Lisa JY Tan

A Cool Nerd

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Legend:
✔️ = I’ve read them & will recommend
❤️ = I re-read them once every 12-18 months, religiously. They pretty much define my value-sets.

100 Books I’d Recommend

There are too many books that I would like to read, but not all of them are good. So I will delete them as I finish each book, and keep only the top 100 books here.

    1. ✔️Slight Edge – Jeff Olson ❤️
    2. ✔️Eat That Frog – Brian Tracey ❤️
    3. ✔️Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell
    4. ✔️Predictably irrational – Dan Ariely
    5. ✔️80-20 – Marshall Perry
    6. ✔️Thinking Fast and Slow  – Daniel Kahneman
    7. The Practicing Mind – Thomas M Sterner
    8. ✔️Lean Start Up – Eric Reis
    9. ✔️The Art of Possibility – Benjamin Zanders
    10. What Should I Do With My Life – Po Bronson
    11. Intelligent Investor – Benjamin Graham
    12. ✔️Abundance – Peter Diamandis
    13. Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha – Tara Brach
    14. Maslows Hierarchy of Needs
    15. ✔️How to win friends and influence people
    16. How Much is Enough? Money and the Good Life – Robert and Edward Skidelsky
    17. ✔️Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World – Cal Newport
    18. How we know what isn’t so – Thomas Gilovich
    19. ✔️The Power of Habit – Charles Dunhigg
    20. ✔️Principles – Ray Dalio
    21. ✔️Think & Grow Rich – Napoleon Hill
    22. ✔️Zero to One – Peter Thiel
    23. The Foundation (Series) – Isaac Asimov
    24. The Shockwave Rider – John Brunner
    25. Smart Cuts – How hackers, innovators and Icons accelerate success – Shane Snow
    26. 1000 True Fans – Kevin Kelly
    27. ✔️Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You – John Warrillow
    28. Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference – William MacAskill
    29. ✔️The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs – Carmine Gallo
    30. Shawn Achor – Big Potential: How Transforming the Pursuit of Success Raises Our Achievement, Happiness, and Well-Being
    31. The Hundred Year Marathon – Michael Pillsbury
    32. Cashvertising – Drew Eric Whitman
    33. ✔️The Richest Man in Babylon
    34. ✔️How to Lie with Statistics – Darrell Huff
    35. ✔️Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel – Tom Wainwright
    36. The Structure of Magic 1
    37. ✔️The Hard Thing about Hard Things – Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers – Ben Horowitz
    38. ✔️Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell
    39. ✔️The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen Covey
    40. Pitch anything – Oren Klaff
    41. ✔️Freakonomics
    42. ✔️Find Your Why: A Practical Guide for Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team – Simon Sinek
    43. ✔️The Law of the Garbage Truck: How to Stop People from Dumping on You – David J Pollay
    44. Radical Candor – Kim Scott (good for team management)
    45. ✔️The Art of War 孙子兵法 – Sun Tzu (孙子)
    46. 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing – Al Rise
    47. Anything You Want –  Derek Sivers
    48. Positioning – Al Ries & Jack Trout
    49. Secrets Of Power Negotiating – Roger Dawson
    50. ✔️Instant Influence – Robert Cialdini
    51. ✔️Getting to YES – William Ury & Roger Fisher
    52. Bold – Peter Diamandis
    53. ✔️The Art of Public Speaking – Dale Carnegie
    54. The Shallows, What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains – Nicholas Carr
    55. ✔️Anti-Fragile – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
    56. ✔️Skin in the Game – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
    57. ✔️Black Swan – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
    58. Meditations – Marcus Aurelius
    59. Sovereign Individual – James Dale Davidson & William Rees-Mogg
    60. 24 Assets: Create a digital, scalable, valuable and fun business that will thrive in a fast changing world – Daniel Priestley
    61. Rework – Jason Fried
    62. ✔️The Magic of Thinking Big – David Schwartz
    63. Revising Prose – Richard A Lanham
    64. Simple & Direct – Jacques Barzun
