The Secret Library

Brandon Parker

Brandon Parker's Secret Library, the books that shaped how he thinks: his Top 12, from Meditations and Antifragile to The 4-Hour Workweek, each with his one-line reason, plus themed shelves, his full reading log and the people on his wall.

Back to the office

My Goodreads favorites

Top 12

  1. The 4-Hour Workweek, Timothy Ferriss. My first intro to building business systems that run without me.
  2. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, Eric Jorgenson. My favorite business thinker. He turns complex truths into simple, beautiful lines.
  3. Getting Things Done, David Allen. My favorite book on personal organization. How to actually be effective in life and business.
  4. No B.S. Marketing to the Affluent, Dan S. Kennedy. Broke my thinking on price. Fewer clients who pay a lot more for the right thing.
  5. Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Look everywhere for setups with uncapped upside and capped downside.
  6. Contagious, Jonah Berger. Unique ways to stand out and stick in people's memory. It's why the hippo at my laundromat is orange.
  7. Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss. Negotiation tactics we use every day. We even used them to program our conversational AI.
  8. Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl. Anyone with a reason to live can get through almost anything. A lot of my why comes from here.
  9. Meditations, Marcus Aurelius. He ran the world and still woke up expecting difficult people, and kept his cool anyway. I think about it daily.
  10. The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas. The greatest comeback story of all time. Redemption and revenge, overcoming even the most unfair circumstances.
  11. The River of Doubt, Candice Millard. Maybe my favorite story ever. Teddy Roosevelt sets the bar for what one person can get done.
  12. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck. My grandma picked peaches in the Depression, at a new school every six months. This showed me what that was really like.

The stacks

Business

  • $100M Series, Alex Hormozi. The most tactical playbook I've found for pricing an offer and putting it out there.
  • Buy Back Your Time, Dan Martell. Taught me to price my own time, then hire people for the roles I don't want.
  • The 4-Hour Workweek, Timothy Ferriss. My first intro to building business systems that run without me.
  • The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, Eric Jorgenson. My favorite business thinker. He turns complex truths into simple, beautiful lines.
  • The Bezos Letters, Steve Anderson. Mental models I keep coming back to as I grow my businesses.
  • The Brower Quadrant, Lee Brower. How to build a legacy. It made me realize I want to build one for my family.
  • The ONE Thing, Gary Keller & Jay Papasan. Exactly what it says. Focus is how you grow.
  • Thinkertoys, Michael Michalko. One of the most interesting books I own. I pick it up to think about a problem a different way.
  • Traction, Gino Wickman. Where I learned how to run meetings and stay focused on output.
  • Trump: The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump & Tony Schwartz. Think bigger. Bold forward action gets you further than you'd expect.

Marketing & Sales

  • Contagious, Jonah Berger. Unique ways to stand out and stick in people's memory. It's why the hippo at my laundromat is orange.
  • Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert B. Cialdini. The human psychology behind sales and negotiation. How people actually say yes.
  • Made to Stick, Chip Heath & Dan Heath. Why some ideas and brands stick, and how to make yours one of them.
  • Never Lose a Customer Again, Joey Coleman. Onboarding, fulfillment, retention. Taking care of people after the sale is where the real money is.
  • Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss. Negotiation tactics we use every day. We even used them to program our conversational AI.
  • No B.S. Marketing to the Affluent, Dan S. Kennedy. Broke my thinking on price. Fewer clients who pay a lot more for the right thing.
  • Purple Cow, Seth Godin. Stand out or get ignored. Be the thing people can't help but notice.
  • The Adweek Copywriting Handbook, Joseph Sugarman. Sugarman is an OG of copywriting. The best examples of how to engage a reader's mind.
  • There's a Customer Born Every Minute, Joe Vitale. P.T. Barnum, one of my favorite marketers, on how outrageous you can be to grab attention.

Strategy & Markets

  • Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Edwin Lefèvre. My favorite trader of all time. He won big and lost big on the edge. Run a system, take the emotion out of money.
  • The 33 Strategies of War, Robert Greene
  • The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene. Human nature, unfiltered. It helps me spot when someone is playing games or working an angle.
  • The Art of War, Sun Tzu. High-level strategy I use for positioning a business.

