Cheryl Strayed is the author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things. Her new podcast is Sugar Calling.

“I think that we have this limited idea of what ambition is. All through my twenties, you wouldn’t necessarily have looked at me and been like, ‘she’s ambitious.’ I mean, I was working as a waitress. I was goofing around and doing all kinds of things. But I was always writing. And I was always really sure and clear and serious about my writing. My ambition was this secret thing within me that I dedicated myself to.”

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Samin Nosrat is a food writer, educator, and chef. Her new book is Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking.

“I kind of couldn’t exist as just a cook or a writer. I kind of need to be both. Because they fulfill these two totally different parts of myself and my brain. Cooking is really social, it’s very physical, and also you don’t have any time to become attached to your product. You hand it off and somebody eats it, and literally tomorrow it’s shit. … Whereas with writing, it’s the exact opposite. It’s super solitary. It’s super cerebral. And you have all the time in the world to get attached to your thing and freak out about it.”

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Jeanne Marie Laskas writes for GQ and the New York Times Magazine. Her latest book is To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope.

“I hate saying this out loud, but it’s true: I’m really shy. Fundamentally, I'm 100% scared most of the time. I’m scared and wondering how I can not be noticed because I don’t know what to say and I’m shy. If you say I’m a good listener, that's why … I become more invisible so I’m more comfortable.”

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Nate Silver is the founder of FiveThirtyEight and the author of The Signal and the Noise.

“I know in a perfectly rational world, if you make an 80/20 prediction, people should know that not only will this prediction not be right all the time, but you did something wrong if it’s never wrong. The 20% underdog should come through sometimes. People in sports understand that sometimes a 15 seed beats a 2 seed in the NCAA tournament. That’s much harder to explain to people in politics.”

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Lisa Brennan-Jobs is a New York-based writer. Her new book is Small Fry.

"You find yourself in a whole net, in a constellation of stories, each one connecting to another. It was amazing how much I remembered. Sometimes I meet people and they say, goodness, I can’t even remember what I had for lunch. How can you remember so much? And I think, oh, sit down for a while writing badly and you will remember and remember and remember. Some things weren’t terribly pleasant to remember. And some things were incredibly wonderful."

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Luke Mogelson is a journalist and fiction writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and other publications. His latest feature is ”Among the Insurrectionists.”

“Get to the front and document as much as you can. ... I think my approach is much more similar to photographers than other writers. I spend a lot of time with photographers and ... I feel like I've gotten pretty good at getting myself into situations where there's few or maybe no other writers around, but there's always a bunch of photographers…. I try to get in right behind the first photographers.”

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Dayna Tortorici is the editor of n+1.

“You can't fetishize conflict so much. Because conflict does generate a lot of good work, but it also inhibits a lot of good work. I think people do their best work when they feel good. Or at least don't feel like shit. ... So I've tried to create a culture of mutual encouragement. Especially when you're not paying anybody, that's all you can really offer.”

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Jim Nelson is the editor-in-chief of GQ.

“One of the things that was initially a challenge was we would all think of ‘the print side’ and ‘the digital side.’ Now what we all think about is, ‘Okay, stop saying GQ.com and GQ the print edition. It’s just GQ!’ And once you cross that line, you don’t ever want to go back to it. I can’t imagine. The job has changed so much, even in the last three years, that when I look back, I think, ‘God, I was just such a quaint little fucker.’”

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Tommy Tomlinson, a former newspaper columnist, is the host of Southbound podcast. His new book is The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America.

“The thing that galvanized me was the death of my sister. I signed the contract November 2014, she died Christmas Eve of that year. She had been overweight just like me. She was older than me and died from complications, an infection that was directly connected to her weight. And that more than anything made me think if I don’t deal with this now, I’m not going to be around in 10 years to write this book. So, the book helped certainly. The idea that I was going to put this stuff on paper and expose myself in this way to the world and I didn’t want to be a failure at the end of it. More than that, I didn’t want to be a failure because I didn’t want to be a failure. I don’t want to die.”

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Nathaniel Rich is a novelist and a writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine. His most recent article is "Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change."

“There’s a huge opportunity with climate change because we talk a lot about the political issue with it, the industry story and the scientific story, but we don’t talk about the human story. And I would say that not only is it a big human story, but it is the human story. ... With every step of the ladder that we’ve advanced, we’re borrowing from our future. I don’t think we’ve reckoned with that in a serious way.”

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Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and GQ.

“My writing career was something that was always about to happen, just as soon as the baby falls asleep, just as soon as I finish watching this five-hour bout of As the World Turns, just as soon as... What do you do when you realize that you have not been doing the thing you were going to do? You're in your 30s. You get to work.”

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Katy Vine is an executive editor for Texas Monthly.

“This is a huge state. There’s so much, and it’s different everywhere you look. You just go to Houston and there’s worlds within worlds within worlds just within the one city. You go to San Antonio and you’re in a different country, and you go to Dallas, you’re in a totally different country. … It’s wild to me. It’s endlessly fascinating.”

Dr. Jelani Cobb is a New Yorker staff writer and the author of three books, including The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress. He teaches journalism at Columbia University.

“Ralph Wiley — the sports writer, late Ralph Wiley — told me something when I was 25 or so, and he was so right. He said I should never fall in love with anything I’ve written. … The second thing he told me was, ‘You won’t get there overnight, and believe me, you don’t want to.’ I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t get it when he told me that. I was like — why would I not want to get there overnight? Now I’m like: Thank God I didn’t get there overnight. Because there’s so much writing I would have to explain.”

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Brian Reed, a senior producer at This American Life, is the host of S-Town.

“It’s a story about the remarkableness of what could be called an unremarkable life.”

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Theo Padnos is a journalist and author of the book Blindfold: A Memoir of Capture, Torture, and Enlightenment.

“I'm trying to tell a story about a person who's attracted to dangerous places and people. I think we all have that within us. I wanted to bring my readers along. So I selected details that we all have in common... I'm trying to invite you along on a journey that you yourself might have taken.”

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