Author Bios

Gillian Flynn was born on January 24, 1971, in Kansas City, Missouri, into a family with a deep appreciation for storytelling. Her father taught film and her mother was a reading teacher, an upbringing that immersed her in narrative craft from an early age. Flynn studied English and journalism at the University of Kansas before…

Philip Hampson Knight was born on February 24, 1938, in Portland, Oregon, the son of a newspaper publisher. He ran track at the University of Oregon under the legendary coach Bill Bowerman, who would later become his business partner, and graduated in 1959 with an accounting degree. After a year in the United States Army,…

Charles Duhigg was born in 1974 in New Mexico and earned his bachelor’s degree from Yale University and his MBA from Harvard Business School. He joined the New York Times as a staff reporter in 2006, where he covered business, economics, and consumer affairs, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2013 as part of a team…

Simon Oliver Sinek was born on October 9, 1973, in Wimbledon, London, and grew up in various countries as a result of his family’s relocations, including time in England, Hong Kong, South Africa, and the United States. He earned a bachelor’s degree in cultural anthropology from Brandeis University in Massachusetts and later studied law at…

Daniel Kahneman was born on March 5, 1934, in Tel Aviv, then part of British Mandatory Palestine, to Lithuanian Jewish parents. He spent part of his childhood in France during the Nazi occupation, an experience of hiding and fear that gave him an early, visceral understanding of the irrationality and contingency that shape human experience….

Jim Collins was born in 1958 in Boulder, Colorado. He earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematical sciences from Stanford University and then his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he became a faculty member in 1988 after a stint at McKinsey and Company. He taught at Stanford for several years before leaving…

Eric Ries was born in 1978 and grew up in Connecticut before attending Yale University, where he studied computer science. During his undergraduate years he co-founded a startup that failed—a formative experience that set the trajectory of his subsequent thinking about why new ventures succeed or collapse. He moved to Silicon Valley after graduation and…

Peter Andreas Thiel was born on October 11, 1967, in Frankfurt, West Germany, and emigrated with his family to the United States as a child. A gifted chess player who reached master level as a teenager, Thiel studied philosophy at Stanford University, then earned his JD from Stanford Law School in 1992. His political thinking…

James Clear was born in 1986 and grew up in Hamilton, Ohio, where he played baseball seriously enough to pursue the sport into college at Denison University. In his sophomore year he was struck in the face by a baseball bat during a warm-up and suffered a severe traumatic brain injury that required emergency surgery….

Eckhart Tolle was born Ulrich Leonard Tolle on February 16, 1948, in Lünen, Germany, into a household he has described as marked by his parents’ marital conflict. He spent much of his adolescence in Spain with his father, largely self-educating through literature, philosophy, and languages before moving to England and enrolling at the University of…