What We’re Reading

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The End of Alzheimer's: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline

In this paradigm shifting book, Dale Bredesen, MD, offers real hope to anyone looking to prevent and even reverse Alzheimer's disease and cognitive decline. Revealing that AD is not one condition, as it is currently treated, but three, The End of Alzheimer's outlines 36 metabolic factors (micronutrients, hormone levels, sleep) that can trigger "downsizing" in the brain. The protocol shows us how to rebalance these factors using lifestyle modifications like taking B12, eliminating gluten, or improving oral hygiene.

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The Age of AI: And Our Human Future

In The Age of AI, three leading thinkers have come together to consider how AI will change our relationships with knowledge, politics, and the societies in which we live. The Age of AI is an essential roadmap to our present and our future, an era unlike any that has come before.

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Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

Every investment plan under the sun is, at best, an informed speculation of what may happen in the future, based on a systematic extrapolation from the known past.

Same as Ever reverses the process, inviting us to identify the many things that never, ever change.

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24: Life Stories and Lessons From the Say Hey Kid

Widely regarded as the greatest all-around player in baseball history because of his unparalleled hitting, defense and baserunning, the beloved Willie Mays offers people of all ages his lifetime of experience meeting challenges with positivity, integrity and triumph in 24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid.

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QB: My Life Behind the Spiral

After hearing Steve’s keynote at our most recent investor conference - many of us added his books to our reading list.

Young’s quest – both in football and in life – was always more about grit than anything. His “get it done” mentality brought MVP awards and Super Bowl championships to San Francisco. As an author, he gives readers the sense of being inside his helmet while he runs through opponents both on and off the field.

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The Pivot Year: 365 Days to Become the Person You Truly Want to Be

The Pivot Year is a book of 365 daily meditations on finding the courage to become who you've always wanted to be, from the internationally best selling author of "101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think," "The Mountain Is You," and more.

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The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects

A start-up executive and investor draws on expertise developed at the premier venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, and as an executive at Uber to address how tech’s most successful products have solved the dreaded "cold start problem” - by leveraging network effects to launch and scale toward billions of users.

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Real Estate Titans: 7 Key Lessons from the World’s Top Real Estate Investors

Real Estate Titans contains the 7 key lessons distilled from interviews with several of the world’s greatest real estate investors. These critical lessons offer insight into the mindset, tactics, and habits that each of the interviewed titans possess. Once you implement these key ideas―which you won’t find anywhere else―into your business, it will grow exponentially within a matter of months.

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The Gambler

The rags-to-riches story of one of America’s wealthiest and least-known financial giants, self-made billionaire Kirk Kerkorian—the daring aviator, movie mogul, risk-taker, and business tycoon who transformed Las Vegas and Hollywood to become one of the leading financiers in American business.

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How Google Works

How Google Works is an entertaining, page-turning primer containing lessons that Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg learned as they helped build the company. The authors explain how technology has shifted the balance of power from companies to consumers, and that the only way to succeed in this ever-changing landscape is to create superior products and attract a new breed of multifaceted employees whom Eric and Jonathan dub "smart creatives."

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Endurance

In August 1914, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton boarded the Endurance and set sail for Antarctica, where he planned to cross the last uncharted continent on foot. In January 1915, after battling its way through a thousand miles of pack ice and only a day's sail short of its destination, the Endurance became locked in an island of ice. Thus began the legendary ordeal of Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men. When their ship was finally crushed between two ice floes, they attempted a near-impossible journey over 850 miles of the South Atlantic's heaviest seas to the closest outpost of civilization.

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Scaling Up

It's been over a decade since Verne Harnish's best-selling book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits was first released. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't is the first major revision of this business classic. In Scaling Up, Harnish and his team share practical tools and techniques for building an industry-dominating business. These approaches have been honed from over three decades of advising tens of thousands of CEOs and executives and helping them navigate the increasing complexities (and weight) that come with scaling up a venture.

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Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

We've all had experiences with two dramatically different types of leaders. The first type drain intelligence, energy, and capability from the people around them and always need to be the smartest people in the room. These are the idea killers, the energy sappers, the diminishers of talent and commitment. On the other side of the spectrum are leaders who use their intelligence to amplify the smarts and capabilities of the people around them. When these leaders walk into a room, lightbulbs go off over people's heads; ideas flow, and problems get solved. These are the leaders who inspire employees to stretch themselves to deliver results that surpass expectations. These are the Multipliers. And the world needs more of them - especially now, when leaders are expected to do more with less.

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A Failure of Nerve

Ten years after his death, Edwin Friedman's insights into leadership are more urgently needed than ever. He was the first to tell us that all organizations have personalities, like families, and to apply the insights of family therapy to churches and synagogues, rectors and rabbis, politicians and teachers.

