You Are Not So Smart is a good, easy-to-read introductory book on how our minds misinterpret things due to our irrationality.

Each chapter breaks down a specific bias we have because of how our minds are wired.

The whole idea of the book is to teach us these biases so we understand them and can make better decisions.

This is one of the best books I've read by far. It's full of wisdom from Charlie's business experiences and his teachings.

Charlie is very big on human behavior and what drives us to do silly things. He talked a lot about the psychological aspect of this in his famous Harvard speech called The Psychology of Human Misjudgment which you can download from the "downloads" section of my website if you haven't read it yet.

Very easy to read and isn't long so is a great introductory book to physics. Doesn't go into detail about the concepts and doesn't use words that are difficult to understand. Discusses energy, atoms, gravity, Kepler's laws, quantum mechanics, biology and other concepts.

This book is one of the great ones I read. Peter Bernstein does deep research on looking back at our evolving understanding of risk from the year 1202 all the way up to when the book was written in 1998. He discusses many of the pioneers who were essential in helping us develop our understanding of risk such as...

Great self-help book on stoicism. This book teaches what stoicism is and how to live a better life by using the principles of stoicism. Stoicism is actually a very old practice but surprisingly not talked about enough or taught very much these days. An important idea I learned from stoicism is that we must control our emotions and one of the greatest causes of our negative emotions is our desires. The more desires we have the more...

In this book Stephen Hawking answers some of the most common and curious questions that readers want to know about. Some of those questions include: is there a God, how did the universe begin, is time travel possible, what is inside a black hole, are there...

This book is one of the most highly recommended introductory books for stock picking. I found it very informative when I read it as a junior in college. There is some stuff that is outdated but there is also some advice that...

Really good book by Neil DeGrasse Tyson on astrophysics. Sums up a lot of the really interesting and big ideas about the universe in a very simple and easy to read book. I learned a lot and rehashed a lot about the basics of Einstein's theory of relativity, atoms, energy, the speed of light, the expanding universe...

This is more of a paper than a book but is very informative. Warren Buffett gets asked a lot about how he thinks the stock market and economy are going to perform in the future and during bear markets and recessions he always talks about how our economic system works and human civilization finds a way to figure things out and progress forward but Warren never expands on that...

Hans Rosling’s main premise of his book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think is that the world is getting better despite what everyone thinks. Hans has went around the world giving speeches on global health, he has taught in many classrooms on global health, and he has lots of experience as a practicing doctor in many countries around the world. No matter which country he goes, he always finds...

Gary V is probably the best online marketing guru there is today. He was one of the first to sell products online and he instantly understood the power of the world wide web. When he was working at his father's wine store, he started an online store which wasn't common for businesses to do back then. It was probably the mid to late 90's so he was ahead of the curve. He was big on...

One of the best books I read about management. Ed Catmull was the head of Pixar which is still to this day one of the most creative studios to create movies at. Ed shares a lot of his wisdom and experiences from his role there. It's a great book to understand what was going behind the scenes at Pixar, learn how to embrace your creativity, battle through uncertainty, and...

Good introductory book to science. Isn't a difficult read and Carl Sagan is a great science writer so this book can be read in less than a week. I had a large gap in what I highlighted between pages 30-201 so I didn't find it all that inspiring but Carl Sagan is one of the...

This book was recommended by Michael Mauboussin on the first episode of Shane Parish's podcast the Knowledge Project. It's a challenging book since it has a decent amount of science terms but can be understood if you take the time to reread some paragraphs and pages. The overall premise of the book is that our economy isn't a system but is more like...

One of the best investment books to read. The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham is Warren Buffett's number 1 book recommendation for stock investing but this one is number 2 for him. This book really nails down how to identify the qualitative characteristics of an investment. Phil Fisher came up with the idea of researching companies by using the scuttlebutt approach. This approach involves doing a lot of...

A good book on how Sam Walton built the greatest retail empire of the 20th century. The amazing thing is he did it late in life. I learned that in order to be the best at business you have to have a serious passion for it. Sam Walton would...

Paul Volcker is one of the most recognized and highest integrity government official there is. He takes honesty and integrity to civil service very serious and this was reflected in him by his father who was also a government official with high integrity as well. Paul goes behind the scenes of a lot of the crises he helped alleviate in...

