Yikes, has it really been more than two weeks? (“Bad blogger! No donut!”) I was down for the count with a flu sort of thing the last week, and before that, running around preparing for the Big Day.

While I wasn’t looking, The Answer made the New York Times bestseller list. (Scroll down: it’s #9.)

Last summer I created a list of affirmations I’ve since adopted as a type of verbal “dream board.” One statement says, “I write bestselling books that change people’s lives.” Another says, “I have twelve books on the market, all of them New York Times bestsellers.”

That’s one.

Last night we drove down our street to park in full view of a glorious fireworks display, on the campus of the University of Massachusetts. From 8:30-ish to nearly 10, we sat surrounded by hundreds of neighbors, oohing and ahhing.

It made me think of Adams and Jefferson.

John Adams, the scrappy lawyer from Massachusetts, and Thomas Jefferson, the gentleman-farmer from Virginia, were two of the three principal architects (with Benjamin Franklin) of the Declaration of Independence. They were also temperamental opposites, as near-perfect a human example of yin and yang as you could wish for.

Through the years of the “war for independency,” Adams and Jefferson become exceptionally close friends. However, in one of those peculiarly human twists of plot, they later became bitterly estranged political enemies, running fierce campaigns against one another for the presidency and spearheading the opposing camps of the nation’s emerging two-party paradigm.

Jefferson even hired a hit-man-journalist to publish vituperative attacks against Adams in a vicious character-assassination campaign — all while Jefferson was serving as his former friend’s vice president.

And yet — evidence of a peculiarly human capacity for redemption — the friendship miraculously healed itself decades later. After both were long out of public life, Adams wrote Jefferson a letter, and they not only reconciled but proceeded to engage in one of the greatest long-running correspondences in American history.

At the end, the one in Quincy and the other in Monticello, the two were so psychically connected to one another that they held onto life in tandem, each saving his last breath for the appointed day. On July 4, 1826, one half-century to the precise day after that fateful signing that had first brought the friendship (and the nation) together, Adams died at the age of ninety. His last words were reported as “Jefferson lives!” — although in fact, his friend from Virginia had given up the ghost just a few hours earlier.

Here’s to independency — and good friendship.

The other day I peeked out onto my front deck in Virginia, and lo and behold, there were two silent visitors. They were nice enough to hold still long enough for me to grab my camera and shoot through the screen door.

Later on, I attended my son Chris’s graduation, where I was able to take this snapshot of another form of wildlife (Chris and his older brother Nick).

The new Networking Times is on the stands and up online. This issue sports a feature article about my fiancée Ana McClellan-for-now here. This is, alas, one of those articles you have to be a paid subscriber to read online.

You can also read my latest editorial here (this one you can read gratis, just by registering on the site)—I also posted it here on the Zen site, along with a photo of Ana’s very own Secret Service bodyguard. (Can you guess his secret identity?)

This week The Answer hit the Wall Street Journal bestseller list for the second time. On iTunes, I notice that it stands right now as the #1 title under “New & Notable” under “Audiobooks: Business,” and is #14 in their “Top Audiobooks” list.

Why is The Answer doing so well? I think one reason is that it fills in a gap so many people feel was left by The Secret, which goes something like this:

“Okay, the Law of Attraction, I get it . . . but don’t we have to do something?”

Indeed. Lao Tzu may have championed wei wu wei, the famous Taoist “doing without doing,” but note that the first word there is not being, experiencing or even manifesting, but doing.

In The Answer, we explain the Law of Attraction by illustrating the miraculous phenomenon of resonance, which is what lies within the heart of music, love and the Doctrine of Signatures, among other many wonderful things. (Writing this section was my favorite part of the whole experience.)

But the Law of Attraction doesn’t operate in a vacuum: it’s only one-third of the story. We lay it all out in Chapter 3, sandwiched between the wild galactic quantum physics romp in Chapter 2 and the Chapter 4 tour of how your brain is more amazing than you thought it was:

There are three laws, each one equally important: the Law of Attraction, the Law of Gestation, and the Law of Action. In practical terms, they go like this:

1. Craft a vivid, compelling picture of your heart’s desire.

2. Have the patience and good grace to let it unfold on God’s timing.

3. Meanwhile, why are you just standing there?

That’s what was missing in The Secret.

I promise I will not let this blog devolve into an endless list of lists. But this one is pretty fascinating: a list of the “100 best reads” from the last quarter-century. Albeit compiled by the editors of Entertainment Weekly (not who you’d necessarily consider the nation’s prime arbiter of literary taste), it’s a meaty list, and not a bad source for building your own “books I really need to read” list.

I was pleased to note my favorite novel of all time on the list: A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving (1989). Here are a few other of my favorite novels that appear on the EW list:

• The Road, Cormac McCarthy (2006)
• American Pastoral, Philip Roth (1997)
• Mystic River, Dennis Lehane (2001)
• Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier (1997)

As well as several nonfiction books that I loved:

• On Writing, Stephen King (2000)
• The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell (2000
• The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (2005)

My wonderful agent Margret McBride and her amazing husband Nevins just enthusiastically recommended that I read Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry (1985). Yep, there it is, #24. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (the only thing of his I haven’t yet read). The Kite Runner, The Interpreter of Maladies, The Remains of the Day, Love in the Time of Cholera, Rabbit at Rest, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—all of these titles are on my shelves, but I just haven’t gotten to them yet.

