Favorite Books

Last Days of Night by Graham Moore: A highly entertaining work of historical fiction on the current wars between Edison and Westinghouse. I listened to the audiobook and couldn’t stop myself from binging it.

Better Than Before by Gretchen Rubin: A book about habits. I spend a lot time in life and on this blog reflecting on habits and trying to cultivate good ones.

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman: A book about empathy for the eventual user of any product or system.

The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper: A foundational theory for how to do science. This is a very dense, though highly thoughtful book.

The Important of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde: One of the wittiest things I’ve ever read. Lucky for me, none of my high school teachers ruined Oscar Wilde for me by making me read him.

Antifragile, The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb: How to build systems that exploit variance. The world is uncertain. These books explain what makes it uncertain and how to live with that uncertainty.

John Grisham Novels: my guilty pleasure.

4 thoughts on “Favorite Books

  1. I think one of the central points of The Lean Startup, which is often left out of discussing the book, is the importance of having a testable hypothesis. It allows you to know when you’re meeting or not meeting your goals.

    1. Very fair point. I agree with Marc Andreessen’s quote that the lean startup is like the startup theory of relativity. Identifying and testing you’re riskiest, mission critical assumptions is essential to spending as little money as possible to test an idea. I also really like Trevor Owen’s work with Lean Startup Machine to put these ideas into practice and make them accessible.

      1. I once had the opportunity to participate in the Lean Startup Machine and didn’t take it. Seems like an all around good experience – have you participated in one?

      2. I did not. However, I took a Skillshare led by Trevor. He was very helpful. He also has given me some great advice via email. If you have another opportunity, I recommend doing something with him / LSM.

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