When Paul Hewson was 11, his parents sent him to a Dublin grammar school that happened to have an outstanding boys’ choir. Paul, who later took the nickname Bono, loved singing. His father had a beautiful voice, and Paul thought he might have some of his dad’s talent. But when the principal asked him if he wanted to join the choir, his mom jumped in before he could answer. “Not at all,” she said. “Paul has no interest in singing.”

Bono’s new book, Surrender, is packed with funny, poignant moments like this. Even though I’m a big fan of U2, and Bono and I have become friends over the years—Paul Allen connected us in the early 2000s—a lot of those stories were new to me. I went into this book knowing almost nothing about his anger at his father, the band’s near-breakups, and his discovery that his cousin was actually his half-brother. I didn’t even know that he grew up with a Protestant mom and Catholic dad.

I loved Surrender. You get to observe the band in the process of creating some of their most iconic songs. The book is filled with clever, self-deprecating lines like “Just how effective can a singer with anger issues be in the cause of nonviolence?” And you’ll learn a lot about the challenges he dealt with in his campaigns for debt relief and HIV treatment in Africa. (The Gates Foundation is a major supporter of ONE, the nonprofit that Bono helped start.)

In this passage, he explains how a boy from the suburbs of Dublin became a global phenomenon: “There are only a few routes to making a grandstanding stadium singer out of a small child. You can tell them they’re amazing, that the world needs to hear their voice, that they must not hide their ‘genius under a bushel.’ Or you can just plain ignore them. That might be more effective. The lack of interest of my father, a tenor, in his son’s voice is not easy to explain, but it might have been crucial.” (It also helped that he has, as he later learned from a doctor, freakishly large lung capacity.)

Bono’s loyalty to his bandmates, and their loyalty to him, is pretty incredible. My favorite illustration from the book takes place at a concert in Arizona, when the band was urging the then-governor to uphold the national MLK Day holiday in his state. U2’s security team picked up a credible threat to Bono’s life if the band played their Martin Luther King tribute “Pride (In the Name of Love).” “It wasn’t just melodrama,” he writes, “when I closed my eyes and sort of half kneeled to disguise the fact that I was fearful to sing the rest of the words.” When Bono opened his eyes, he saw that bassist Adam Clayton had moved in front of him to shield him like a Secret Service agent. Fortunately, the threat never materialized.

There’s another factor that explains the band’s tight bonds: They share the same values. All four of them are passionate about fighting poverty and inequity in the world, and they’re also aligned on maintaining their integrity as artists. I learned this the hard way. When Microsoft wanted to license U2’s song “Beautiful Day” for an ad campaign, I joined a call in an attempt to persuade the band to go for the deal. They simply weren’t interested. I admired their commitment.

While Bono never got lost in drugs or alcohol, he acknowledges that stardom gave him a big ego. He also says that he had a “need to be needed.” His key to survival was embracing the concept of spiritual surrender, as the title of the book suggests. He eventually came to see that he’d never fill his emotional needs by playing for huge crowds or being a global advocate. His faith in a higher power helped him a lot. So did his wife, Ali. He writes that when his mom died during his childhood, his home “stopped being a home; it was just a house.” Ali and their four children gave him a home once again.

Bono writes that his surrender is still incomplete. He’s not going to retire anytime soon, which is great news and not just for U2 fans. After the past few years, the field of global health—one of his chief causes—needs an injection of energy and passion. Bono’s unique gifts are perfectly suited to that mission.

I’m a big fan of presidential memoirs, but they tend to follow the same script. The author usually touts things that went well or repeats talking points you’ve heard from them before. I think the best writing about presidents is often done by a third party, because they’re able to be more objective. (The Bully Pulpit and Presidents of War are some of the best books I’ve read.)

You have to be a pretty self-aware person to write a candid autobiography—something that politicians aren’t exactly known for. Fortunately, President Obama isn’t like most politicians. A Promised Land is a refreshingly honest book. He isn’t trying to sell himself to you or claim he didn’t make mistakes. It’s a terrific read, no matter what your politics are. 

The book covers Obama’s life up through the operation that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. I found the parts about his early career to be particularly interesting. He does an excellent job describing how challenging he found politics, especially when he was just starting out. I liked him before I read the book but even more after reading it.

Most people think of Obama as a natural politician because he’s so good at public speaking. But he didn’t enjoy campaigning the way Bill Clinton did, and he preferred sitting in policy briefings to shaking hands and kissing babies. He was especially uncomfortable with the adoration that he got in 2008, writing that he had to “constantly take stock to make sure I wasn’t buying into the hype and remind myself of the distance between the airbrushed image and the flawed, often uncertain person I was.”

I wish more politicians could write like Obama. A Promised Land almost reads like a novel, because he’s so good at connecting each individual event into one big narrative. The book—which is the first of a planned two volumes—covers some of his biggest accomplishments, including the 2009 stimulus package and the Affordable Care Act. Even though you already know that both of those bills become law, his honest assessments turn them into compelling stories that keep you on the edge of your seat.

Obama has a very lawyerly approach to thinking and writing about policy, which I like. He talks at length about how his staff would get frustrated by his need to understand all of the facts and every side of the argument. I loved how he describes seeking out different points of view and how they influenced the choices he made. The chapter about his disagreements with the generals over his decision to withdraw from Iraq is fascinating (and is especially interesting in light of President Biden’s decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan later this year).

The book captures how complex the job of running the country is. You’re constantly shifting gears, even more than a CEO does. As president, your day is all about making monumental decisions that affect many people’s lives and livelihoods, and you have to focus on many problems at once. Obama says he found it difficult to stay focused and not get pulled into different crises all the time. Toward the end of the book, he recalls flying to Alabama to survey the damage from a deadly tornado right after giving the green light for the bin Laden raid. I was impressed by his ability to approach such radically different situations with equal attention and care.

Obama makes it clear the positives of the job—especially the opportunity to make lives better—outweigh the negatives. But overall, the memoir left me with a surprisingly melancholy impression of what it’s like to be the president. “Sometimes I’d fantasize about walking out the east door and down the driveway, past the guardhouse and wrought-iron gates, to lose myself in crowded streets and reenter the life I’d once known,” he writes.

A Promised Land is ultimately a story about how the presidency defines the lives of those wrapped up in it. “For all its power and pomp,” Obama says, “the presidency is still just a job and our federal government is a human enterprise like any other.” I can’t wait to get another peek behind the curtain when the second book comes out.

How do you move on after trauma?

That’s a question many of us will unfortunately have to grapple with at some point in our lives. It’s certainly relevant right now. The good news is that there is no shortage of smart, thoughtful people out there offering advice on the subject. I recently read a book by Dr. Edith Eva Eger that I think is particularly useful.

The Choice is partly a memoir and partly a guide to processing trauma. Melinda recommended that I read it, and I’m glad she did. What makes the book exceptional is Edith’s life story: she’s an Auschwitz survivor and a professional therapist. That combination gives her fascinating insight into how people heal.

Edith was just a teenager when her family was taken from their home in Hungary and sent to the death camp at Auschwitz. She was separated from her parents, whom she never saw again. Edith and her sister Magda managed to stay together, though, and they spent the next year helping each other survive unbelievable horrors.

Even after the sisters are liberated, Edith’s trauma doesn’t end. I don’t want to give away specifics, but the book offers a look into how chaotic the post-war period was in Europe. Her story is a reminder of how people’s worst instincts can come out when civil order is completely broken down. Edith remained a victim long after her rescue, even as she’s supposed to be healing from the physical trauma she sustained at Auschwitz.

