Hermann Karl Hesse was born on 2 July 1877 in the Black Forest town of Calw in Württemberg, German Empire.&nbsp;
His grandparents served in India at a mission under the auspices of the Basel Mission, a Protestant Christian missionary society. His grandfather Hermann Gundert compiled a Malayalam grammar and a Malayalam-English dictionary and contributed to translating the Bible into Malayalam in South India. Hesse's mother, Marie Gundert, was born at such a mission in South India in 1842.&nbsp;
In describing her own childhood, she said, "A happy child I was not..." As was usual among missionaries then, she was left behind in Europe at the age of four when her parents returned to India. Hesse's father, Johannes Hesse, the son of a doctor, was born in 1847 in Weissenstein, Governorate of Estonia, in the Russian Empire (now Paide, Järva County, Estonia). Johannes Hesse belonged to the Baltic German minority in the Russian-ruled Baltic region. Thus, his son Hermann was, at birth, a citizen of both the German and Russian Empires.
Hermann had five siblings, but two of them died in infancy. In 1873, the Hesse family moved to Calw, where Johannes worked for the Calwer Verlagsverein, a publishing house specializing in theological texts and schoolbooks. Marie's father, Hermann Gundert (also the namesake of his grandson), managed the publishing house at the time, and Johannes Hesse succeeded him in 1893.
Hesse grew up in a Swabian Pietist household, with the Pietist tHermann's mother Marie wrote in a letter to her husband—itHermann'sendency to insulate believers into small, deeply thoughtful groups. Furthermore, Hesse described his father's Baltic German heritage as "an important and potent fact" of his developing identity. His father, Hesse, stated, "always seemed like a very polite, very foreign, lonely, little-understood guest." His father's tales from Estonia instilled a contrasting sense of religion in young Hermann.&nbsp;
"[It was] an exceedingly cheerful, and, for all its Christianity, a merry world... We wished for nothing so longingly as to be allowed to see this Estonia... where life was so paradisiacal, so colorful and happy." Hermann Hesse's sense of estrangement from the Swabian petite bourgeoisie grew further through his relationship with his maternal grandmother Julie Gundert, née Dubois, whose French-Swiss heritage kept her from ever quite fitting in among that milieu.
From childhood, Hesse was headstrong and hard for his family to handle. In a letter to her husband, Hermann's mother Marie wrote: "The little fellow has a life in him, an unbelievable strength, a powerful will, and, for his four years of age, a truly astonishing mind. How can he express all that? It truly gnaws at my life, this internal fighting against his tyrannical temperament, his passionate turbulence [...] God must shape this proud spirit, then it will become something noble and magnificent – but I shudder to think what this young and passionate person might become should his upbringing be false or weak."
Hesse showed signs of serious depression as early as his first year at school. In his juvenilia collection Gerbersau, Hesse vividly describes experiences and anecdotes from his childhood and youth in Calw: the atmosphere and adventures by the river, the bridge, the chapel, the houses leaning closely together, hidden nooks and crannies, as well as the inhabitants with their admirable qualities, their oddities, and their idiosyncrasies.&nbsp;
The fictional town of Gerbersau is pseudonymous for Calw, imitating the real name of the nearby town of Hirsau. It is derived from the German words gerber, meaning "tanner," and are, meaning "meadow". Calw had a centuries-old leather-working industry, and during Hesse's childhood, the tanneries' influence on the town was still very much in evidence. Hesse's favorite place in Calw was the St. Nicholas Bridge (Nikolausbrücke), so a Hesse monument was built there in 2002.
Hermann Hesse's grandfather Hermann Gundert, a doctor of philosophy and fluent in multiple languages encouraged the boy to read widely, giving him access to his library, which was filled with works of world literature. All this instilled a sense in Hermann Hesse that he was a citizen of the world. His family background became, he noted, "the basis of an isolation and a resistance to any sort of nationalism that so defined my life."
Young Hesse shared a love of music with his mother. Both music and poetry were important in his family. His mother wrote poetry, and his father was known for his use of language in both his sermons and the writing of religious tracts. His first role model for becoming an artist was his half-brother, Theo, who rebelled against the family by entering a music conservatory in 1885. Hesse showed a precocious ability to rhyme and, by 1889–90, had decided that he wanted to be a writer.
In 1881, when Hesse was four, the family moved to Basel, Switzerland, staying for six years and then returning to Calw. After successfully attending the Latin School in Göppingen, Hesse entered the Evangelical Theological Seminary of Maulbronn Abbey in 1891. The pupils lived and studied at the abbey, one of Germany's most beautiful and well-preserved, attending 41 hours of classes a week.&nbsp;
Although Hesse did well during the first months, writing in a letter that he particularly enjoyed writing essays and translating classic Greek poetry into German, his time in Maulbronn was the beginning of a serious personal crisis. In March 1892, Hesse showed his rebellious character, and, in one instance, he fled from the Seminary and was found in a field a day later. Hesse began a journey through various institutions and schools and experienced intense conflicts with his parents.&nbsp;
In May, after an attempt at suicide, he spent time at an institution in Bad Boll under the care of theologian and minister Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt. Later, he was placed in a mental institution in Stetten im Remstal and then a boys' institution in Basel. At the end of 1892, he attended the Gymnasium in Cannstatt, now part of Stuttgart. In 1893, he passed the Year Examination, which concluded his schooling. The same year, he began spending time with older companions and took up drinking and smoking.
After this, Hesse began a bookshop apprenticeship in Esslingen am Neckar but quit after three days. Then, in the early summer of 1894, he began a 14-month mechanic apprenticeship at a clock tower factory in Calw. The monotony of soldering and filing work made him turn himself toward more spiritual activities.&nbsp;
In October 1895, he was ready to begin a new apprenticeship with a bookseller in Tübingen wholeheartedly. This experience from his youth, especially his time spent at the Seminary in Maulbronn, he returns to later in his novel Beneath the Wheel.