Note to self: get to them.

Eventually I’ll compile my own “top 100 books of all time” list and post it here — and invite you to let me know your list, too. Meanwhile, there are about 75 books on the EW list I haven’t read yet . . .

A few weeks ago, leadership expert David Zinger posted a list of 300 thought-provoking blogs. It’s quite a resource, well worth poking through and seeing what you find.

P.S. When you get to the G’s, you might notice included there a certain blog about a “Little Story about a Powerful Business Idea”…

Thanks, David!

If you liked The Go-Giver, here are two other short, positive-message, parable-style books that have come out in the past few months that you might enjoy. I loved em both. (In fact, if you hunt, you’ll find my endorsement printed inside each.)

Both are short, one-afternoon reads that contain big insights.

The Pep Talk

I’m not big on sports stories (although in our house we often quote Tom Hanks from A League of Their Own: “There’s no crying in baseball!”). Still, this one is special.

The Pep Talk takes a familiar idea—the underdog team galvanized to triumph by an inspiring locker-room homily—and breathes new life into it. The talk itself and story of the team’s win are lovely in their own right, but it’s in the aftermath of the big game, an aftermath that stretches long years into the boys’ adulthoods, that the story’s twists reveal an unexpected depth of meaning.

If this were a film, Act I would be the story you expect. Act II would surprise and intrigue you, and Act III would be the ending that would blow your mind.

The Fourth Secret

How do you say those three little words that mean so much? No, not those three words — I’m speaking of a different and more challenging triad: “I was wrong.”

There are few things as liberating as the willingness to freely admit a mistake. And what could be simpler? Still, it seems to be one of the rarest acts of leadership. The Fourth Secret (full title: The Fourth Secret of the One Minute Manager) offers a beautiful recipe for how to apologize, in the form of a modern-day parable (fiction) wrapped around a quite moving Abraham Lincoln vignette (factual).

The book is cowritten by my dear friend and amazing literary agent, Margret McBride, and the legendary Ken Blanchard, coauthor of The One Minute Manager. The title alludes to the “three secrets” of that classic: one minute goals, one minute praisings, and the one minute reprimand. The very definition of compelling simplicity. I loved this book when I first read it in the eighties, and I didn’t see how any other book could live up that standard, let alone take the idea further. Happily, Blanchard and McBride could, and did.

Yesterday was my birthday: I celebrated by not writing anything.

For a writer, spending time not writing is precious, in the same way that cleaning out your closets helps grow your wardrobe and having earthworms in your garden helps the soil bring forth plants. It’s the aeration that comes from introducing emptiness.

Empty space is one of the greatest secrets of all creative endeavor, and the one that most readily divides wannabes from masters. The value of white space in page layout; of silence in music; of understatement in rhetoric; and of knowing when the greatest eloquence lies in not saying anything at all.

I think of Jack Benny and Johnny Carson, of Peter Falk as Columbo, of the peculiar genius of Steven Wright — all masters of the pause.

In traditional churches, mosques and synagogues there are these vast empty spaces above our heads — extra space, someone once said, “to leave room for God.” In the same way, the silence of listening makes room for another person, and the conscious pause in action leaves room for inspiration.

Blaise Pascal, writing during the generation of Isaac Newton, when the science of Europe was just beginning to grasp the vastness of the universe, wrote, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.”

I think of these infinite spaces as a pool from which one may sip when the brain and heart become parched from too much fullness.

If you have not already gotten yourself a copy of The Answer, here is a cool excerpt. This is the Conclusion, and it pretty well sums up where the other 264 pages of book take you (with as much poetry and inspiration as I could muster).

In addition to the Conclusion, I thought I’d excerpt the Dedication right here in this post. Both were written last fall right at the very end of the entire giddy, ninety-day process, in a rush of elation—something like the feeling I imagine mountaineers might have when they finally reach the summit of an Everest, K2 or Kangchenjunga.

A few days ago, in my June “eLetter,” I mentioned Marianne Williamson’s new book The Age of Miracles, saying, “This is a five-star recommend if you want to create great things in your life — and especially if you happen to be over 50.”

I got an immediate reply from one of my newsletter readers who is, I suspect, living proof that it is 80, not 50, that is “the new 30.”

Hey, how about over 80? I have just read The Slight Edge. A wonderful book! I think that this book should be required reading for all students in high school.

Funny thing he should mention The Slight Edge and high school students: as it happens, I’ve been working with the publishers of The Slight Edge on an adaptation of that book specifically for, guess who? Yup: teenagers. You can read a little bit about it here and also here.

The book is currently slated to cone out before the end of this summer. I’ll post all details about it here, as soon as I have them.