Books
Books I want to be able to return to.
- A Brief History of Time Hawking explains spacetime, expansion, and singularities without demanding graduate math — while stressing that theories are provisional maps, not ultimate answers.
- Atomic Habits A field guide to habit design: shape identity, cues, friction, and feedback so the better action becomes easier to repeat.
- Awaken the Giant Within Change is not insight alone — it is physiology, focus, and language aligned with a decision you repeat until it becomes identity.
- Candide A picaresque demolition of “all is for the best” in a world of disaster and hypocrisy. The famous close shifts from metaphysics to modest productive work among a small community.
- Deep Work Professional success today rewards the ability to learn hard things fast — that learning happens in uninterrupted concentration, not in inbox zero.
- Everything is Figureoutable The thesis is practical optimism: most limits are negotiable with persistence, creativity, and ruthless prioritization. “Figureoutable” is a behaviour — try small, learn, adjust — not a mantra.
- Getting Things Done Your brain is for having ideas, not holding them. When every commitment has a trusted place and a next action, stress drops because the system, not your memory, owns the open loops.
- Greenlights A memoir-as-manual: scrape ego, notice when the universe is offering a lane change, and own the edit of your own story — not as slogans, as lived consequences.
- How to Win Friends and Influence People The book is a catalogue of behaviours that reduce social friction: remember names, listen without interrupting, admit error first, let the other person save face. Influence follows rapport, not rhetoric.
- Man’s Search for Meaning Frankl’s witness account grounds his clinical idea: suffering is not a contest, but attitude toward suffering can be chosen. Meaning arrives through work, love, or courage in hardship — not as a slogan, as practice.
- Meditations Private notes from a Roman emperor — not a system for followers but a practice: examine impressions, act with justice, accept what you cannot change, and keep death in view without morbidity.
- Never Split the Difference Negotiation is not a battle of arguments — it is a search for information and influence under pressure. Label emotions, ask how-based questions, and trade things that cost you little for things that matter.
- Scientific Advertising Advertising is distribution of information at scale. Hopkins’s method: one clear promise, a reason to believe, a specific offer, and a way to measure what worked — coupon codes, split runs, humility about guesses.
- Shoe Dog A memoir of endurance: importing, rebranding, and almost failing repeatedly. The lesson is not genius strategy on day one — it is stamina, relationships, and fixing the next bottleneck.
- Superlife Olien frames vitality as stacking fundamentals — nutrient density, sleep, stress hygiene, and environment — rather than chasing hacks. Small repeatable upgrades beat heroic unsustainable sprints.
- The 4-Hour Workweek The book is a wedge against busywork: define outcomes, kill low-yield obligations, batch communication, and buy back time with systems — not with guilt.
- The Almanack of Naval Ravikant Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Status games are a trap; leverage and specific knowledge are the real game — if you can stomach accountability.
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin Franklin’s memoir is a playbook for apprenticeship, networks, and incremental virtue — not perfection. Public projects (library, fire brigade, postal routes) compound trust and leverage.
- The Choice: Embrace the Possible Eger pairs memoir with therapy: freedom expands when you stop confusing the past with the present, and when you replace victimhood narratives with accountable, compassionate action — without pretending pain is trivial.
- The Miracle Morning The bet is simple: front-load identity and energy before reactive work. Savers (Silence, Affirmations, Visualization, Exercise, Reading, Scribing) are modular — start tiny, stack when stable.
- The Psychology of Money Wealth is what you don’t see — cars not bought, upgrades deferred, and the room you leave for dumb luck. Financial success is mostly behaviour, then math.
- The Richest Man in Babylon Simple laws: save before you spend, invest in what you understand, seek counsel from those with results, and avoid confusing appetite with opportunity.
- The Time Machine The Traveller leaps toward entropy and human descendants split into Eloi and Morlocks — a dark mirror on comfort, exploitation, and the long arc of civilization.
- Think and Grow Rich Wealth follows clarity of aim plus persistence through failure. Hill’s through-line is psychological: belief, organized knowledge, and a council of minds aligned to one outcome.