born 1946 · American author, lecturer & former world trampoline champion
Daniel Jay Millman (born 22 February 1946) is an American author and lecturer in the personal-development field. Before he wrote anything, he was a 1964 world trampoline champion and an NCAA champion in vaulting at UC Berkeley. His first book, Way of the Peaceful Warrior (1980), is a part-fictional, part-autobiographical account of his early life, built around a mentor figure — an all-night gas-station attendant Millman nicknamed “Socrates” after the Greek sage, a nickname that would go on to cost him credit for his own best-known sentence.