Links
Essays and books that level up my thinking—yours too!
This page lists essays & books that have shaped my thinking over the years, organized by theme. It suffers from some recency bias as I lost past bookmarks due to changing services. I will keep adding to this page as time passes! Hope you get some gems!
Personal Growth
Ben Kuhn
Dan Luu
Venkatesh Rao: The Holy Grail of Self-Improvement
Alex Vermeer: Life Hacking
Marc Andreessen: Guide to Personal Productivity
Keith Johnstone: Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (book)
Rationality, Risk and Decision science
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Map and Territory (book)
Inadequate Equilibria (book)
The Sequences (book)
Nassim N. Taleb
Fooled by Randomness (book)
Antifragile (book)
Skin in the Game (book)
Howard Marks: The Most Important Thing (book)
Henry Hazlitt: Economics in One Lesson (book)
Paul Graham: Superlinear Returns
Scott Alexander: Meditations On Moloch
Startups and entrepreneurship
Paul Graham
Naval Ravikant: How to Get Rich without Getting Lucky
Alexandr Wang: Do Too Much
Peter Thiel: Zero to One (book)
Eric Ries: The Lean Startup (book)
Nir Eyal: Hooked (book)
YC: Lecture Library (start here)
Decentralization & Digital Governance
Vitalik Buterin
Saifedean Ammous: The Bitcoin Standard (book)
James D. Davidson & William Rees-Mogg: The Sovereign Individual (book)
Peter Thiel: The Straussian Moment
Philosophy
Seneca
Letters from a Stoic (book)
On the Shortness of Life (book)
Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil (book)
On the Genealogy of Morals (book)
The Birth of Tragedy (book)
Twilight of the Idols (book)
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Idiot (book)
Notes from Underground (book)
The Gambler (book)
Plato: The Last Days of Socrates (book)
Career
Benjamin Todd: Career Guide
R.W. Hamming: Advice on doing Research
Sam Altman: How to be Successful?
Candor: Negotiation Strategies in Tech
Nikhil Suresh: Does A Software Engineer Have Scorpion Nature?
Patrick McKenzie: Don't Call Yourself A Programmer