Business books
These five business books inspire me the most and are worth reading if you want to start a business.
Starting a business is a process.
Lean Startup gives us a tested template to start a business
by understanding the customer/user, prototyping, getting feedback, and iterating quickly.
This book gives you a framework to understand business.
Seeing from different angles lets you understand and improve its strengths and weaknesses.
Steve Jobs has many inspiring personality traits, both good and bad.
His biography allows us to understand the leadership role, being a founder,
losing it, coming back, and building a culture that outlives himself.
This is a well-researched book about building a lasting company that grows 10x.
Concepts like "20 mile march," "Fire Bullets, then Cannonballs," and "Leading above the death line" are
well worth knowing.
This book is entertaining while showing that reality is not as simple as it seems.
With statistical data, we can see reality clearly.
People are driven by incentives, and we need to ensure goals and incentives are aligned.
Books about investing
When we are young, we should invest in our knowledge, and later we invest in deeper relationships.
But don't forget to invest our capital so we can have financial freedom.
This is a great book about the basics of investing.
It covers historical events, theories, asset classes, and practical tips.
A must-read.
This is another book about the basics of economics.
It helps you understand the complex mechanisms of markets, productivity, and crashes.
The finesse is that the book explains it gradually, starting with an island where two people catch fish, and
slowly
covers all the phases of a market economy.
Nassim Taleb explains the effects of randomness and feedback.
You can do everything right but still get a negative outcome.
Other times, you can have a poor process but get great results.
We need to quantify and evaluate properly.
I think there are two winning investing strategies.
One is buying index funds, holding them until you are close to retirement, and slowly withdrawing the cash
for
spending.
The second investing strategy is to specialize in something complex.
This book shows you that if you dig deeper and read about cases that other lazy people avoid,
that is where you can excel.
Find your niche.
Howard Marks covers many topics that you should consider while investing.
Books that improve life
We need to have a growth mindset. Here are a few books that I hope will improve your life.
This book provides a generalized way to learn much faster by focusing on the right things.
To be able to improve, we need to understand ourselves deeply.
This book helps you break through the wall of self-justification and biases.
Then we will stop blaming others and finally improve ourselves.
That is the only way for personal growth and maintaining wonderful, lasting relationships.
This book discusses many aspects of living a long, healthy, and energetic life. It explains why we should
limit carbohydrates.
It guides us on how to eat, exercise, and think - all subjects backed by research.
In relationships, we often misunderstand each other because we expect others to be like ourselves.
But that is not how it works; everyone has different preferences.
This book gives us 5 perspectives to help us understand what our partner prefers compared to ourselves.
This is a book by the Swedish doctor, Anders Hansen.
He explains through research papers the relationship between the brain and exercise.
Exercise increases blood circulation, affects hormones, and many factors that ultimately affect the
brain.
Philosophy for 2025
I have a few pillars of life, some of which might change over the years.
Writing them down here helps me keep myself accountable.
I hope this inspires you to write down your own.
Here are the seven I focus on at the moment.
Don't tell others what to do
Always lead by example. Don't tell others what to do unless they ask. Unsolicited advice is unwanted.
Growth mindset
Always be a better person than you were last month. Learn new things,
do more exercise, eat healthier, and be generous in love.
Be more awesome and be kinder.
Focus on the controllable
There are things that you can control and things that are not within your power;
focus on the things you can directly affect.
Worrying about things that are not in your control is called anxiety.
For instance, you cannot choose to never have cancer or never be in any accidents.
What you can do is eat healthy and avoid crossing the street absent-mindedly.
If you find yourself anxious about something,
mentally divide the controllable parts from the rest and focus on those.
Blame yourself
Take responsibility for your own life and never blame anyone else.
Because if you blame others, you will have less and less control of your own life.
This is hard because responsibility is heavy and we are lazy.
But the more you carry now, the stronger you will be.
The stronger you are, the happier you will be,
because you worry less about things outside of your control and
you focus on things that make you happier.
Don't gossip
Refrain from saying anything bad about people who aren't in the room.
Nothing good will come from it.
Only those who lack character try to raise their own status by lowering someone else's.
Instead, praise others and tell good stories.
Take small risks
Take many small risks.
Don't be afraid to make mistakes or be seen as a failure.
There is no success without failures.
No failures probably means that you are not trying hard enough.
But avoid failing big, like getting a permanent injury, dying, or losing someone you love.
Money can be re-earned, but not trust and love.
Desire
Set one long-term and many short-term goals.
Desire is a contract that makes you unhappy until you achieve it.
Set one long-term goal as a vision - you might or might not reach it, but at least you have a direction to
go.
You can only have one vision at a time, so choose it wisely.
The short-term goals should be exact and measurable.
If you can measure it, you can feel the progress.
Every time you reach a goal, you will be happy, so set them short and plausible, preferably one to six
months.
Longer than that and you will be unhappy for too long.
Don't be binary
Think in scales or percentages.
How much do you agree with Trump or Biden in percentage terms?
Or the climate crisis?
Lazy thinkers think in binary terms, either agreeing or totally disagreeing.
Reality is not like a school test question; there is not just yes or no.
Think in detail and you will see many different aspects of yes and no.
You can sum them up and say that you are 60% for and 40% against something.
In the long run, this is the only way you can really see reality as it is and better understand it.
Sometimes it is better not to share your opinion too early.
If you don't have an opinion on an important matter, go home and come to a conclusion later.
If it is unimportant, don't express it and say that you don't care.
Be truthful and reasonable.