Eventually, though, Edith met the man who became her husband and moved to the United States. After a rough couple of years, she started a family and learned enough English to begin studying psychology at the University of Texas, El Paso. Her past continued to haunt her, though—she often found herself paralyzed by memories of the concentration camp.

Everything changed when a fellow student gave her a copy of Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was a prisoner at Auschwitz at the same time as Edith, and his writing becomes the inspiration for her philosophy as a therapist. The lesson she says she took from it is that “each moment is a choice. No matter how frustrating or boring or constraining or painful or oppressive our experience, we can always choose how we respond.” (I read Man’s Search for Meaning many years ago, and I completely understand why it made such an impact on Edith.)

Edith begins processing her past--she even returns to visit Auschwitz as part of the healing process. All the while, she builds a career as a successful therapist who specializes in trauma. This is when the book starts to become more of a guide. She talks a lot about her patients, some of whom suffer from PTSD and have really tragic stories. But not all of her patients have experienced huge traumas.

I think it’s important to point out that her approach applies to everyday disappointments, too. In one memorable story at the beginning of the book, Edith talks about a patient who cried over the fact that her new car was the wrong shade of yellow. Your first reaction as a reader is to see the woman as petty. How can she be upset over a such a silly thing when there is real suffering in the world?

Edith doesn’t see it that way, though. She saw that “her tears of disappointment over the car were really tears of disappointment over the bigger things in her life that hadn’t worked out the way she had hoped.” The patient was transferring her emotional isolation to material disappointment. Edith makes a sympathetic and understandable case that there was something missing in that woman’s life that made her latch onto seemingly silly points of validation. She treats the patient’s pain as seriously as she would anyone else’s.

I really like her approach, because it implies that there is a path to getting better no matter what you’re going through. People can struggle and feel worthless without extreme things happening. That pain is still worthy of attention and help.

It’s a good reminder that there is no “hierarchy of suffering,” as Edith calls it. If you’re struggling with something, that struggle is real—even if you think your experience feels trivial compared to the experience of someone who survived Auschwitz or someone whose child is suffering from a terrible disease. I think this is an especially important thing to keep in mind right now while everyone has different experiences with the COVID-19 outbreak.

Although Edith’s early life is what will make you pick up The Choice, her insights as a therapist are what will stick with you long after you finish it. I hope it gives you some comfort in these challenging times.

I don’t read many books about how to run a business. In my experience, it is rare to find one that really captures what it’s like to build and operate an organization or that has tips you could really put into practice.

It’s still the case that the best business book I have ever read is Business Adventures, a little-known collection of articles by a reporter named John Brooks. Whenever someone asks me to recommend one book on business, that’s the one I suggest most often.

But I recently read another business book that I will happily recommend to anyone who asks: The Ride of a Lifetime, by former Disney CEO Robert Iger. In fact, I have already suggested it to several friends and colleagues, including Satya Nadella.

As the person who led Disney’s acquisition of Pixar, Lucasfilm (that is, all the Star Wars stuff), Marvel, and most of 21^st Century Fox, Iger is able to take you inside the workings of a massive media company and show how he thought about building on its strengths and shoring up its weaknesses. This is a short, readable book with smart insights, and along the way he crosses paths with some colorful characters.

Iger does a great job explaining what it is like to be a CEO. You’re always worried, “Which thing am I not spending enough time on?” As Iger writes, “You go from plotting growth strategy with investors, to looking at the design of a giant new theme-park attraction with Imagineers, to giving notes on the rough cut of a film, to discussing security measures and board governance and ticket pricing and pay scale... there are also, always, crises and failures for which you can never be fully prepared.” Although I never had to deal with most of those specific issues, the overall picture he draws is quite accurate.

One of the most memorable parts of the book occurs in 2006, shortly after Iger becomes Disney’s CEO. Although the company had built its reputation on animation (including old classics like Snow White and modern ones like the original Lion King), by the time Iger took over, Disney had experienced a long series of box-office disappointments. Rather than trying to rebuild the studio, Iger decides to try to buy the most successful animation company out there: Pixar, whose CEO and majority owner was Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

Iger takes you through all the twists and turns of the negotiations with Steve. Some people thought the $7 billion-plus price tag they settled on was too high, but Iger was convinced it was the only way to go. No one else had managed to solve the problem by rebuilding from within, and Iger didn’t think he could do it either.

There’s an especially dramatic and poignant moment near the end of the story. Just 30 minutes before the press conference where they will announce this massive merger, Steve takes Iger aside and shares some crushing news that only his wife and doctors know: After years in remission, his pancreatic cancer has returned and spread to his liver.

“I am about to become your biggest shareholder and a member of your board,” Steve tells him. “And I think I owe you the right, given this knowledge, to back out of the deal.”

Iger chooses to go through with it. As it turns out, the acquisition is a brilliant move, quickly re-establishing Disney at the cutting edge of animation. By keeping his ego in check and realizing that he wasn’t the guy who was going to rebuild Disney’s animation studio, Iger was able to make a big bet that paid off phenomenally well. (Sadly, Steve passed away five years later, in 2011.)

Another big bet that Iger made was to build a streaming service that would host all of Disney’s content. It may seem obvious now, but at the time Iger made the decision, it was considered a risky move. Disney would have to take their content off other services, where it was generating healthy revenue streams for the company. Would they be cannibalizing their other business, like the ABC television network? Could they attract enough subscribers to make it worthwhile?

Iger knew that, to draw enough of an audience, Disney would need a massive amount of great content. That is why he was willing to potentially overpay not only for Pixar but also for Lucasfilm, Marvel, and the non-news divisions of 21^st Century Fox. As Iger makes clear in the book, his strategy was to double down on high-quality content and put it into a modern format via a streaming service. I think it is fair to say the strategy worked: Disney+ gained more than 28 million subscribers in its first three months.

Iger concludes the book with a list of what he calls “lessons to lead by.” Normally, I am allergic to lists like this because they’re so vacuous. But Iger’s is quite perceptive. For example, he advises, “Value ability more than experience, and put people in roles that require more of them than they know they have in them.” And he writes, “I became comfortable with failure—not with lack of effort, but with the fact that if you want innovation, you need to grant permission to fail.” Melinda and I regularly give the same advice to the teams at our foundation.

Earlier this year, Iger stepped down as CEO of Disney after 15 years and announced that he plans to retire from the company in 2021. He has had a brilliant career. I think anyone would enjoy this book, whether they’re looking for business insights or just want a good read by a humble guy who rose up the corporate ladder to successfully run one of the biggest companies in the world.

I spend my days asking “Why?” Why do people get stuck in poverty? Why do mosquitoes spread malaria? Being curious and trying to explain the world around us is part of what makes life interesting. It’s also good for the world—scientific discoveries happen because someone insisted on solving some mystery. And it’s human nature, as anyone who’s fielded an endless series of questions from an inquisitive 5-year-old can tell you.

But as Kate Bowler shows in her wonderful new memoir, Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved, some “why” questions can’t be answered satisfactorily with facts. Bowler was 35 years old, married to her high-school sweetheart, and raising their young son when she was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. When she got sick, she didn’t want to know what was making her body’s cells mutate and multiply out of control. She had deeper questions: Why me? Is this a test of my character?

