You Should Read These 12 Books Every Year
The Hyperfocused Entrepreneur
September 18, 2023
Read time: 14 minutes
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Years ago I got hit with a Facebook ad from one of those skeezy internet marketer types saying the average CEO reads 52 books a year.
At that point I was living in the back of a van and just looking for a way to turn my life around, so when I heard this I thought:
“Well, hell, CEOs probably have their shit figured out, so I should probably take a page out of their book and read more.”
And I did… but I went way overboard and for the next 3 years I read over a hundred books every single year.
I justified this insane amount of reading by thinking if the average CEO reads 52 books per year, then I’ll be twice as good as the average CEO if I read 100!
But that’s not how it works.
Because I’ve come to realize something after having met literally hundreds of successful entrepreneurs over the year:
Reading more doesn’t make you better…
Reading BETTER makes you better.
And in this week’s article I’m gonna share exactly how to do that by breaking down my four part system for reading better PLUS the 12 books I think are worth rereading every year if your goal is to be successful.
Alright, so let’s break down:
How To Actually Read Better
- Read
- Reflect
- Integrate
- Repeat
When we read, the goal is not to read the MOST books, it’s to read the BEST books.
A lesson it took me far too long to learn is that it’s better to read and understand deeply the 10 best books written on a topic than it is to skim the top 100.
Which is why it’s important to make time to reflect on what you’re reading.
The best way I’ve found to do this is through writing.
We read to collect dots, and then we write to connect them.
As Leo Tolstoy said: “Read Less… Think More.”
The third step in reading better is to actually put what you’ve read into action.
This is the Integration step and it’s THE most important because without this reading is simply mental masturbation.
It makes you feel productive, but if you don’t Implement what you’ve learned then you’ve simply wasted your time being busy and not effective.
The final step in reading better is one I struggled with for a long time, that is Repeating the whole process.
Magic occurs when you go back to the beginning and Re-Read that book, reflect on it even deeper, integrate again, and then…
Repeat.
These days, I read A LOT, but I actually read very few books.
Because I just keep going back and re-reading the absolute best ones that have had the biggest impact on my life…
And in doing so, I’ve experienced far more personal growth and business growth than I ever did when I was reading hundreds of books at a time.
But what exactly are those books worth reading over and over again?
Well, for all of you hyperfocused entrepreneurs out there, I’m gonna save you a lot of time and energy and just give you the 12 books I think are worth re-reading every single year:
1. Meditations – Marcus Aurelius
This first book is not only one of the greatest books ever written, but it’s also one of a kind in that it’s the personal journal of a guy who, thousands of years ago, was the most powerful man in the world.
The beauty of this book is that this man, a Roman Emperor, wasn’t writing for an audience.
He never intended for this book to be published (in fact, he’d probably be mortified to learn that is WAS).
These were simply the internal thoughts of a man wrestling with the question:
“What’s it mean to be a good person and to live a life of value?”
This was a man who had the world at his fingertips, but who understood the only battles actually worth fighting (and winning) were the ones being waged inside.
With his temper, his ego, his pride, his place in the universe.
And perhaps, most remarkable of all is just the simple and eloquent way in which this book is written.
For instance, he says this:
“Our life is what our thoughts make it.”
So simple, so accessible, and so easy to understand…
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is perhaps my favorite book of all-time, and the one that inspires new wisdom and insight every single time I read it.
2. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
The second book on this list was written about 2,000 years more recently than the first, but it’s equally filled with incredible wisdom that you can instantly start applying to improve your life and business.
The book is called The Almanack of Naval Ravikant and it’s simply a collection of blogs, tweets, and podcast interviews featuring the modern day entrepreneurial-philosopher, Naval Ravikant.
If you’re not familiar with Naval, he’s a prolific Angel investor and one of the most highly regarded entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley over the past two decades.
What makes him so interesting is his ability to distill complex topics into simple sound bites that you can easily carry with you and apply in all sorts of situations.
One of my favorites is this one:
Play long term games with long term people.
