library

a map of the ideas, people, and books that have shaped how i think. not exhaustive. curated.

thinkers

  • Naval Ravikant — specific knowledge, leverage, and the idea that you can be wealthy without getting lucky.
  • Nassim Taleb — antifragility, skin in the game, and the courage to hold non-consensus positions.
  • George Mack — memory time, the 85-year-old self test, optimizing for the best story.
  • Paul Graham — writing as thinking. building things people want. the essay as a form of discovery.
  • Derek Sivers — radical independence, hell yeah or no, the beauty of subtracting.
  • Seneca — the urgency of living deliberately.
  • Richard Hamming — "what are the important problems in your field, and why aren't you working on them?"
  • Clayton Christensen — how will you measure your life? the question that reframes everything.
  • Patrick Collison — building fast, reading widely, the case for progress and ambition.
  • Marc Andreessen — software eating the world, the pmarca blog archives as a startup bible.
  • Alain de Botton — emotional intelligence as philosophy. the school of life. making the examined life accessible without cheapening it.
  • Rob Henderson — luxury beliefs, the logic of envy, status games disguised as virtue.
  • Albert Camus — the myth of sisyphus. the absurd as a starting point, not an ending.
  • Nietzsche — schopenhauer as educator. on the use and abuse of history. becoming who you are.
  • Venkatesh Rao — the cactus and the weasel. systems thinking with a sense of humor.
  • Kevin Kelly — 1000 true fans. the technium. advice that compounds.
  • Robert Sapolsky — human behavioral biology. why we do what we do.
  • David Perell — writing online, building a personal monopoly.
  • Jonathan Bi — mimetic theory, girard, the philosophy of desire.
  • Balaji Srinivasan — network state, market research as worldview, the future as something you build.
  • Sam Altman — how to be successful, startup playbook, the value of optimism.
  • Tim Ferriss — deconstructing fields to find the core, learning the fundamentals in the right order.
  • Andy Matuschak — evergreen notes, knowledge work as a craft.
  • Henrik Karlsson — looking for alice. writing as thinking in public.
  • Tim Urban — the best explainer alive. how to pick a career, a life partner, a way to think about time.
  • John Collison — the quieter collison brother. co-built stripe at 19. proof that operator excellence and intellectual depth aren't in tension.
  • Bill Gurley — the best venture capital blogger ever. marketplace economics, competitive moats.
  • Ben Thompson — aggregation theory. the best analyst of how the internet reshapes every industry.
  • Maria Popova — the art of connecting ideas across centuries. proof that curation is a creative act.
  • Morgan Housel — the psychology of money. writing about finance as stories about human behavior.
  • James Clear — atomic habits. the compound effect of tiny choices. systems over goals.
  • Kunal Shah — cred founder. delta 4 framework. one of the sharpest thinkers in the indian startup ecosystem.
  • Vinod Khosla — sun microsystems co-founder, khosla ventures. contrarian thinker.
  • Tyler Cowen — the most prolific intellectual on the internet. economics, culture, talent, and reading widely.
  • Sahil Bloom — transformative guides to designing a life. clear frameworks for big personal questions.
  • Nat Eliason — 30-year thinking. learning as a practice. building a life that compounds.
  • Seth Godin — the daily discipline of shipping ideas. purple cow. the most consistent creative voice on the internet.
  • Harivansh Rai Bachchan — madhushala. the hindi poetic tradition at its most musical and philosophical.
  • Rabindranath Tagore — gitanjali. where the mind is without fear. the bridge between indian and western intellectual traditions.
  • Mirza Ghalib — the greatest urdu poet. love, loss, wit, and the impossibility of capturing existence in language.
  • Cal Newport — deep work, digital minimalism, the craftsman mindset. the case for focus in an age of distraction.
  • Rumi — 800 years old and still the most-read poet on earth. love as a path to the divine.
  • William Shakespeare — as you like it, hamlet, much ado about nothing. the original psychologist, comedian, and tragedian in one.

books

on building

  • Zero to One, Peter Thiel — the difference between copying what works and finding secrets nobody else sees.
  • Shoe Dog, Phil Knight — the best founder memoir ever written. what seven years of nearly going bankrupt before "making it" actually feels like.
  • The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz — what to do when everything is falling apart and there's no playbook.
  • How to Make a Few Billion Dollars, Brad Jacobs — the operational playbook for scaling, told without romance.
  • The Lean Startup, Eric Ries — build, measure, learn. and stop building things nobody wants.
  • The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christensen — why great companies fail by doing everything right.
  • Blitzscaling, Reid Hoffman — the playbook for scaling at speed when speed is the strategy.
  • High Output Management, Andy Grove — the operational bible for managers. written by intel's ceo. every page is usable.
  • The Mom Test, Rob Fitzpatrick — how to talk to customers without lying to yourself about what they said.
  • Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore — the gap between early adopters and the mainstream. most startups die here.

