Ryan Peterson

Hazlitt's 1946 distillation of Bastiat's 'broken window' insight: good economic reasoning requires seeing both what is visible and what is made invisible by a policy. A short book that teaches a single analytical habit, and that habit is genuinely useful regardless of your politics.

Eight centuries of price revolutions and what ended each one.

The economy as a complex evolving system rather than one in equilibrium.

Seven sources of lasting advantage, each a benefit plus a barrier to rivals.

A plant manager learns that a system's output is set by its bottleneck.

Operating manual for scaling a company from fifty to thousands

Why startups should build something new and own a small market before growing.

Speeches making the case for a latticework of mental models from many fields.

Treat stocks as parts of businesses and buy only with a margin of safety.

Scott's two-axis framework — care personally, challenge directly — gives a practical vocabulary for the feedback conversations managers routinely avoid. The quadrant model (Radical Candor, Ruinous Empathy, Obnoxious Aggression, Manipulative Insincerity) is one of the most operationally useful tools in management writing.

An operating manual for founders scaling from a few people to a few hundred.

Incerto volume 4

Naval Ravikant's ideas on building wealth and being happy, gathered from his talks.

People who think ability grows with effort learn more than those who think it fixed.

Rene Girard's theory that people imitate each other's desires, applied to business.

John Boyd's military strategy, including the OODA loop, applied to business.

The original text on strategic positioning. Sun Tzu's core insight — that winning without fighting is the highest form of strategy — runs through everything that followed. Short enough to read in an afternoon, dense enough to argue about for a career.

Academic study of relational coordination and turnaround times.

Interviews with 50 investors, from Dalio to Bogle, turned into money advice.

The history of finance by instrument: credit, bonds, stocks, insurance and property.