Library

Thinking books

Free — no account needed to read

Reading alone does not make anyone a better thinker; practising does. So every book here comes with its big ideas in plain sentences, the thinking methods it gave us, an exercise you can do without having read it, and where it shows up in a real life.

Foundations & philosophy

Where thinking about thinking started, and the questions that have not gone away.

The Republic — Plato — A long argument about what justice is, which turns into an argument about knowledge, education and who should decide. (Core)
The Apology — Plato — Socrates on trial, explaining why he spent his life asking people questions they did not want. (Start here)
Meditations — Marcus Aurelius — A Roman emperor’s private notebook, written to himself, about keeping his judgement under pressure. (Start here)
Nicomachean Ethics — Aristotle — An argument that character is a set of habits, and that good judgement is itself a skill you practise. (Core)
Metaphysics — Aristotle — An attempt to say what exists and what counts as an explanation of it. (Advanced)
Tao Te Ching — Lao Tzu — Eighty-one short passages on acting with the situation rather than against it. (Start here)
Beyond Good and Evil — Friedrich Nietzsche — An attack on the idea that inherited moral categories are simply obvious. (Advanced)
Thus Spoke Zarathustra — Friedrich Nietzsche — A strange, literary book about becoming someone other than who you were told to be. (Advanced)
Man’s Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl — A psychiatrist’s account of the concentration camps, and what he concluded about meaning from it. (Start here)

Learning how to learn

What actually makes knowledge stick, as against what feels productive.

Make It Stick — Brown, Roediger & McDaniel — What the research says actually produces durable learning, and why it feels worse than what does not. (Start here)
A Mind for Numbers — Barbara Oakley — How to learn subjects you believe you are bad at, written by someone who switched into engineering late. (Start here)
Peak — Anders Ericsson & Robert Pool — The research on expert performance, and what separates practice that improves you from practice that does not. (Core)
How We Learn — Benedict Carey — A survey of learning and memory research, much of which contradicts standard study advice. (Core)
Ultralearning — Scott Young — A method for aggressive self-directed learning projects, built from cases and from learning science. (Core)
The Art of Learning — Josh Waitzkin — A chess prodigy turned martial arts competitor on how he learned to learn. (Core)
Why Don’t Students Like School? — Daniel Willingham — A cognitive scientist on how thinking actually works, and what that means for teaching and learning. (Core)
The Talent Code — Daniel Coyle — A reported account of places that produce unusual numbers of skilled people, and what they have in common. (Core)

Critical thinking

Claims, evidence, bias, and the gap between a story and a finding.

Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman — A summary of decades of research on how judgement systematically goes wrong. (Core)
The Art of Thinking Clearly — Rolf Dobelli — Ninety-nine short chapters, each on one recurring reasoning error. (Start here)
The Scout Mindset — Julia Galef — The difference between reasoning to find out what is true and reasoning to defend a position. (Start here)
Think Again — Adam Grant — An argument for rethinking as a skill, and for the pleasure of finding out you were wrong. (Start here)
Calling Bullshit — Carl Bergstrom & Jevin West — How to detect misleading claims, especially numerical and graphical ones, without being a specialist. (Core)
Factfulness — Hans Rosling — Why most people’s picture of the world is systematically out of date, and ten habits that cause it. (Start here)
A Field Guide to Lies and Statistics — Daniel Levitin — A practical guide to the ways numbers, graphs and expert claims mislead. (Core)
How to Think About Weird Things — Schick & Vaughn — A textbook on evaluating extraordinary claims, built around a set of explicit criteria. (Core)
Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) — Carol Tavris & Elliot Aronson — How self-justification works, and why it is strongest in people who most need to reconsider. (Core)
Predictably Irrational — Dan Ariely — Experiments showing that irrational behaviour is systematic, and therefore predictable and exploitable. (Start here)
The Intelligence Trap — David Robson — Why intelligent, educated people are not protected from bad judgement, and are sometimes worse at it. (Core)

Logic & argumentation

What follows from what, and how to build a case that survives contact.