    65. Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process – John McPhee
    66. Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory – Wolfgang Palaver
    67. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics – Carlo Rovelli
    68. Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor E. Frankl
    69. The Undercover Economist – Tim Harford
    70. Life is So Good – George Dawson
    71. True Believer – Eric Hoffer
    72. Blue Highways – William Least Heat Moon
    73. War On The Boards: A Rebounding Manual – George Raveling
    74. Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future – Joi Ito & Jeff Howe
    75. The Sorites Principle: How to harness the power of perseverance
    76. Verbal Judo: The Gentle Art of Persuasion – George J. Thompson, Jerry B. Jenkins
    77. Options, futures and other derivatives – John C. Hull
    78. The Feynman Lectures on Physics – Richard Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, Matthew L. Sands
    79. Don’t Make Me Think – Steve Krug
    80. ✔️The Design of Everyday Things
    81. Frogs Into Princes – Bandler and Grinder
    82. Trance-formations – Bandler and Grinder
    83. The Gift of Fear – Gavin de Becker
    84. Poor Charlies Almanack – Charlie Munger (Mental Models)
    85. Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity – John Gribbin
    86. ✔️The Power of TED (The Empower Dynamic) – David Emerald
    87. ✔️The upside of irrationality – Dan Ariely
    88. Algorithms to live by – Brian Christian
    89. ✔️Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets – Nassim Taleb
    90. ✔️21 Lessons for the 21st Century – Yuval Noah Harari
    91. ✔️Essentialism – Greg McKeown
    92. ✔️Crush it – Gary Vaynerchuk
    93. ✔️When China Rules the World – Martin Jacques
    94. The Great Transformation – Karl Polanyi
    95. Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
    96. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain
    97. The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism
    98. Einstein: his life and universe – Walter Isaccson
    99. The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
    100. WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us – Tim O’Riley
    101. Intellectual – Boris Johnson
    102. ✔️Animal Farm – George Orwell
    103. ✔️The Predictioneer’s Game – Bruce Bueno De Mesquita
    104. Awareness – Anthony De Mello
    105. ✔️Amusing ourselves to death – Neil Postman
    106. Reckoning With Risk : Learning to Live With Uncertainty – Gerd Gigerenzer
    107. Gut Feeling: the intelligence of the unconscious – Gerd Gigerenzer
    108. The Innovator’s Dilemma – Clayton Christensen
    109. Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State – Yasheng Huang
    110. ✔️My Voice Will Go With You – Sidney Rosen ❤️
    111. Knowledge and Decisions – Thomas Sowell
    112. ✔️The Time Keeper – Mitch Albom ❤️
    113. ✔️Tuesdays with Morrie – Mitch Albom
    114. Be Here Now – Ram Dass
    115. ✔️The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power – Shoshana Zuboff
    116. The Greatest Salesman in the World – Og Mandino
    117. Failing Forward – John C Maxwell
    118. Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us – Daniel Pink
    119. ✔️Fierce Conversations – Susan Scott
    120. Reminiscences of a Stock Operator – Edwin Lefèvre
    121. The Four Agreements – Don Miguel Ruiz
    122. The Power of Intention – Wayne Dyer
    123. The Surrender Experiment – Michael Singer
    124. Younger Next Year – Chris Crowley & Harry Lodge
    125. Unfinished business – Anne Marie Slaughter
    126. The design of experiments – Ronald Fischer
    127. Governing the Commons – Elinor Ostrom
    128. Thinking in Systems – Meadows
    129. Why Dissent Matters: Because Some People See Things the Rest of Us Miss – William Kaplan
    130. Confessions of an Economic Hitman
    131. The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History by Sanjeev Sanyal
    132. A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage

Books To buy

  1. Geopolitical Alpha by Marko Papic
  2. he World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources