Ideas That Stuck

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

• Be Impatient

• Attention is Your Scarcest Resource

• Staring into the Abyss

• To Listen Well, Get Curious

• You Don’t Need to Work on Hard Problems

• Impact, Agency, and Taste

Dan Luu

• 95-percentile Isn’t That Good

• Willingness to Look Stupid

• Reasons to Work on Productivity and Velocity

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

• How to Start a Startup

• Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas

• Relentlessly Resourceful

• Ramen Profitable

• Startup = Growth

• How to Get Startup Ideas

• Life is Short

• How People Get Rich Now

• The Need to Read

• Superlinear Returns

• When to Do What You Love

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

• Coordination

• Legitimacy

• Techno-Optimism

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)

• The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (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