Hermann

Laozi, also known by numerous other names, was a semi-legendary ancient Chinese Taoist philosopher. Laozi is a Chinese honorific, generally translated as "the Old Master." Traditional accounts say he was born as Li Er in the state of Chu in the 6th century BC during China's Spring and Autumn Period, served as the royal archivist for the Zhou court at Wangcheng (modern Luoyang), met and impressed Confucius on one occasion, and composed the Tao Te Ching before retiring into the western wilderness.
Chinese folk religion holds that he then became an immortal hermit or a god of the celestial bureaucracy under the name Laojun, one of the Three Pure Ones. A central figure in Chinese culture, Laozi is generally considered the founder of philosophical and religious Taoism. He was claimed and revered as the ancestor of the 7th–10th century Tang dynasty and similarly honored by modern Chinese with the surname Li.&nbsp;
His work had a profound influence on subsequent Chinese religious movements and on subsequent Chinese philosophers, who annotated, commended, and criticized his work extensively. Since the 20th century, however, archeological finds and textual criticism have caused some modern historians to question Laozi's timing or even existence, believing that the received text of the Tao Te Ching was not composed until the 4th century BC Warring States Period.

Neal Town Stephenson (born October 31, 1959) is an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction. His novels have been categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk, postcyberpunk, and baroque. Stephenson's work explores mathematics, cryptography, linguistics, philosophy, currency, and the history of science. He also writes non-fiction articles about technology in publications such as Wired. He has written novels with his uncle, George Jewsbury ("J. Frederick George"), under the collective pseudonym Stephen Bury.
Stephenson has worked part-time as an advisor for Blue Origin, a company (founded by Jeff Bezos) developing a spacecraft and a space launch system, and is also a cofounder of Subutai Corporation, whose first offering is the interactive fiction project The Mongoliad. He was Magic Leap's Chief Futurist from 2014 to 2020. Born on October 31, 1959, in Fort Meade, Maryland, Stephenson came from a family of engineers and scientists; his father was a professor of electrical engineering, while his paternal grandfather was a physics professor. His mother worked in a biochemistry laboratory, and her father was a biochemistry professor.&nbsp;
Stephenson's family moved to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in 1960 and then in 1966 to Ames, Iowa. He graduated from Ames High School in 1977. Stephenson studied at Boston University, first specializing in physics, then switching to geography after he found that it would allow him to spend more time on the university mainframe. He graduated in 1981 with a B.A. in geography and a minor in physics. Since 1984, Stephenson has lived mostly in the Pacific Northwest and currently lives in Seattle with his family.
Stephenson's first novel, The Big U, published in 1984, is a satirical take on life at American Megaversity, a vast, bland, and alienating research university beset by chaotic riots. His next novel, Zodiac (1988), is a thriller following a radical environmentalist in his struggle against corporate polluters. Neither novel attracted much critical attention on first publication but showcased concerns that Stephenson would further develop in his later work.