Mindset & Self-Help

  • Atomic Habits, James Clear. Small, tactical habits that actually get things done. I build my schedule around them.
  • Awaken the Giant Within, Tony Robbins. Feelings follow action. Feeling bad? Stand up, smile and move. That one stuck with me.
  • Getting Things Done, David Allen. My favorite book on personal organization. How to actually be effective in life and business.
  • Say Yes to Your Potential, Skip Ross. Read it as a kid and it stuck: we can do far more than we think. Usually our mind is what gets in the way.
  • The 5 Love Languages, Gary Chapman. For understanding people: business relationships, friends, family, partners.
  • The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey
  • The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin. Break a skill into its smallest parts, 80/20 it, and get good fast.
  • The Success Principles, Jack Canfield. My favorite book on setting goals. There are lots of them. This one nails it.
  • The War of Art, Steven Pressfield. Fighting for your own creativity is a job in itself.
  • Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill. An epic mindset book. Its principles still hold up under every new guru.

Philosophy & Spirituality

  • Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl. Anyone with a reason to live can get through almost anything. A lot of my why comes from here.
  • Meditations, Marcus Aurelius. He ran the world and still woke up expecting difficult people, and kept his cool anyway. I think about it daily.
  • The Art of Living, Epictetus
  • The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle. The first time I realized I could listen to the voice in my own head.
  • The Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff. A comforting read about accepting things as they are.
  • The Untethered Soul, Michael A. Singer. One of the first times I thought deeply about my own consciousness.
  • Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Shunryu Suzuki

Science & Ideas

  • Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Look everywhere for setups with uncapped upside and capped downside.
  • Blink, Malcolm Gladwell. Your subconscious decides fast. Put yourself where your snap calls work for you.
  • Cosmos, Carl Sagan
  • On Writing Well, William Zinsser
  • Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell. Great outcomes take doing things completely differently, with work that sometimes feels absurd.
  • Six Easy Pieces, Richard P. Feynman. There's genius in his simplicity. He makes hard physics make sense to anyone.
  • Skin in the Game, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. If someone doesn't share the downside, don't count on them for the upside. Know who has skin in the game.
  • The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Outlier events happen far more often than we think. Plan around them.
  • The Elements of Eloquence, Mark Forsyth. Simple tricks like alliteration that make writing and speech sound exceptional, and why they work.

Health & Performance

  • Ben Hogan's Five Lessons, Ben Hogan. The best book on golf. Like Feynman, he breaks something infinitely complex into simple lessons.
  • The 4-Hour Body, Timothy Ferriss. My first look into biohacking and getting high performance out of my body.
  • The Inner Game of Music, Barry Green. Stay in the process, not the noise around it. Presence I bring to anything I build.

History & Adventure

  • Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, Alfred Lansing. When everything seems lost and impossible, you put one foot in front of the other.
  • Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer
  • Kon-Tiki, Thor Heyerdahl. Thinking so far outside the box you'll bet your life on it and sail across an ocean.
  • Seven Years in Tibet, Heinrich Harrer
  • The Log from the Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck. Makes me want to sell everything and live on the water. There's beauty in how ordinary their cataloging is.
  • The Republic of Pirates, Colin Woodard. My favorite kind of true story. Pirates are famous for a reason: they were so weird and cool.
  • The River of Doubt, Candice Millard. Maybe my favorite story ever. Teddy Roosevelt sets the bar for what one person can get done.
  • Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck
  • Tribe, Sebastian Junger. Doing hard things alongside other men builds a bond I crave. College soccer and a national title taught me that.
  • Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand. How much pain people can endure, and what they can do once they set their mind to it.
  • Vagabonding, Rolf Potts. How to leave everything behind and experience the world at its core. My favorite daydream.
  • Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild, Lee Sandlin. The lawless Mississippi of rafts, river pirates and outlaws. It's why that river has always enchanted me.

