The Mind

My reading isn't a shelf of finished books; it's a set of syllabi I set for myself, each one ordered, budgeted, and graded — with homework I assign and actually do. The honest version up front: most of these curricula are plans I'm working through, not trophies. I let my love of reading lapse for about seven years and reignited it a year ago, and the systems below are what I built so it would stick this time. What I can show you isn't "books read." It's the program I designed to read them — and the single lens underneath all of it.

The lens: 80/20, and everything connects

People who meet me as a builder are sometimes surprised there's a romantic autodidact under it. There isn't a contradiction. The same brain that keeps a words-per-minute throughput table also keeps a 4,670-page philosophy budget, and both come from one belief I've held long enough to call doctrine: find the vital fraction of any field, operationalize it, and move on — because the fields aren't separate.

“Everything is interconnected. Singing makes you a better speaker. Video games train you to perform under pressure… Each skill feeds into the next, creating exponential growth… If you want to be truly unstoppable, learn everything.”— from a script of mine, “The Real Cheat Code to Growth”

That's why I read across every field at once instead of going deep on one. The Pareto principle applies to learning too: you can reach 80% of a skill in a fraction of the time it takes to perfect it, so instead of ten years on one thing you could be 80% good at five — and the five compound. It's a thesis I can argue, not just a vibe, and it's the engine behind the whole reading project. The lists below are its output.

This also didn't arrive fully formed, which matters to me. The honest origin is a relapse story — the only kind I trust about myself. I was a childhood reader who as a kid actually wrote and published a book, then spent about seven years reading nothing, trading it for binging TV, before a deliberate restart roughly a year ago. The curricula here are the output of that restart, not a lifelong habit I'm coasting on. I had to engineer my way back into a thing I'd loved and lost — which is a more fragile and frankly more honest place to write from than "voracious reader."

I run it like a project, not a vibe

Before any of the syllabi, there's the meta-system that makes them runnable. I treat my reading list the way I'd treat any other project: one master priority list, weaknesses first, top-down from high-level to low-level for maximum compounding, fiction and coding books deliberately deprioritized, and a rule to keep five books in "currently reading" so I can switch by mood and keep the activation energy low. That last rule is the giveaway — I apply my own habit-design knowledge to my own reading so it doesn't collapse the way it did the first time.

I also measure it like an engineer, which is the cleanest place to watch the spreadsheet-optimizer and the romantic share a desk. I've calibrated my own throughput — nonfiction around 238 words per minute, fiction 260, call it 250 for math — and turned it into a conversion table: a page a minute, 60 pages an hour, 600 pages in 10 hours, a million words in about 67 hours. That table is why the philosophy list has a number attached to it at all. A reading list with a page count and an hour budget stops being a wish and becomes a project plan with a delivery date.

The philosophy syllabus (the one I'm proudest of)

The artifact I'm proudest of in this whole domain isn't a book I've read. It's a list — about 4,670 pages, roughly 77 hours, sequenced Plato through Dostoevsky — that I researched once, locked, and then forbade myself from ever touching again.

“Well researched absolutely final philosophy reading list. DONT prompt llms again or do additional research, just read thru these in order — like them or not. The last book needs to be last but is also most important so have to FINISH this list.”— the header of my philosophy curriculum

The order is deliberate and Western-plus-Eastern on purpose: Warburton's A Little History of Philosophy to get the map, then Sartre, Plato's Five Dialogues, Aristotle's Ethics, Descartes, Marcus Aurelius (Hays translation — I specify translations, because they matter), the Bhagavad Gita (Easwaran), Kierkegaard, Camus, Zhuangzi (Burton Watson), Sandel's Justice, Nietzsche, Seneca, the Buddha via Thich Nhat Hanh, and Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov near the end, where it earned its spot. The intent, in my own words, is to balance practical life philosophy — Stoics, the Gita, Buddhism — with "the uncomfortable destabilizing stuff that makes writing interesting" — Nietzsche, Camus, existentialism — and enough ethics that I could write morally complex characters without defaulting to good versus evil.

Here's the part that makes it a syllabus and not a wishlist. After every book, I owe myself an hour of homework:

“FOR each book, right after reading it spend 1 hour HW: write a 500-1000 word… essay argument for and against… Also write a short character scene/sketch… that uses the books ideas for tension and internal/external debate.”— the homework protocol in my philosophy list

Notice what the second half does. The essay is for my thinking. The character scene — a zoomed-in moment, internal and external debate — is for my fiction. The philosophy reading and the novel are the same muscle; the syllabus is wired so that studying Kierkegaard literally generates raw material for a scene. That fusion is the part I find quietly strange and useful: most people who read Nietzsche file the ideas under "philosophy I know about." I file them under "tension a character can carry." A book that destabilizes me is a book that hands me a better antagonist.