Stephenson's breakthrough came in 1992 with Snow Crash, a cyberpunk or post-cyberpunk novel fusing memetics, computer viruses, and other high-tech themes with Sumerian mythology, along with a sociological extrapolation of extreme laissez-faire capitalism and collectivism. Mike Godwin would later describe Stephenson at this time as "a slight, unassuming grad-student type whose soft-spoken demeanor gave no obvious indication that he had written the manic apotheosis of cyberpunk science fiction." In 1994, Stephenson joined with his uncle, J. Frederick George, to publish a political thriller, Interface, under the pen name "Stephen Bury"; they followed this in 1996 with The Cobweb.
Stephenson's next solo novel, published in 1995, was The Diamond Age: or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. The plot involves a weapon implanted in a character's skull, near-limitless replicators for everything from mattresses to foods, smart paper, and air and blood-sanitizing nanobots. It is set in a world with a neo-Victorian social structure. Cryptonomicon followed this in 1999, a novel including concepts ranging from Alan Turing's research into codebreaking and cryptography during the Second World War to a modern attempt to set up a data haven. In 2013, Cryptonomicon won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award.
The Baroque Cycle is a series of historical novels set in the 17th and 18th centuries and is, in some respects, a prequel to Cryptonomicon. It was originally published in three volumes of two or three books each – Quicksilver (2003), The Confusion (2004), and The System of the World (2004) – but was subsequently republished as eight separate books: Quicksilver, King of the Vagabonds, Odalisque, Bonanza, Juncto, Solomon's Gold, Currency, and System of the World. (The titles and exact breakdown vary in different markets.) The System of the World won the Prometheus Award in 2005.
Following this, Stephenson wrote Anathem (2008), a long and detailed novel of speculative fiction. It is set in an Earthlike world, deals with metaphysics, and refers heavily to Ancient Greek philosophy. Anathem won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 2009. In May 2010, the Subutai Corporation, of which Stephenson was named chairman, announced the production of an experimental multimedia fiction project called The Mongoliad, which centered upon a narrative written by Stephenson and other speculative fiction authors.
Stephenson's novel REAMDE was released on September 20, 2011. The title is a play on the common filename README. This thriller, set in the present, centers around a group of MMORPG developers caught in the middle of Chinese cyber-criminals, Islamic terrorists, and the Russian mafia. On August 7, 2012, Stephenson released a collection of essays and other previously published fiction entitled Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing. This collection also includes a new essay and a short story created specifically for this volume.
In late 2013, Stephenson stated that he was working on a multi-volume work of historical novels that would "have a lot to do with scientific and technological themes and how those interact with the characters and civilization during a particular span of history." He expected the first two volumes to be released in mid-to-late 2014. However, at about the same time, he shifted his attention to a science fiction novel, Seveneves, which was completed about a year later and was published in May 2015. On June 8, 2016, plans were announced to adapt Seveneves for the screen.
In May 2016, as part of a video discussion with Bill Gates, Stephenson revealed that he had just submitted the manuscript for a new historical novel—"a time travel book"—co-written with Nicole Galland, one of his Mongoliad coauthors. This was released as The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. on June 13, 2017. In June 2019, his novel Fall, or Dodge in Hell, was published. It is a near-future novel that explores mind uploading into the cloud and contains characters from 2011's Reamde, 1999's Cryptonomicon, and other books. Termination Shock, published in November 2021, is a climate fiction novel about solar geoengineering.

