I read 28 books this year. And I did this using the Slight Edge method of only reading 20 pages a day. In this post, I’ll talk about all the books I read in 2021 and give a bullet point summary / review for each.

Hope you enjoy, and hope some of the book’s descriptions inspire you to pick one up to read.

Books I Read In 2021

This year was a good year in books. Some years, I’d read quite a few books that are ‘meh’. But it seems like this year, almost every single book I’ve read was a very enjoyable experience.

The 48 Laws Of Power

• Fun (but) long book to read. Talks about how to exert influence and gives plenty of historical case studies on his talking points. Quite Machiavellian.

Measure What Matters

• Talks about OKRs (AKA Objectives & Key Results). Great book if you like a systematic way of setting hard-to-achieve goals and attacking/tracking them.

Grit

• Talks about the importance of persistence and not giving up. This is obvious, but the book really helps you internalize a never-give-up attitude. Also, some great morsels on how to learn. Pairs well with Seth Godin’s “The Dip” which considers the question of when you should be giving up.

The Dip

• Good, short booklet that talks about when you should keep going vs. when you should give up. TL;DR give up if you’re no longer learning, and keep going if there’s still something to try.

How To Be Well

• Wonderful, comprehensive book on all things health-related. Sound advice from categories ranging from sleep optimization, diet, to exercise. If you care about your health at all, this book is a must-have reference. Use different chapters of this book to work on various parts of your health depending on your current needs.

12 Months To $1 Million

• I talk about this book as one of the best books I’ve read at the time of writing. Great book for those looking for a fast (yet very hard) way to financial independence. Guides you through all the steps you need to build an audience, create a product for that audience, and to sell to that audience so you get money.

A World Without Email

• This book illustrates fully why there’s so much ‘background anxiety’ in office work today. This book provides multiple solutions on how to get away with the FOMO of leaving messages unanswered. Other words; this is a book that helps make work not suck. A must-read for those that do more white-collar work. More detailed summary of A World Without Email here.

What You Do Is Who You Are

• This book talks about how to build company culture. And I review and summarize What You Do Is Who You Arein another post. Great for those building a company – but pretty irrelavant for most.

Richard Branson: Finding My Virginity

• This book dives into the mind of one of our great business magnates of our time. Branson’s done everything from airlines to trains to mobile. Learn his thoughts on life/death disasters, how he handles obstacles, and his view on mortality. I like this book because it’s always interesting to see top-tier business people talk about how they view life in general.

Angel: How To Invest In Technology Startups – Timeless Advice From An Angel Investor Who Turned $100,000 Into $100,000,000

• Great book if you’re looking to be an Angel Investor, or if reading about people Angel Investing is something you’re interested in. The book teaches you everything from: how to start angel investing, the risks associated, where to find deals, and how to underwrite them. And the author is credible / nothing to scoff at – he flipped $100K to $100M.

Sprint: How To Solve Problems And Test New Ideas In Just 5 Days

• This is a super-comprehensive book for those that like prototyping/testing ideas. A must-read for those who are looking into diving into starting a business/product idea. This book outlines, in great detail, how you could test really big ideas in just 5 days. It’s so detailed it breaks down the 5-day schedule into basically 1-hour chunks. Great book for active entrepreneurs – terrible book for 9-5 lifers.

How To Talk To Absolutely Anyone

• This talks about various techniques on how to chat to strangers. I’m personally not a salesperson nor have the desire to talk to anyone in-person, especially with COVID and all. Great for socialites – terrible for someone like me who has no intrinsic motivation to socialize “IRL”. A “meh” for me.

The Lean Startup

• Good book for entrepreneurs that want to start a business. But not ‘the best’. I enjoyed Peter Thiel’s Zero To One more. This book is “OK” – not a great book, not a bad book. I covers basics like minimum effective dose, fail frequently, and other basic concepts. Decent book with good foundations, but nothing groundbreaking to see here.

Breath

• A series of stories and anecdotes of the pseudoscience of breathing. The book talks about the cause/effects of bad breathing behavior and why you should breathe through your nose, with a tempo of 5.5 seconds for inhale and 5.5 seconds for exhale. Not sure about the science of this book, but definitely entertaining and doesn’t hurt to play and test around with the plethora of breathing techniques the book describes.

I Will Teach You To Be Rich

• Great all-around, comprehensive book on finances. Doesn’t matter if you’re a noob or an expert. Great reference book all around. And if you’re like me and like buying / selling equities irrationally – this book has a lot of great refreshers to keep you grounded in reality. There’s way too many foundational finance nuggets to summarize, but I try to do a good job of reviewing I Will Teach You To Be Rich here. Highly recommend for anyone.

