Here’s a list of books and resources I am currently reading and will read in the near future. Note that this list also contains online resources like blogs or courses I have taken and am taking currently. Of course, this is not a comprehensive list by any chance since there is only so much I could include in an email blog post. I shall update this post on the website on a later date.

You see, reading books is not about finishing them. Its about getting the essence of what you read. In the end, for me reading is all about growing as a person. On an average I read for about 2 - 14 hours a week. That works out to 20 mins - 2 hours a day. In the beginning, it was never like this. I felt guilty and thought I was an imposter if I didn’t finish a book I purchased. This was until I came across a podcast episode called Naval Ravikant: The Angel Philosopher [The Knowledge Project Ep. #18] (I think this was in 2017). In this podcast, among many things Naval Ravikanth discusses how he goes about reading. It was a huge relief (listen to the podcast). Since then, I don’t worry about finishing a book. And I don’t read books in a linear fashion. I jump chapters and read what interests me.

This podcast episode appeared in The Knowledge podcast by Shane Parrish. It was a life changing episode for me.

💡By the way, Farnam Street a blog/newsletter run by Shane Parrish, is an incredible blog. You have to, I repeat, have to check it out!

Growth Mindset/Psychology

• 📖Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene 👉 dissects human nature and behavior.

• 📖48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene 👉 is all about power plays, dirty politics, being amoral, ruthless, cunning and more. One of the best books I have ever read!

• 📖The Daily Laws by Robert Greene 👉 Is a collection of the concepts from many of his books that he has written so far. This is essentially a distillation of his work. I am enjoying this book.

• 📖The Art of Seduction by Robert Greene 👉 ahem…yes, who wouldn’t want to seduce (💕), you too can learn how to 😎

💡 “These books☝, especially 48 Laws of Power can be quite dark, but represents today’s reality. It will change the way you think. In fact, all of Robert Greene’s books would do the same. They just rewire you! He is one of my favorite authors. I would recommend his books any day. His books would change your perspective on life permanently.”

• 📖Becoming Bullet Proof by Evy Poumpouras👉 As the names says, read it if you want to be bullet proof (figuratively speaking). This book could help you build courage.

• 📖12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson 👉 Jordan Peterson is like a second father. Read this book, especially men.

• 💻📖Almanack of Naval Ravikanth 👉 I can’t emphasize this book enough. It’s available to read for free on the web as well as available as a PDF, paperback, hardcover and on Kindle. This book is a collection of Naval’s wisdom from Twitter, Podcasts, and Essays over the past decade.

• 📖Atomic Habits by James Clear 👉 James Clear is a master when it comes to helping you build good habits. A must read!

• 📖Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss 👉 In this book Tim Ferriss shares tactics, routines and habits of billionaires and world class performers. The very premise of this book blew my mind. I have started with this, have lots more to go and the journey so far has been awesome!

• 📖Wise Guy - Lessons from a life by Guy Kawasaki 👉 This is a lovely book. Would help you professionally, from a business aspect as well.

• 📖Think Straight: Change your thoughts. Change your life by Darious Foroux

💡Apart from Robert Greene’s books, read these four books👇 to get an insight into human behavior.

• 📖The Ellipsis Manual - Analysis and Engineering of Human Behaviour by Chase Hughes 👉 What you learn from this book can be applied in therapy, intelligence, sales and any social interaction.

• 📖The Definitive Book of Body Language by Barbara and Allan Pease

• 📖What Every BODY is Saying by Joe Navarro

• 📖Telling Lies – Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics and Marriage by Paul Eckmen 👉 a brilliant book where he teaches us how to observe and understand "micro expressions", that is, facial expressions that may reveal a person’s true intentions.

• 📖Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker 👉 A great book on how to differentiate between “True” and “Unwarranted” fear. A must read in this age of social media and smart phones, where there is poor situational awareness.

• 📖The Subtle Art of not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson 👉 Read this if you are too nice. Really, its not good to be be too nice😣.

• 💻The Art of Learning 👉 A section in Tim Ferriss’s blog. Read this to cultivate the forgotten art of learning. This blog is pretty much responsible for how I have “learnt to learn” different skills.

• 💻Illimitable men 👉 This website is an amazing collection of 86 essays on how to become a better man. Few of the essays may be a little extreme (or red pilled to be specific), but you do you. What may be extreme to me need not be one for you.

• 📖The Change Book by Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschappeler 👉 This is a nifty little book that visually communicates fifty models to explain how things happen.

• 💻55 Essays by Corporate Machiavelli 👉 These essays make for an amazing read.

• 📖The Creativity Challenge by Tanner Christensen

Philosophy

• 📖Man's Eternal Quest by Sri Sri Paramahansa Yoganandha

• 📖Journey to Self Realization by Sri Sri Paramahansa Yogananda

• 📖An autobiography of a Yogi by Sri Sri Paramahansa Yogananda

These are some amazing books. I was blessed to be introduced to these books very early in life (I read Man’s Eternal Quest when I was 19). I am no saint though. But you can be a modern day monk, where you could have high aspirations, but be grounded and non-attached to material things. That mindset gives you a lot of peace :)

• 📖The Song of God: A Simple Translation of the Bhagavad Gita by AKC Panniker👉 The Bhagavad Gita, essentially a dialogue between Lord Krishna and warrior prince Arjuna (of the Pandavas) is a great guide on how humans should live life. 

• 📖 The Tao of Seneca - Practical letters from a Stoic Master (Volumes 1,2&3) based on the Moral Letters to Lucilius by Seneca, translated by Richard Mott Gummere 👉 Available on Time Ferriss’s blog for a free download. Read these whenever you are feeling low. They will give you strength.

Startup/Business

• 📖Four Hour work week by Tim Ferriss 👉 I escaped my 9-5 routine after reading this book. Really, I am not exaggerating. It changed my perspective of how I viewed work and money. A brilliant book!

• 📖Zero to One by Peter Thiel 👉 If you want to start a business and have not heard of this book, you must be living under a rock!

• 📖The Lean Startup by Eric Ries 👉 Learn how to go lean. Amateur, first time entrepreneurs are often ready to splurge money, build unnecessary features for their product and often end up without a product-market fit. If you want to start-up, hold on a second, get a hold of this book and then decide what to do. You won’t regret it.

• 📖Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss

• 📖The Minimalist Entrepreneur by Sahil Lavingia, CEO of GumRoad👉 When I started my company, I was naïve to think that the only way to run a startup was to raise VC funds and grow the company as fast as possible. This put me under a lot of stress and I had imposter syndrome. It took me many years to realize that it was not the only way to run a business and that the mission for an entrepreneur is to build sustainable/profitable companies that solve problems. My confidence grew after I started reading this book. It reiterated and answered many of the doubts I had for many years. I am just 3 chapters in, so far, but it has been an informative read.

• 📖Getting Acquired by Andrew Gazdecki👉 The author, CEO of MicroAcquire talks about his experience of how he built and sold his SaaS Startup.

• 💻The Venture Hacks Bible by Babak Nivi and Naval Ravikanth 👉 A huge collection of articles that offer some great advice for startup founders.

• 📖Steal like an Artist by Austin Kleon

• 📖Show your work by Austin Kleon

💡These two books by Austin Kleon are a must read for content creators. Actually, the basic principles in this book can be applied to any sort of work. Very inspirational books!

• 📖Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday 👉 An amazing book on marketing and growing your startup.

Technology

I took learning technology very seriously. I always wanted to start a tech startup, but didn’t know the “ABC” of tech. Not that I necessarily needed to know the nitty-gritty of things. But I knew understanding tech, as well as marketing and sales would be a great combination. I have worked very hard and continue to work hard to learn technology, especially anything concerned with Doodling, Video Editing, Sketch Animations, Web Development (coding & no-code), Web Hacking and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). Not that I am some great app developer, marketing & sales expert, entrepreneur or hacker. I am none of them. But you get the point.

This section would have a lot of courses (I haven’t finished many though 😛) I have taken over the years. It’s okay to dabble with many courses. It takes time to know what you want. At least that was how it was and is for me. I shall split this section, category wise.

Web Development

• Coding

  • 💻The Web Developer Bootcamp 2022 by Colt Steele (Udemy Course)

  • 💻The Complete Javascript course 2022: From Zero to Expert by Jonas Schmedtmann (Udemy Course)

  • 💻The Modern Javascript Bootcamp course 2022 by Colt Steele (Udemy Course)

  • 💻The Modern Python 3 Bootcamp by Colt Steele (Udemy Course)

  • 📖💻Automate the boring stuff with Python by Al Sweigart (yet to read this)

  • 📖The Fundamentals of Web Development by Randy Conolly & Ricardo Hoar

  • 📖Web application architecture, Principles, Protocols and Practices by Leon Shklar and Richard Rosen

• No-code

  • 💻The Bubble Beginner’s Bootcamp (2019) - Visual Programming by Gregory John (Udemy Course)

  • 💻Bubble Jumpstart Bootcamp by JJ Englert (Bubble Online Bootcamp)

  • 📖The No-Code Playbook by Makerpad

Web Hacking/Open Source Intelligence/Privacy and Security/Social Engineering

• 📖Open Source Intelligence techniques 8th Edition by Michael Bazzell👉 I had digested the 6th version previously. The 8th is the most recent edition.

• 💻IntelTechniques Video training and Certification Course (OSINT) by Michael Bazzell and Jason Edison👉 Currently I am taking only the video course. The video course is awesome and I complement it with the book by the same author.

• 📖Hacking Web Intelligence (OSINT) by Sudhanshu Chauhan, Nutan Kumar Panda

• 📖Google hacking for penetration testers (OSINT) by Johnny Long, Bill Gardner & Justin Brown

• 📖The Art of Invisibility (Privacy) by Kevin Mitnik

• 📖The Web Application Hackers Handbook (Web hacking) by Marcus Pinto, Dafydd Stuttard

• 📖Web Application Security a Beginner's Guide by Bryan Sullivan, Vincent Liu

• 💻Web Security Academy (Web hacking) by PortSwigger

• 📖Real World Bug Hunting (Web hacking) by Peter Yaworski

• 📖Bug Bounty Hunting Essentials (Web hacking) by Carlos Lozano and Shahmeer Amir

• 📖Hands on Bug Hunting for Penetration Testers (Web hacking) by Joseph Marshall

• 📖The Art of Human Hacking (Social engineering) by Christopher Hadnagy

Miscellaneous

• 📖Exponential by Azeem Azhar (yet to read) 👉 This book is all about how the human mind struggles and is unable to keep up with the exponential growth of technology and what we could do about it. Seems to be very interesting. Can’t wait to dive in.

Closing Notes

• Remember, these resources are predominantly a collection from the last 6 years, some I have read during my college days. Nothing is achieved overnight.

• I haven’t completed most of the books or resources listed. I don’t have to. I need to get my priorities right, and read or learn what is necessary. But remember, reading a little, of a variety of books everyday could make you multi-dimensional and create a unique advantage for you in life. Or let’s call it an unfair advantage.

• There is no such thing as genius. Everything boils down to hard, and most importantly smart work.

Cheers 🍻

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