Neal

Don Miguel Ruiz is a renowned spiritual teacher and internationally bestselling author of the “Toltec Wisdom Series,” including “The Four Agreements,” “The Mastery of Love,” “The Voice of Knowledge,” “The Four Agreements Companion Book,” “The Circle of Fire,” and “The Fifth Agreement.” The Toltec Wisdom books have sold over 12 million copies in the United States and have been published in 46 languages worldwide.&nbsp;
Don Miguel has spent the past three decades guiding students to personal freedom through his profound insights regarding the nature of human reality. His newest book, THE ACTOR (Ediciones Urano), written with Barbara Emrys, was published on November 3rd, 2020.
The youngest of thirteen children, don Miguel Ruiz, was born in rural Mexico to parents who were healers and practitioners of ancient Toltec traditions. As a young adult, he graduated from medical school in Mexico City and practiced neurosurgery with his older brother in Tijuana. A near-fatal car crash forever changed the direction of his life, however, causing him to leave medicine and examine the essential truth about life and humanity. With his mother’s help and through her ancestral teachings, he discovered his own path to awareness, which evolved into a deep understanding of the physical universe and the virtual world of the mind.
Combining Toltec mythology and scientific perspectives, don Miguel has been able to merge ancient wisdom with modern physics and practical common sense, forging a new philosophy for seekers of truth and personal authenticity. His landmark bestselling book, The Four Agreements, contains practical steps for long-term, personal transformation and has been read by millions around the world.
First published in 1997, The Four Agreements has since sold over nine million copies in the United States and seven million worldwide. It has been translated into 46 languages, appeared on the New York Times bestseller for nearly ten years, and was the 36th bestselling book of the decade. Don Miguel is also the author of The Mastery of Love, The Voice of Knowledge, Prayers, and the New York Times bestseller, The Fifth Agreement, a collaboration with his son, don José Ruiz. Each of his books is an international bestseller.
The wisdom don Miguel has brought to the world has earned him respect around the globe. He has dedicated his life to sharing his message through practical concepts in order to promote transformation and ultimately change lives for the better. Don Miguel is the recipient of numerous recognitions, including a U.S. Air Force ‘challenge coin’ engraved with “The Four Agreements.” He is the recipient of an Honorary Degree in Cultural and Social Education from the American Cultural Institute of Mexico. He is referenced as a “national treasure” in his native country.

Ariel Durant was a Russian-born American researcher and writer, the co-author of The Story of Civilization with her husband, Will Durant. Ariel Durant was born in Proskurov, Russian Empire (now Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine) as Chaya Kaufman to Jewish parents Ethel Appel Kaufman and Joseph Kaufman. The family emigrated to the United States in 1901. She met her future husband while a student at Ferrer Modern School in New York City. Will was then a teacher at the school but resigned his post to marry Ariel, who was fifteen at the time of the wedding on October 31, 1913.
Ariel and Will Durant were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1968 for Rousseau and Revolution, the tenth volume of The Story of Civilization. In 1977 they were presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Gerald Ford, and Ariel was named "Woman of the Year" by the city of Los Angeles. Ariel Durant and her husband Will died within two weeks of each other in 1981 and are buried at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.