Fiction

  • 1984, George Orwell. Redefine the words, make people dependent, and they'll trade their autonomy for safety until it's too late.
  • A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess. Burgess invented his own slang, with a dictionary in the back. Words like britva stuck with me for good.
  • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll. A trippy, fun story I like to zone out to.
  • Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand. Who is John Galt? Producers versus grifters, and wanting deeply to be one of the producers.
  • Conqueror Series (Genghis Khan), Conn Iggulden. One of the most insane rags-to-riches stories: nothing to absolute power, and the savage things it took.
  • Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky. You might get away with a crime, but the real punishment happens inside you.
  • Dracula, Bram Stoker. Nothing does atmosphere like this. Dark and mysterious on every page.
  • Les Misérables, Victor Hugo. Redemption in a brutal, unfair world, with bitter joys along the way.
  • Moby-Dick, Herman Melville. A man chasing his obsession, and the toll it takes on his mind.
  • On the Road, Jack Kerouac. Made me want to hop a train and just go. I did it once because of this book.
  • Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Mark Twain. One of my favorites. A young girl's faith, fervor and commitment take back France.
  • Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse. To really feel life's joys, you have to go through hardship too. A cushy life never fulfills like you think.
  • The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas. The greatest comeback story of all time. Redemption and revenge, overcoming even the most unfair circumstances.
  • The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck. My grandma picked peaches in the Depression, at a new school every six months. This showed me what that was really like.
  • The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald. How materialism rots the soul. Envy, money and power can be perverse things.
  • The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
  • Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne. Probably my favorite adventure. Magical and real at once, and I love those underwater walking scenes.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

  • A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin. Some of the best world-building I've ever read.
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
  • Dune, Frank Herbert
  • Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury. The irony: firemen burn the books and people want them burned. We'll censor ourselves.
  • Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, Edwin A. Abbott. A mental puzzle that lets you picture other dimensions, which is almost impossible without it.
  • I, Robot, Isaac Asimov. Give a machine rules in a complex world and you always get unintended consequences.
  • Ready Player One, Ernest Cline. Pure, dripping 80s and 90s nostalgia. The best of it I've ever read.
  • Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein. Where the word grok comes from. Now everyone uses it.
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams. Light, goofy fun, plus the lesson of 42: if you don't ask the right question, the answer is useless.
  • The Lord of the Rings (Trilogy), J.R.R. Tolkien. My favorite. Classic good and evil, spirituality, and light overcoming dark.
  • The Time Machine, H.G. Wells. Upper class and underclass. Which side of power you're positioned on decides what it does to you.

Kids & Young Adult

  • A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle. My first taste of space travel and sci-fi, folding through different dimensions.
  • Hatchet, Gary Paulsen. I brought a hatchet on every camping trip as a kid because of this book.
  • James and the Giant Peach, Roald Dahl. I can still picture James grabbing giant handfuls of peach. The most vivid kids' writing I remember.
  • The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery, Graeme Base. An all-time kid favorite. My first puzzle book, flipping back through pictures to find what's hidden.
  • Tuck Everlasting, Natalie Babbitt. The first time I thought about mortality, and immortality, as a kid.

The wall

  • Mike Tyson: Indomitable spirit. Pure force of will can overcome almost anything.
  • Marcus Aurelius: He ruled the world and dealt with the same problems as any man, and stayed level-headed through all of it.
  • Albert Einstein: Beautifully simple thinking. E=mc² is famous for how much it explains, but even more for how simple it is.
  • Teddy Roosevelt: One of the greatest American adventurers. He set an impossibly high bar for one lifetime.
  • Frank Sinatra: He did things his way and made the world his own. Larger than life.
  • P.T. Barnum: Outside-the-box marketing. He did what no one would expect.

The redwood

The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. ... From them comes silence and awe. It's not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time. ... The vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect.

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley (1962)

Card catalog

302 books on the log.

