# Reading: Philosophy, strategy and entrepreneurship

> Samet Samyeli's reading list: the Stoics, Robert Greene and Sun Tzu on strategy, Peterson, Frankl, Kahneman and Taleb on the mind, and the books on entrepreneurship.

Source: https://samye.li/reading/

Not much fiction: mostly philosophy, strategy and how companies get built. These are the books I have read, shelf by shelf, each with a line on what it is about.

## The Stoics

How to keep your own mind: duty, death, fear, and what is in our control.

- **Meditations**, Marcus Aurelius. A Roman emperor's private notes to himself on duty, death and keeping his own mind.
- **Letters from a Stoic**, Seneca. Letters to a friend on time, fear, wealth, friendship and how to live.
- **On the Shortness of Life**, Seneca. Life is not short; we waste most of it.
- **Enchiridion**, Epictetus. The handbook: what is up to us, and what is not.
- **Discourses**, Epictetus. A former slave's lessons on the freedom no one can take from you.
- **The Obstacle Is the Way**, Ryan Holiday. Stoicism in practice: turning what stands in the way into the way.
- **Ego Is the Enemy**, Ryan Holiday. How ego gets in the way when you aspire, when you succeed and when you fail.

## Strategy, power and war

Power, war and mastery: how people actually win, from Sun Tzu to Robert Greene.

- **The Art of War**, Sun Tzu. Win before the battle: knowing yourself, the enemy and the ground.
- **The 48 Laws of Power**, Robert Greene. Three thousand years of power, distilled into forty-eight laws and the stories behind them.
- **The 33 Strategies of War**, Robert Greene. Military strategy, from Napoleon to guerrilla warfare, read as a guide to everyday conflict.
- **Mastery**, Robert Greene. How masters in every field got there: apprenticeship, mentors, and years of deliberate work.
- **The Laws of Human Nature**, Robert Greene. Reading people, and yourself: envy, grandiosity, the pull of the group.
- **The Prince**, Niccolò Machiavelli. How power is won and kept, as it is rather than as it should be.
- **The Book of Five Rings**, Miyamoto Musashi. A duellist's treatise on strategy, timing and mastering one way thoroughly.
- **On War**, Carl von Clausewitz. War as the continuation of politics, and why plans meet friction.

## Meaning, mind and decisions

How we think, decide and find meaning, and how to come out of chaos stronger.

- **12 Rules for Life**, Jordan B. Peterson. Order against chaos: responsibility as the source of meaning.
- **Beyond Order**, Jordan B. Peterson. The companion: when order turns rigid, and how to bring life back into it.
- **Man's Search for Meaning**, Viktor E. Frankl. A psychiatrist who survived the camps, on meaning as what keeps a person going.
- **Thinking, Fast and Slow**, Daniel Kahneman. The two systems of thought, and the biases between them.
- **Antifragile**, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Things that gain from disorder, and how to build them.
- **The Black Swan**, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Rare, unpredictable events that end up explaining most of history.

## Entrepreneurship

How companies get built, run and kept alive, told by the people who built them.

- **Zero to One**, Peter Thiel. Build something new instead of copying what exists; the case for the monopoly.
- **The Hard Thing About Hard Things**, Ben Horowitz. Running a company when there is no recipe: layoffs, crises, the struggle.
- **The Lean Startup**, Eric Ries. Build, measure, learn: validated learning instead of long plans.
- **High Output Management**, Andrew S. Grove. Management as production: leverage, meetings, one-on-ones and output.
- **The Innovator's Dilemma**, Clayton M. Christensen. Why well-run companies lose to cheaper, simpler newcomers.
- **Good to Great**, Jim Collins. What the companies that made the leap had in common.
- **Shoe Dog**, Phil Knight. Nike's founder on the years when the company almost didn't make it.
- **Steve Jobs**, Walter Isaacson. The biography written with Jobs's cooperation, flaws included.
- **Elon Musk**, Walter Isaacson. Two years alongside Musk, from Tesla and SpaceX to X.