Tim Ferriss

Routines, tools and advice from over 200 podcast guests on health, wealth and wisdom.

Learning to cook as a route to learning any skill, with chefs' recipes and tricks.

A novel in which industrialists vanish from an economy run by government directives.

A novel of wartime codebreakers and their descendants building a data haven.

A novel of a feudal space empire fighting over a desert planet and its spice.

A novel of a gifted boy trained in an orbiting school for war against aliens.

Nine science-fiction stories, each working through one idea with care.

A novel of a poor farmer's son who moves to the city and gets rich bottling water.

Poems on Vietnamese heritage, family, war, the body, sexuality and violence.

A novel of a hacker in a corporate-run America and its virtual world, the Metaverse.

Eight science-fiction stories, each working out one premise with rigour.

A novel of nine people whose lives are bound up with trees and their defence.

Behavioural training methods for animals and people, explained with examples.

Life in Nazi concentration camps, and logotherapy: finding meaning to survive.

A journalist learns memory techniques and wins the US Memory Championship.

Experiments showing people work for meaning and recognition, not just money.

Daniel Gilbert's accessible account of affective forecasting — our poor ability to predict what will make us happy. His research on immune neglect and focalism is less cited than Kahneman's work but equally well-evidenced.

Alfred Adler's psychology taught through five nights of dialogue.

How to spot subtle warning signs of violence and trust the intuition that sees them.

Modern Stoicism; desire management and negative visualisation

Incerto volume 4

Letters on how to live, a course in Stoic philosophy written to a friend.

A short case against all lying, white lies included.

A Roman emperor's private notes reminding himself to live by Stoic principles.

An almanac of proverbs and maxims urging thrift, industry and courtesy.

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

A news anchor's panic attack on air leads him to meditation, and what it did for him.

From abused child and 300-pound exterminator to Navy SEAL, and how to get tough.

How lack of sleep damages nearly every system in the body, and what sleep does.

Build habits by making them obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying.

Why distraction-free concentration is rare and valuable, and how to train for it.

A method for finding the few activities that matter and dropping the rest.

The plateau and long practice; mastery as a delayed reward

How masters from Leonardo to Faraday found a life's task and served apprenticeships.

Tim Ferriss's book belongs on a personal-finance list not for its investment advice but for its income argument: the fastest way to reach financial independence may be redesigning how and where you work rather than cutting spending to the bone. The 'new rich' framework is deliberately provocative, and the specific tactics age poorly, but the income-side case remains underweighted in most FIRE writing.

Get more with less by finding the 20% of effort that yields 80% of results.

The size of your thinking sets the size of your results, and how to think bigger.

Goldman wrote Butch Cassidy, All the President's Men, and The Princess Bride, and this book is his frank account of what it is actually like to write for Hollywood. His central claim — that nobody knows anything — is an important corrective to every book on this list that treats filmmaking as a solved problem.

Writing advice focused on the fears and habits that stop people writing.

A manual for non-fiction: clear writing comes from clear thinking.

The key elements of literary memoir: memory, identity and reflecting on the past.

How prices are set in the contemporary art market, from dealers to auction houses.

A course in the creative process and in living an artist's life.

Pressfield's book on resistance applies with particular force to musicians, where the gap between technical facility and creative output is often enormous. The concept of 'turning pro' — treating creative work as a practice with professional discipline regardless of whether it pays — is the mental shift that separates hobbyists from people who actually finish records.

Lessons from building CD Baby from a side project to an $85 million business.

Why organisations kill breakthrough projects, and how structure can protect them.

Small firms fail when technicians run them; build systems that run the business.

How drug companies distort medical evidence, starting with unpublished trials.

The history and revival of psychedelic research, and the author's own trips.

How music acts on the brain, through patients, musicians and ordinary people.

How checklists stop experts in complex fields failing to apply what they know.

The botany and chemistry of hallucinogenic plants and how people have used them.

Species change over time as natural selection favours heritable variations.

Franklin's life as printer, scientist, diplomat and founder.

Running Disney and buying Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and Fox to add creative talent.

A tennis champion's life story, built around the fact that he hated tennis.

How to create new market space instead of fighting rivals over existing demand.

How Pixar kept a creative company working after success, and the habits it used.

Decision rules from building Bridgewater: radical truth and radical transparency.

Effectiveness is learned practice: manage time, pick priorities, decide well.

The record-priced 1787 Lafite said to be Jefferson's, and doubts about its origin.

How the Mongol empire's trade and communication helped make the modern world.

Recurring patterns drawn from world history: biology, morals, religion, economics.

Principled negotiation: bargain over interests, not positions, and trade less.

Why some words persuade and others fail, from a political pollster.

A guide to learning more than one language, focused on Europe's languages.

Life on Salomon Brothers' bond trading floor in the 1980s mortgage-bond boom.

Hedge funds from Alfred Winslow Jones in 1949 through Soros, Robertson and beyond.

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

Where to find mispriced stocks: spinoffs, mergers, bankruptcies and restructurings.

Management as production: a manager's output is the output of the team they lead.

Eighty-one short chapters on the Tao, the founding text of Taoism.

Navy SEAL leadership doctrine adapted to running teams and firms

Twenty-two rules of marketing, such as being first is better than being better.

A physicist's stories, from fixing radios as a boy to Los Alamos and beyond.

Learning to cook as a route to learning any skill, with chefs' recipes and tricks.

From LinkExchange to Zappos, and the case for building a company on its culture.

Why many successful children and adults feel empty, and how to break the cycle.

The case that fast-improving technology will make scarce resources cheap.