I’d like to leave you with a list of my favorite overview books and resources from the four topics I cited as influential to me: history, economics, psychology, and philosophy. Additionally, I added a fifth category that appeals to my practical side: How Change Happens.
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History
Origin Story: A Big History of Everything, by David Christian
In his Big History courses, Christian distills everything that humankind knows about the universe and our own history. He starts with the Big Bang, moving through the formation of stars and planets, then discusses the appearance of humanity and its path to dominating the earth. Christian’s framework helped me put myself and the world into the grandest context of all.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humanity, by Noah Yuval Harari
In this book, Harari zooms in on humanity. He begins by asking how we, the Homo sapiens, defeated Neanderthals and all of the other species of Homo. And he examines how, upon achieving victory, we became the dominant species on the planet. In addition to his insightful way of flipping well-known historical observations on their head, Harari also writes with a dry wit that keeps his book lively. I’d also like to note that Harari’s book is the only book I know of that was written as a college textbook and became an international best seller.
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, by Noah Yuval Harari
Completing his description of humanity’s ascension in Sapiens, Harari turns his attention toward the future. He looks at the focus of human effort—defeating the scourges of famine, plague, and war—and extrapolates how the outcomes of our current technological pursuits may shape the future of humankind.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond
To answer his New Guinean friend’s question about why Europeans came to dominate all other societies, polymath Jared Diamond scoured a variety of scientific and historical fields for insights. His search produced this book. Though Diamond has been criticized for getting some things wrong, I still find his thesis compelling. While his prose is not as lively as Harari’s, I believe you find your effort rewarded.
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, by Peter Frankopan
Noticing that his elite, Western, Europe-centric, British education neglected eastern Europe, the land of his ancestors, Frankopan devoted his academic career to studying that region. In this book, he lays out the history of the world through the eyes of the Silk Road, the famous trade route that connected Europe and Asia. In it, he makes Eastern Europe and Central Asia the stars. I found his prose to be exciting and each page to be bristling with insight.
The Lessons of History, by Will and Ariel Durant
Near the end of their 50-year writing of their 11-volume series, The Story of Civilization, the Durants reflect on the lessons learned from studying human history. They distill their learnings into just over 100 pages, focused on 13 topics. As a lover of history, I find their extreme compression makes their book especially rewarding reading. This book can provide a good introduction to the study of history, a nice capstone after reading some of the macro histories I recommend above, or perhaps both.
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, by Niall Ferguson
Because traditional historians frame history in terms of heroic politicians and wars, Ferguson decided to take a different perspective, that of money. He shows how money and financial innovation have enabled humans to cooperate effectively at ever larger scales. He also shows how financial management undergirds the success of nations: well-managed finances propelled the rise of nations, and poorly managed finances lead to their weakening. Ferguson’s book adds a fascinating new layer to these other histories.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn
Though not a scientist myself, I found Kuhn’s 1962 book provides an insightful look into how science progresses. This book gives me context when I read about the history of science and current scientific research.
World Order, by Henry Kissinger
Political strategist and historian Henry Kissinger presents his view on four ideas of world order that exist today: the present European balance of power system under which we live, the Islamist desire to create a global caliphate, the Chinese desire to fulfill the Mandate of Heaven and rule over all the world, and the U.S.’s conscience-based perspective as the sole post-Cold War superpower. He also discusses how the Treaty of Westphalia has shaped our current system, purely by historical coincidence. Kissinger’s book taught me how to understand geopolitics in a historical context that goes beyond the writings of agenda-laden journalists and their knee-jerk reactions.
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and the Markets, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
As a financial trader and voracious reader of history and philosophy, Taleb presents his meditation on uncertainty, what it is, and how we can face it rationally. From his book, I learned how to view the uncertainty I face and how to honestly evaluate past decisions whose outcomes are known. This is his first non-academic book of five, all of which I love.
Economics Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science, by Charles Wheelan
I’ve found Wheelan’s book to be an incredible way to introduce the topic to someone who has never studied economics. As someone who has, I enjoy the elegant way in which Wheelan explains the key concepts of the discipline.
Psychology
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt
In his goal of understanding the psychology of morality, Haidt lays out an entire theory of mind. To do so, he brings together philosophy and science, including his own research on our “moral taste buds.” From Haidt’s book, I gained an understanding of psychology’s latest view of what the mind is.
Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
Kahneman and his collaborator Amos Tversky spent their careers trying to understand the irrational habits of thought that come naturally to the human mind. In this book, Kahneman writes about these biases that lead us off track. Though I found his writing cumbersome, I did appreciate his in-depth descriptions of experiment design and the joy with which he and Tversky approached their work.
The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living, by the 14th Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler
American psychiatrist Howard Cutler interviews the Dalai Lama about the perspectives of Tibetan Buddhism on attaining happiness. Cutler writes for a Western audience unfamiliar with Buddhism. While Tibetan Buddhism represents only one tradition among many, I find this book to be a fantastic introduction to Buddhist thought.
Philosophy
The Problems of Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell
In this short book, logician and public intellectual Bertrand Russell lays out the main problems encountered by philosophy as it has attempted to make sense of the world. Russell focuses primarily on epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge.
The Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition, from The Great Courses, by Daniel Robinson
Throughout these 40 lectures, Robinson describes what he considers to be the most important ideas of Western philosophy. He describes ideas from the ancient Greeks to modern philosophical views on the mind, science, morality, and religion. I’ve listened to his lectures at least five times through and find them full of insight and wit.
How Change Happens
The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done, by Peter Drucker
Based on his career of studying management and advising business leaders, Drucker shares his insights on how executives can be more effective. By “executive,” he means knowledge workers, whether CEO or an entry-level analyst. I learned much about how to be more effective in both work and life from Drucker.
The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, by Eric Ries
After founding a moderately successful start-up, entrepreneur Eric Ries codified a system for improving a start-up’s chances of succeeding. His system treats products as hypotheses about problems that people face and ways to solve those problems in a profitable manner. To test these hypotheses, startups iterate through a process of coming up with ideas for products that solve problems and building a minimum viable product to test the hypothesis with users. With the learnings from user testing, startups then refine their hypotheses for the next round of tests. Reading Ries’s book gave me a good sense of how progress is actually made: through messy trial and error, not through a linear progression of idea to outcome.
The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman
Based on his academic career and his design work at Apple Computers, Don Norman has been recognized as one of the fathers of design thinking. In his book, he lays out his principles for design thinking and teaches how to be empathetic to users of what you design. Realizing that everything in human society has been designed by someone, I understood that I could change things if I didn’t think they made sense. Recognizing that I could change things gave me a greater sense of agency.
Principles: Life and Work, by Ray Dalio
Having had great success as an investor and building the largest hedge fund in the world, Ray Dalio attributes his success to developing good principles and living by them. In his book, Dalio systematically lays out all of his life principles, which revolve around pursuing intellectual honesty and depth, treating people fairly, and holding people and oneself accountable. Reading Dalio’s book, I understood that consistently following good principles is a key to bringing about effective change. In particular, I have tried to adopt some of his principles around speaking more honestly and directly.