As the world is going through an abundance of content, my challenge has been more and more to curate my information diet to serve my goals in life better.
Throughout the past few years I have read a ton of books, these are the ones that come top of mind when people ask me for recommendations. I like them because each one, in its own small way, has helped me to become the person I am today. I know those books are good because I have re-read some of them, or would love to do that again. Enjoy.
Zero to One — Peter Thiel
The most important question a founder can ask, according to Thiel, is one nobody around them wants to hear: what do you believe that almost nobody else agrees with?
The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Ben Horowitz
The only startup book that tells you what it actually feels like when everything is falling apart — not how to prevent it, but how to survive it.
Build — Tony Fadell
The guy who built the iPod, the iPhone, and Nest tells you everything he knows — the central thesis being that if you're not solving a real problem real people have, no amount of engineering genius will save you.
The Mom Test — Rob Fitzpatrick
Teaches you how to talk to potential customers without them lying to you — not because they're dishonest, but because people naturally try to be nice and tell you what you want to hear.
Shoe Dog — Phil Knight
Nike nearly collapsed a dozen times, and Phil Knight doesn't package that into lessons — he just tells you what happened, which is rarer and more useful than any framework.
Endurance — Alfred Lansing
Shackleton's ship gets trapped in Antarctic ice, his entire crew is stranded for nearly two years with no rescue coming, and nobody dies — a masterclass in what leadership looks like under conditions of genuine, prolonged crisis.
Antifragile — Nassim Taleb
Some things break under stress, some things survive it, and some things get stronger because of it — founders who understand the difference set themselves up completely differently.
Skin in the Game — Nassim Taleb
The people most worth listening to are the ones who have personally bet on their beliefs, and everyone else is just talking.
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant — Eric Jorgenson
A compiled philosophy on wealth, leverage, and living deliberately — it's free online, I have read it eight times, and still return to it.
The Rational Optimist — Matt Ridley
The case that human exchange and specialization have made the world relentlessly better across almost every measurable dimension — the philosophical backbone for why solving hard problems is not naive idealism but the most reliable mechanism for progress we've ever found.
The WEIRDest People in the World — Joseph Henrich
A Harvard anthropologist explains why Western people are psychologically strange compared to virtually everyone who has ever lived, and in doing so puts the entire entrepreneurial impulse in a context most founders have never considered.
Atlas Shrugged — Ayn Rand
It's 1,200 pages and most people don't finish it, but the good news is that you don't have to — just a few chapters in, if you are among the rare few who want to build something genuinely valuable for the world, your worldview will change, because it makes a serious case for the moral legitimacy of ambition and the role of the individual in collective progress.