What book has inspired you the most?

Recently: "The map and the territory" by Michel Houellebecq. It's certainly not the kind of book that you'd think is inspiring in a literal way (ie. would make you want to go and achieve things etc.), but it's just such an extraordinary piece of literature that reading it shows how much a person (a writer in this case) is capable of when he applies himself.

It's really outdated now, but "A Walk Across America" by Peter Jenkins. Reading that inspired me to spend 13+ months living on a bicycle in my twenties.

So much of who I am is a direct result of the experiences I had living on the road for several years. (I spent several summers, and one full year living on a bike.)

Certainly most of you have already read but next time you read "A Brief History of Time" focus more on how Stephen thinks and how he deals with uncertainty, it's like reading a new book.

"The Four Agreements" has forever changed the way I view my actions and the actions around me.

"The Power of Now" is a great book about spiritual enlightenment. It opens up your mind to a different way of thought related to no stress, no pain, no anxiety, no past, no future, etc...

It's hard to synthesize, this book revolves around an attempt to model what produces good design and provide a formal method to reach it (note that it's "design" in the broader sense of finding solutions given certain constraints). It provides many insights:

- The notion that form (more generally, structure) is not something in itself, but the manifestation of the forces (constraints) acting on it. An example of that is how a water droplet not only has a particular form, but can only have that particular form, because that is a manifestation of the constraints (molecular structure of water) and forces (gravity, surface tension) acting on it.

- The notion of problem vs. context, and how you can find a solution by just moving the boundaries;

- Definition of good solutions as a function of "fitness";

- Development of the concept of "fitness", as a process of reaching balance between interdependent, positive and negative features;

- A critic on the current design process (he calls it the "conscious" process), in which features are proposed/changed indiscriminately, as opposed to forms that arise from feedback loops ("unconscious" process). He gives the comparison between a consciously architected building that fails to meet the requirements vs. an indigenous village in which the buildings already evolved, already meet the criteria given the constraints, and basically don't change anymore between generations

While the author's discusses all these from the PoV of architecture, I've found his insights have surprising parallels with other things, from darwinism to machine learning to data structures and algorithms.