A self help book aimed at the art and advertising world to help you sell better. The book mainly focuses on changing how your mind thinks. It does a pretty decent job of motivating you and inspiring you to be more creative and take some risks. I picked it up in the Guggenheim museum gift shop and flipped through a couple pages. The few pages I read got...

Hard to go wrong with a book written by, in my opinion, the smartest man of the 20th century. The book talks about a little science but is much more focused on Albert's ideas and opinions on economics, religion, politics, philosophy, ethics, and many other topics.

Great book on life and career advice. Scott gives a lot of wisdom through his experiences and career. The quote above was my favorite one from the book and I always try to keep it in mind always to this day. Probably my favorite idea in the book was Scott's idea of looking at life like a slot machine where you have an unlimited amount of...

A great book to learn about life. The author, Karl Pillemer, interviewed many elders in America who all shared their life stories and life lessons. The topics include: career, marriage, parenting, getting old, living a regret-free life, and happiness. A lot to learn from and I remember very well that most of the “experts” - Karl refers to the elderly people he interviewed throughout his book as the experts due to their life experience – all talked about...

Difficult read and wouldn't recommend to a beginner who is trying to learn the markets and investing. I read it in my late 20's when I had a better understanding of markets and it was really influential to my thinking. George Soros is one of the most famous traders and is probably

​Walter Isaacson is in my opinion the best writer when it comes to biographies and Steve Jobs has one of the most fascinating stories to tell. He was adopted; one of the early Silicon Valley tech startups; an underdog to Bill Gates and Microsoft for so long; fired from the company he started...

This is the 5th book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Incerto series. I didn't find this book as good as Antifragile, The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness but it still had some very good and relevant concepts. The overall idea of the book was...

Good and very interesting. I learned a lot from this book. The author is a professor of psychology at Arizona St. University where he studied under the famous psychologist know for his best-selling book Influence, Robert Cialdini. Douglas' work integrates...

This book was recommended by Ray Dalio. I didn't find it a great read but there were a couple of parts I found interesting and useful for life. One is in the first paragraph below which discusses how mother nature doesn't have feelings and is "pitilessly indifferent." Another interesting part was...

A culmination of a short background and life history of Ray Dalio, his principles for how to live life, and his principles for management. This is one of the best books I’ve read. It is a lot more of a philosophy and psychology book on self-improvement than anything else probably. I read this...

A really simple and short book that doesn't take a long time to read and has a very good idea to get us moving in the right direction. A lot of times we overthink what we need to do. If we think of accomplishing a grand goal such as writing a book, the thought of writing 300 pages or thousands of words takes a big mental toll on us and...

Marcus Aurelius is one of the most successful emperors of Rome and this book is a compilation of his writings to himself. He kept a journal where he reflected on his life, interacting with others, dealing with adversity, and dealing with nature. Marcus Aurelius was a stoic philosopher and so if you're familiar with stoicism then you will see this...

A good and interesting book on the different kinds of cycles in investing and how to navigate them. Howard Marks discusses all kinds of cycles including the real estate cycle, credit cycle, distressed debt cycle, and the cycle in profits. He also discuses...

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl is one of the most sought after books for inspiration. It’s good, short and not a difficult read. The author is a psychologist who was sent to a Nazi concentration camp where he...

A must read for all serious investors. Can be a little tough read if you are just starting out your journey into value investing but is one of the best books to read on Buffett and investing in general. Lawrence accumulates a lot Warren's wisdom and teachings from

This is a very helpful book for investors. It's different than other investing books like Peter Lynch's Beating the Street and Phil Fisher's Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits because it gives much more of a mental framework on how to...

Richard Duncan is my favorite economist. He has his own blog where he regularly gives his update on the economy, a video series called Macro Watch where he publishes about 2 videos a month about the economy and he also has 2 great classes that he published on Udemy. This book was

I really enjoyed this book from Ben Bernanke. It's a story told by Ben Bernanke who was the Chairman of the Federal Reserve during the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. His decision to print a lot of money prevented our economy from living another great depression and Ben discuses his thought process...

Easy to read book on real estate investing. I recommend as a good introductory book but it mostly focused on getting started and giving the reading introductions on different ways to get started, what to look out for, and a lot of terms to know like lien, title, etc. The best idea I think he has is...