The book is about her search for answers that align with her deeply held religious beliefs. A professor at Duke Divinity School in North Carolina, she grew up in a family of Mennonites and wrote a history of the prosperity gospel, the idea popular among some Christians that God rewards the faithful with health and wealth. Before she got sick, Bowler didn’t subscribe to the prosperity gospel, but she didn’t exactly reject it either. “I had my own prosperity gospel, a flowering weed grown in with all the rest,” she writes. “I believed God would make a way.” Then came her diagnosis. “I don’t believe that anymore.”

Given the topic, I wasn’t surprised to find that Bowler’s book is heartbreaking at times. But I didn’t expect it to be funny too. Sometimes it’s both in the same passage. In one scene, Bowler learns there’s a 3 percent chance that her cancer might be susceptible to an experimental treatment. A few weeks later, her doctor’s office calls with good news: She’s among the 3 percent. “I start to yell. I have the magic cancer! I have the magic cancer!” She turns to her husband: “ ‘I might have a chance,’ I manage to say between sobs…. He hugs me tightly, resting his chin on my head. And then he releases me to let me sing ‘Eye of the Tiger’ and do a lot of punching the air, because it is in my nature to do so.”

The central questions in this book really resonated with me. On one hand, it’s nihilistic to think that every outcome is simply random. I have to believe that the world is better when we act morally, and that people who do good things deserve a somewhat better fate on average than those who don’t.

But if you take it to extremes, that cause-and-effect view can be hurtful. Bowler recounts some of the unintentionally painful things that well-meaning people told her, like: “This is a test and it will make you stronger.” I have also seen how this line of thinking affected members of my own extended family. All four of my grandparents were deeply devout members of a Christian sect who believed that if you got sick, it must be because you did something to deserve it. When one of my grandfathers became seriously ill, he struggled to figure out what he might have done wrong. He couldn’t think of anything, so he blamed his wife. He died thinking she had caused his illness by committing some unknown sin.

Bowler answers the “why” question in a compelling way: by refusing to accept the premise. As the title suggests, she rejects the idea that we need a reason for everything that happens. But she also rejects the nihilist alternative. As she said in one TV interview: “If I could pick one thing, it would be that everyone simmers down on the explanations for other people’s suffering, and just steps in with love.” She even includes an appendix with six ways you can support a friend or loved one who’s sick. It’s worth dog-earing for future reference.

Everything Happens belongs on the shelf alongside other terrific books about this difficult subject, like Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air and Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. Bowler’s writing is direct and unsentimental. She's not saying her life is unfair or that she deserved better. She’s just telling you what happened.

I won’t spoil the ending, except to say that Bowler has too much integrity as a writer to offer pat answers or magic solutions. When I was done with the book, I went online to see how she was doing. I was happy to find that she was still keeping a blog about faith, morality, and mortality. It’s inspiring to see this thoughtful woman face such weighty topics with honesty and humor.

I’ve recently discovered that I have a lot in common with a funny, dyslexic, transgender actor, comedian, escape artist, unicyclist, ultra-marathoner, and pilot from Great Britain. Except all of the above.

Eddie Izzard is one of my favorite performers. Melinda and I had the pleasure of seeing one of his comedy shows live in London, and then we got to talk with him backstage after the show. So I was excited to pick up his autobiography, Believe Me. It was there that I learned for the first time that Izzard and I share a lot of the same strengths and weaknesses.

As a child, Eddie was nerdy, awkward, and incompetent at flirting with girls. He had terrible handwriting. He was good at math. He was highly motivated to learn everything he could about subjects that interested him. He left college at age 19 to pursue his professional dreams. He had a loving mom who died of cancer way too young.

I can relate to every one of these things.

You might find you share similarities with Eddie as well. In fact, that’s the overarching point of this book. We’re all cut from the same cloth. In his words, “We are all totally different, but we are all exactly the same.”

If you’ve never seen Eddie perform his stand-up routine, you’re missing out. Like Monty Python, he often draws from real historical figures, such as Shakespeare or Charlemagne, and comes up with hilarious riffs, many of them improvised. And like other super talented comedians like Robin Williams and Tom Hanks, he’s also great in serious dramatic roles. (He recently appeared in the movie Victoria and Abdul, with Dame Judi Dench.) He even talks semi-seriously about running for Parliament.

Despite all those gifts, I’m not sure I’d recommend this book for those who’ve never seen Eddie perform. There are some comedians, such as David Sedaris and George Carlin, whose books would make perfect sense even if you haven’t seen their act. That’s not the case here. You have to witness his brand of surreal, intellectual, self-deprecating humor. Otherwise, it will be like you’re walking into the middle of a conversation.

But if you have seen Eddie’s stuff and you like it—here’s a typical bit, a riff on Pavlov’s dogs—I promise you’ll love this book. You’ll see that his written voice is very similar to his stage voice. You’ll also see that the book provides not just laugh-out-loud moments but also a lot of touching insights into how little Edward Izzard, a kid with only a hint of performing talent, became an international star.

The book begins with the event that had by far the biggest impact on his life—the death of his mom in 1968, when Eddie was just six years old. Eddie’s father, an accountant who traveled a lot for work, was not able to care for Eddie and his brother by himself. So the Izzard boys were sent off to a boarding school near a Welsh seaside resort “where you’d expect a few dead bodies to wash up occasionally … but no such luck.” Imagine you’re six years old, you’ve just lost your mom, you’re starting to have gender-identity issues that make no sense to you, and you’re packed away to a boarding school where you have to cry yourself to sleep!

As hard as these experiences were, there’s no way Eddie would be the star he is today if they hadn’t happened. “I do believe I started performing and doing all sorts of big, crazy, ambitious things because … on some childlike magical-thinking level, I thought doing those things might bring her back. But she never came back. I keep trying, though, just in case.”

He’s honest about the fact that he was the opposite of a natural. Instead of innate talent, he had something perhaps more important: a burning desire to be in show business and the propensity to be relentless in pursuit of his goals.

He spent most of the 1980s working as a street performer, often in London’s Covent Garden. It was a slog, with a lot of embarrassing moments. But he got much better the old-fashioned way: by working at it day in and day out and learning from his many failures.  

In fact, I couldn’t help but think that Eddie’s life would be a perfect case study for the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, who has written about the concept of the “growth mindset.” As Dweck explains in her book Mindset, the growth mindset is one in which you believe that your capabilities derive from practice and perseverance rather than DNA and destiny.

Eddie has the growth mindset in spades. Being lousy at something doesn’t stop him from doing it. In fact, it often has the opposite effect, driving him to work at it until he is no longer terrified of it.

Not only did he apply that to performing in front of huge audiences, despite his fundamental shyness. That growth mindset also drove him to become a pilot, despite his fear of heights. It drove him to run 27 marathons in 27 days, despite his lack of natural athleticism. And it drove him to start performing stand-up in French, German, Arabic, Russian, and Spanish, despite the difficulty of learning these languages and translating his British humor into other cultural contexts.

Maybe most difficult of all, that growth mindset allowed him to walk out the door of his home in 1985 in makeup and a dress, despite opening himself up to ridicule and hate. But doing so was liberating: “It led to … a world I could begin to change in my own personal way, carving out for myself a small slice of freedom of expression.”

I’m always impressed by the growth mindset when I see it in action. Now that I understand how much it’s at the core of Eddie’s brilliance on stage, I’ve become an even more devoted fan of his.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the future. When I’m deciding which book to read next, I often reach for ones that offer another perspective on where society is headed. So when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told me that he was working on a new book about the future of technology, I couldn’t wait to read it. And when he asked me to write an introduction for Hit Refresh, I was happy to say yes. 

