Who Inspires You?

I’m one of those people who reads books cover-to-cover, including the acknowledgments, the prologues, the introductions and the testimonials.

You can learn quite a bit about the author/s by reading this information: who is in his/her network, how the book idea came about, who edited the book, and sometimes how long it took to write or the obstacles encountered.

So I was tickled to read Jason Fried’s and David Heinemeier Hansson’s list of people who inspired them on the Acknowledgments page of their new book, Rework. (Fabulous reading, by the way. Five stars.)

The 37Signals founders included the typical names you see in books of this type, i.e. Seth Godin and Jeff Bezos.

But they also included lots of other “big” thinkers who have changed our world, including Julia Child, Thomas Jefferson, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Love it!

While walking the dogs this morning, I pondered my own list of people who have inspired me in some way in the last 25 years, both personally and professionally. Herewith my list, in no particular order:

Jane Austen
Virginia Woolf
Sharon Teitelbaum
David Meerman Scott
Mark Victor Hansen
W. Clement Stone
Brian Halligan
Anne Holland
Mac McIntosh
Steve Jobs
Barbara Stanny
Bob Bly
The Founding Fathers and Mothers
Doyle Dane Bernbach
Jim Fannin
Leo Babauta

Who inspires you?