Too busy to read?

Charles Atlas's "Dynamic Tension" program was to bodybuilding: a common-sense, practical program

Naval Ravikant (here) regularly credits Scott's short blog post "The Day You Became a Better Writer" for improving his writing.

Kanban Change Leadership: Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement.

In his brilliant book The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz explains how setting rules in advance can free us from the constant barrage of willpower-depleting choices that make a real difference in our lives.

David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity. It's a remarkable argument for the power of knowledge--as not just a human capability but as a force that shapes the universe.

(Alain de Botton's The Course of Love and Sam Harris's Waking Up are both excellent attempts to provide just that.)

The Gary Halbert Letter (also The Boron Letters) and Ogilvy on Advertising.

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.

Reid recommends studying Ludwig Wittgenstein, about whom he's taught a course at Oxford.

Think and Grow Rich, Who Moved My Cheese?, Blue Ocean Strategy, Invisible Selling Machine, The Richest Man in Babylon, and Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.

The War of Art and The Art of Possibility.

Churchill to write his final set of memoirs, The Second World War,

Linda Kaplan-Thaler's The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness and The Power of Small:

The Tao of Power by Lao Tzu [a translation of the Tao Te Ching by R. L. Wing] helped me see the relationship between "enough," health, and wealth. It sent me on a 30-year journey to find enough food, exercise, and rest; to learn how to live between too much and too little to create a youthful and happier existence.

Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan.

Mind Gym by Gary Mack is a book that strips down the esoteric nature of applied sport psychology. Gary introduces a variety of mindset training principles and makes them extremely easy to understand and practice.

I read Mental Toughness Training for Sports in a bunk bed, and it changed my life.

The book I've gifted most is Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao Te Ching: ancient Taoist wisdom applicable to anything. It can be read at different times in your

frequently give the book A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. I'm not a visual person, but this book taught me to see the world around me in an entirely new way. It's a brilliant way of analyzing experience and information. It's haunting.

Jon Kabat-Zinn's Wherever You Go, There You Are. It's a wonderful book from 1994. The beauty of it is that it can spark the desire in a nonmeditator to take up the practice. [At the same time] you could be a lifelong meditator, read it, and still learn a tremendous amount. Thinking about it now inspires me to read it again.

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I think it is the most prophetic book of the 20th century, and the most profound discussion of happiness in modern Western philosophy. It had a deep impact on my thinking about politics and happiness. And since, for me, the relationship between power and happiness is the most important question in history, Brave New World has also reshaped my understanding of history.

The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker (here). Most news is about things that are going wrong. It can be discouraging and makes people feel powerless. This book takes a long view and shows the long-term decline in violence that has occurred.

I was persuaded to adopt a low-carb approach to eating when I read Gary Taubes' book Why We Get Fat.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application, which is available for free at gettingreal.37signals.com

(when reading The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker, one of my all-time favorite management books)

Propaganda by Edward Bernays,

The Whole Earth Catalog by Stewart Brand

10% Happier by Dan Harris made me totally rethink mindfulness and meditation.

If they're interested in running, I give them Born to Run by Christopher McDougall.

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond: This text helped rid me of the nagging incompleteness in my understood connection between the successes and failings of ancient and modern civilizations. Power needs tools and circumstance. Neither need be earned.

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand:

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, explains more about life (including human behavior and myself) than anything else I've read.

The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho.

Little Things Make All the Difference, and Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data

The books Superforecasting (by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner) and How to Measure Anything (by Douglas W. Hubbard) have some good advice on how to improve your ability to make accurate predictions.

Marie would always say that Hersey's Hiroshima was the best book on war she had ever read.

Damage by Default: the Flaw in Pensions Auto Enrolment,

For more on value stream mapping, see Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation by Karen Martin and Mike Osterling.

Humble and Farley, Continuous Delivery, Kindle edition, location 3868.)

Continuous Delivery

Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni.

Continuous Delivery.

Visible Ops Security.

Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability:

The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen.

Charles Duhigg's best-selling book The Power of Habit,

The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World by Sir Edward Shepherd Creasy,

Ad Herennium.

Bell in his book Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything.

Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World

The Power of Positive Thinking.

They Got It Wrong: History: All the Facts that Turned Out to Be Myths (Emma Marriott)

Win Your Case: How to Present, Persuade, and Prevail--Every Place, Every Time (Gerry Spence)

The Design of Everyday Things (Don Norman)

How to Write a Good Advertisement (Victor O. Schwab) The Secret of Selling Anything (Harry Browne)

The Smartest Investment Book You'll Ever Read,

James Kerr's book Legacy, about his time spent with the All Blacks, studying their culture: