100 Books Like Before You Know It

The work of Anders Ericsson changed my life. In this book, he describes his research into how certain people become really good at what they do. They all use one particular approach to achieving excellence. First, through a teacher, they learn the specific skills they need for their chosen activity. Then, they devote large amounts of time to practicing each skill to the point of mastery. Finally, with more practice, they learn to put all the skills together.

This way of learning is familiar to anyone who’s played a sport or a musical instrument. But it had never been applied to writing. Inspired by Ericsson’s work, that’s what I did, first with my own writing, then in classes I taught, and finally in my book listed above.

I recommend this book because it completely flips the idea of resilience.

Taleb argues that we shouldn’t aim to be unbreakable. Instead, we should aim to grow stronger from stress and volatility. I don’t agree with every example (and it’s dense at times), but it’s one of those books that forces me to think differently about systems, teams, and even my own mindset.

It’s a powerful reminder that disruption isn’t the enemy, stagnation is. 

This book will capture your imagination and dazzle your senses with deep scholarship.

Deep exploration of creative outputs at their maximum states, the state of “flow”, condensing Csikszentmihalyi’s thirty years of research and nearly one hundred interviews with exceptionally creative people, spanning science, business, and art, in all of their dimensions. Creativity in art, technology, and science, perceived by many as being different types of creativity, revealed, at its core, to be the same.

The Pyramid Principle is about problem-solving and communication, two areas completely decisive for anyone who has the ambition to get the most out of their personal and professional lives.

It offers practical advice on how to organize your ideas and present them in a clear and persuasive manner. It provides a framework for effective problem-solving communication that can be applied to a variety of contexts, from business writing to presentations and speeches.

Love this book! This is a foundational behavioral ethics book, written by two giants in the field—psychologists Bazerman of Harvard Business School and Tenbrunsel of Notre Dame.

It is research-based, yet very accessible to the novice, directly addressing, as the title indicates, why people sometimes mess up and how they can avoid it. It introduces the reader to cognitive biases and other influences that can fool people’s brains into making poor moral choices.

Blind Spots was an invaluable resource for Cara Biasucci and me for many of the 150 or so videos we have produced for Ethics Unwrapped.

I was intrigued to learn about “moral disengagement,” which is a particular way of thinking about the processes, pressures, and biases that lead good people to do bad things.

The creation of the late Albert Bandura, a psychologist at Stanford University and one of the most influential psychologists of modern times, moral disengagement is the process by which we separate our identity as good people from the bad acts that we do so that we can do what we wish but still think of ourselves as good folks.

At more than 400 pages, this book is not a quick read, but learning about the mechanisms of moral disengagement is endlessly fascinating. The book never bores.   

This is the best book I’ve read about the human dreams and failings of white-collar criminals.

With Soltes’ direct access to headline names—like Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Skilling, and Marc Drier—I steeped myself in his profound research on our myths about “nurture vs. nature,” whether companies are inherently “good” or “bad,” and whether criminal behavior inside companies is performed by fundamentally “bad” people. The book taught me about the psyche of embezzlers and the conditions inside companies that influence their stealing. That knowledge took me beyond my own familial myths about George Hormel’s embezzler and enhanced my understanding of why he likely did his stealing.

The book also outlined the great impact of white-collar crime on families, companies, and our economy, leading me to a more nuanced understanding of southern Minnesota in the 1920s. History and humanity are woven together in whole cloth, and Soltes’ work allowed me to speculate about… show more.

I know and admire Paul Woodruff, a noted philosopher at the University of Texas. His worldview has been shaped by his experiences as a young soldier in the Vietnam War and he has spent much of his professional life trying to make sense of those experiences.

The book begins with Woodruff remembering a time, 50 years ago, when he was lying in ambush in Vietnam, pondering the question that he attempts to answer in this book: “What makes the difference in a human being between acting ethically and not? Specifically, in a soldier, between committing atrocities and holding back?” He realized at that moment that all his philosophy training at Princeton had not helped him answer that question.

Much of his discussion in this book, written half a century later, finds useful guidance by focusing on the psychological influences of behavioral ethics rather than the philosophical musings of Socrates.

Thanks to Freud, one of the most cherished ideas in psychology is that we have an unconscious. Yet because it is by definition inaccessible, our unconscious is almost impossible to study scientifically. Freud himself certainly didn’t provide much reliable evidence for its existence. Nick Chater, a respected researcher of language and perception, argues that little if any evidence for an unconscious drive exists even now, almost a century after Freud. With lively and pugnacious arguments drawn from fascinating and diverse discoveries about language and perception, Chater deconstructs the unconscious and argues instead for a human mind that is inherently dynamic and in-the-moment. When I have assigned this book to my undergraduate students studying perception it has provoked some of the most heated debates, which is how I know it is a great book!

I loved this book because it gave me a toolkit for smarter decision-making. Weinberg’s collection of mental models helped me see patterns I hadn’t noticed before and approach problems more strategically. As someone who thrives on structure but also values creativity, I found these models incredibly useful for balancing logic with intuition.

This book has become one of my go-to resources whenever I’m faced with complex challenges—it’s like having a cheat sheet for life!