In this post, I’ll talk about the 5 best books I’ve ever read and that you should buy ASAP.

And by 5 “best” – I mean my 5 favorites.

As with any “top 5”s, my preferences changes over time, so I’ll be updating this every quarter or so (or if the list has changed enough) for me to de-throne one of the books with a new book.

Each post will just have a brief description of what the book talks about, and an affiliate link to buy it. If you buy it through my affiliate link, you’ll support this site at no cost to you and I’d be super duper grateful.

If I’ve wrote a summary for the book, I’ll add a link to it as well (in case you want to just read the summary or find out more about the book).

Winning

This is my favorite book I’ve read to memory.

Quick Summary: It’s not a really technical book and it’s one of those higher-level ‘mindset’ books. But, it’s a very invigorating read and grounds you in the reality of how difficult it is to win something. It’s kind of a perverse book in that it tells you how difficult it is to win, and yet, as you read it, you want to win more than ever.

Or maybe I’m just perverse.

Other notes: His tone for this book and his other book, Relentless, is quite intense. I like it, some don’t.

Here’s the summary for Winning with a lot of quotes taken directly from the book so you can see if the tone’s right for you.

Total Recall

No, not the movie. This is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s autobiography. You know, the guy that:

• Immigrated from the Austrian alps to the US to popularize bodybuilding, worldwide.
• Won Mr. Olympia 7 times. This is the most intense bodybuilding competition. Winning once is difficult. HE. WON. 7. TIMES.
• Got tired of bodybuilding and pivoted to Hollywood. And made starred in iconic films like the Terminator. Hollywood, as you might know, is also an extraordinarily competitive place. And to get a leading role, pivoting out of bodybuilding? Insane.
• Built a million dollar business before he even became famous.
• Was bored with movies and pivoted to politics and won another remarkably hard game of winning the governorship for California.

Short Summary: Tons of lessons can be learned from someone who’s done so much in such a short amount of time. In this book, you’ll learn “Arnold’s Rules” amongst just how he approaches life and its immense challenges in general.

Thinking In Bets

This book’s written by poker player Annie Duke, a top-4 in how much money’s been won by women in the WSOP. She’s won a WSOP gold bracelet in 2004.

Summary: This book provides a framework in how to learn and make decisions optimally. And makes the argument that life is more like “Poker” than like “Chess”. That is, events happen probabilistically and isn’t deterministic. For example, someone getting into a car accident doesn’t mean they are a bad driver. It’s correlated – yes – but it could just be the case that someone else rear-ended them at a red light and the driver was surrounded by cars so there’s nowhere to evade.

For me: the book taught me an important lesson, which is: don’t worry about the result. Worry about a sample of results. Changing your decision making framework on a single result can lead to a lot of bad future decisions. Likewise, focus on the accuracy of your reasoning as opposed to the result. If the result baffles all logic, then you should not change your logic to fit the result. That makes no sense.

It’s a great book because it provides a learning and a decision making framework that fits in a world full of uncertainty.

Great By Choice

Great By Choice by Jim Collins is an immense book.

Summary: You’ll learn the 3 ideas for the most successful businesses. These 3 ideas have a lot of nuance in nature, and so the author does an incredible job of giving you real-life stories on how flesh out those ideas. He presents real-life case studies: from incredibly successful businesses to 2 arctic explorers whose life-and-death race to the South Pole has real applications in how businesses are run.

If you are an entrepreneur at all, you should definitely read this book.

12 Months To A Million

This is a *MUST READ* if you’re in the e-commerce space. Even if you’re dropshipping. Many folks have touted this as the book to read if you’re serious about doing online commerce. And those folks aren’t trying to sell me anything – because a book isn’t a $1000 course. It’s like ~$20, or about 3 coffees if you don’t tip.

Summary: The book highlights 10 steps on how to build an incredibly successful e-commerce business. And he even suggests technologies that you should use to be able to make sales. This book is super-sensible and its emphasize on taking the most high leverage path to results has a very Tim Ferriss-esque feel to it.

Despite the very tacky title, this is one of the 5 best books I’ve ever read. And the 12 months he describes is a very realistic timeframe, albeit a very sucky 12 months.

Wrapping It Up

Keep in mind that this list might change from time to time. These are just all of the best books I can recall from memory. As I think of something that’s better than these 5, I’ll drop the 5^th best book. In this way, this post is always gonna be F.R.E.S.H.

So bookmark this if you like my recommendations, and check back from time to time for new recommendations.

Or just sign up for my book club newsletter where I’ll recommend a new book anywhere between every 2 weeks to every month. It’s a super brief email with a 2-3 sentence summary. With no spam. Just sign up above.