Books I really like.

Some tips first

1. The best books are supposed to pull you in. When you read them you will be so engrossed you won't want to stop reading. And then there will be some books that you have to get through and are not pulled towards. These are very very difficult to finish. Always always prioritise the first kind. The second, do only for books that are incredibly incredibly important. Curiosity is key.
2. Install Shortform and pay for it. Instead of 20 hour books it gives you 1 hour versions of the best ideas in those books. Use it in audio form. This will help you get a breadth of knowledge that would be very difficult otherwise.
3. It is worth it to think about how to increase your reading speed. If you focus on it a bit, you may be able to 2x the speed at which you read blogs.
4. Use AI copiously. Ask it doubts, questions, more about the dynamics of different things, facts not in the book. Your goal is to make an accurate mental model of the world. The best mental models help you understand things about the world that the book doesn't mention.
5. Take notes as you read, in Notion or Obsidian. Do not write down everything. Only write down ideas and epiphanies so important that you want to remember them forever. Writing it down almost cements it in your brain. Log all your thoughts and make a second brain: Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte is a great book on this.
6. Invest in audiobooks. It is very very important, and it will greatly increase the throughput of books you consume. You can't read while you travel or at the gym, because your eyes are needed to navigate the world. But as you navigate the world, your ears can be used for audiobooks.

Mental models

• The Almanack of Naval Ravikant - this will teach you judgement: how to make good decisions in life. One of the most important books I have ever read. Also quite short.
• Poor Charlie's Almanack - Charlie Munger (Berkshire Hathaway co-founder) wrote this. One of the wisest people I know, excellent book on judgement.
• Nassim Taleb's works - Black Swan, Antifragile, Skin in the Game.
• Ben Kuhn's blogs - Searching for outliers taught me how to look for a life partner, and how to look for the best business ideas. Also Staring into the abyss as a core life skill and Be impatient.
• Sam Altman's blogs - especially How To Be Successful. Also Researchers and Founders, on what the best people across research and founding have in common, and What I Wish Someone Had Told Me.
• Paul Graham - Richard Hamming's You and Your Research, which he hosts, and Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas.
• The Beginning of Infinity - an incredible book. It taught me a lot of what I know about critical thinking, and a lot about epistemology: why we need progress, how we actually get it, and how the universe works. It also taught me some cool alternate quantum physics theories, and how to think about whether something is objective or not.
• The LessWrong sequences - this will teach you to think in likelihoods. Nothing will make you better at navigating the world than thinking in likelihoods. It will also teach you critical thinking. It's a long one, may take a full day to crunch: lesswrong.com/highlights

Habits

• Atomic Habits - may not be the easiest read but extremely important. Read the full book, do not read this one on Shortform. I have learnt this the hard way: you can almost never get better at anything unless you create conditions where your natural state and nature give the outcomes you want. I cannot get better at dealing with loneliness or startup stress, I can only change my environment so I naturally thrive in the conditions I am in every day.

Psychology & persuasion

• How to Win Friends and Influence People
• Influence by Robert Cialdini
• Never Split the Difference - an incredible book on persuasion and negotiating.
• Aquarium by Viktor Suvorov - on GRU espionage: how they recruit people, how they infiltrate networks, and the lengths intelligence agencies will go to. A very interesting read into human psychology.
• The Prince by Machiavelli - a great book on psychology and human nature.

Economics & governance

• Lee Kuan Yew - read about him. He turned Singapore from a poor country into one of the world's richest, and all of it is creating the right incentives and systems.
• The New China Playbook - a very detailed look into exactly how China grows so fast, and how upstream policy changes affect everything downstream. A heavy read but it will teach you much of economics and how policy changes the world.
• The Art of Strategy - a great simple game theory book.

Futurist

• Situational Awareness by Leopold Aschenbrenner - you will learn more about the world of AI we will soon go into. It's much more drastic than you currently think. He has been shockingly accurate about this stuff until now, and he made one of the most successful hedge funds in the world by investing based on the things he wrote here.
• The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil - gave me a lot of really good insight into what the future holds.
• Life 3.0 - a great book. It talks about humanity a thousand years in the future, a million years in the future, and a billion years in the future, and breaks down the limits of the universe using cosmology. It talks about eight different ways the future of humans and AI could go, and equally, a few pits it could fall into. It's very thought-provoking.

