Peter Han is a Harvard graduate now working at Microsoft. He co-founded a small software company and sold it in 2002. Before that, he wrote for The New York Times, Boston Herald, Houston Post, Associated Press, and magazines like The Corporate Board and Marketing Management. Peter lives in Seattle with his wife, Meredith.

Q: Why did you write this book?

The book really started as a labor of love. In both the Introduction and the Conclusion, I allude to a conversation I had with a good friend back in the winter of 2002. I'd just finished a roller-coaster ride with my startup company, with some really exciting and happy moments mixed with really tough ones, and I was at a crossroads. I was trying to figure out what to do next professionally, and who I wanted to become personally.

In that conversation back in 2002, it occurred to my friend and me that a lot of people our age, meaning twenty- and thirty-somethings, were feeling the same way. We have dreams, but we lack clear plans for achieving them. We work hard and have good intentions, but we drift sometimes. We're human, and stray off pre-set paths and neat career ladders defined for us by others. I took that for granted; the question was how people who'd gone before us, and done really well for themselves, handled the same kinds of issues back when they were anonymous young people starting their careers.

Q: What did you learn from writing this book?

This is definitely the question I hear most frequently! Not surprisingly, my answer is to buy the book! More seriously, though, I did feel like there were some interesting takeaways from the 100 people to whom I talked. What struck me was that despite their fantastically diverse backgrounds, the leaders showed a lot of similarities.

I make clear in the book that the biggest lesson imparted by leaders centered on change and self-development. Somehow, I had a stereotype in my head that the types of people who become society's pillars - the CEOs, the scientists, politicians, artists, and so on - get to the top by following well-accepted paths, by being "straight A students in life". What I learned, though, was that this was only sometimes true. There were a lot of offbeat characters among the people I met! What was much more consistent was the leaders' capacity for recognizing potential growth in themselves, and then pushing towards that growth.

The growth could be any number of things: it might be new skills, new industries, new ways of picking up information or relating to people. What mattered most was the energy and discipline to keep pursuing self-improvement. During the interviews, I was continually amazed at the number of leaders who achieved moderate success early in life, but remained restless and kept improving themselves. They never seemed to rest on their laurels: "Oh, I've reached the finish line." Even now, many have a youthful air about them, and I really believe it's that essential curiosity and restlessness that gives them their vigor and underlies their success.

In the end, I realized that my conclusion was really fitting, because after all my book was about transformation - nobodies turning themselves into somebodies through lifetimes of hard work, integrity, and honesty. But it was interesting to come full circle - to start with curiosity about these people who'd made something of themselves, and then to see the gritty detail of how openness to small changes on a daily level enabled these leaders to create incredible change over the course of their lives.

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