Sources of Influence: the story

Context:
Everyone carries around stories in their head - at some level it's part of our collective culture. These stories provide common ground for those who know them. While many of us share thousands of stories in common I think that understanding those stories that influence people can be a powerful way of learning from them. Those stories influence the way we see the world. Whether it confirms our existing world-view or shapes a new one (likely both) it plays an important role.

Thesis:
Wouldn't it be interesting to read the 5 books that have done the most to shape the way people like Einstein, Barack, your Boss, or your close friends think?

Comparables:
Blogs have done this already with blog roll features, when they aren't giant link-fests, blog rolls enable you to see those people that influence the thinking of the blog writer. In some ways Facebook's profile page for your "favorite books" accomplishes this for your friends.

Gap:
But these are often not 'thought out' or distilled enough. For leaders in their respective field's - the Barack's and the Einstein's - it simply doesn't exist (at least to my knowledge). The only way to obtain this kind of information would be a thorough a review of any passing references in their biographies or press interviews. But if this kind of task were accomplished, I think we could potentially have an interesting product: a compilation of the stories (books, blogs, articles or even simply ideas) that most influenced the way these people think. But this could also be taken one step further and by tracing back the influencers of the influencers you could draw this out as a network with ideas as the connecting factors between people.

You would then have both a list of some of the top books to read and a schematic of the evolution of personal philsophies and principals. Now that is interesting.

Ideas in the open

Ideas, both brilliant and mundane often do not make it very far. They are either jealously guarded or if shared, lost in transmission. I hope to overcome both of these obstacles and this blog is the first of (likely) many attempts and steps to do so. Throughout the course of this blog, I hope to make some time for sowing creativity.