Why am I passionate about this?
I'm an author, inventor, military veteran, (mostly) self-taught scholar, and an entrepreneur. Every internet-connected person interacts with things I invented (the tracking pixel, the ebook, etc) every day, but I'm best known for my books about business and personal development. As I write this, I'm serving as the Founder and CEO of a software platform called "Simpleology." It's designed to solve what I think is one of mankind's greatest threats to survival as a species: "The Complexity Gap." It's the gap between the amount of information in the world and our ability to navigate it. It solves this by guiding you to focus on what we call "HIME" (high impact, minimal effort).
Mark's book list on self-help books masquerading as sci-fi
Why did Mark love this book?
While it is best known for being the first book to introduce the concept of a "galactic empire," the real juice comes from the gradual revelation of a profound thesis: Epistemology and Persuasion Science are the most important academic disciplines of all.
This was the inspiration for my own journey into those two fields and led to my career in Military Intelligence.
While these explorations are ultimately liberating, this liberation does not come without a cost. I found myself truly in the dilemma of Plato's Allegory of the Cave: I had to accept both the obligation to free minds and the social strife that comes with choosing that path.
8 authors picked Foundation as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
The first novel in Isaac Asimov’s classic science-fiction masterpiece, the Foundation series
THE EPIC SAGA THAT INSPIRED THE APPLE TV+ SERIES FOUNDATION, NOW STREAMING • Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Seldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future—to a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years. To preserve knowledge and save humankind, Seldon gathers the best minds in the Empire—both scientists and scholars—and brings…