I hope you’ll enjoy my foreword, which I’ve shared below. Satya has a lot of interesting things to say about the transformation of both Microsoft and the tech industry at large. I’ve benefitted from his insights for decades, and I’m glad everyone else will now have the same opportunity to learn from him.

Foreword:

I’ve known Satya Nadella for more than twenty years. I got to know him in the mid-nineties, when I was CEO of Microsoft and he was working on our server software, which was just taking off at the time. We took a long-term approach to building the business, which had two benefits: It gave the company another growth engine, and it fostered many of the new leaders who run Microsoft today, including Satya.

Later I worked really intensely with him when he moved over to run our efforts to build a world-class search engine. We had fallen behind Google, and our original search team had moved on. Satya was part of the group that came in to turn things around. He was humble, forward-looking, and pragmatic. He raised smart questions about our strategy. And he worked well with the hardcore engineers.

So it was no surprise to me that once Satya became Microsoft’s CEO, he immediately put his mark on the company. As the title of this book implies, he didn’t completely break with the past—when you hit refresh on your browser, some of what’s on the page stays the same. But under Satya’s leadership, Microsoft has been able to transition away from a purely Windows-centric approach. He led the adoption of a bold new mission for the company. He is part of a constant conversation, reaching out to customers, top researchers, and executives. And, most crucially, he is making big bets on a few key technologies, like artificial intelligence and cloud computing, where Microsoft will differentiate itself.

It is a smart approach not just for Microsoft, but for any company that wants to succeed in the digital age. The computing industry has never been more complex. Today lots of big companies besides Microsoft are doing innovative work—Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and others. There are cutting-edge users all around the world, not just in the United States. The PC is no longer the only computing device, or even the main one, that most users interact with.

Despite all this rapid change in the computing industry, we are still at the beginning of the digital revolution. Take artificial intelligence (AI) as an example. Think of all the time we spend manually organizing and performing mundane activities, from scheduling meetings to paying the bills. In the future, an AI agent will know that you are at work and have ten minutes free, and then help you accomplish something that is high on your to-do list. AI is on the verge of making our lives more productive and creative.

Innovation will improve many other areas of life too. It’s the biggest piece of my work with the Gates Foundation, which is focused on reducing the world’s worst inequities. Digital tracking tools and genetic sequencing are helping us get achingly close to eradicating polio, which would be just the second human disease ever wiped out. In Kenya, Tanzania, and other countries, digital money is letting low-income users save, borrow, and transfer funds like never before. In classrooms across the United States, personalized-learning software allows students to move at their own pace and zero in on the skills they most need to improve.

Of course, with every new technology, there are challenges. How do we help people whose jobs are replaced by AI agents and robots? Will users trust their AI agent with all their information? If an agent could advise you on your work style, would you want it to?

That is what makes books like Hit Refresh so valuable. Satya has charted a course for making the most of the opportunities created by technology while also facing up to the hard questions. And he offers his own fascinating personal story, more literary quotations than you might expect, and even a few lessons from his beloved game of cricket.

We should all be optimistic about what’s to come. The world is getting better, and progress is coming faster than ever. This book is a thoughtful guide to an exciting, challenging future.

Last week, Jimmy Carter made a surprise appearance at our foundation’s annual employee meeting. His visit was a huge honor for all of us. I think he was an even bigger hit with our colleagues than Bono, who stopped by a few years ago. They particularly loved hearing him talk about Rosalynn, his wife of over 70 years. According to the former President, the secret to their incredible love story is simple: give each other space, and never go to bed angry. Our team soaked up all the insights he had to offer on love, global health, and many other topics. 

For years our foundation has worked closely with the Carter Center in the fight against Guinea worm disease, onchocerciasis, lymphatic filariasis, and many other diseases. Melinda and I recently had a chance to spend an evening with Jimmy and Rosalynn at their home, in Plains, Georgia. At age 92, and after a scary battle with malignant melanoma, President Carter is as sharp as ever. Mrs. Carter, who is also super smart, is still her husband’s closest friend and advisor.

In preparation for our trip to Plains, I read President Carter’s newest book, A Full Life. The book would have been a worthwhile read under any circumstances. At less than 250 pages, it’s a quick, condensed tour of Carter’s fascinating life. His storytelling is simple and elegant, just like the wood furniture Carter has made by hand all his life.

Although most of the stories come from previous decades, A Full Life feels timely in an era when the public’s confidence in national political figures and institutions is low. It is true that President Carter made unforced errors during his time in office. But when you read this book and have a chance to meet him in person, you can’t help but conclude that Carter is a brave, thoughtful, disciplined leader who understands the world at a remarkable level and who has improved the lives of billions of people through his advocacy for human rights and global health.

I loved reading about Carter’s improbable rise to the world’s highest office. He spent his early years in rural Georgia, in a small Sears Roebuck house without running water, electricity, or insulation. His highest aspiration was to become a plowman on his family’s farm.

His first exposure to the wider world came through his service in the U.S. Navy. He earned a student appointment at the U.S. Naval Academy during World War II, served as an officer on submarines during the Korean War, and went on to develop advanced nuclear subs. Despite being on a fast track in the Navy, Carter decided to return home to Georgia to run the family farm after his father’s passing—a move that made Rosalynn furious.

In retrospect, it makes sense that Carter would want to follow in his dad’s footsteps. James Earl Carter was a strict man who rarely gave his son praise, but Jimmy revered him. This close father-son relationship shaped Jimmy’s whole life.

To earn his father’s approval, Jimmy became a Jack of all trades and a master of most. He became skilled at everything from farming to forestry, firefighting to furniture making, differential calculus to nuclear physics. (Being a master of so many things can also have a downside. As president, he was often criticized for micromanaging, to the point of wanting to oversee the schedule for the White House tennis court.)

Perhaps more than anything else, James modeled for his son a commitment to service. While running his farm and doing significant manual labor himself, James served in the Georgia legislature, on the local board of education, on the local hospital authority, and in many other volunteer posts. These civic values are what led the younger Carter to run for the Georgia Senate in 1962. He’s lucky he had Rosalynn by his side in that race. She had great political instincts and helped him rise all the way to the White House over the subsequent 14 years.

Even though Carter had already written more than two dozen books before this one, he somehow managed to save some great anecdotes for this book. I’ll share two of my favorites:

Carter salvaged the Camp David Accords with a small human gesture. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was furious with Carter, and the negotiations were just about to get called off, when Carter went to Begin’s cabin and gave him photographs with personal inscriptions for each of Begin’s eight grandchildren. After reading the notes, Begin “had a choked voice, and tears were running down his cheeks. I was also emotional, and he asked me to have a seat. After a few minutes, we agreed to try once more.” The rest, as they say, is history.

During the Iran Hostage Crisis, the CIA managed to sneak agents into Tehran with false German passports. One agent was caught by customs officials. “Something is wrong with your passport,” the official said. “This is the first time I’ve seen a German document that used a middle initial instead of a full name. Your name is given as Josef H. Schmidt.” The agent saved his skin with a brilliant response: “Well, when I was born my given middle name was Hitler, and I have received special permission not to use it.”

A Full Life is a good read about a great man. It made me think of David Brooks’s book The Road to Character and its insights about the values that give life purpose. As Brooks explains, the Book of Genesis contains two very different versions of Adam. “Adam I is the career-oriented, ambitious side of our nature,” Brooks writes. “He wants to have high status and win victories.” Adam II, in contrast, “wants to have a serene inner character, a quiet but solid sense of right and wrong—not only to do good, but to be good.” Jimmy Carter brought Adam II to the fore. 