The Art of Reasoning — David Kelley — A full introduction to reasoning: concepts, definitions, deduction, induction and fallacies. (Core)
A Rulebook for Arguments — Anthony Weston — A short, practical set of rules for constructing arguments that hold. (Start here)
Asking the Right Questions — Browne & Keeley — A fixed set of questions to ask of any argument you encounter. (Start here)
Critical Thinking — Brooke Moore & Richard Parker — A standard university text on argument analysis, credibility and fallacies. (Core)
The Philosophy Gym — Stephen Law — Twenty-five philosophical problems presented as exercises, graded by difficulty. (Start here)
An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments — Ali Almossawi — Common logical fallacies, one per page, with a picture. (Start here)
The Uses of Argument — Stephen Toulmin — A philosopher’s case that formal logic is the wrong model for real-world argument, and a better model. (Advanced)
How to Win Every Argument — Madsen Pirie — A catalogue of fallacies, written partly as a manual for using them — which is the point. (Core)

Problem solving

Defining the real problem, then methods for working it.

How to Solve It — George Pólya — A mathematician’s general method for problems you do not immediately know how to solve. (Start here)
The Art of Problem Solving — Lehoczky & Rusczyk — A competition-mathematics text whose real subject is how to attack an unfamiliar problem. (Advanced)
Problem Solving 101 — Ken Watanabe — A short, deliberately simple guide originally written for Japanese schoolchildren. (Start here)
Think Like a Rocket Scientist — Ozan Varol — First-principles thinking and experimentation, drawn from spaceflight engineering. (Core)
Range — David Epstein — A case that breadth and late specialisation often beat early narrow focus. (Core)

Decision making

Choosing under uncertainty, and judging the choice separately from the outcome.

Thinking in Bets — Annie Duke — A professional poker player on deciding well when luck is part of every result. (Start here)
Superforecasting — Philip Tetlock & Dan Gardner — What distinguished the people who predicted world events better than everyone else, including experts. (Core)
Decisive — Chip & Dan Heath — Four common ways decisions go wrong, and a practical counter for each. (Start here)
Sources of Power — Gary Klein — How experienced people actually decide under time pressure, studied in firefighters, nurses and soldiers. (Advanced)
The Undoing Project — Michael Lewis — The story of Kahneman and Tversky, and how the study of judgement errors came about. (Core)
Noise — Kahneman, Sibony & Sunstein — On unwanted variability in judgement — the same case judged differently by different people, or by the same person twice. (Advanced)
Clear Thinking — Shane Parrish — On the ordinary moments before a decision, where most outcomes are actually set. (Start here)

Creativity

Generating possibilities, because thinking is not only criticism.

Creative Confidence — Tom & David Kelley — An argument that creativity is a practice rather than a trait, from the founders of a design firm. (Start here)
Lateral Thinking — Edward de Bono — A case that generating ideas is a skill with methods, distinct from judging them. (Core)
Six Thinking Hats — Edward de Bono — A method for doing one kind of thinking at a time, especially in groups. (Start here)
The Creative Act — Rick Rubin — A music producer on the conditions creative work needs, in short meditative sections. (Start here)
Steal Like an Artist — Austin Kleon — A short book arguing that original work comes from visible, honest synthesis. (Start here)
Where Good Ideas Come From — Steven Johnson — A study of the environments that produce innovation, rather than the people. (Core)
The Design of Everyday Things — Don Norman — Why things are hard to use, and why the person using them blames themselves. (Start here)

Systems thinking

Loops, delays, constraints and the consequences nobody planned.

