Where I
got all of it.
Almost nothing here is mine. I am assembling other people’s thinking into something that hopefully is. This is the room those ideas came out of.
Books I have actually read
Not books I own, or books I have heard summarized. If it is on this list I read it, and I will happily argue about it.
- Traction Gino Wickman
EOS. The weekly scorecard, the Level 10 meeting, quarterly rocks. We run the company on it.
- The Creative Act Rick Rubin
Attention as the artist’s core discipline. Read it more than once.
- The War of Art Steven Pressfield
Resistance, named and personified. The best gift you can give a student is a name for what is happening to them.
- The Creative Habit Twyla Tharp
Creativity as a habit made of ritual, not inspiration. The box per project.
- The Art of Learning Josh Waitzkin
Making smaller circles, investment in loss, numbers to leave numbers. Loved it.
- Ultralearning Scott H. Young
Nine principles for aggressive self-directed skill acquisition. Directness and drill are the load-bearing pair. Loved it.
- The 80/20 Principle Richard Koch
Plus several of his others.
- Essentialism Greg McKeown
The disciplined pursuit of less.
- Principles Ray Dalio
Decision-making as a written, testable system.
- Make Your Own Rules Andrew Huang
The working creator’s practice and economics in the platform era, from someone who built it with no label.
- The Great Mental Models Shane Parrish and Rhiannon Beaubien
The series. A latticework instead of one favorite hammer.
- Elite Minds Stan Beecham
Performance psychology.
- The 4-Hour Workweek Tim Ferriss
The one that starts most people down this road.
- Made to Stick Chip and Dan Heath
Simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, stories. Read it a long time ago and due a refresher.
On the desk right now
- The Anatomy of Genres John Truby
Every genre is built on a major activity of life and carries its own moral vision.
Next
- Art & Fear David Bayles and Ted Orland
Why artists quit. The canonical book on it.
- Peak Anders Ericsson
Deliberate practice, from the man whose research the 10,000-hour rule misquotes.
- Toward a Psychology of Being Abraham Maslow
Being-values and peak experiences. I have read about it, not read it.
Who I go to, by problem
A different claim from the shelf above. These are the people I reach for when a specific question comes up, and what each of them specifically owns. Where the best disagree I would rather name the disagreement than average it.
Selling to a human
- Neil Rackham SPIN Selling
35,000 recorded sales calls. Closing pressure works in small sales and backfires as the decision gets bigger, and the best performers meet fewer objections because better questions stop them forming.
- Chris Voss Never Split the Difference
Tactical empathy. Labeling, mirroring, and chasing "that’s right" instead of "yes."
- Keenan Gap Selling
The size of the gap you have actually diagnosed sets the urgency. Pain alone moves nobody. Impact does.
- Zig Ziglar
The five basic obstacles: no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust. Diagnose which one is live before answering any of them.
Copy and persuasion
- Eugene Schwartz Breakthrough Advertising
Five states of awareness and five stages of market sophistication. The sophistication half is the one nobody quotes and the one that matters in a crowded market.
- Robert Cialdini Influence
Reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity, and unity. The most rigorously sourced voice in the whole field.
- David Ogilvy Ogilvy on Advertising
Five times as many people read the headline as the body, so when you have written the headline you have spent eighty cents of your dollar.
- Blair Warren The One Sentence Persuasion Course
Confirm their suspicions. The hook on my first essay here is his move.
- Russell Brunson Expert Secrets
The value ladder and the epiphany bridge. Rereading it is what started this site.
Making things, and not quitting
- Austin Kleon Steal Like an Artist
Steal from many rather than one, transform rather than copy, and credit what you took. This page exists because of him.
- Ira Glass
The taste gap. Your taste arrives before your ability, that gap is why beginners quit, and only volume closes it.
- Julia Cameron The Artist’s Way
Morning pages and the artist date.
- Robert Greene Mastery
Life’s task, apprenticeship, creative-active, mastery. The arc almost no art program names out loud.
How people actually learn
- Anders Ericsson Peak
Deliberate practice at the edge of ability, on defined sub-skills, with immediate feedback.
- Brown, Roediger and McDaniel Make It Stick
Retrieval beats rereading and spacing beats cramming, and all of it feels worse while you do it, which is why students avoid exactly what works.
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Flow
He named it and built the research program behind it.
- Albert Bandura
Self-efficacy. Belief in your own capability drives what you attempt and how long you last.
The business of art specifically
- Heather Darcy Bhandari and Jonathan Melber Art/Work
A Chelsea gallery director and an arts lawyer. The strongest authorship in the genre.
- Olav Velthuis Talking Prices
Why art prices behave the way they do. Galleries avoid visible price cuts, and dealers separate the front space where you discuss the work from the back space where you discuss money.
- Hans Abbing Why Are Artists Poor?
The structural economics. Useful for keeping base rates honest rather than for comfort.
- Kevin Kelly 1,000 True Fans
The 2008 essay underneath every creator-economy argument since.
Deciding and measuring
- Annie Duke Thinking in Bets
Resulting: judging a decision by how it happened to turn out. The single most expensive habit in advertising.
- Eliyahu Goldratt The Goal
Throughput is set by one binding constraint, so improving anything else changes nothing.
- Philip Tetlock Superforecasting
Start from base rates, update often and in small increments, and keep score.
- Charlie Munger
A latticework of models from several disciplines, because a person with one model bends every problem to fit it.
Following, not reading
People whose stuff I keep going back to, wherever it lives.
- Naval Ravikant Podcast, X, The Almanack
The four kinds of luck reached me through him. The Almanack is wonderful.
- Matthew Dicks Storyworthy, live storytelling
Homework for Life. Five minutes at the end of the day finding the one story-worthy moment. I have kept it for years.
- Alex Hormozi YouTube, the $100M playbooks
The hooks playbook is the most useful free document in marketing. His register is not mine and the structure transfers anyway.
- Marc Andreessen pmarchive, essays
The 2007 essay that carried James Austin’s four kinds of luck out of medical research and into business.