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Who Not How

When we want something done, we've been trained to ask ourselves: "How can I do this?" Well, there is a better question to ask. One that unlocks a whole new world of ease and accomplishment. Expert coach Dan Sullivan knows the question we should ask instead: "Who can do this for me?"

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How Will You Measure Your Life?

From the world’s leading thinker on innovation and New York Times bestselling author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton M. Christensen, comes an unconventional book of inspiration and wisdom for achieving a fulfilling life. Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, notably the only business book that Apple’s Steve Jobs said “deeply influenced” him, is widely recognized as one of the most significant business books ever published.

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Blue Ocean Strategy

In this perennial bestseller, embraced by organizations and industries worldwide, globally preeminent management thinkers W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne challenge everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success.

Based on a study of 150 strategic moves (spanning more than 100 years across 30 industries), the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors but from creating "blue oceans"—untapped new market spaces ripe for growth.

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10x is Easier Than 2x

Dan Sullivan, the world's leading coach for highly successful entrepreneurs, wants you to know that achieving 10X growth is exponentially easier than striving for 2X growth. Most find this idea confusing at first because simply imagining 10X growth causes them to think they need to do 10X more work to achieve it. However, being a 10X entrepreneur is nothing like what most people think.

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The Rational Optimist

In a bold and provocative interpretation of economic history, Matt Ridley, the New York Times-bestselling author of Genome and The Red Queen, makes the case for an economics of hope, arguing that the benefits of commerce, technology, innovation, and change—what Ridley calls cultural evolution—will inevitably increase human prosperity.

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American Kingpin

In 2011, a twenty-six-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine Web site hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything—drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons—free of the government’s watchful eye.

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Shoe Dog

Fresh out of business school, Phil Knight borrowed fifty dollars from his father and launched a company with one simple mission: import high-quality, low-cost running shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the trunk of his car in 1963, Knight grossed eight thousand dollars that first year. Today, Nike’s annual sales top $30 billion. In this age of start-ups, Knight’s Nike is the gold standard, and its swoosh is one of the few icons instantly recognized in every corner of the world.

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Stranger in Paradise

Written by a prominent wealth psychologist, Strangers in Paradise takes an innovative approach to the challenges facing wealth’s “immigrants and natives.” Combining clear reasoning with real-world stories, Strangers in Paradise outlines for the first time how the key process for families of wealth—like all immigrant families—is adaptation.

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Can’t Hurt Me

For David Goggins, childhood was a nightmare—poverty, prejudice, and physical abuse colored his days and haunted his nights. But through self-discipline, mental toughness, and hard work, Goggins transformed himself from a depressed, overweight young man with no future into a U.S. Armed Forces icon and one of the world's top endurance athletes.

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How the Mind Works

What makes us rational―and why are we so often irrational? How do we see in three dimensions? Why do we fall in love? And how do we grapple with the imponderables of morality, religion, and consciousness?

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Big Debt Crises

For the 10th anniversary of the 2008 financial crisis, one of the world’s most successful investors, Ray Dalio, shares his unique template for how debt crises work and principles for dealing with them well. This template allowed his firm, Bridgewater Associates, to anticipate events and navigate them well while others struggled badly.

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The War of Art

What keeps so many of us from doing what we long to do? Why is there a naysayer within? How can we avoid the roadblocks of any creative endeavor—be it starting up a dream business venture, writing a novel, or painting a masterpiece? The War of Art identifies the enemy that every one of us must face, outlines a battle plan to conquer this internal foe, then pinpoints just how to achieve the greatest success.

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Texas Patriarch

Cloyce Box was larger than life. He left his career as a Pro Bowl wide receiver for the Detroit Lions to rise to corporate fame and extravagant wealth in construction and the oil and gas industries. Cloyce ran both his companies and his family with a firm hand and inextricably linked the two by raising his sons in the business. When he finally passed, he left a wake of collapsing relationships at home and in the boardroom.

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Thank You for Being Late

A field guide to the twenty-first century, written by one of its most celebrated observers. In his most ambitious work to date, Thomas L. Friedman shows that we have entered an age of dizzying acceleration—and explains how to live in it.

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Conscious Capitalism

Whole Foods Market cofounder John Mackey and professor and Conscious Capitalism, Inc. cofounder Raj Sisodia argue that both business and capitalism are inherently good, and they use some of today’s best-known and most successful companies to illustrate their point.

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The Infinite Game

The more Simon started to understand the difference between finite and infinite games, the more he began to see infinite games all around us. He started to see that many of the struggles that organizations face exist simply because their leaders were playing with a finite mindset in a game that has no end. The leaders who embrace an infinite mindset, in stark contrast, build stronger, more innovative, more inspiring organizations.

