Books

These are a curated set of books I've recommended privately to my friends. They are outstanding.

Have one of your own? Recommend it to me here. Prefer to listen to audiobooks? Here's a sprout specifically for you.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
- This is a book I carry with me everywhere I go. It has the best wisdom-to-words ratio of any book I've read.
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
- Nerd book to blow your mind if you can page through 200 pages of deep math.
Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- Flow, the state of mind where time flies and you're not aware of yourself. This book explores its nature and how to trigger it. Whenever I feel stuck, I seek flow states to help me escape the stuckness (currently: kitesurfing)
The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin
- Practical advice on how to go from 90% to 99%.
- What got you here won't get you there.
- Most of the time, being the top 1% shouldn't be your goal. 80/20.
High Output Management by Andy Grove
- THE book on management. A must read if you have direct reports.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Open by Andre Agassi
- The only sports autobiography that's worth reading in my opinion.
La Casa de los Espíritus by Isabel Allende
- What an amazing book. It's so raw, so inspiring, so gut wrenching. Allende has the ability to inhabit the mind of every character in the story and portray their point of view so vividly, that it increases your capacity to empathize with the "other". This is Latin America with its irreconcilable points of view, none of them wrong but nonetheless in perpetual conflict with each other.
The Courage to be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
- A book about Adlerian psychology, which is a branch of psychology that focuses on the individual's ability to choose their own way.
- You can only really know you're free if you can make decisions that are unpopular. If everything you decide is coincidentally what everyone else decides as well, are you really thinking on your own?