$100M Offers & $100M Leads , Alex Hormozi

The core of Hormozi is one idea: make an offer the person would be stupid to say no to. Everything else flows from the value equation, increase the dream outcome and perceived likelihood of achievement, decrease time delay and effort. The leads book taught me the content unit (hook, retain, reward) and that you should give away the secrets and sell the implementation. Zero fluff. The best advice I took: “switch ‘how to’ to ‘how I’ whenever possible.”

Good to Great , Jim Collins

Five-year study of 1,435 Fortune 500 companies. Only 11 made the leap from good to great. The findings that matter: Level 5 leaders are not high-profile personalities. They are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. “First who, then what”, get the right people on the bus before deciding where to drive it. Confront the brutal facts yet never lose faith. Technology accelerates transformation but doesn't cause it. Most companies fail not because they lack ambition, but because they lack discipline.

Paul Graham's Essays

The essays I keep returning to: How to Think for Yourself (be curious, don't be a follower), Schlep Blindness (the best startup ideas are often the tedious ones nobody wants to do), The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius (obsessive interest matters more than talent), and The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups. His key insight on startups: they are more like science than athletics. You need to follow the trail wherever it leads, not stick to a fixed vision. The formula for a good essay (importance + novelty + correctness + strength) is also a recipe for making people mad.

Sam Altman's Blog

Moore's Law for Everything is the piece I think about most, how AI will restructure what work means and why GDP growth needs to be distributed fairly. His startup advice is deceptively simple: fast learning to find product-market fit before scaling. Always customer value alongside tech initiatives. Evidence over opinions. His personal advice is even better: “If you can't figure out what kind of work you like, pay attention to what's easy to concentrate on and gives you energy vs. what makes you tune out and feel tired.”

Excellent Advice for Living , Kevin Kelly

Kelly distills decades of living into sentences that hit harder the older you get. Five ideas that stuck with me: family rituals compound (spend half the money but double the time with your kids), work should feel like play (“do more of what looks like work to others but is play for you”), learning requires humility (“a superpower worth cultivating is learning from people you don't like”), and happiness comes from wanting what you already have, not what others have. His line “don't be the best, be the only” is the closest thing to universal career advice I've found.

Naval Ravikant , various tweets, podcasts, essays

Naval's reading list shaped how I think more than any single book: Deutsch, Taleb, Szabo, Feynman, Popper, Girard. His curriculum (physics, mathematics, computers, microeconomics, game theory, persuasion) is what I wish school had been. The tweets I keep coming back to: “If identity feels threatened, then we are literally incapable of acknowledging facts.” And: “People think they can't change themselves, but they can. People think they can change others, but they can't.” Material progress doesn't make us happier. We compete for status, an older zero-sum game. We don't want things, we want to be things.

Nassim Taleb , Antifragile, The Black Swan

Taleb taught me to think about fragility rather than prediction. “If you are busy at work, odds are you will be replaced by a robot.” And: “To check if it is a fraud, don't investigate the merchant, look at the customers.” The broader lesson: build systems that gain from disorder rather than ones that break under it. Applies to business, health, relationships, everything.

The Diary of a CEO , Steven Bartlett

Bartlett's framework is a hierarchy: Self, Story, Philosophy, Team, Buckets, Knowledge, Skill, Network, Resources, Reputation. Don't skip steps. Weak foundations collapse under weight. The pieces I internalized: the obligation to teach in order to learn (social obligation equals skin in the game), conflict to solve versus conflict to fight (start from a point you agree on, listen more, then talk), and his observation about cognitive dissonance, when people fight you, they are fighting you because they know you are right and they are already fighting themselves. The root of most bad habits is stress. The key for any performance is stress minimizing: sleep, nutrition, friends, exercise.

Andrew Huberman , Huberman Lab

Huberman gave me a framework for understanding why modern life makes people miserable: “Dopamine for nothing and likes for free, main reasons for the explosion of mental illness, the ready availability of pleasures without effort.” We suffer when we get pleasure without effort. The most simple question to get a directionally correct answer is “what would my ancestors have done?” Easy choice, hard life. Hard choice, easy life.

Daniel Gross , 10X essay

Gross writes about how to measure progress and decide what to work on. The idea that determination and speed are the best traits combined with intellect and curiosity. Hire for passion and intensity, pair those with high integrity, then work with those people for a lifetime. It will be a tough battle between whether that's more lucrative or fulfilling. Probably both.