A concise history book full of unique observations and wisdom. After writing their 11 volume series The Story of Civilization documenting the entire history of the West, Will & Ariel Durant organized their meta-observations and reflections into this short 100 page book.

It highlights what history teaches us about biology, morals, character, religion, economics, government, war, and more. By turning to the past, it also reveals many of the unintuitive empirical truths about human nature & civilization.

Beyond their insights on history, they also offer a beautiful perspective on what it means to be a historian, what history has to offer us, and what progress means for humanity.

The bible of starting a massive technology company. Anyone interested in startups needs to read this.

The first principles on (1) what to work on (2) how to work on it to create massive value and (3) how to capture part of the value to build a valuable company.

Wow. Being surrounded by Elon's life is incredible. Isaacson does an excellent job highlighting the right stories to provide a full picture of Elon and let you draw your own conclusions.

Elon is exceptionally agentic. He has a strong belief in his ability to turn ideas from imagination into reality. He is aggressively first-principled and focused on product and engineering over everything else. He constantly gravitates toward risk and takes dangerous, often costly bets.

On the other hand, Elon is also deeply flawed, mercurial, and immature. He frequently has manic outbursts and his personal life is full of drama.

Isaacson implies that Elon's flaws are necessary for his success. Instead, I see his success as an affirmation that you can achieve incredible results with a wide variety of dispositions and despite massive personal faults, as long as you possess a few essential qualities.

The defining work on the principles and pscyhology of achievement. This book is famous, but still underrated. It isn't about becoming rich - it's about achieving anything you desire. The philosophy can be applied to building wealth and everything else worthwhile.

It guides you through the thirteen steps to achievement, starting with creating a burning desire for a well-defined future. Each one is an insightful and unintuitive lesson demanding reflection.

Everyone should read and reference this book as many times as necessary for its principles to be fully adopted and applied - they're that critical to success.

If you feel like you're drifting through life without direction, spending your time working toward the dreams of others without your own dream, and you don't want to remain that way, you especially have to read this.

I went into the book expecting another iteration of self-help or life advice books, but ended up really liking it. The author organizes all of Naval's online advice into a nice structure around achieving happiness and financial freedom in life.

Very high readability, like reading through a series of tweet storms for the entire book, and great boiled down insights on time allocation, what to optimize for, how to be happy, and more.

The definitive handbook on being a genuine, likeable, influential, and positive-sum person with many practical tips and anecdotes.

It would be great if everyone operated with this philosophy.

This book is the conceptual opposite of The 48 Laws of Power.

Claude Hopkins reflects on his lifetime of advertising experience and distills the principles of advertising that he has learned from it.

He builds everything from the idea that advertising should be treated the same as in-person on-on-one sales. He focuses on understanding the needs of the common man and catering to them. His advertising approach emphasizes simplicity and working with human psychology over untargeted attention seeking and embellishment.

David Ogilvy, the "Father of Advertising," famously said "nobody should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times."

Learning from Hopkins' career in My Life in Advertising felt like building intuitions directly from life experience. This also helped to integrate ideas in Scientific Advertising with more references.

A short and highly readable book about how to hone your craft as an artist. Similar to "How to Do Good Work" by Paul Graham, but with more targeted advice and a more creative format.

Good insights on the importance of taking inspiration from other places, curating your taste, staying creative & consistent, and sharing your work with the world.

A creative non-traditional history book about humanity that explores how stories have our species.

The core concept is that religions, businesses, language and much more are all shared myths. This lens casts a more high-clarity perspective on the world.

A compilation of Charlie Munger's best speeches. He focuses on the importance of building multi-disciplinary knowledge and understanding "the big ideas from the big disciplines.

Excellent essays on the psychology of human misjudgement, the surprisingly destructive nature of bad practice in corporate accounting, and using the first principles of psychology to design a plan for a $2T business.

His speeches often don't translate well to writing; the transcribed format misses out on delivery and audience reactions, and the pacing and concision are suboptimal for a book.

Many of the topics lacked broad relevance. Rather than presenting a full picture of Munger's thinking, this book felt like a small slice of some of his ideas with lots of repetition across chapters.

The history of our universe, but with too much unmotivated technical detail and not enough context.

I love technical details when they're explained well, but Hawking often dives into details without ever framing them with why they're relevant.

The readability wasn't great either - I was hoping for a narrative about the history of the universes creation with technical details to fill in the gaps, but instead it was several losely strung together technical details without any broader narrative.

My rating here is an unpopular opinion, given that Feynman is one of the best physics teachers of all time, and this series is typically considered excellent.

I think I expected more perspective-shifting insight on how to intuitively understand different principles of physics in unique ways, which I found at times, but there was also a substantial amount repetition from standard high-school physics, with similar pedagogical approaches.

My rating is mainly motivated by my expectation of more unique insight characteristic of Feynman, which I didn't find much of in this book. Still a good explanation of the relevant physics.