Why read books at all?

Our ability to learn is one of our defining traits as humans.

Learning makes us valuable in the world.

Being valuable and using our acquired mastery to exchange value with others is one of the most rewarding human experiences.

As well, learning, remixing, and building on top of existing structures, is the only way for progress to happen. And progress appears to be a baked in necessity for human satisfaction.

Author Nassim Taleb likes to say that the best way to learn is by combining street fights (practical experience) with time in the library (books).

We learn more in street fights than in the library. So, if we must choose just one, we should prefer street fights. However, learning is optimized when we use both.

Books are therefore half the learning equation.

Reading a book is to have a conversation with the author, who is presumably more knowledgeable than us on the subject of the book. Giving us the opportunity to close that knowledge gap and get smarter.

Books are more knowledge dense than say articles or podcasts. They usually contain years-worth of research or experience packed into a couple hundred pages that can be consumed in 5-10 hours.

However, we’re unfortunately limited in how many books we can consume.

Over 40 years, reading 25 books a year, that’s only 1000 books.

That’s hardly one bookshelf at the local library.

If we assume that we’ll read the good books more than once. Well, those 1000 books are probably more like 500.

I chose 500 books as a baseline. Some of us may read 5000, others 5. The number isn’t important. The number of books we’ll read during our lives is a tiny fraction of recorded human knowledge.

So, it probably makes sense to choose wisely.

Choosing the books

The multiple T shaped skillset is often considered the ideal model for professional development such that an individual maximizes the value of the skills they bring to the world. That is, an individual gains a broad but shallow base of foundational skills, while going deep in 2 to 3 niche areas.

The 2 to 3 areas of depth tend to be specific to the individual and should be developed through a discovery process of following curiosities and getting feedback from the world. It’s extremely difficult to make book recommendations in advance for the areas of depth as the path to those books will need to be discovered along the way. However, the foundational timeless base is far more general. For that reason, we can plan to an extent which books should be read for its development.

As well, while the areas of depth tend to push the individual to sources of information on the cutting edge of research, the foundational sources are more timeless and have a longer useful life for the individual, giving them a larger compound interest effect over our lifetime.

Ideally, if we’re reading 25 books per year the books should be split evenly between the timeless base, and deep diving into the niche topics of interest.

What types of books are considered foundational?

There are a couple of factors that help a book be considered foundational.

1. Undisputed or nearly undisputed.

Math and physics are airtight. Anything left of biology should be taken with a grain of salt.

2. Timeless.

If a book is old and still available today that means it must have some timeless value. Older books, especially ones that deal with human nature, tend to be more valuable than newer books.

3. Brilliant

There have been some human beings over the centuries that were just flat out smarter than you and I. People such as: Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Darwin, and Kant. Being exposed to their thoughts through their writing is probable a good idea.

4. Admirable lives

Studying the lives of admirable people in the form of biographies is a great way to pattern recognize the cause and effect of our choices over a lifetime.

5. Particularly important categories to study

Interpersonal relationships. Human biases. Self-knowledge. Math. Physics. Evolutionary biology. The nature of reality and the mind. Philosophy. Religion. Mythology.

6. Avoid Anti-learning

Some books will make us dumber for having read them. It would have been better to read nothing at all. These books typically come and go with the popular pseudo-science movement of the moment. They make rational arguments based on pre-selected biased data giving the author a false sense of authority. If we read mainly older, time tested books, however, we can avoid most of these.

Making time for foundational learning

Foundational learning, much like exercise, is never urgent. But because of the timeless nature of its contents, it pays with compounded interest in the future. It will always be tempting to spend all our time reading the material at the cutting edge of our niche but over the years it’s the foundational learning that will build a strong base of knowledge with which we can leverage deep into our lives.

Examples of foundational books by category

This list of foundational books is not even close to being exhaustive. It’s just a sample. Some of these I’ve read, others are still on my to read list. I’m obviously missing some important pieces here, so please reply to this email with your recommendations.

Category	Book	Author	Year Published
Philosophy	Plato – The Complete Works	Plato	350 BC
	The Complete Confucius	Confucius	400 BC
	Tao Te Ching	Lao Tzu	400 BC
	The I Ching or Book of Changes		500 BC
	The Essential Epicurus	Epicurus	300 BC
	Letters from a Stoic	Seneca	65
	Meditations	Marcus Aurelius	180
	Candide	Voltaire	1759
	The Critique of Pure Reason	Immanuel Kant	1781
	Existentialism is a Humanism	Jean Paul Sartre	1947
	Philosophy as a Way of Life	Pierre Hadot	1995
Mythology	Maps of Meaning	Jordan Peterson	1999
	The Hero with 1000 Faces	Joseph Campbell	1968
	Myths to Live By	Joseph Campbell	1972
Religion	The Holy Bible		0
	Aquinas’s Shorter Summa	Saint Thomas Aquinas	2001
	The World’s Religions	Huston Smith	2009
History	The Lessons of History	Will & Ariel Durant	1968
	The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich	William Shirer	1961
	The Story of Civilization: Volume 1 – Our Oriental Heritage	Will Durant	1935
	Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches	Marvin Harris	1974
	Sapiens	Yuval Noah Harari	2014
Diet	The Essentials of Sport and Exercise Nutrition	Precision Nutrition	2010
Exercise	Movement	Gray Cook	2010
	King	Elliott Hulse	2016
Relationships	How to Win Friends and Influence People	Dale Carnegie	1936
	Crucial Conversations	Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, Switzler	2012
	Motivational Interviewing	Miller, Rollnick	2013
Wealth Creation	The Millionaire Master Plan	Roger James Hamilton	2014
	Think and Grow Rich	Napoleon Hill	1937
High Performance	Tools of Titans	Tim Ferriss	2017
	So Good They Can’t Ignore You	Cal Newport	2012
Mathematics	Mathematics – Its Content, Methods, and Meaning	Aleksandrov, Kolmogorov, Lavrent	1999
	Incerto	Nassim Taleb	2001-2018
	Statistical Models – Theory and Practice	David Freedman	2009
Computer Science	Algorithms	Sedgewick, Wayne	2011
Physics	The Feynman Lectures on Physics	Richard Feynman	2011
Biology	The Origin of Species	Charles Darwin	1859
	River Out of Eden	Richard Dawkins	1995
	The Rational Optimist	Matt Ridley	2010
Earth Sciences	Atlas of the World – 11th Edition	National Geographic	2019
Economics	The Wealth of Nations	Adam Smith	1776
	Microeconomics – 5th Edition	Krugman, Wells	2017
	Macroeconomics – 5th Edition	Krugman, Wells	2017
Psychology	Modern Man in Search of a Soul	Carl Jung	1933
	The Language of the Body	Alexander Lowen	1958
	Man’s Search for Meaning	Viktor Frankl	1946
Management	The Ten Day MBA	Steven Silberger	2012
	Managing Oneself	Peter Drucker	2008
	Principles	Ray Dalio	2017
Literature	The Odessey	Homer	700 BC
	On the Nature of Things	Lucretius	50 BC
	Shakespeare: The Complete Collection	William Shakespeare	1616
	War and Peace	Leo Tolstoy	1869
	The Alchemist	Paulo Coelho	1993
	Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance	Robert Pirsig	1974
Biographies	The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie	Andrew Carnegie	1905