  • A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
  • The Lord of the Rings (trilogy), J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Cosmos, Carl Sagan
  • Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
  • Dune, Frank Herbert
  • A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson
  • Unveiling the Edge of Time, John Gribbin
  • Dracula, Bram Stoker
  • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
  • Ready Player One, Ernest Cline
  • A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire #1), George R.R. Martin
  • Hell & Gone, Duane Swierczynski
  • A Clash of Kings (#2), George R.R. Martin
  • 1984, George Orwell
  • How to Make Money in Stocks, William J. O'Neil
  • Market Wizards, Jack D. Schwager
  • The Bible of Options Strategies, Guy Cohen
  • Winning on Wall Street, Martin Zweig
  • Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
  • 24 Essential Lessons for Investment Success, William J. O'Neil
  • Emotional Branding, Marc Gobé
  • The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort
  • A Storm of Swords (#3), George R.R. Martin
  • The 5 Love Languages, Gary Chapman
  • The Untethered Soul, Michael A. Singer
  • Encyclopedia of Chart Patterns, Thomas N. Bulkowski
  • The Success Principles, Jack Canfield
  • How to Trade in Stocks, Jesse Livermore
  • Get the Edge, Anthony Robbins
  • The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle
  • Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
  • David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell
  • The Richest Man in Babylon, George S. Clason
  • Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill
  • Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Edwin Lefèvre
  • Elliott Wave Principle, A.J. Frost & Robert Prechter
  • The Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff
  • The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
  • A Dance with Dragons (#5), George R.R. Martin
  • Sport Psychology: Concepts and Applications, Richard H. Cox
  • The Edge: 50 Tips from Brands That Lead, Allen Adamson
  • Adventures Beyond the Body, William Buhlman
  • The Charge, Brendon Burchard
  • Contagious, Jonah Berger
  • Way of the Heart,
  • The River of Doubt, Candice Millard
  • The Art of the Sale, Philip Delves Broughton
  • Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
  • Good to Great, Jim Collins
  • The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
  • The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells
  • Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild, Lee Sandlin
  • Killing Lincoln, Bill O'Reilly & Martin Dugard
  • Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl
  • The Millionaire Next Door, Thomas J. Stanley & William D. Danko
  • Journey to the Center of the Earth, Jules Verne
  • Eleven Rings, Phil Jackson
  • The Casual Vacancy, J.K. Rowling
  • Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda
  • Genghis: Birth of an Empire, Conn Iggulden
  • Genghis: Lords of the Bow, Conn Iggulden
  • Genghis: Bones of the Hills, Conn Iggulden
  • Tarzan of the Apes, Edgar Rice Burroughs
  • A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle
  • Saltwater Buddha, Jaimal Yogis
  • Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer
  • The Republic of Pirates, Colin Woodard
  • Pirate Latitudes, Michael Crichton
  • Seven Years in Tibet, Heinrich Harrer
  • Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand
  • Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
  • Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
  • ZOR: Philosophy, Spirituality, and Science, J.B.
  • Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, Alfred Lansing
  • The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
  • Birds of Prey, Wilbur Smith
  • Dharma Punx, Noah Levine
  • Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Emperor: The Gates of Rome, Conn Iggulden
  • From Dairy Farmer to Forex Trader, Andrew Mitchem
  • Emperor: The Death of Kings, Conn Iggulden
  • Emperor: The Field of Swords, Conn Iggulden
  • Guitar Ninja,
  • Emperor: The Gods of War, Conn Iggulden
  • The Elements of Eloquence, Mark Forsyth
  • Blind Man's Bluff, Sherry Sontag & Christopher Drew
  • Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, Paul Reps
  • Black Hawk Down, Mark Bowden
  • Genghis: Empire of Silver, Conn Iggulden
  • Divergent, Veronica Roth
  • Insurgent, Veronica Roth
  • Allegiant, Veronica Roth
  • Think Like a Freak, Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
  • Conqueror (Kublai Khan), Conn Iggulden
  • The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams
  • The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg
  • Emperor: The Blood of Gods, Conn Iggulden
  • Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach
  • Half Empty, David Rakoff
  • Get All Your Relationships Right,
  • Ghost Soldiers, Hampton Sides
  • Job: A Comedy of Justice, Robert A. Heinlein
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
  • Trump: The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump & Tony Schwartz
  • The Last Kingdom (Saxon Stories #1), Bernard Cornwell
  • Anastasia (Ringing Cedars #1), Vladimir Megré
  • Dear Girls Above Me, Charlie McDowell
  • Content Rules, Ann Handley & C.C. Chapman
  • No B.S. Guide to Brand-Building by Direct Response, Dan S. Kennedy
  • The Pale Horseman (Saxon Stories #2), Bernard Cornwell
  • The Ringing Cedars of Russia (Ringing Cedars #2), Vladimir Megré
  • The Space of Love (Ringing Cedars #3), Vladimir Megré
  • I, Robot, Isaac Asimov
  • A Good Talk, Daniel Menaker
  • Rigged, Ben Mezrich
  • The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
  • The Naked Sun, Isaac Asimov
  • Online Marketing Superstars, Mitch Meyerson
  • No B.S. Business Success, Dan S. Kennedy
  • The Robots of Dawn, Isaac Asimov
  • The Brower Quadrant, Lee Brower
  • Guerrilla Marketing, Jay Conrad Levinson
  • No B.S. Marketing to the Affluent, Dan S. Kennedy
  • No B.S. Pricing Strategy, Dan S. Kennedy
  • Hypnotic Writing, Joe Vitale
  • Pour Your Heart Into It, Howard Schultz
  • There's a Customer Born Every Minute, Joe Vitale
  • Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely
  • Celebrity Branding You, Nick Nanton & JW Dicks
  • Launch, Jeff Walker
  • Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Shunryu Suzuki
  • Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
  • The Adweek Copywriting Handbook, Joseph Sugarman
  • How to Be a Billionaire, Martin Fridson
  • The Slight Edge, Jeff Olson
  • The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge
  • The Greatest Salesman in the World, Og Mandino
  • The Greatest Miracle in the World, Og Mandino
  • The Inner Game of Music, Barry Green
  • The Copywriter's Handbook, Robert W. Bly
  • The 4-Hour Workweek, Timothy Ferriss
  • Practical Business Wisdom & Magic, Pat O'Bryan
  • The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi
  • Money From Anywhere, Pat O'Bryan
  • The E-Myth Revisited, Michael E. Gerber
  • Make Millions with Your Ideas, Dan S. Kennedy
  • The Magic of Thinking Big, David J. Schwartz
  • The 4-Hour Body, Timothy Ferriss
  • Atomic Dog: The Testosterone Principles, T.C. Luoma
  • The Man Who Sold the Moon, Robert A. Heinlein
  • The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
  • The Spirit of Zen, Alan Watts
  • The Surrender Experiment, Michael A. Singer
  • Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • Six Easy Pieces, Richard P. Feynman
  • Tribe, Sebastian Junger
  • Thinkertoys, Michael Michalko
  • MCDP 1: Warfighting, U.S. Marine Corps
  • MCDP 2: Intelligence, U.S. Marine Corps
  • MCDP 3: Expeditionary Operations, U.S. Marine Corps
  • MCDP 4: Logistics, U.S. Marine Corps
  • MCDP 5: Planning, U.S. Marine Corps
  • MCDP 6: Command and Control, U.S. Marine Corps
  • On the Road, Jack Kerouac
  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer & Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (complete edition), Mark Twain
  • To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
  • The Light in the Forest, Conrad Richter
  • The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells
  • Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
  • Journal of a Trapper, Osborne Russell
  • The Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi
  • Vagabonding, Rolf Potts
  • Say Yes to Your Potential, Skip Ross
  • The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster
  • Hatchet, Gary Paulsen
  • The Secret of the Indian, Lynne Reid Banks
  • Einstein's Cosmos, Michio Kaku
  • Wicked, Gregory Maguire
  • The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery, Graeme Base
  • $100M Money Models, Alex Hormozi
  • $100M Offers, Alex Hormozi
  • $100M Leads, Alex Hormozi
  • The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee, James Freeman, Caitlin Freeman & Tara Duggan
  • The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger, Stephen King
  • The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three, Stephen King
  • The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands, Stephen King
  • The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, Al Ries & Laura Ries
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig
  • Purple Cow, Seth Godin
  • The Indian in the Cupboard, Lynne Reid Banks
  • James and the Giant Peach, Roald Dahl
  • The Accelerating Universe, Mario Livio
  • Made to Stick, Chip Heath & Dan Heath
  • Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
  • The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • The Greatest Secret in the World, Og Mandino
  • The Door in the Wall, Marguerite de Angeli
  • The Black Pearl, Scott O'Dell
  • Kon-Tiki, Thor Heyerdahl
  • Lord of the Flies, William Golding