Ariel

Richard Dawkins, elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in May 2001, is a gifted writer who is known for his popularization of Darwinian ideas as well as for original thinking on evolutionary theory. He has invented telling metaphors that illuminate the Darwinian debate: His book The Selfish Gene argues that genes-molecules of DNA-are the fundamental units of natural selection, the "replicators." Organisms, including ourselves, are "vehicles," the packaging for "replicators." The success or failure of replicators is based on their ability to build successful vehicles. There is a complementarity in the relationship: vehicles propagate their replicators, not themselves; replicators make vehicles. In The Extended Phenotype, he goes beyond the body to the family, the social group, the architecture, and the environment that animals create and sees these as part of the phenotype-the embodiment of the genes. He also takes a Darwinian view of culture, exemplified in his invention of the "meme," the unit of cultural inheritance; memes are essentially ideas, and they, too, are operated on by natural selection.
Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, former Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science at Oxford University, and Fellow of New College. Among his books, as the author is Books Do Furnish a Life, Outgrowing God, The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, River out of Eden (ScienceMasters Series), Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, The Devil's Chaplain, The Ancestor's Tale, The God Delusion, The Greatest Show on Earth, The Magic of Reality.

Ashlee Vance is an award-winning feature writer for Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. Vance is also the host of the "Hello World" TV show. Previously, he worked for The New York Times and The Register.&nbsp;
Vance was born in South Africa, grew up in Texas, and attended Pomona College. He has spent more than a decade covering the technology industry from San Francisco and is a noted Silicon Valley historian.

Ashlee

Carl Van Doren, and his younger brother Mark, were both literary authors and university professors. Each brother earned the Pulitzer Prize during his respective lifetime, each brother received his respective Ph. D. from Columbia University, and each brother held a professorial appointment at Columbia University. Carl was the older brother by nine years.
Carl Van Doren was the son of a country doctor, but he was reared on a family farm near the town of Hope in Eastern Illinois. His Dutch American background dates back ten generations to his Dutch forbears. The name of his earliest forbear, eight generations back, was Jacob Van Doorn, who used the original Dutch spelling, later changed to Van Doren.
Carl Van Doren attended Columbia University, where he was awarded a Ph. D. in literature in 1911. He was given an appointment at Columbia and served there as a professor of literature until 1930. During his time at Columbia, he also served as the managing editor of “The Cambridge History of American Literature” from 1917 to 1921. Van Doren also became the literary editor of “The Nation” in 1919 and served in that position until 1922. Following that appointment, he became the literary editor of “Century Magazine,” from 1922 to 1925.
Carl Van Doren won the Pulitzer Prize for biography with a biography entitled, ‘Benjamin Franklin” in 1939, a year before his brother Mark won a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry. Other publications by Carl Van Doren were: “The American Novel” published in 1921 and revised in 1940, “Contemporary American Novelists” in 1922, “American and British Literature since 1890” published in 1925 [with his brother Mark], and “What is American Literature?” in 1935. He also wrote his autobiography in 1936 and titled it “Three Worlds.”
Carl Van Doren was born on September 10, 1885, in Hope, Illinois. He was married to Irita Bradford, who was the editor of the “New York Herald Tribune Book Review,” from 1912 to 1935. Carl Van Doren passed away in Torrington, Connecticut, on July 18, 1950, at the age of 64.

Carl

Paul Kalanithi was a neurosurgeon and writer. He graduated from Stanford with a B.A. and M.A. in English literature and a B.A. in human biology. He earned an M.Phil in the history and philosophy of science and medicine from Cambridge. He graduated cum laude from the Yale School of Medicine, where he was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha national medical honor society.&nbsp;
He returned to Stanford to complete his residency training in neurological surgery and a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience. He received the American Academy of Neurological Surgery's highest award for resident research. He died in March 2015. He is survived by his family, including his wife, Lucy, and their daughter Elizabeth Acadia.

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