The Hands Off Investor

• Great book if you’re looking into investing into real estate syndications. This book goes into an extraordinarily deep dive on how to underwrite real estate deals. And by this I mean Brian Burke literally goes line-by-line on what every single thing in a real estate PNL is. Very mathematical and I’d say required reading for those accredited folks looking to buy into syndications. But useless for those that just wanna YOLO into crypto.

Winning

• The best book I read last year. Here’s a quote compilation and some notes I took from Winning by Tim Grover. This book is quite an intense book and is great for those folks with competitive spirits. Not so great for people who want to just ‘go through life and relax.’

Great By Choice

• For some reason, this isn’t marked in my iOS books app as ‘read’. This is probably due to my forgetting to mark it as ‘finished’ or iCloud being dumb. For example, iCloud has lost all my notes for 4-Hour Body today as my 2022 New Year’s gift. Anyway, I’d say this is a required business book because it goes through some advanced fundamentals on how you should grow and maintain your business. Here’s some summary and lessons here for Great By Choice.

The Road Less Stupid

• This is an OK book. It basically dives deep in the ‘productive paranoia’ from Great By Choice (previous book). And it gives you hundreds of questions to ask yourself to see where you can improve / prevent disasters in your business. This book’s a great idea but somewhat poor execution. The hundreds of questions is overwhelming and remarkably difficult to implement. It’s like me giving you a recipe book, but each recipe has 200 ingredients. How would you ever be able to get started?

Sell It Like Serhant

• This is a great book for salespeople. But seems less relevant for introverts like myself (even though salespeople will always sale ‘eVerYonE is A saleSPErson beCAUsE YOU’re alWAYs seLLing SomEthING~~~~!’). Yeah…no. You can make money being autistic. And you can make money being social. Deeper dive of Sell It Like Serhant here.

Lying

• Short booklet talking about the dangers of lying. Including small, tiny, white lies. Great book for those with morals. Terrible if you’re Machiavellian.

Total Recall

• One of the best autobios I’ve ever read. Arnold talks about his approach to conquering bodybuilding, then Hollywood, then politics. And even talks about his illegitimate kid. I talk about why this is the best 5 books I’ve ever read here.

Big Money Energy

• This is a general mindset / tactics books on how to make money. Nothing groundbreaking, but could be a good read if you haven’t read a lot of these types of books under your belt already. This book is quite ‘meh’ for me because there’s not any ideas that stand out or memorable, despite my reading this book much more recently than a lot of the above.

The Hard Things About Hard Things

• Horowitz talks about his startup as a case study on why hard things are hard. I don’t think this book is worth reading. His other book, Who You Do Is What You Are (mentioned above) is much better. Won’t bother linking to this book. Might be worth picking up if you’re managing a large company and you need to lay a lot of people off. That’s about it.

High Output Management

• The silicon valley bible of management and creating high production out of your team. This is a must have if you’re an entrepreneur. It teaches you how to manage people, and indirectly, your own time. And it does so by first establishing first principles in how productivity works, and then building up from there. Deeper dive of High Output Management here.

The Dollar Crisis

• Book chats about why the USD will crash. It presents a lot of historical data cause/effect hypotheses on why the USD is causing the global economy to be terrible. It also offers some fanciful solutions on how to fix the global-economic meltdown / apocalyptic crisis. Great, grounding read on how screwed we are.

Flash Boys

• A compilation of stories from different perspectives in the world of high frequency trading. Written by the same guy that did The Big Short. Excellent book for those interested in quant, or finance, or how stock-trading mechanisms work in general.

4 Hour Chef

• Do you like eating? Then you should pick up this book. Excellent book on providing extraordinarily easy (4 recipes), cheap, yet wonderfully tasty meals. Even if you’re not a cook – his recipes can be done with 5 minutes of work and tastes as good as restaurant quality. And it’s much cheaper. We made his ‘Osso Buco’ recipe the other day and it was delicious. Yet obnoxiously easy. And cheap.

The Art Of Learning

• The last book I finished in 2021. This autobio talks about how chess grandmaster Josh Waitzkin approaches learning in order to become: 1) A chess grandmaster, and 2) a world champion in Push Hands, despite the rules being severely biased against non-Taiwanese. I highly recommend this book for anyone who doesn’t want to live life as a vegetable and actually likes learning stuff. This book provides tools to become a world-class learner and lifelong performer. Here’s a summary and review of The Art Of Learning.

What Do You Think?

Have you read any of the above? Or does any of the books above remind you of any great books that I should be reading? Let me know.

If you’d like more like this, be sure to join my book club below where I’ll send a bullet point or 2 (much like the above format) about a current book I’m reading or a book I’ve read in the past. Frequency’s about once every 2-4 weeks, so your inbox is safe.