  • The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin
  • Existentialist Philosophy: An Introduction, L. Nathan Oaklander
  • A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia Nasar
  • The Art of Living, Epictetus
  • Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell
  • What the Dog Saw, Malcolm Gladwell
  • Tuck Everlasting, Natalie Babbitt
  • A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle
  • On Writing Well, William Zinsser
  • Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
  • Have Space Suit—Will Travel, Robert A. Heinlein
  • What It Takes, Stephen A. Schwarzman
  • Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir
  • Your Next Five Moves, Patrick Bet-David
  • Competitive Strategy, Michael E. Porter
  • Buy Back Your Time, Dan Martell
  • The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
  • Shōgun, James Clavell
  • Traction, Gino Wickman
  • Feel-Good Productivity, Ali Abdaal
  • Gap Selling, Jim Keenan
  • Way of the Wolf, Jordan Belfort
  • Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Eliezer Yudkowsky
  • The Bezos Letters, Steve Anderson
  • Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, Edwin A. Abbott
  • Building a Second Brain, Tiago Forte
  • Deep Work, Cal Newport
  • The Lean Startup, Eric Ries
  • Never Lose a Customer Again, Joey Coleman
  • Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
  • The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein
  • Getting Things Done, David Allen
  • War God, Graham Hancock
  • Masters of Scale, Reid Hoffman
  • The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton M. Christensen
  • Profit First, Mike Michalowicz
  • The Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter
  • Home Service Millionaire, Tommy Mello
  • Built to Sell, John Warrillow
  • The Minimalist Entrepreneur, Sahil Lavingia
  • How to Get Rich, Felix Dennis
  • Zero to One, Peter Thiel with Blake Masters
  • The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley
  • Ernest Hemingway on Writing, ed. Larry W. Phillips
  • Tribe of Mentors, Timothy Ferriss
  • The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, Eric Jorgenson
  • The Art of Thinking Clearly, Rolf Dobelli
  • The 33 Strategies of War, Robert Greene
  • The 1-Page Marketing Plan, Allan Dib
  • Prosperity Consciousness, Fredric Lehrman
  • The Essential Drucker, Peter F. Drucker
  • The Effective Executive, Peter F. Drucker
  • The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch
  • The Art of Impossible (and Peak Performance Planner), Steven Kotler
  • How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie
  • Rework, Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson
  • Ready Player Two, Ernest Cline
  • Buy Then Build, Walker Deibel
  • Greenlights, Matthew McConaughey
  • Ben Hogan's Five Lessons, Ben Hogan
  • The Immortality Key, Brian C. Muraresku
  • Magicians of the Gods, Graham Hancock
  • The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell
  • The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Al Ries & Jack Trout
  • What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, Jim Paul & Brendan Moynihan
  • Folks, This Ain't Normal, Joel Salatin
  • The Obstacle Is the Way, Ryan Holiday
  • How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Scott Adams
  • Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert
  • Civilized to Death, Christopher Ryan
  • A Guide to the Good Life, William B. Irvine
  • Mastery, Robert Greene
  • Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell
  • Lifespan, David A. Sinclair
  • Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert B. Cialdini
  • The Law, Frédéric Bastiat
  • America Before, Graham Hancock
  • The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson
  • The ONE Thing, Gary Keller & Jay Papasan
  • This Is Marketing, Seth Godin
  • AI Superpowers, Kai-Fu Lee
  • Atomic Habits, James Clear
  • For a New Liberty, Murray N. Rothbard
  • Skin in the Game, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • The War of Art, Steven Pressfield
  • Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari
  • Own the Day, Own Your Life, Aubrey Marcus
  • HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy, Harvard Business Review
  • Awaken the Giant Within, Tony Robbins
  • The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene
  • The Art of War, Sun Tzu
  • The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey
  • A Feast for Crows (A Song of Ice and Fire #4), George R.R. Martin
  • The Log from the Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck
  • Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Mark Twain
  • The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
  • The Chronicles of Narnia (7 books), C.S. Lewis
  • Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss
  • Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck

My Goodreads favorites