I’m a longtime fan of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. When Jon Stewart stepped down as host in 2015, I was sad to see him go. I was also worried for his replacement, Trevor Noah, a South African comedian. Stewart’s style is so unusual that I didn’t see how anyone could fill his shoes—especially someone like Noah, who describes himself as an outsider. As popular as Noah was in South Africa, I didn’t know whether his humor would connect with American audiences.

I’m happy to report that I was wrong. Millions of viewers—myself included—are tuning in to The Daily Show because Noah’s show is every bit as good as Stewart’s. His humor has a lightness and optimism that’s refreshing to watch. What’s most impressive is how he uses his outside perspective to his advantage. He’s good at making fun of himself, America, and the rest of the world. His comedy is so universal that it has the power to transcend borders.

Reading Noah’s memoir, Born a Crime, I quickly learned how Noah’s outsider approach has been honed over a lifetime of never quite fitting in. Born to a black South African mother and a white Swiss father in apartheid South Africa, he entered the world as a biracial child in a country where mixed race relationships were forbidden. Noah was not just a misfit, he was (as the title says) “born a crime.”

In South Africa, where race categories are so arbitrary and yet so prominent, Noah never had a group to call his own. As a little boy living under apartheid laws, he couldn’t be seen in public with his white father or his black mother. In public, his father would walk far ahead of him to ensure he wouldn’t be seen with his biracial son. His mother would pose as a maid to make it look like she was just babysitting another family’s child. On the schoolyard, he didn’t fit in with the white kids or the black kids or the kids who were “colored” (the term used in South Africa to describe people of mixed race).

But during his childhood, he quickly discovered that there’s a freedom that comes with being a misfit. A polyglot who speaks English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu, Tsonga, Tswana, as well as German and Spanish, Noah used his talent for language to bounce from group to group and win acceptance from all of them. One of my favorite stories in the book involves Noah walking down the street when he overhears a group of men speaking in Zulu about how they were plotting to mug “this white guy.” Noah realizes they were referring to him. Noah spins around and announces in perfect Zulu that they should all mug someone together. The Zulu men are startled that Noah speaks Zulu and a tense situation is defused. Noah is immediately accepted as one of their own.

Again and again throughout his childhood, he discovered that language was more powerful than skin color in building connections with other people. “I became a chameleon,” Noah writes. “My color didn’t change, but I could change your perception of my color. If you spoke to me in Zulu, I replied to you in Zulu. If you spoke to me in Tswana, I replied to you in Tswana. Maybe I didn’t look like you, but if I spoke like you, I was you.”

Much of Noah’s story of growing up in South Africa is tragic. His Swiss father moves away. His family is desperately poor. He’s arrested. And in the most shocking moment, his mother is shot by his stepfather. Yet in Noah’s hands, these moving stories are told in a way that will often leave you laughing. His skill for comedy is clearly inherited from his mother. Even after she’s shot in the face, and miraculously survives, she tells her son from her hospital bed to look at the bright side. “’Now you’re officially the best-looking person in the family,’” she jokes.

In fact, Noah’s mother emerges as the real hero of the book. She’s an extraordinary person who is fiercely independent and raised her son to be the same way. Her greatest gift was to give her son the ability to think for himself and see the world from his own perspective. “If my mother had one goal, it was to free my mind,” he writes. Like many fans of Noah’s, I am thankful she did. 

Many books I’ve read about entrepreneurs follow a common, and I believe misleading, storyline. It goes like this: A sharp entrepreneur gets a world-changing idea, develops a clear business strategy, recruits a crack team of partners, and together they rocket to fame and riches. Reading these accounts, I’m always struck by how they make their achievements appear to be the inevitable result of some great prescience or unusual skill. It’s no wonder publishers churn out “how-to” titles packed with tidy checklists, 5-step programs, and other simplistic recipes for entrepreneurial success.

Shoe Dog, Phil Knight’s memoir about creating Nike, is a refreshingly honest reminder of what the path to business success really looks like. It’s a messy, perilous, and chaotic journey riddled with mistakes, endless struggles, and sacrifice. In fact, the only thing that seems inevitable in page after page of Knight’s story is that his company will end in failure.

Failure, of course, is about the last thing people would associate with Nike today. The company’s sales top $30 billion and Nike’s swoosh is one of the most universally recognized logos across the globe. Walk down almost any street in the world and you’ll likely find someone wearing a pair of Nikes. But Knight brings readers back more than 50 years to the incredibly humble and fragile beginnings of the company when he started selling imported Japanese athletic footwear out of the back of his Plymouth Valiant.

I’ve met Knight a few times over the years. He’s super nice, but also very quiet. Like many other people who’ve met him, I found him difficult to get to know. As famous as his company has become, Knight was a mystery among Fortune 500 executives.

In the pages of Shoe Dog, however, Knight opens up in a way few CEOs are willing to do. He’s incredibly tough on himself and his failings. He doesn’t fit the mold of the bold, dashing entrepreneur. He’s shy, introverted, and often insecure. He’s given to nervous ticks—snapping rubber bands on his wrist and hugging himself when stressed in business negotiations. It took him weeks to tell Penny, the woman who would become his wife, that he liked her. And yet, in spite of or perhaps because of his unusual character traits, he was able to realize the “Crazy Idea,” as he calls it, to do something different with his life and create his own shoe company.

Knight’s interest in shoes started at the University of Oregon, where he ran track for legendary running coach Bill Bowerman. He then went to Stanford for his MBA, where he wrote a paper about the potential market for importing Japanese athletic shoes to the U.S. At the time, Japanese cameras were making a dent in the German-dominated camera market. Why not do the same with Japanese running shoes which he thought could compete against leading German athletic shoe makers Adidas and Puma?

So far, this storyline may feel familiar. It’s the myth of the young entrepreneur with a world-changing idea who is headed down a straight path to success. But the rest of Knight’s journey rips that myth to shreds.

Much of the suspense in the book is built by the precarious nature of Knight’s finances. He started his shoe import business, known then as Blue Ribbon Sports, with $50 from his father. It was the beginning of many years of living in debt. Year after year, he goes on his knees to his bankers to beg for more credit so he could import more Japanese shoes. He rarely had any savings in the bank because he would plow all of his profits back into the company to order more shoes from Japan. Even as sales of his shoes took off, his business was constantly on life support. Meanwhile, he had a rocky relationship with his Japanese shoe supplier, whose executives were constantly eyeing other potential U.S. partners, despite Knight’s success selling and helping to improve the designs of their shoes. Eventually, Knight broke away and started Nike, beginning another round of uncertainty.

Knight is amazingly honest about the accidental nature of his company’s success. Consider the famous Nike swoosh. He paid an art student $35 to design it, but he didn’t recognize what a special logo it would become. “It’ll have to do,” he said at the time. The decision to call the company Nike was also not Knight’s top choice. He wanted to name it Dimension Six, but his employees pushed him to choose Nike. At the time, Knight agreed but he was not convinced. “Maybe it will grow on us,” he said.

When I was starting Microsoft I was fortunate enough that I was entering a business that didn’t have such tight margins. I didn’t struggle with banks to get financing as Knight did. I also didn’t need to struggle with the large factories, which I wish Knight spent more time explaining. After reading close to 400 pages about the shoe business, I was disappointed that I didn’t learn more about what it takes to manufacture an athletic shoe: what are all the parts of the shoe? which ones are difficult to manufacture and why?

