Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735211299/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness
https://www.amazon.com/Almanack-Naval-Ravikant-Wealth-Happin...
I wasn't arguing anything about any particular person, but rather commenting that a lot of the entrepreneurs and investors that get fetishized around here found their "success" from family wealth or by doing some sociopath-level things. There are obviously exceptions, and maybe Naval is one of them, but I've read enough Silicon Valley biographies to become pretty skeptical of this entire genre of business/self-help/productivity hack books/blogs/tweets.
That's a "privilege" he earned.
My personal epiphany came about 10 years ago. I was in an incubator in SF, and some investor came to give a talk about fundraising. They heavily emphasized that many startups do a friends-and-family round to bridge them to a proper seed round-- nothing major, just get 20k from 5 family members and you should be good until you have something to show angel investors. My two co-founders and I (all from the Midwest) realized that we couldn't even come up with five people to ask for 20k because all of us came from pretty modest families.
These are the types of privileges that get glossed over in success stories. To be successful you, more likely than not, need to either have money or have connections to money. Everyone likes a good underdog story, but those founders are more like lottery winners than anything else.
So, coming from that lens, it's hard to take advice seriously from "successful" entrepreneurs. It's sort of our industry's equivalent of "just stop eating avocado toast and you'll become a millionaire."
I wrote this 2 months ago, my opinion hasn't changed. I guess there are worse charlatans out there (ribbonfarm springs to mind) but why should one waste his/her time reading chewed takes by someone who doesn't seem to have a single original thought-idea streak in him.
Varela / Maturana - The Tree of Knowledge
Miller - Living Systems
Prepare to have your mind blown apart.
If he offers me a bunch of true and useful ideas, in a single place, and in a useful form, that seems valuable to me.
I listened to Naval with a critical eye, and read criticisms from HN. His ideas seems useful, but tilted towards selling Entrepreneurship as the only way to become wealthy, and creating the feeling that's his path is a safe bet.
How beyond that does he manipulate his audience ?
Ad hominems are relevant when the person's work involves telling people how to be.
It is obvious that Jordan Peterson has seen and experienced misfortune. For most of us, it's much easier to relate to his ideas, than to those of the self-proclaimed modern gurus and egomaniacs from Silicon Valley.
His books are very verbose and boring, he covers too much stuff. I admit that I couldn't finish any of them. There are however excerpt from his lectures and interviews on Youtube which are spot on - very clear and direct.
It doesn’t make all of them bad authors, sometimes the talant is in the way you communicate known ideas.