100 books like So Grows the Tree

In my 26 years as a Holocaust educator, I worked closely with hundreds of Holocaust survivors helping them to pass along their legacy of remembrance to thousands of students and teachers. When I retired, I developed and began teaching a course entitled Living and Leaving Your Legacy®. Since 2012, I have taught 64 classes and have spoken to audiences locally, nationally, and internationally. My goal is to help people understand that how we live our lives becomes our legacy. I have worked with individuals at the end of their lives helping them to do sacred legacy work and have trained hospice staffs and volunteers to do the same.

In my 26 years as a Holocaust educator, I worked closely with hundreds of Holocaust survivors helping them to pass along their legacy of remembrance to thousands of students and teachers. When I retired, I developed and began teaching a course entitled Living and Leaving Your Legacy®. Since 2012, I have taught 64 classes and have spoken to audiences locally, nationally, and internationally. My goal is to help people understand that how we live our lives becomes our legacy. I have worked with individuals at the end of their lives helping them to do sacred legacy work and have trained hospice staffs and volunteers to do the same.

In my 26 years as a Holocaust educator, I worked closely with hundreds of Holocaust survivors helping them to pass along their legacy of remembrance to thousands of students and teachers. When I retired, I developed and began teaching a course entitled Living and Leaving Your Legacy®. Since 2012, I have taught 64 classes and have spoken to audiences locally, nationally, and internationally. My goal is to help people understand that how we live our lives becomes our legacy. I have worked with individuals at the end of their lives helping them to do sacred legacy work and have trained hospice staffs and volunteers to do the same.

In my 26 years as a Holocaust educator, I worked closely with hundreds of Holocaust survivors helping them to pass along their legacy of remembrance to thousands of students and teachers. When I retired, I developed and began teaching a course entitled Living and Leaving Your Legacy®. Since 2012, I have taught 64 classes and have spoken to audiences locally, nationally, and internationally. My goal is to help people understand that how we live our lives becomes our legacy. I have worked with individuals at the end of their lives helping them to do sacred legacy work and have trained hospice staffs and volunteers to do the same.

I’m an American author and writing teacher for both Harvard and Oxford’s online writing programs. I am also a mother of two who lived three years in a tiny backyard guest house with my family in an effort to focus more on what we love. Editing books is a practice I have honed over decades, and when my family was stuck in a living situation that felt unsustainable, the clearest way forward was for me to ask myself how I might edit our way out of it. It worked! In this book, I share the most valuable eight principles that we learned through the process.

My career and life were changed by Robert Cialdini’s work on influence. There are only a dozen people in the world who have been personally trained, certified, and endorsed by Cialdini to teach his methodology on influence and persuasion. I’m fortunate to be in that very select group. I’ve authored three books and given a TED Talk on influence. My LinkedIn Learning courses around influence in sales and coaching have been viewed by more than 500,00 across the globe. I take Cialdini’s influence concepts and marry them with my 35+ years of business experience to give organizations practical ways to ethically influence people. 

I am an award-winning composer, author, and educator. Since 1990 I have had the privilege of teaching others about music through my concerts, children’s books, academic books, lessons, and online courses. 

There is a scene in the 1960 movie adaptation of The Time Traveler by HG Wells where the protagonist goes rapidly into the future as he watches a whole city spin into existence around him. That’s how I feel about my career. I started in 1994 and have watched UX grow into an incredible field! I’ve run my own business since 2008 focused exclusively on qualitative research consulting while also doing all sorts of exciting thought leadership activities – from writing to speaking to creating a number of courses on LinkedIn Learning – and I love to build my UX network too! I live in Silver Spring, Maryland.

My first career was as a reporter on daily newspapers. As I got promoted to editing and eventually webmaster jobs, I needed to learn about design. Newspapers had been trying to figure out which designs attract the most readers for a century. The Poynter Institute, founded in 1975, began doing quantitative research as part of its journalism education mission. Seven years later, Gannett, a large newspaper publisher, introduced USA Today, based on the latest graphic and readability research. About the same time, Edward Tufte wrote his seminal book on graphic design (See recommendation #1). With the arrival of the web, companies like Google and Microsoft took the research to new levels. For example, Microsoft used readability research to create Verdana, a font designed to be legible with then-low resolution screens. Of course, the advertising and direct-mail industries had been conducting design research for decades to enhance sales. In short, you can’t pretend to be a competent designer, webmaster, or editor in this day and age without understanding quantitative readability research.

Since I was a teenager, I have thought about the connection between reason and ethics. This preoccupation was present during my formal education (A.B. and A.M., University of Chicago; J.D., Cleveland State University), during my three decades as a practicing lawyer, and, finally, as an independent philosopher during more than a decade of retirement from law practice. My book Reason and Human Ethics is the culmination of my reflection about this philosophical issue. The books I have recommended have been among those references that have been most helpful to me in formulating my own conclusions, though my own views are not identical with those of any other writing.