Library
Twenty three books, what I kept from each, and what happened when I used it. Not reviews written to help anyone decide what to buy.
The 4 Hour Workweek
A permission slip dressed as a system: sharp on elimination and negotiation, thin on what to do with the freed time.
The Psychology of Money
The clearest book on financial behavior available, written almost entirely for someone who already has slack to save.
Poke the Box
A permission slip more than a method, and it never separates a start worth making from noise.
Zero to One
The best explanation of why venture funded technology chases monopoly, and a poor general theory of business despite the framing.
Getting Things Done
The best inbox in a book and the weakest on judgment: it files everything and ranks nothing.
Atomic Habits
A maintenance manual sold as a change manual, precise about everything except the moment of deciding to change.
Deep Work
Right about the mechanism and narrow about who it serves; it has little for anyone whose job is coordinating people.
How to Talk to Anyone
A phrasebook mistaken for a psychology; half the techniques work and the book never explains which half or why.
Mindwise
Superb at diagnosing why we misread other minds and unexpectedly short on remedies once the diagnosis is finished.
Presuasion
Rigorous and useful about attention, leaning hard on priming research the replication crisis has since made smaller.
Skin in the Game
Taleb is right about more than he has any right to be, buried in more contempt than the argument needs.
So Good They Can't Ignore You
A sharp corrective to follow your passion that assumes the market will pay fairly for the capital you build.
Steal Like An Artist
A permission slip, not a method: worth hearing once, with nothing to say about the day after permission.
The Art of Profitability
Twenty three profit models delivered as a parable, and the parable is scaffolding a spreadsheet could have replaced.
The Courage to be Disliked
A therapy session staged as dialogue that oversells its own certainty: every problem interpersonal, every feeling chosen.
The E Myth Revisited
Right about one distinction, the technician manager entrepreneur split, and padded around it for two hundred pages.
The Personal MBA
A glossary dressed as a course: it teaches vocabulary for judgment rather than judgment itself.
The Practice
True in each sentence and resistant to being organized into a method, with reading a real risk of replacing practice.
The Ultimate Sales Machine
Sound systems for repeatable process, written for a buyer who still takes unsolicited calls and has mostly stopped existing.
The War of Art
A pep talk with real teeth that treats every stalled project as a failure of nerve.
This is Marketing
A manifesto for anyone who already has a hundred people who would miss them, weak for anyone hunting the first ten.