Art

• The Creative Act by Rick Rubin - an incredible book. It taught me how to be an artist: how to let my mind sit in the optimally fluid state, how to come up with good art, how to be in the right headspace. It frames the whole thing as a beautiful process where you're engaging with the ethereal, drawing strength from different places, being divinely inspired. It's just a way of thinking which is really good.

Biographies

These I personally find incredibly incredibly interesting. You get to live their lives and see the mistakes they made.

• Founders podcast by David Senra - biographies of the most successful people in the world, the wisest, smartest people. I've been listening to it for a long time now, and still do.
• The Mind of Napoleon - taught me a lot about institutions, policy, motivating yourself, love, courage, and the mindset it takes. Taught me greatly about the mindset of a war general: how to be decisive, how to act very fast, how much of an advantage speed gives you, how to win battles when you're outnumbered, how to run the calculations accurately in your own head. A good way to think about this book is as if Elon actually wrote one himself, on the exact way he thinks and operates, and how to make your own limbic system do it too. I would highly, highly recommend reading this. It changed my life in multiple different ways.
• Titan by Ron Chernow - on Rockefeller.
• Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins - a very good look into how far the human body can be pushed, and how much you can trust it to take. I realised my own limits were much, much higher than I thought they were.
• The Man from the Future - on von Neumann. I also read the neuroscience book he wrote, The Computer and the Brain. A very interesting read: it showed me how someone who was nowhere near this era of technology, but was hyper-intelligent, thought about building machines that emulate the brain. So interesting now that we're this close to it.
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin - incredible inventor and politician, played a big role in America's independence. One of the only really prominent and successful people who isn't a complete asshole, and one of the only leaders who was also kind and charismatic.
• Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson - taught me more about taste, getting in touch with my intuition, and becoming an artist than anything else.
• Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson - a must if you want to learn how to build a startup that changes the world.
• The Optimist (on Sam Altman) - shows how you get the world's smartest people together, and how the AI revolution began.

Life

• Bhagavad Gita - this helped me come up with the operating principle for my life, and it may really help you understand what life is all about. It teaches you how to separate the actions you do from your ego, how to dissolve your sense of self, and how to know that you are one with the universe. It shows you how you are a conduit through which you can do service towards the universe. It has given me a lot of peace.
• Ashtavakra Gita - talks about the stages you will go through to get enlightened. I expect the last 20 years of my life to be spent meditating and reaching enlightenment this way, maybe from 175 or so onwards. It would be kind of cool.

Some additional books I'd recommend

• The Art of War - the first book I read on war strategy. It showed me how much inherent advantages matter when you're trying to achieve something, and that you can't just declare you're better than everyone else and expect to win where they failed. There have to be structural reasons why, because most humans have the same capability in a lot of ways: the conditions have to actually be different, or you have to deliberately make them different. It also showed me how to think rationally in high stakes situations, and that your common sense and your gut are worth trusting there.
• Traction - for go-to-market. It walks through every distribution channel and how to be methodical about finding the one that works best for you. It made me feel like I'd closed the loop on being a founder: I knew how to build product, and now I at least know the lay of the land on distribution.
• Founding Sales - closed the loop on B2B sales for me.
• Dealers of Lightning - a very, very good read. It shows you the kind of culture you want inside a company for incredible innovation.
• The Everything Store - a very interesting look into how Jeff Bezos and Amazon work. One of the biggest companies in the world, so it's cool to see the inside of it.
• Superforecasting - how to make very accurate predictions about the future, and how to update your priors.
• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari - really cool.
• A Brief History of Time - a very interesting read. Taught me a lot about how the universe works, cosmology and physics.
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

How I split my information diet

Books are only one part of it. The rest is habit stacks:

• Twitter in the morning - I compulsorily use Twitter every morning. It's incredible for the latest things happening in the world.
• Podcasts - podcasts are the best way to get the latest domain expertise across every field in today's world, and to see the trends of where things are going. Brad Jacobs built 8 unicorns, and his big skill was staying up to date on all the latest trends: he copiously read the journals, newspapers and publications of his day, caught trends before anyone else, and exploited them. Podcasts today are exactly that.
• Speaking to LLMs - every time even a small thought gets sparked, I ask. Every time I read or see something that mildly catches my imagination, I go down the rabbit hole with an LLM. This has been a big chunk of my most recent learning.
• Deep research reports - I meditate on a thing with the LLM and then have it compile a deep research report. One of the most recent ones: I didn't want to read a whole book on each of them, so I had it compile the best campaigns of Caesar, Alexander and Frederick the Great, just so I could read them quickly.