Bookshelf

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies”, said Jojen. “The man who never reads lives only one.” 

George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

Books, more than any other form of media, have had an overwhelmingly positive impact on my life. In 2015, inspired by Zuck, I made a New Year’s Resolution to read a book every 2 weeks. The theory was that it takes (at least) 2 years for an author to conceptualize, write, edit and publish a book, and often much much longer.

If I hit my goal, in a single year I would consume 52 years of other people’s focused mental energy. Over the next 20 years, I would consume a millennium of human thought. I missed my goal by four books in both 2015 and 2016, but since then have met or exceeded it.

On this page, in no particular order, I have listed the most impactful and entertaining books I’ve read.

Business

  • Principals: Life and Work by Ray Dalio
  • Creativity, Inc by Ed Catmull
  • Delivering happiness by Tony Hsieh
  • Who: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart
  • Cross the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
  • The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon
  • The Rebel Allocator by Jacob Taylor
  • Never split the difference by Chriss Voss
  • Trillion Dollar Coach by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg & Alan Eagle
  • The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
  • Zero to One by Peter Thiel
  • The Innovators by Walter Isaacson
  • Rise of the robots: technology and the threat of a jobless future by Martin Ford
  • The Upstarts by Brad Stone
  • Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy
  • Nudge by Richard H Thaler

Life & Philosophy

  • Being Mortal by Atul Gawande
  • Man’s search for meaning by Victor Frankl
  • The Rational Optimist by Matthew Ridley
  • The Richest Man in Babylon
  • Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
  • The Prince by Nico Machiavelli
  • The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer
  • When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
  • How will you measure your life by Clayton M Christensen
  • The Brain: The Story of You by David Eagleman
  • Sapiens by Yuval Noah Hariri

Thinking clearly

  • The Great Mental Models by Shane Parrish
  • Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
  • Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger

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