Ayn Rand had a significant impact on me when I was young. I read her books while being a teenager, and was captured by her ideas. Recently, her two famous books "The fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" gained new translations to Hebrew, which was a good opportunity to read them again after many years.
In retrospect, there was something naive in my attitude to Ayn Rand's book as a young person, there is also a lot of misinterpretations of her ideas in the universe, one of them is the claim that this is a basis for conservative thinking. Ayn Rand was far from being conservative in the political sense.
However, two things I have taken from Ayn Rand, escorted me all my life:
The ability to "swim against the current" and take what other people think of me with a grain of salt (including my managers over all the history), and the strive for excellence in the mediocre culture around us.
These two are blended together in Ayn Rand's books.
She puts the individual in the middle, rather than the society, and puts in the center of her stories individuals with some kind of excellence.
Our current society seems to prefer mediocre people that meet metrics, rather than individuals who break out of the box (thus the metrics don't follow them). A food for thought.