Epictetus was born into slavery before being freed and starting his own school of Stoic philosophy. He is famous for teaching Marcus Aurelius, the most famous emperor of the Roman Empire, especially since Marcus was very well known for applying stoicism to his own life as emperor which we know from his book Meditations. The Art of Living is...

Good book on the human psyche that looks into our emotions and how we think and behave towards other humans. Made me examine myself a little bit on how I was acting as a human and what I could do better. Emphasizing with other humans is important.

A very informative read and you will learn a lot but the book is very long and I felt it could be shorter in some areas. Siddhartha definitely has a lot of knowledge about genetics and is a brilliant guy. He discusses a very wide range of topics about the gene including its history, its future, the role it plays in our cells, how it was ...

Either this book or Andy's Grove's book, Only the Paranoid Survive, is my favorite business book on management. Both are written by great CEOs who have a lot of great experiences in navigating the uncertainty of the competitive business world that they share in their books. I think Ben in this book did a great service to the business community by writing this because so many people like to talk about their successes and what comes easy in business but the easy stuff takes care of itself; it's the hard stuff that...

Will and Ariel Durant wrote an 11 volume set of books on history over 4 decades that spans 10,000 pages. This book is their summary of all of those volumes and it is only 97 pages. Will and Ariel have lots of in-depth knowledge about history and this book is

Very good book about decision making in an uncertain future. Annie Duke is a World Series Poker champion and uses her experience to teach us how to be better decision makers. Some things I learned were that every decision is a bet. What we choose to eat for lunch is a bet on what will better make us happy and satisfy our hunger, the route we take to work in the morning is a bet on...

Not very well known in the investment community these days but Peter Cundhill was a great Canadian value investor. He was a follower of Ben Graham and practiced a lot of his investment principles such as valuing the assets on the balance sheet and comparing them to market cap. He was known for his investment fund, The Cundhill Value Fund. Peter kept a journal which the author cites a lot from in this book. The author, Christopher Risso-Gill, is the senior consultant to the Peter Cundhill Foundation and does a good job displaying to readers Peter's successful investment approach by citing a lot from his speeches, journal, and other writing.

Great book about becoming more self-aware and finding our meaning in life. Mark makes a good point that no matter what we do in life there will always be some adversity or pain so it is best that we find what the pain or adversity is that we want to put up with so we can strive to get past it and get what we want out of life. He also mentions...

One of my favorite and most recommended books. Just so much great life advice in this book and there were so many gems of advice I wrote down. Cheryl used to be a column writer for I believe an online magazine or newspaper called the Rumpus and readers used to submit questions to her. Cheryl has a such a great writing ability, way of expressing herself through words, and a large amount of courage to be so honest and helpful to her readers. Some important things I learned are...

Peter Thiel has been one of the smartest thinkers in my opinion over the last 2 decades. He formed Paypal with the PayPal mafia which solved the problem buyers and sellers were having of sending money over the internet, he saw the future success of Facebook and was early backer, he started the data analytics company Palantir, and has made lots of numerous investments with his venture capital firm....

Great book on the partnership letters of Warren Buffett when he was managing money in his early years. The author read all of Buffett's partnership letters and summarized them in this book and added his own insight as well. Highly recommended if you're looking to set up your own hedge fund or investment partnership. Warren is very famous for being one of the best stock pickers and this book focuses on the first stage of his evolution as an investor. This book also looks in depth at how Warren set up the partnership and focuses on how fair Warren was in not robbing his partners with high fees.

Good book to learn about evolution. There are some science terms that you will need to look up if you are at the beginner level when it comes to understanding science, like myself, but overall this book is very readable. No surprise from the title of the book that it is about Bill Nye discussing why evolution is a fact and he doesn't just talk about humans. He talks about...

This was a really good book. It’s long but there is a lot to learn about human nature since modern humans have been around for 200,000 years and although our minds have changed since then, they haven’t changed all that much over the past couple thousand years. The world certainly has though...

This book was recommended many times by Warren Buffett and Michael Bloomberg recommended it with a blurb on the back of the jacket of the book. The book doesn't disappoint. It's short, very easy to read and extremely entertaining. It gives a humorous take on the stock market in what I would guess is the early to middle of the...

Touching book about death and the meaning of life. Highly recommended by Bill Gates and I believe it is a great book to get your mind thinking hard about how you're living your life. As you're reading how Paul was at the top of the world...