And because I know myself, the list also ships with a pitch I wrote to keep me honest when it gets hard — that it's not an academic curriculum but a curated sequence where each book builds on the last, that every book earned its spot and nothing is filler, that if a book feels hard or annoying I should push through, because that's the point. It ends with an instruction I gave myself on purpose: "Start Sartre. It's 30 pages. Go." The smallest possible first step, because I know my real enemy isn't difficulty — it's the friction of starting.

The history and business curricula

History gets the same treatment, except the theory of why is more explicit. Sixteen books, five phases, ordered so the early ones build the scaffold the later ones hang on.

• Phase 1 — Scaffold: Durant's The Lessons of History, Harari's Sapiens, Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, Frankopan's The Silk Roads — the mental map, plus a deliberate correction for Western-centric bias.
• Phase 2 — Power, Decisions & Folly: Machiavelli's The Prince, both Tuchmans (The March of Folly, The Guns of August), and Thucydides in the Landmark edition — "the Melian Dialogue alone is worth it."
• Phase 3 — Why nations succeed or fail: Why Nations Fail, Beard's SPQR, Mann's 1491, Gaddis on the Cold War.
• Phase 4 — Cycles & prediction: Strauss & Howe's The Fourth Turning, Turchin's Ages of Discord.
• Phase 5 — Depth: Judt's Postwar, Shirer on the Third Reich.

I read history to think historically about decisions — folly, institutions, the way leaders walk into catastrophe — because those lessons map straight onto companies and communities. And the lens shows up here too:

“Phases 1–2 alone (~8 books) will get you 80% of the way to holding your own in any conversation and thinking historically about decisions. Phase 3–4 makes you genuinely dangerous. Phase 5 is gravy.”— my history curriculum, on where the payoff lives

The business reading is the most layered of the three, because I'm not trying to learn "business" — I'm trying to build a judgment engine. It's seven layers, roughly thirty titles, read in order for compounding, with a six-month sprint schedule mapping books to months, and the commander's intent is one phrase every time: maximum insight per page. The layers go bottom-up — self-mastery first (Naval's Almanack, Deep Work, The War of Art), then mental models and decision-making (Munger's Poor Charlie's Almanack, Parrish's Great Mental Models) as the judgment engine, then economics and strategy and game theory, then the business-building canon (The Personal MBA, Zero to One, The Lean Startup, Traction), then persuasion (Influence, Never Split the Difference, Sutherland's Alchemy), then systems and leverage (The Goal, Principles, Who Not How), and creativity on top. You build the operating system before you install the apps.

I read to build, never to collect

If there's one thing I want this page to land, it's this. Reading, for me, is upstream of building. The output is the point, and I can name the conversions exactly: Mindset and Range became a hiring framework — I wrote my own structured takeaways (growth versus fixed, breadth over depth, delayed specialization, "generalists triumph"), then fused them into an original interview-and-hiring process. Atomic Habits became a product idea, a companion workbook that turns the book into an implementation system. And a fantasy trilogy I loved, the Daevabad books, became the structural template for my own novel.

That last one is the clearest receipt. I didn't just read the Daevabad trilogy; I reverse-engineered it — per-book nested summaries, a "core story arcs" note abstracting each volume into conflicts and themes (Identity & Belonging, Power & Oppression, Loyalty & Betrayal), and individual arc notes tracing characters across all three books. The stated purpose was to learn how a published trilogy is actually assembled so I could build my own. Critical reading, pointed at construction.

My relationship to Atomic Habits is the tell on how I think about reading itself:

“Great book, highly recommend reading. I could summarize it here but the points in it wouldn't stick if I did that.”— my note on Atomic Habits

I refuse to summarize it to myself, on purpose, because writing the summary would rob me of the retrieval practice that makes it stick. That's learning science applied to my own note-taking — I'm not performing intellectualism, I'm trying to optimize it. The psychology shelf is where you can watch this densest: my self-help notes record lineage, not titles. I picked up Successful Intelligence because Mindset pointed at Robert Sternberg as the authority on intelligence, then Ultralearning because it builds on Sternberg, then The Intelligence Trap because I wanted the failure mode — why smart people make dumb mistakes. Around that sits the cognition core: Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, Cialdini's Influence, Predictably Irrational, Haidt's The Righteous Mind. I'm not collecting psychology books; I'm tracing how the ideas connect, because the connections are the useful part.