What I identified most with from his story were the odd mix of employees Knight pulled together to help him start his company. Among them, a former track star paralyzed after a boating accident, an overweight accountant, and a salesman who obsessively wrote letters to Knight (to which Knight never responded). They were not the people you would expect to represent a sportswear company. It reminded me of my very early days at Microsoft. Like Knight, we pulled together a group of people with weird sets of skills. They were problem solvers and people who shared a common passion to make the company a success. We all worked hard, but it was also lots and lots of fun.

Readers looking for a lesson from Knight’s book may leave this book disappointed. I don’t think Knight sets out to teach the reader anything. There are no tips or checklists. Instead, Knight accomplishes something better. He tells his story as honestly as he can. It’s an amazing tale. It’s real. And you’ll understand in the final pages why, despite all of the hardships he experienced along the way, Knight says, “God, how I wish I could relive the whole thing.”

When it comes to books, it’s pretty rare that I get intimidated. I read all kinds of books, including ones that only the harshest college professors would assign. And yet I must admit that for many years I steered clear of anything by David Foster Wallace. I often heard super literate friends talking in glowing terms about his books and essays. I even put a copy of his tour de force Infinite Jest on my nightstand at one point, but I just never got around to reading it.

I’m happy to report that has now changed. It started last year when I watched “The End of the Tour,” a great movie with Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg that takes place when Wallace was on the road somewhat reluctantly promoting Infinite Jest. The movie made Wallace seem so damn interesting, and it really humanized him for me. In addition to shedding light on the nature of his literary genius, it also foreshadows the depression that led him to commit suicide in 2008. Recently, I also watched an amazing video of Wallace’s famous 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College. It is one of the most moving speeches I’ve heard in a long time.  

Then this past May, Library of America came out with String Theory, a short volume of Wallace’s essays on tennis. The book gave me the perfect opportunity to give Wallace a try, because I really enjoy tennis. I gave up tennis when I got fanatical about Microsoft. (During those intense years, my only exercise was running around the office and jumping up and down.) I’m now back on the court at least once a week and have built a pretty solid game for a 61-year old who can’t hit a lot of winners from the baseline.

I would say to anyone who likes tennis as much as I do, you have to read String Theory. You’ll take away insights that go way beyond what you get by reading the typical article in a tennis magazine or listening to a color commentator on TV. In this respect, the book reminded me of John McPhee’s classic Levels of the Game, about Arthur Ashe’s 1968 U.S. Open victory, and The Blind Side, Michael Lewis’s brilliant book about the evolution of the game of football.

Wallace is insightful about the sport partly because he was a very good junior player when he was growing up in the late ’70s, using his brilliant math mind to understand and play all the angles on the court. His personal experience gave him a lasting appreciation for the physical and mental gifts you need to be truly great.

As much as I loved the book for its insights on the game, I loved it just as much for the writing itself. I now understand why people talk about David Foster Wallace with the same kind of awe that tennis fans use to talk about a Roger Federer or Serena Williams. Wallace’s ability to use language is mind-blowing. He’s an artist who approaches a canvas with the exact same oil paints everyone before him has used and then applies them in breathtaking new and creative ways.

The first thing you have to get used to with Wallace is his non-linear expository style. You just have no idea where Wallace’s mind or story will go next, like a great tennis player who never telegraphs a shot. An essay that starts out describing his childhood tennis competitions in Illinois will flow into fascinating eddies on calculus, geometry, meteorology, and engineering. Fortunately, almost all of his narrative digressions are both fascinating and surprisingly easy to follow, even when Wallace uses lots of footnotes. (Even some of the footnotes have footnotes!)

When I was putting off reading Wallace, I assumed his writing would be pretentious. I was wrong. Yes, there are lots of words you’ll have to look up online. But even with all the SAT words, Wallace just doesn’t sound like he’s trying to prove he went to a fancy college. For every reference to Aquinas or Wagner, there’s a reference to Beavis or Danny DeVito.

I came away with the sense that Wallace felt compelled to bend language like a metal spoon not to show off his supernatural ability but simply to allow him to capture all the keen observations his mind was constantly making. It’s almost impossible to illustrate this idea with a single passage of his writing—so I encourage you to pick up String Theory or one of his other books and see for yourself. But I can give you at least a hint of what I’m talking about. Here’s a passage from a review of Tracy Austin’s memoir, which was less about the book than about our unrealistic expectations of our sports heroes: 

Real indisputable genius is so impossible to define, and true technē so rarely visible (much less televisable), that maybe we automatically expect people who are geniuses as athletes to be geniuses also as speakers and writers, to be articulate, perceptive, truthful, profound. If it’s just that we naively expect geniuses-in-motion to be also geniuses-in-reflection, then their failure to be that shouldn’t really seem any crueler or more disillusioning than Kant’s glass jaw or Eliot’s inability to hit the curve.

With the fancy words, English-major allusions, and winding sentences, it’s the opposite of the elegantly simple language of Hemingway. But it’s no less articulate, perceptive, truthful, or profound. That’s why I’m now on a big Wallace kick. I still haven’t read Infinite Jest, at a whopping 1,079 pages, but I know I’ll get to it. Because this troubled genius, who died way too young, was the real deal.

It should go without saying: People are complicated. Yet I’m surprised by the number of biographies I read that paint their subjects in black-and-white terms. A classic example is former U.S. president Richard Nixon, who is too often portrayed as little more than a crook and a war monger.

So it was refreshing to see a more balanced account in Being Nixon, by author and journalist Evan Thomas. I wouldn’t call it a sympathetic portrait—in many ways, Nixon was a deeply unsympathetic person—but it is an empathetic one.

Rather than just focusing on Nixon’s presidency, Thomas takes a cradle-to-the-grave approach. You follow along as Nixon goes from being a lawyer to U.S. Congressman to Senator to Vice President by the age of 40. He loses a presidential campaign in 1960, vows to leave politics forever after a failed bid for California governor, gets back into politics and wins the presidency six years later, is re-elected by a then-record landslide, and is forced to resign in 1974. And even then his story isn’t over.

Along the way, Thomas gives you smart insights into Nixon’s character. You learn about his hard-scrabble upbringing, and how the social slights he experienced as a child put a chip on his shoulder that would last the rest of his life. He suspected that many of Washington D.C.’s elites looked down on him, and he was right. He railed against Ivy Leaguers, insisting that they would never serve in his White House, and then proceeded to fill his team with Harvard and Yale graduates. He was socially awkward—painfully so—but he took on the most public career imaginable. 

Thomas doesn’t ignore Nixon’s worst decisions, including the secret bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, his support for a military coup in Chile, and his complicity in covering up the Watergate burglary. Nor does he look past Nixon’s worst personal qualities, like his petty vindictiveness, racist outbursts, and willingness to ignore the law when it suited him.

I was a little surprised to learn what a bad manager Nixon was. Although it doesn’t compare to his other failings, Nixon’s management style offers some good reminders of how not to run a team. He avoided conflict at all costs. His staff frequently left meetings with diametrically opposed views on what he had just asked them to do. Or he would be crystal-clear about what he wanted, while actually expecting his staff to ignore his demands. His team wisely blew off his repeated orders to break into the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, and steal a document that might be damaging to him.

But the book doesn’t get overwhelmed by Nixon’s dark side. Thomas gives you a sense of the man’s positive qualities; he could be tender and even sentimental towards his family, and he believed that government really could help people improve their lives. The book spends ample time on the positive things Nixon accomplished, like détente with China and the Soviet Union, and a domestic agenda that included creating the Environmental Protection Agency and proposing major health-care reforms.

