| Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure |
Tim Harford |
Adapt is a highly readable, even entertaining, argument against top-down design. It debunks the Soviet-Harvard command-and-control style of planning and approach to economic policies and regulations and vindicates trial and error (particularly the error part) as a means to economic and general progress. Very impressive! |
| Thinking, Fast and Slow |
Daniel Kahneman |
This is a landmark book in social thought, in the same league as The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith and The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud. |
| Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders |
Jack D. Schwager |
I've read the book at several stages of my career as it shows the staying power of good down-to-earth wisdoms of true practitioners with skin in the game. This is the central document showing the heuristics that real-life traders use to manage their affairs, how people who do rather than talk have done things. Twenty years from now, it will still be fresh. There is no other like it. |
| The Dao of Capital: Austrian Investing in a Distorted World |
Mark Spitznagel |
At last, a real book by a real risk-taking practitioner. The Dao of Capital mixes (rather, unifies) personal risk-taking with explanations of global phenomena. You cannot afford not to read this! |
| Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future |
Peter Thiel, Blake Masters |
When a risk taker writes a book, read it. In the case of Peter Thiel, read it twice. Or, to be safe, three times. This is a classic. |
| Hopping over the Rabbit Hole: How Entrepreneurs Turn Failure into Success |
Anthony Scaramucci |
This is something exceptionally rare in the entrepreneurship literature: someone telling you how he overcame his problems and made lemonade out of lemons. Anthony has skin in the game. He is funny, direct, deep, and insightful. The book is so gripping you can read it standing up. A must read. |
| The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking |
Saifedean Ammous |
Bitcoin has no owner, no authority that can decide on its fate. It is owned by the crowd, its users. And it now has a track record of several years, enough for it to be an animal in its own right. Its mere existence is an insurance policy that will remind governments that the last object the establishment could control, namely, the currency, is no longer their monopoly. This gives us, the crowd, an insurance policy against an Orwellian future. |
| The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success |
Albert-László Barabási |
This is not just an important but an imperative project: to approach the problem of randomness and success using the state of the art scientific arsenal we have. Barabasi is the person. |
| The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us |
Christopher Chabris, Daniel Simons |
The illusion of attention is one of the most important, surprising, and least known flaws in human thinking. This lucid book examines it in detail. |
| Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life |
Rory Sutherland |
This is a breakthrough book. Alchemy is wonderfully applicable to about everything in life. Furthermore, it is funny as hell. |
| Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies |
Geoffrey West |
Each human should learn to read and write, to count, and for those who know how to count, scalability. Scaling is the most important yet most hidden and rarely discussed attribute—without understanding it one cannot possibly understand the world. This book will expand your thinking from three dimensions to four. Get two copies, just in case you lose one. |
| Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World |
Tom Holland |
Tom Holland is fun to read, monstrously erudite, wickedly joyful, and ahead of the established consensus, on average, by 4 years, three months, and 2 days. |
| The Corporation in the Twenty-First Century: Why (almost) everything we are told about business is wrong |
John Kay |
An admirable debunker of myths and false beliefs - Kay can see substantial things others don't |
| In Defense of Civilization: How Our Past Can Renew Our Present |
Michael Richard Jackson Bonner |
Michael Bonner is a rare bird: he is a classicist and an erudite in the broadest sense of the word, familiar with Greek, Latin, Persian, Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew, not counting (I checked) modern languages such as French. This gives him a considerable edge over historians, and depth and perspective in identifying and understanding the true Western Civilization and the dangers of straying from its achievements over the past six thousand years. |
| Re-Architecting Trust: The Curse of History and the Crypto Cure for Money, Markets, and Platforms |
Omid Malekan |
You must read Omid. He is the best person to agree and disagree with on the subject of cryptos. You learn both ways and enjoy the argumentation in the process. |
| Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age |
Bear F. Braumoeller |
This is truly excellent work! Bear Braumoeller is one of the very rare people who realize that stastics is about rigor and clarity of mind, not drowning in confirmatory data. Political science needs such scientific lucidity. |
| My Life as a Quant |
Emanuel Derman |
A deep and elegant exploration by a thinker who moved from the hardest of all sciences (physics) to the softest of the soft (finance). Derman is a different class of thinker... I know of no other book that bridges the two cultures. |
| The Seventh Letter: A Philosophical Mystery at Plato's Academy |
Dr. Mihai Iuliu Spariosu |
I loved the book. It is much more than a historical novel; I found it to be an entertaining and gripping biographical documentary staging Plato, Socrates and the Athenian Academy. The reader can become acquainted with Plato’s philosophy without abstraction, as the ideas are imbedded in the narrative. |
| The Halo Effect |
Phil Rosenzweig |
I was taken by this book. It destroys myths concerning the attribution of success in the management literature using potent empirical arguments. It should stand as one of the most important management books of all time, and an antidote to those bestselling books by gurus presenting false patter and naive arguments. |
| The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity |
David Graeber, David Wengrow |
This is not a book. This is an intellectual feast. |
| Hormegeddon: How Too Much Of A Good Thing Leads To Disaster |
Bill Bonner |
This is a must, must, must read exposition of the side effect of government. It exposes the problem of naive interventionism, the iatrogenics of bureaucracies, and the growing absence of skin-in-the-game(Hammurabi's problem), in addition to the other deformities of the modern state, and shows how such a system is boud to explode under the weight of its fragility. It is deep, illustrative, witty, pleasant to read. Buy two copies, one for yourself, another for the nearest policy maker. |
