Author Bios

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…

Bessel van der Kolk was born in 1943 in The Hague, Netherlands, and came of age in a country still processing the psychological wounds of World War II and German occupation. He trained as a psychiatrist and moved to the United States, joining the faculty at Boston University School of Medicine and eventually founding the…

Carol Susan Dweck was born in 1946 in Brooklyn, New York, and developed an early fascination with the question of why some children embrace challenge while others retreat from it. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Barnard College and her PhD in psychology from Yale University, going on to teach and conduct research at Columbia…

Mark Manson was born on March 28, 1984, in Austin, Texas, and grew up moving frequently due to his father’s career, a childhood experience he credits with shaping his interest in identity, belonging, and the psychology of self-worth. He attended Boston University briefly before dropping out to travel the world and build an online business…

Dale Carnegie was born Dale Carnagey on November 24, 1888, on a farm in Maryville, Missouri, the son of poor farmers who struggled with debt and poverty. His early life was marked by financial hardship and social anxiety, yet he harbored fierce ambitions. He worked his way through the State Teachers College of Warrensburg, competing…

Viktor Emil Frankl was born on March 26, 1905, in Vienna, Austria, into a Jewish family with deep intellectual and spiritual traditions. From a young age he showed an extraordinary interest in psychology, corresponding with Sigmund Freud as a teenager and publishing his first paper in a psychoanalytic journal at eighteen. He studied medicine at…

Stephen Richards Covey was born on October 24, 1932, in Salt Lake City, Utah, into a family that prized education and service. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of Utah, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a Doctor of Religious Education from Brigham Young University, where he later…

Peter Frankopan was born in 1971 in London and was educated at Eton College before reading history at Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he earned his PhD. He is a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, and the founding director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. His academic specialty is Byzantine and Silk Roads…

Erik Larson was born on January 3, 1954, in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up on Long Island. He studied Russian history at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. He worked for years as a staff writer and correspondent for newspapers and magazines including the Wall Street…

Jared Diamond was born in 1937 in Boston, Massachusetts, to a physician father and a musician and linguist mother—a combination of scientific and humanistic influences that would prove formative for his career as one of the most ambitious interdisciplinary thinkers of the twentieth century. He attended Roxbury Latin School before earning his undergraduate degree from…