As Thomas concludes in the book’s final passage: “Nixon was no saint. But the fears and insecurities that led him into sinfulness also gave him the drive to push past self-doubt, to pretend to be cheerful, to dare to be brave, to see, often though sadly not always, the light in the dark.”

All in all, Being Nixon is a balanced book that doesn’t try to convince you that Nixon was all good or all bad. It’s a worthwhile read for anyone who is interested in this brilliant, conflicted, and complicated man.

Some of the books I’ve recommended as summer reads really aren’t. They’re long nonfiction books that might look a little out of place beside the pool or on the beach.

But Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things that Happened , by Allie Brosh, is an honest-to-goodness summer read. You will rip through it in three hours, tops. But you’ll wish it went on longer, because it’s funny and smart as hell. I must have interrupted Melinda a dozen times to read to her passages that made me laugh out loud.

The book consists of brief vignettes and comic (in both senses of the word) drawings about Brosh’s young life (she’s in her late 20s). It’s based on her wildly popular website.

Brosh has quietly earned a big following even though, as her official bio puts it, she “lives as a recluse in her bedroom in Bend, Oregon.” The adventures she recounts are mostly inside her head, where we hear and see the kind of inner thoughts most of us are too timid to let out in public. Despite her book’s title, Brosh’s stories feel incredibly—and sometimes brutally—real.

I don’t mean to suggest that giving an outlet to our often-despicable me is a novel form of humor, but she is really good at it. Her timing and tone are consistently spot on. And so is her artwork. I’m amazed at how expressive and effective her intentionally crude drawings are.

Some of Brosh’s stories are funny without being particularly meaningful, such as her tales about her two dogs and their humorously illogical inner thoughts. Here’s a typical snippet: “To the simple dog, throwing up was like some magical power that she never knew she possessed—the ability to create infinite food. I was less excited about the discovery because it turned my dog into a horrible, vomit-making perpetual-motion machine.”

And here’s a typical illustration:

But her best stuff is the deep stuff, especially the chapters about her battles with severe depression. There is a lot of self-revelation here but no self-pity. She brings the same wit to this subject as she does to her stories about her dogs—even if it makes the reader more likely to tear up than crack up.

Here’s a typical snippet that follows a riff about feeling suicidal and not quite knowing how to let loved ones know about these feelings:

I suspect that anyone who has experienced depression would get a lot out of reading this book. The mental illness she describes is profoundly isolating: “When you have to spend every social interaction consciously manipulating your face into shapes that are only approximately the right ones, alienating people is inevitable.” It must be empowering for those who have struggled with depression to read this book, see themselves, and know they’re far from alone.

It might be even more valuable for those who have a friend, colleague, or family member who has experienced depression. Hyperbole and a Half gave me a new appreciation for what a depressed person is feeling and notnot feeling, and what’s helpful and helpful. Here’s a good example: “People want to help. So they try harder to make you feel hopeful…. You explain it again, hoping they’ll try a less hope-centric approach, but re-explaining your total inability to experience joy inevitably sounds kind of negative, like maybe you WANT to be depressed. So the positivity starts coming out in a spray—a giant, desperate happiness sprinkler pointed directly at your face.”

I get why Brosh has become so popular. While she self-deprecatingly depicts herself in words and art as an odd outsider, we can all relate to her struggles. Rather than laughing at her, you laugh with her. It is no hyperbole to say I love her approach—looking, listening, and describing with the observational skills of a scientist, the creativity of an artist, and the wit of a comedian.

I love learning about history, especially the history of innovation. I recently got to write the foreword for Edison and the Rise of Innovation, a new book about one of the greatest inventors ever. I thought I would share the foreword with you, along with a few photos of some of the Edison-related items I’m lucky enough to own.

Foreword

There’s no question in my mind that one of America’s greatest gifts to the world is our capacity for innovation. From light bulbs and telephones to vaccines and microprocessors, our inventions and ideas have improved the lives—and even saved the lives—of countless people around the globe.

In the pantheon of American innovation, Thomas Edison holds a unique place. He became a symbol of American ingenuity and the conviction that inspiration and perspiration could lead to remarkable things.

He certainly has been an inspiration to me in my career. I’m lucky enough to own a few pieces of Edison memorabilia, including his sketch of an idea for improving the incandescent light bulb and some papers on finding a substitute for rubber. Looking at this work, it’s easy to see a creative mind continually trying to refine and improve his ideas.

Obviously, Edison’s inventions were revolutionary. But as this book makes clear, the way he worked was also crucial for his success. For example, Edison consciously built on ideas from predecessors as well as contemporaries. And just as important, he assembled a team of people—engineers, chemists, mathematicians, and machinists—that he trusted and empowered to carry out his ideas. Names like Batchelor and Kruesi may not be famous today, but without their contributions, Edison might not be either.

Second, Edison was a very practical person. He learned early on that it wasn’t enough to simply come up with great ideas in a vacuum; he had to invent things that people wanted. That meant understanding the market, designing products that met his customers’ needs, convincing his investors to support his ideas, and then promoting them. Edison didn’t invent the light bulb; he invented the light bulb that worked, and the one that sold.

Finally, Edison recognized that inventions rarely come in a single flash of inspiration. You set a goal, measure progress using data, see what’s working—and what isn’t working—adjust your plan, and try again. This process can be very frustrating because it means running into a lot of dead ends. But each dead end tells you something useful. As Edison famously said, “I have not failed 10,000 times. I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

Edison set a high goal for his lab: an invention every 10 days.

These lessons are just as true today as they were in Edison’s time. Innovators still have to work in teams. (Although that’s far easier to do today than at the turn of the twentieth century. Imagine what the Wizard of New Jersey’s Menlo Park could have done with the tools coming out of California’s Menlo Park.) Innovators still have to understand and solve real-world problems, and they still have to persevere for the long haul. Scientists run trial after trial to perfect a new vaccine. Co-workers at software companies debug each other’s code.

While we’ve seen amazing advances in science and technology since Edison’s day, these things have not changed. Thomas Edison remains a powerful exemplar of creativity, perseverance, and optimism. Even more than light bulbs and movie cameras, that may be his greatest legacy.

I’ve met former Secretary General Kofi Annan several times and admire his work—particularly on behalf of Africa—a great deal. In fact, I was a bit envious when Melinda recently had the opportunity to spend several days with him on an agricultural learning trip to Tanzania.

Annan served as Secretary-General of the United Nations for 10 years. In 2001, he received the Nobel Peace Prize—along with the UN—for his efforts to reform the organization, his commitment to human rights, and his commitment to tackling terrorism and HIV/AIDS.

Only after reading his recently-published book, Interventions: A Life in War and Peace, did I get a true sense of how difficult a job he had. As a voluntary organization of 192 states, it’s easy to criticize the effectiveness of the UN, but without it, we would be substantially further behind on issues of global health and development.

It was helpful to learn about the other side of Annan’s work at the UN—peacekeeping issues and the work of the Security Council. It is clearly very challenging work. One day, the Secretary-General has to be an impartial arbiter of disputes among member states. The next, he has to challenge member countries he believes are not acting in the interest of world peace. Surviving in that position for 10 years says a lot about Annan’s diplomatic skills.