Thinking in Systems — Donella Meadows — The clearest short introduction to seeing situations as systems rather than as events. (Start here)
The Fifth Discipline — Peter Senge — Systems thinking applied to organisations, and what stops groups from learning. (Core)
The Systems Bible — John Gall — A satirical but serious book of laws about how complex systems actually behave. (Core)
Antifragile — Nassim Nicholas Taleb — On things that gain from disorder, as distinct from things that merely survive it. (Advanced)
The Goal — Eliyahu Goldratt — A business novel about constraints, and why improving everything improves nothing. (Start here)
Seeing Systems — Barry Oshry — On the predictable blindness that comes with your position in an organisation. (Advanced)
Complexity — M. Mitchell Waldrop — The story of the Santa Fe Institute and the science of emergent, adaptive systems. (Advanced)

Emotions & understanding people

Frameworks for what people do and why — offered to explore, never as a diagnosis of you.

Emotional Intelligence — Daniel Goleman — The book that popularised the idea that handling emotion is a set of learnable capacities. (Core)
Social Intelligence — Daniel Goleman — On what happens between people, rather than inside one person. (Core)
Emotional Agility — Susan David — On working with difficult emotions rather than suppressing them or being led by them. (Core)
Permission to Feel — Marc Brackett — A researcher’s case for emotional skills as teachable, with a method for doing it. (Core)
The Righteous Mind — Jonathan Haidt — On why decent people divide over politics and morality, and cannot hear each other. (Core)
Games People Play — Eric Berne — A catalogue of repeating, unproductive interaction patterns, from transactional analysis. (Advanced)

Conflict & negotiation

Disagreement handled so that something comes out of it.

Nonviolent Communication — Marshall Rosenberg — A four-part structure for saying difficult things in a way that can be heard. (Start here)
Getting to Yes — Fisher, Ury & Patton — The standard method for negotiating without treating it as a contest of will. (Start here)
Never Split the Difference — Chris Voss — A hostage negotiator’s approach, built on listening rather than on trading. (Start here)
Difficult Conversations — Stone, Patton & Heen — Why hard conversations are hard, and how to have them anyway. (Start here)
Crucial Conversations — Patterson, Grenny, McMillan & Switzler — A method for high-stakes conversations where opinions differ and emotions are strong. (Core)
The Anatomy of Peace — The Arbinger Institute — On the mindset underneath conflict, argued through a narrative. (Core)
Getting Past No — William Ury — The follow-up to Getting to Yes, for when the other side will not cooperate. (Core)

Strategy & competition

Position, timing, information, and deciding what you will not do.

The Art of War — Sun Tzu — A short treatise arguing that the best outcome is the one you reach without fighting for it. (Start here)
The Book of Five Rings — Miyamoto Musashi — A swordsman’s notes on strategy, perception and training, written near the end of his life. (Core)
The Prince — Niccolò Machiavelli — A cold description of how power is actually acquired and kept, as opposed to how it is said to be. (Core)
The Innovator’s Dilemma — Clayton Christensen — Why well-run companies fail, precisely by doing the things that made them successful. (Core)
On War — Carl von Clausewitz — A dense, unfinished theory of war whose real subject is acting under uncertainty. (Advanced)
Good Strategy / Bad Strategy — Richard Rumelt — What actually makes something a strategy, and why most documents called strategy are not one. (Start here)
Playing to Win — A.G. Lafley & Roger Martin — Strategy as five linked choices, from the people who ran it at Procter & Gamble. (Core)
Competitive Strategy — Michael Porter — The structural analysis of industries, and where profit actually comes from. (Advanced)
The Strategy Paradox — Michael Raynor — On why the strategies most likely to succeed spectacularly are also most likely to fail. (Advanced)

Human nature & society

Why people organise the way they do, and what that costs.

Leviathan — Thomas Hobbes — An argument that without a common authority, life is a war of everyone against everyone. (Advanced)
The Social Contract — Jean-Jacques Rousseau — An argument about where the authority of a group over its members legitimately comes from. (Advanced)
On Liberty — John Stuart Mill — A defence of individual freedom, and of letting wrong opinions be heard. (Core)
The Laws — Plato — Plato’s late, more practical work on how a society should actually be governed. (Advanced)
Politics — Aristotle — A comparative study of constitutions and what makes them stable or fragile. (Advanced)
Sapiens — Yuval Noah Harari — A sweeping history of humankind organised around shared fictions. (Start here)
The Dawn of Everything — David Graeber & David Wengrow — An argument that the standard story of human social evolution is largely wrong. (Advanced)

Scientific thinking

How a claim becomes knowledge, and how knowledge gets overturned.

