This year has been an opportunity to just sit and read a lot of books. I managed to cover 57 non-fiction books. These included sub-genres such as entrepreneurship, marketing, psychology, philosophy etc.

Here are some core insights from the better books I covered:

• The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: The culmination of his epic tweet-storm. It details the basic principles to learning, building wealth and to being happy. He discusses how being rich can be achieved without the luck factor. He talks about how to choose leverage effectively, focusing on fundamental knowledge and using a combination of philosophy, meditation, fitness to be happy and wealthy.

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Starting up is intense. Ben Horowitz says, ‘As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up and cried every 2 hours.’ The book offers a gory first-person perspective on what it’s like to head a tech startup. The book is goldmine on understanding how to build strong teams, creating the company culture, leadership styles. Grit, perseverance, resilience, humility and gratitude are some traits that come to mind.

• Freedom from the Known: Krishnamurti uses an experience and intellect driven discourse format that aims to separate our daily experience of survival as it is from the idea of human beings as a more evolved collective. Through his talks, he has impacted the lives of millions. This book discusses the idea of conditioning, images of ourselves, the idea of the self, perception among other.

• Kant by Roger Scruton: Known as one of the Enlightenment philosophers. The book talks about the story eccentric man and his enormously influential works. While extremely complex, I got an idea of “transcendental idealism” which combined the subjective and objective notions of the world. He explains that human beings experience reality only subjectively.

• Spin Selling: Backed by empirical research, this book from delves into a better approach to pursue sales. The author suggests that perhaps the best way to sell is to understand the customer and what they want, be it a small-ticket or big-ticket sale. While this sounds simple, we must realise that in order to become a good salesman, there is no substitute for experience.

• Purple Cow: The marketing classic. I gathered insights on qualitative aspects of differentiation, virality, loyalty and product-market fits.

• The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution: This short book delves into our understanding of the world through the idea of psychology and the very different levels of interpretation and consciousness.

• Fooled by Randomness: We live in a world of data, and probability and black swan events. Nassim Taleb, in his classic acerbic style, showed me that perhaps what I thought was determinant was, in reality, just a throw of the die. This brought to my attention the very real role of uncertainty and luck in decision-making in business and life.

• The Lessons of History: This book has been enlightening in helping me understand the macro movements of the world as well as its evolution. The author does a fine job of conveying essay style insights on how we survived as a species how ethics, morals and governments work among other things. A must read to begin to understand humanity.

• Theory of Multidimensional Reality: This universe might not be real, but a projection. The book offers a lot of scientific evidence and makes a convincing argument for a simulation. Consciousness and science seem to have reached a unified consensus with this theory.

Until Next Time! Happy Holidays and a New Year!