For all of the difficulties he experienced on the peacekeeping side of the equation, his work on development and global health can’t be emphasized enough. In 2000, during Annan’s tenure, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were agreed to by all UN member countries and 23 international organizations. The MDGs are an ambitious set of goals for reducing poverty and child mortality rates, and fighting diseases that sap the socioeconomic potential of poor countries.   (I’m writing my annual letter at the moment, and I’m talking about the MDGs in more detail there, so it’s top of mind for me at the moment.)

Although a number of countries won’t be able to achieve all of the goals by the target date of 2015, the MDGs provide clear targets and indicators of progress in key areas, such as ending poverty and hunger, ensuring universal education, gender equality, improving child and maternal health, combatting HIV/AIDS, environmental sustainability, and strengthening global development.

Annan also played an important role in creating the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria—the main funder of efforts to fight three of the world’s biggest health challenges.

For anybody who wants to understand the complexities of the role of the Secretary General, this book is an illuminating read. 

Though the book is framed around the rise of Deng Xiaoping and his reforms that transformed China into an economic powerhouse, Ezra Vogel’s compelling biography examines how China went from being a desperately poor country to certainly one of the two most important countries in the world today.

A Communist revolutionary and military commander under the brutal rule of Mao Zedong, Deng emerged as China’s capable leader in 1978 for fourteen years. For all of Deng’s success leading China out of poverty, he cannot escape the central role he played in violent attacks on landlords in 1949, or intellectuals in 1957 or the tragic killings in Tiananmen Square under his own leadership in 1989.

Deng was a strong believer of socialism although he supported a market economy and created an export model of economic development. Subsequently China’s economy grew at over 10% per year for 20 years.

As part of our work at the Foundation we strive to improve 10 or 20 million lives in the areas of global health and global development. We have discovered new approaches and created new tools to get vaccines, AIDS drugs and contraceptives to the people who need them, and advanced agricultural innovation to transform farmers’ lives so that they can feed their families.

But, China’s reforms coupled with the tenacity and hard work of its people has improved hundreds of millions of people’s lives in less than a generation. That is more human lives climbing out of poverty post World War II than any other country.

Today, about 15 percent of people in the world - over 1 billion people - live in abject poverty. Fifty years ago, 40 percent of the global population was poor. The massive reduction in poverty is due in part to the “Green Revolution,” in the 1960s and 1970s where researchers produced seeds that helped farmers vastly improve their yields. And because of China. One country alone has lifted 500 million people out of abject poverty.

China in 1979 was one of the poorest countries in the world, far poorer than India. They were barely scratching out a living and their population density made it difficult for them to feed their population. There was very little to build on other than the fact that the party had incredible authority. With this authority, Deng set in motion a series of critical changes early on in his leadership to achieve cultural stability and significant economic growth.

Surviving the Great Famine of 1961 where millions died, Deng reformed the land system and increased agriculture production, initially in just one part of the country. He extended farmers’ land leases and encouraged them to profit from any grain they grew over and above what they owed. He introduced high-yielding varieties of cereal grains and synthetic fertilizers emulating the best innovations of the “Green Revolution”. As a result the agricultural sector exploded with farmers producing three times as much in 10 years, all with less labor.

Where before they taxed poor farmers to bootstrap the industrial commune, the workers who were no longer needed in the fields moved into the cities and created a robust industrial sector.

To support a high growth industrial sector, Deng fostered education and built new schools and institutions of learning to underpin the economy. He also endorsed students and business people to travel internationally to study and learn from other countries. China’s success in part has been its ability to synthesize what successful economies have done well and leapfrog history and the competition.

Vogel, an emeritus professor at Harvard University, demonstrates a deep understanding of China’s complex culture and draws on extensive research and his East Asian experience as an intelligence officer for the Clinton Administration. In a recent New York Times interview, Vogel said, “with this book, I thought I could write something new that would educate Americans about China.” I think he absolutely achieves this. Vogel also helps his readers navigate the labyrinth of people and places with mini bios and a map that was an invaluable reference when reading his book.

Although Deng’s transformation of China cannot be separated from the violent attacks that he administered under Mao’s rule or the brutal approach he took to stopping the Tiananmen Square student protests, the economic reforms have improved the livelihoods of millions of people.  China has capitalized on advances in education, healthcare, agriculture and innovative technology to help accelerate their own development and transition beyond the need for aid.

To have done this essentially in one generation is an unbelievable accomplishment and is unique in the history of the world.

So it’s no surprise that I’m really pleased to see Carol Loomis’ book on Warren published this month. Tap Dancing to Work: Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, 1966-2012 is a compilation of forty-plus years’ worth of coverage of Warren by the writers of FortuneFortune, with a notable share written by Warren’s longtime friend, Carol Loomis. Inside are pieces by Carol, other writers, some essays by Warren himself, and there’s even a reprint of a piece I wrote in 1996 about our friendship.

It’s fairly well known that I almost didn’t meet Warren. My mom and dad had invited him, Katharine Graham and Meg Greenfield to the family’s weekend home, and my mother really insisted that I meet him, in spite of my pushing back hard that I had too much to do to take a day off to meet “some guy who picked stocks.” But from the moment we started talking, I could tell this was an extraordinary individual, whose intellect and business insights were astounding. I realized that day I had met a genius. I have felt that way ever since that July afternoon in 1991 and have never passed up an opportunity to learn more from him about business. In the process, I’ve also learned a great deal from him about life.

Tap Dancing to Work is a comprehensive look into Warren’s thinking about business and investing. The stories in the book are arranged roughly chronologically. I think anyone who reads it cover to cover will come away with two reactions: First, how Warren’s been incredibly consistent in applying his vision and investment principles over the duration of his career; and, secondly, that his analysis and understanding of business and markets remains unparalleled. I wrote in 1996 that I’d never met anyone who thought about business in such a clear way. That is certainly still the case.

Carol Loomis has done us all a big favor in pulling together this collection and writing quite thoughtful introductions to the major pieces. Examining the arc of Warren’s business life in his own words and those of other gifted observers (preeminently, Carol Loomis, herself) is an extremely worthwhile use of time to get into the mind of this remarkable business leader and philanthropist. I hope many people, even those who think they know Warren well, will read it cover to cover. I know I will.

Peter Buffett recently published a terrific book, titled Life is What You Make It. Peter writes about the values he absorbed growing up as the son of Warren Buffett and his late mother, Susan Buffett, and the path he has pursued to identify and pursue his passions in life.

I knew Peter was passionate about music. He’s an Emmy-Award-winning musician and songwriter, has composed for film and television, and released more than 15 albums. But the focus of his book is a reflection of his broader life experiences—in particular the values, work ethic and commitment to social action that he learned growing up in the modest Buffett family home in Omaha, Nebraska.

Contrary to what many people might assume, Peter won’t inherit great wealth from his father. Instead, he was encouraged by his parents to find his own path. The book is a chronicle of that journey—and the wisdom and perceptions he has developed along the way.

In particular, Peter’s insights about the four core values he “absorbed” growing up in the Buffett home really resonated with me. They are:

• Trust in the belief that the world is fundamentally a good place and that all people, however, flawed, are—at the core—well-intentioned
• Tolerance for other people’s viewpoints and perspectives
• A passion for education—not in the traditional sense but as a way to approach life with curiosity and an openness to what others have to teach us
• A personal work ethic grounded in self-discovery and a commitment to finding something that you wake up every morning looking forward to

Melinda and I have both read it and like it a lot. We’ve known Peter for many years because of our friendship with Warren, and the whole Buffett family. It’s a thoughtful and touching book, and we plan on reading it with our older children.