Reading

What I return to, and why.

A working list, not a canon. Revised when something new earns a place.

Thinking & mental models

  • Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger, Peter Bevelin. The book that taught me to collect mental models deliberately. Re read every year.
  • Poor Charlie's Almanack, Charlie Munger. The single most useful operator's manual for multi-disciplinary thinking.
  • Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman. Two systems, a thousand ways to misjudge a decision. Required reading for anyone who quotes stats at you.
  • The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz. Informed my essay on why constraint is the product.
  • The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. How tail events shape portfolios, reputations, and the stories we tell about success.
  • The Art of War, Sun Tzu. Twenty-five centuries old and still the cleanest writing on asymmetric strategy ever produced. Short, sharp, worth re reading in one sitting.
  • The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene. A field guide to the dynamics every operator will encounter whether they like it or not. Read as description, not prescription.

Building & operating

  • High Output Management, Andy Grove. The operating bible. Still the clearest writing on managing people who manage people.
  • The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz. Honest about the parts nobody wants to write about.
  • Zero to One, Peter Thiel. The contrarian thinking primer. Shaped how I frame every venture decision.
  • Principles, Ray Dalio. Take or leave the economics, the operating philosophy stands alone.
  • The Richest Man in Babylon, George S. Clason. The fundamentals of wealth, dressed as parables. The simplest principles survive the longest, and these have.
  • Purple Cow, Seth Godin. A one idea book that became an industry. If your product is not remarkable, no marketing budget will save it.

Presence & self

  • The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle. Entrepreneurship asks you to live in the future. This book argues for occasionally living in the present. Both disciplines matter.
  • Psycho-Cybernetics, Maxwell Maltz. Your self image sets the ceiling on what you'll attempt. This is the book that taught me to raise the ceiling deliberately.
  • The Celestine Prophecy, James Redfield. Read it young, re read it older. A book about paying attention to the patterns you keep dismissing as coincidence.

Perception & memory

  • The Scent of Desire, Rachel Herz. The neuroscience behind why scent outperforms every other sense at memory.
  • The Emperor of Scent, Chandler Burr. A biography of fragrance science that reads like a thriller.
  • A Mind at Play, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman. Claude Shannon's biography. Information theory as elegance.

Place & the Caribbean

  • Omeros, Derek Walcott. The Caribbean epic. Required for anyone trying to build something lasting here.
  • The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James. How the Haitian Revolution rewrote what was possible for the region.
  • Island People, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. A modern atlas of the Caribbean told through people and place.
  • A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James. Jamaica through seven perspectives, none of them polite.

Essays I return to

  • Paul Graham's essays. Start with How to Do Great Work and Do Things That Don't Scale.
  • Derek Sivers. Hell Yeah or No is a whole philosophy in two words.
  • Patrick Collison's reading lists and questions page. A masterclass in intellectual curiosity made public.
  • Morgan Housel on finance and human behavior. The writing is almost too clean.
  • Nassim Taleb's Incerto series. Dense, necessary, occasionally insufferable, usually correct.
  • Tribe of Mentors, Tim Ferriss. A collection of answers to the same eleven questions from over a hundred operators. Great for a single evening of perspective.

If a book or essay has genuinely shaped how I operate, it's on this list. If it impressed me once but didn't survive a second pass, it isn't. I'd rather recommend ten books I stand behind than fifty I skimmed.