His most famous piece of writing is a tweet storm called How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky, and it is, in my opinion, the absolute best step-by-step guide to building Wealth and Happiness.
How to Get Rich (without getting lucky):
— Naval (@naval) May 31, 2018
3. Antifragile – Nicholas Nassim Taleb
Our third book was written by my favorite author who actually has two books on this list.
Now, the reason he’s my favorite is because he has this incredible ability to take things that we all look at every single day and to turn them on their head and present them in a new way that you’ve never thought about before.
Each of his books creates a paradigm shift, a fundamental change in how you view the world in relation to topics like risk, probability, accountability, economics, and investing.
But of all of those, the one that’s had the most profound effect on my life happens to be the name of the third book on our list:
It’s called: Antifragile by Nicholas Nassim Taleb.
Now, the central premise of this book is that a fragile system is one that breaks or fails when faced with adversity.
Like when you drop a lightbulb on the floor and it meets resistance it shatters.
A robust system is one step up from a fragile system in that it has a higher resistance or tolerance to stress.
So instead of dropping a lightbulb on the floor, if we drop a rock, it’s probably not gonna hurt it all that much. That’s not to say the rock can’t be hurt, but it’s going to require more adversity.
The next level up is a resilient system or one that can recover or adapt from failure.
The example Taleb gives in the book is that of the Phoenix which dies in a fiery blaze only to be reborn shortly thereafter from the ashes.
What’s important to know about the resilient system, however, is that it bounces back to where it was before the stress, not better not worse.
And this is where we arrive at the Antifragile system which is one that capitalizes on adversity and chaos to actually come back stronger than before the adversity.
In sticking with mythology, this is the story of the Hydra where for every head you chop off, another two take its place.
It actually gets stronger when you hurt it.
A practical real life example of an antifragile system are your bones and muscles, which only ever get stronger after they’ve been stressed and damaged an appropriate amount.
Now, obviously you can only stress these systems so much before they ultimately give out and your bones break or your muscles tear, but the core concept here is still so damn valuable because these types of antifragile systems are exactly what we want to design into our lives and our businesses so that we can ultimately thrive amidst the inevitable chaos.
4.Influence – Robert Cialdini
The fourth book on our list has not only made me more money than any other book I’ve ever read, but it’s also given me a framework to understand why humans do what humans do.
Which is important because I believe every single one of us has a core desire to be seen and to be heard and to be valued. To connect.
There are very few feelings in the world worse than being in a room full of people you love and respect, and yet, feeling absolutely invisible.
Feeling like nobody values your ideas… or that your words are falling on deaf ears.
This book, Influence by Robert Cialdini, gives you the tools necessary for communicating your message to the world both persuasively and with impact.
In particular, it teaches the 6 Weapons of Influence which are reciprocity, commitment, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity.
Truly, if you don’t understand these six concepts, you will always be at the mercy of the person who does, so pick up this book and arm yourself.
5. Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman
Alright, the fifth book on our list is the best I’ve ever come across for understanding how we make decisions.
Now, that might not seem like a big deal, but as Naval says:
In an age of infinite leverage, judgment becomes the most important skill.
So anything we can do to help improve the quality of our judgment and therefore our decisions is always worth the time and energy.
This book is called Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
In it he explains the two types of systems that govern our thinking.
System 1 is our intuition. It’s fast, automatic, emotional, stereotypical and… most importantly… unconscious.
It’s not something we can control in the heat of the moment.
Thankfully, System 1 thoughts are generally pretty accurate. Or at least, accurate enough to get us through 90% of life.
System 2 thinking on the other hand is much slower, more effortful, and deliberate. It requires intention.
Now, the key to thriving in the modern world is to recognize those moments in life when we need to override our System 1 intuition and instead, turn to the more deliberate System 2.
To help with this, Kahneman shares a number of heuristics and cognitive biases that we all unknowingly default to.
Things like the Anchoring Effect which show we can easily be influenced by completely irrelevant numbers.
Or the Loss Aversion Bias which describes why the pain of losing is psychologically twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining.
This book is like reading the human brain’s operating manual, which gives you an incredible advantage in the world of business (not to mention just life in general).