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Money Masters of Our Time

Money Masters of Our Time is a survey of the investment strategies of about 20 different prolific investors. We love this book because we try to see the world and opportunity through the eyes of successful investors. We particularly enjoyed the story of Richard Raintree who turned around Disney after the death of Roy Disney.

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Anthro-Vision

Instead of reading exclusively in our industry, we love finding overlap from other disciplines. In Anthro-Vision, PhD Philanthropist, Gillian Tett shares her findings on how human behavior affects entrepreneurs and their business models.

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What It Takes

From folding handkerchief's in his father's linen shop to co-founding Blackstone, Stephen Schwarzman quite literally embodies rags to riches. We love this book because Schwarzman candidly shares the ups and downs of his journey.

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Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

What if working like crazy to beat the competition did exactly the opposite, making you mediocre and more like the competition?

In today’s world of overabundant consumer choices and superfluous apps, upgrades, add-ons, and features, brands have become nearly identical, as their efforts to outdo one another have pushed them into a dizzying herd of indistinct options.

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Mastering the Market Cycle

Author Howard Marks provides practical insight and analysis on how to understand, track, and react to the ups and downs of market cycles. Marks reveals the hidden logic in carefully pinpointing market trends so that investors have the opportunity to improve their results.

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Extreme Ownership

This book explains the SEAL leadership concepts crucial to accomplishing the most difficult missions in combat and how to apply them to any group, team, or organization. It provides the reader with Jocko and Leif’s formula for success: the mindset and guiding principles that enable SEAL combat units to achieve extraordinary results. It demonstrates how to apply these directly to business and life to likewise achieve victory.

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Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0

The latest book by Jim Collins is a roadmap for entrepreneurs and leaders of small-to-mid-sized enterprises who want to build enduring great companies. Inside is practical guidance for becoming a great leader, setting a compelling vision, articulating an effective strategy, and achieving consistent tactical excellence.

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Traction

Traction offers a helping hand for beginning entrepreneurs and others whose businesses are stuck at a point where hard work and determination are no longer enough to survive and grow. Author Gino Wickman explains how to structure a business using his Entrepreneurial Operating System to remove typical frustrations, so it regains momentum, runs seamlessly, and you don’t get mired in details. The system is based on practical experience, not theory.

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Blue Ocean Strategy

In this perennial bestseller, embraced by organizations and industries worldwide, globally preeminent management thinkers W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne challenge everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves (spanning more than 100 years across 30 industries), the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors but from creating "blue oceans"—untapped new market spaces ripe for growth.

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Outlive

Wouldn’t you like to live longer? And better? In this operating manual for longevity, Dr. Peter Attia draws on the latest science to deliver innovative nutritional interventions, techniques for optimizing exercise and sleep, and tools for addressing emotional and mental health.

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How Finance Works

If you're not a numbers person, then finance can be intimidating and easy to ignore. But if you want to advance in your career, you'll need to make smart financial decisions and develop the confidence to clearly communicate those decisions to others. In How Finance Works, Mihir Desai - a professor at Harvard Business School and author of The Wisdom of Finance - guides you into the complex but endlessly fascinating world of finance, demystifying it in the process.

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The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley’s most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup - practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog.

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The New New Thing

In the weird glow of the dying millennium, Michael Lewis set out on a safari through Silicon Valley to find the world’s most important technology entrepreneur. He found this in Jim Clark, a man whose achievements include the founding of three separate billion-dollar companies. Lewis also found much more, and the result―the best-selling book The New New Thing―is an ingeniously conceived history of the Internet revolution.

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That Will Never Work

Once upon a time, brick-and-mortar video stores were king. Late fees were ubiquitous, video-streaming unheard was of, and widespread DVD adoption seemed about as imminent as flying cars. Indeed, these were the widely accepted laws of the land in 1997, when Marc Randolph had an idea. It was a simple thought—leveraging the internet to rent movies—and was just one of many more and far worse proposals, like personalized baseball bats and a shampoo delivery service, that Randolph would pitch to his business partner, Reed Hastings, on their commute to work each morning.

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In An Uncertain World

Robert Rubin was sworn in as the seventieth U.S. Secretary of the Treasury in January 1995 in a brisk ceremony attended only by his wife and a few colleagues. As soon as the ceremony was over, he began an emergency meeting with President Bill Clinton on the financial crisis in Mexico. This was not only a harbinger of things to come during what would prove to be a rocky period in the global economy; it also captured the essence of Rubin himself--short on formality, quick to get into the nitty-gritty.

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Algorithms To Live By

What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of the new and familiar is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not. Computers, like us, confront limited space and time, so computer scientists have been grappling with similar problems for decades. And the solutions they’ve found have much to teach us.

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