Writing-craft, science, and a healthy choosiness

The fiction I want to write gets its own syllabus too, and it's the bridge that proves the philosophy homework wasn't a gimmick. The craft shelf runs through Save the Cat! Writes a Novel, Stephen King's On Writing, Story Genius, Wonderbook, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, and Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. On top of that I keep a deliberate Brandon Sanderson study track — his Laws of Magic, the Writing Excuses podcast, his full BYU lecture playlist — plus a worldbuilding video syllabus on hard versus soft systems, how empires actually function, and how to name places. I treat storytelling as a learnable, syllabus-able discipline, the same way I treat philosophy or business — which is the whole reason the per-book "character scene" homework exists. The reading and the worlds I'm building are not two hobbies. They're one pipeline.

Past the three big curricula there's a breadth appetite I rarely talk about. I keep a benchmark list of roughly a hundred cultural-touchstone titles across history, economics, philosophy, science, memoir and politics, partly to make sure I'm literate in the broad canon, not just the founder-book niche. There's a science cluster in there that surprises people who only know me as a builder — A Brief History of Time, Cosmos, The Selfish Gene, The Gene, When Breath Becomes Air, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks — and a health-reading streak I treat as anti-misinformation work, with Why We Sleep and a Harvard nutrition book updated yearly as a single source of truth to cut through the noise. That's the same value that drives the statistics course I want to teach. I'm choosy in a way I think is part of the rigor, not snobbery: my manga list, for instance, is "comprehensively researched," and for most of it I'll tell you the anime adaptation is better. The move is always the same — find the few things worth the hours, skip the rest without guilt.

The toolbelt: thinking as a named set of tools

Underneath all the reading is a framework I treat as both how I think and what I want to teach. I've broken "thinking" into three named toolkits — Mathematical, Statistical, and Computational — each with five sub-tools. Mathematical: abstraction, pattern recognition, logical reasoning, quantitative estimation, problem framing. Statistical: data sense, probability, correlation-vs-causation, inference, risk. Computational: decomposition, algorithmic thinking, automation mindset, systematic debugging.

“Track your ‘toolbelt’ as you go, categorizing it into thinking frameworks, subtools within frameworks… that's the toolbelt you whip out to solve any problem that comes your way.”— from my note on mathematical thinking

I keep worked examples of pointing these at real life — the math of weight loss, lower-bound estimates for YouTube income, even a board game (Century: Spice Road) used to make the difference between accumulating worth and converting worth concrete. The board-game one is my favorite, because it's a whole life lesson smuggled inside a tabletop economy: spend your turns accumulating worth and conversion becomes trivial, which is exactly why I'd rather level myself up than grind a job hunt. The same three toolkits are the spine of the Mathematical / Statistical / Computational Thinking courses I want to teach — so the reading life and the teaching life are the same artifact seen from two sides.

And the reason any of it is worth the hours is simple: I read as leverage on the entire history of people who already solved the problems I'm facing. Books are the culmination of human knowledge — you don't have to figure everything out yourself when millions of people before you faced and overcame the same problems. So I pair every book with notes, on purpose, so the insight turns into behavior and not just highlights: read, summarize, change something I do. And I've gotten opinionated about where people should start, keeping an annotated entry-point map — Mindset first; Why We Sleep and the Harvard nutrition book for health; Atomic Habits for execution — that I hand to friends unprompted. That's generous, and also, if I'm honest, the same advise-more-than-I-listen reflex I'm working on elsewhere.

The honest part

The counterweight, because I'd rather name it than have you catch it. I'm aware that "rigorous reader" can curdle into a self-image, and mine has a specific shadow I've flagged in my own files: an occasional "non-intellectual" dismissiveness, an eye-roll I don't like in myself. So, plainly: most of these curricula are to-read, not read — the checkboxes are mostly unticked, and the philosophy syllabus I'm so proud of is, today, mostly ambition. I deliberately deprioritize fiction and even coding books in favor of nonfiction I'm weaker on, which means my fiction reading is thinner than a true literary type's would be. And the same finishing problem that haunts my building haunts this: the lists are immaculate; reading them all the way through is the hard part. Designing the syllabus is the fun bit. Doing the homework after book eleven is the real game — and the one I'm actually trying to get better at.

What I've done, and what's next

If you've got a curriculum you'd defend, a book that rewired you, or a list you think I've ordered wrong — that's exactly the conversation I want. Come say hi, or wander over to the worlds the philosophy quietly feeds.