What do all these books have in common?
Great storytelling.
Something I’ve come to realize over the years is that there are very few skills more powerful (or lucrative) than that of storytelling.
The person who knows how to craft their message in a powerful story has the ability to change the world.
This one skill, more-so than any other, helped change the trajectory of my life and has helped my businesses earn tens of millions of dollars.
I’m gonna show you my exact playbook for telling stories that you can use to grow your business, but here’s the thing…
Your situation is probably unique and different from mine.
And I’ve decided it’s not enough to just package up the system and give it to you to figure out for yourself.
So, I’m gonna do something a bit different.
In the next month I’m launching The Creator Collective to help you become a Seven Figure Storyteller.
The Collective is a monthly subscription that’ll include not only my blueprint for scaling your current business to 7-figures and beyond, but also:
- Access to all my Premium Paid Courses
- Bi-Weekly Live Office Hour Calls
- Monthly Live Workshops and Trainings
- Private Community
- Personalized Real Time Help
If you’re interested in becoming a Seven Figure Storyteller, then click here to join the Creator Collective waitlist.
6. The One Thing – Gary Keller
Our sixth book is about a brutally basic concept that I have found to be THE main difference between average performers and elite performers.
The reason I re-read this book every year is because it’s core lesson is one that I personally struggle with. I find it valuable, therefore, to annually revisit this book and put this concept back at the front of my mind.
The book is called The One Thing by Gary Keller and it can be summarized with these words:
“What is the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary? Until my One Thing is done – everything else is a distraction.”
In my personal pursuit of greatness I’ve come to realize that the thing holding me back from achieving all my goals is not that I don’t have enough time… it’s simply that I don’t have enough focus.
Specifically, enough focus on the RIGHT things.
This book provides a framework that’ll help you figure out what that MOST important thing is so that you can move towards it with clarity.
I like to re-read this book at the beginning of each year when I’m sitting down to set my annual goals as it helps me get into the right mental space for planning out what I’m going to focus on.
7. The Most Important Thing – Howard Marks
Bonus points because it’s a super quick and easy read, just like our the seventh book on this list which comes from the mind of one history’s greatest investors that most people have never even heard of.
I’m talking about the founder of OakTree Capital, Howard Marks, and his book is called The Most Important Thing.
One of the things I love about Howard Marks is that he’s been posting his annual investor memos every year for the past 30 years for free.
You get to step into the mind of this incredible investor, in real time, to see how navigated the 2000 dotcom boom, or the great financial crisis of 2007.
Which is important, because as Howard himself says:
“Good times teach only bad lessons: that investing is easy.”
These memos are a masterclass of investing wisdom and this book, The Most Important Thing, is a collection of some of those most impactful memos.
I could not recommend this book more highly. It is, hands down the best book I’ve ever read about the psychology and principles of investing…
Most importantly, it’s written in simple, plain language that most of us non-experts can easily understand.
8. Fooled by Randomness
Alright, this is a good time to revisit our boy Nicholas Nassim Taleb who is such a fantastic writer and thinker that he features on this list twice!
And if I had to sum up the eighth book on our list in a single sentence, it would be this:
“Nobody accepts randomness in his own success… only his failure.”
Or. put another way, we blame luck when we lose and skill when we win.
I actually did a video on this recently where I broke down the four different types of luck and how to get lucky by design.
Check it out here:
Alright, back to this mythical book by Nicholas Nassim Taleb which is called Fooled by Randomness.
The simple premise of this book is that everything in life happens along a curve of probability.
Some things are just more likely to occur than others.
Which isn’t to say that just because something is unlikely to happen, it therefore won’t happen.
The important thing for our purposes is just to understand that most of life is determined by the consequences of those very few outlier events that were never supposed to happen… but did.
Think of things like Covid, or the great financial crisis, or 9/11.
The problem is, we humans are absolutely horrible at calculating probabilities in real time.
Which means we tend to skew the likelihood (or unlikelihood) of any particular event occurring.
Now, the reason I find this book so valuable is that it helps us see through the matrix of probabilities so we can position ourselves to benefit in life regardless of what does or does not happen.