The Demon-Haunted World — Carl Sagan — A defence of scientific thinking as a way of staying honest, not just a way of doing science. (Core)
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — Thomas Kuhn — On how science actually changes — not by accumulation, but by periodic upheaval. (Advanced)
The Gene — Siddhartha Mukherjee — A history of genetics that doubles as a demonstration of scientific reasoning. (Core)
The Selfish Gene — Richard Dawkins — Evolution explained from the gene’s perspective rather than the organism’s. (Core)
The Information — James Gleick — A history of information as a concept, from drums and writing to Shannon and beyond. (Advanced)

Probability & quantitative thinking

Chance, randomness, prediction, and thinking in ranges.

Fooled by Randomness — Nassim Nicholas Taleb — On how much of what looks like skill is luck, and why we cannot see it. (Core)
The Black Swan — Nassim Nicholas Taleb — On rare, high-impact events, and why models built on the ordinary miss them. (Core)
The Signal and the Noise — Nate Silver — Why most predictions fail, across weather, elections, earthquakes and finance. (Core)
The Drunkard’s Walk — Leonard Mlodinow — How randomness shapes outcomes people confidently attribute to skill. (Start here)
How Not to Be Wrong — Jordan Ellenberg — Mathematical thinking as an extension of common sense, shown through real cases. (Core)

Knowledge & truth

What can be known, and how you would tell. The deep end.

The Logic of Scientific Discovery — Karl Popper — The argument that science proceeds by attempting to refute theories, not to confirm them. (Advanced)
The Beginning of Infinity — David Deutsch — An argument that good explanations are the engine of all progress. (Advanced)
Discourse on Method — René Descartes — A short account of how to rebuild your beliefs from a foundation you cannot doubt. (Core)
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding — David Hume — On the limits of what experience can establish, especially about cause and effect. (Advanced)
Critique of Pure Reason — Immanuel Kant — An attempt to map what reason can and cannot establish on its own. Famously difficult. (Advanced)

Communication & persuasion

Thinking is not much use if it cannot leave your head.

Thank You for Arguing — Jay Heinrichs — Classical rhetoric made usable, with modern examples. (Start here)
Influence — Robert Cialdini — Six principles that reliably produce compliance, documented from field research. (Start here)
Pre-Suasion — Robert Cialdini — On how what happens before a message determines how it lands. (Core)
How to Win Friends and Influence People — Dale Carnegie — The original popular book on interpersonal effectiveness, still largely accurate. (Start here)
Made to Stick — Chip & Dan Heath — Why some ideas survive being retold and others do not. (Start here)
On Writing Well — William Zinsser — A guide to clear non-fiction writing, and by extension to clear thinking. (Start here)
The Elements of Style — Strunk & White — The short, opinionated classic on writing plainly. (Start here)
The Pyramid Principle — Barbara Minto — A structure for presenting a conclusion so a busy reader can follow it. (Core)

Leadership & character

Judgement applied where other people are affected by it.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People — Stephen Covey — A framework for personal and interpersonal effectiveness built on character rather than technique. (Start here)
Good to Great — Jim Collins — A study of companies that made a sustained leap in performance, and what they shared. (Core)
Leaders Eat Last — Simon Sinek — On safety and trust inside a group as the precondition for performance. (Core)
Extreme Ownership — Jocko Willink & Leif Babin — Leadership principles from military experience, centred on taking full responsibility. (Core)
The Effective Executive — Peter Drucker — On effectiveness as a learnable practice rather than a personality. (Start here)