9. The Great Mental Models – Farnham Street
Fooled by Randomness is a mind-bending book that’ll give you a new lens through which to look at the world.
But the ninth book on our list is gonna give you dozens of new lenses.
Which is invaluable because as Charlie Munger always says:
To the man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
So our goal is to equip ourselves with as many tools as possible so we can be prepared to solve any and every problem that might come our way.
To do this, we want to cultivate what Munger refers to as a Latticework of Mental Models which will empower us to see every problem through a variety of lenses and possible options.
This book, The Great Mental Models by Farnham Street, provides just that. It gives you a ready made toolbox of mental models you can immediately start applying to your own life.
Which is the ultimate goal, because as this book points out:
Understanding only becomes useful when we adjust our behavior and actions accordingly.
Which is why I encourage you to reply to this email and share your top 3 takeaways and how you plan to implement those into your life moving forward.
This is called an Implementation Intention which studies have shown again and again increases the likelihood of achieving a goal.
10. The Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle
But, without a doubt, the single thing that will ultimately determine whether you are successful in achieving a goal or failing miserably is what you do in the present moment.
Which is the topic of our tenth book, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.
This is the most foo-foo book on our list and for many years I resisted reading it despite the dozens of recommendations I received from friends.
That was a mistake.
I wish I had read this sooner.
In many ways this book reshaped my perception of reality. In particular, it formed my opinion that time is not in fact your most valuable asset.
Your focus is.
And the reason I came to that conclusion is because Time is merely an illusion.
As Tolle said:
“Nothing has happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.”
This might seem like a game of semantics, but I assure you it’s not.
There’s a deep and profound shift that occurs when you realize this singular moment, right this instant, is all you have. And life changes in unimaginable ways when you make the NOW the primary focus of your life.
Which is very easy to say, and yet very hard to do.
So good luck.
11. Show Your Work – Austin Kleon
Now this leads us to the eleventh book on our list and one of my all-time favorites for all you creators, artists, and entrepreneurs out there.
It’s called Show Your Work by Austin Kleon.
It’s the shortest book on this list (in fact it only takes about 30 minutes to read), but it packs a powerful punch for all you people out there who have some sort of message you want to share with the world, but for whatever reason, you’re falling prey to that internal resistance which convinces you that nobody cares what you have to say and that nobody is going to pay attention.
But here’s the thing… right now, if you’re not sharing your thoughts, ideas, your writing, or art, or business with the world…
Then guess what, nobody is paying attention anyways.
Here’s how I think about it:
Nobody is remembered for the things they didn’t do.
So you literally have nothing to lose (and everything to gain), by sharing your work with the world.
But I understand this is all easier said than done, which is why most people don’t do it.
This book will help you get out of your own way so your work finally has the opportunity to change the world.
12. Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl
Now, speaking of changing the world, the twelfth and final book on our list makes the argument that changing the world begins simply by changing your perspective to find meaning and purpose in your life regardless of circumstance.
Which is a grand claim that’s easily dismissed as hyperbole if not for the fact that Victor Frankl wrote this book, Man’s Search for Meaning, after having survived the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps of WW2.
The core thesis of this book is that the ultimate test for each one of us is to find meaning in our lives.
As Frankl said:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
In a very real way our suffering ceases to be suffering the moment it finds a meaning… such as the meaning of a sacrifice.
I find this book so incredible because I can’t really put myself in Viktor’s shoes to truly appreciate the atrocities he endured.
It just defies comprehension, the depths of what he experienced.
But it puts into perspective that our problems in life are only ever as big or as small as we allow them to be, and that it’s our responsibility to derive meaning from our lives.
Which is a lesson I don’t think any of us can be reminded of too often.
And because I believe, as Samuel Johnson said:
We need to be reminded more often than we need to be instructed.
I do hope you take this list of 12 books and revisit them each year to uncover the many beautiful lessons each one has to share.
Until next week,
Stay Hyperfocused,
AV
From YouTube This Week:
You Should Read These 12 Books Every Year
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