on thinking

  • Antifragile, Nassim Taleb — some things gain from disorder. design your life to be one of them.
  • The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, Eric Jorgenson — wealth, happiness, and leverage distilled into the clearest possible language.
  • Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman — two systems of thought, and why you can't trust either one completely.
  • Poor Charlie's Almanack, Charlie Munger — mental models as an operating system for better decisions.
  • Meditations, Marcus Aurelius — not a book you read once. a book you keep on your desk and open at random.
  • Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill — sometimes strategies that work don't work for the reasons people think.
  • The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn — paradigm shifts. why the world doesn't change gradually. it breaks and reforms.
  • Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Taleb — you are worse at distinguishing luck from skill than you think.
  • Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari — the story of everything. useful for zooming out when you're stuck in the weeds.
  • The Bed of Procrustes, Nassim Taleb — aphorisms that cut. every page has a sentence that rearranges your thinking.
  • Range, David Epstein — the case for being a generalist in a world that worships specialization.

on living

  • The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro — what happens when you optimize for the wrong thing for an entire life.
  • Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse — an indian prince who leaves everything to find meaning.
  • Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke — 80 pages on creative courage, patience, and trusting your interior.
  • How Will You Measure Your Life, Clayton Christensen — the question that keeps you honest with yourself.
  • Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl — meaning is not found. it is made. even in the worst conditions.
  • On the Shortness of Life, Seneca — you have enough time. you just waste most of it.
  • When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi — a neurosurgeon dying of cancer writes about what makes life meaningful. the most important book written by a doctor.
  • The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran — on love, work, children, freedom. prose poetry as life philosophy.
  • Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom — an old professor dying slowly, teaching one last class. simple, devastating.
  • Madhushala, Harivansh Rai Bachchan — the tavern as a metaphor for life. drink deep, for you shall not pass this way again.
  • Gitanjali, Rabindranath Tagore — the spiritual architecture of modern india.
  • How to Live, Derek Sivers — 27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion. the book that refuses to give you a map.
  • Staring at the Sun, Irvin Yalom — confronting mortality without flinching. existential therapy as a philosophy of living.

on seeing and craft

on writing and creating

  • On Writing, Stephen King — "the scariest moment is always just before you start"
  • Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott — the permission to write badly, which is the only way to eventually write well.
  • Purple Cow, Seth Godin — be remarkable or be invisible. there is no in between.

ideas

  • pronoia — the conviction that things happen for the best. the opposite of paranoia. an irrational belief that has been empirically validated in my own life, over and over.
  • fingerspitzengefühl (German) — intuitive, fingertip feeling. knowing how to navigate a dark room. the skill that boarding school teaches you whether you want it or not.
  • memory time (George Mack) — seek novelty, optimize for the best story, marvel at the smallest details. die at 80, feel like you lived 300 years.
  • specific knowledge (Naval Ravikant) — your unique combination of skills, interests, and experience is your moat. it can't be trained for; it can only be discovered by following genuine curiosity.
  • antifragility (Nassim Taleb) — build systems that get stronger under stress. don't just survive disorder. gain from it.
  • the blank canvas — life is inherently empty. meaningless, even. and that's the beauty of it. you get to paint the canvas. you get to fill it with meaning. nobody else is going to do it for you.
  • consumption to creation — turn everything you absorb into something you make. what's the essay? what's the conversation you'll now have differently?
  • bunker fuel, not jet-a — be deliberate about what you ignite for. be slow to start, essentialist in what you choose. but once lit, don't stop. the slow burn compounds.
  • the 85-year-old self (George Mack) — when stuck in a decision, ask: what would my 85-year-old self say was worth doing here? most of the things you're agonizing about won't even register.
  • janet's law — you experienced roughly half your perceived life by age 20. which means the urgency of novelty after 20 is not optional. it's survival.
  • the mundanity of excellence (Daniel Chambliss) — excellence is not about talent. it's about dozens of small, mundane choices made consistently. the difference between good and great is qualitative, not quantitative.
  • high agency — the disposition to find a way, or make a way. not waiting for permission. not accepting "that's just how it is." treating constraints as problems to solve.
  • ichigo ichie (Japanese) — every moment, even when it feels repetitive, is unique and will never be repeated. this exact dinner, with these exact people, at this exact age, in this exact weather. never again.
  • skin in the game (Nassim Taleb) — don't trust anyone who doesn't have something to lose. including yourself.
  • 1000 true fans (Kevin Kelly) — you don't need millions. you need 1000 people who genuinely care about what you make.
  • kintsugi (Japanese) — the art of repairing broken pottery with gold. the cracks become the most beautiful part. your failures and breaks are not things to hide; they are what make you distinctive.
  • wabi-sabi (Japanese) — finding beauty in imperfection and transience. the crack in the wall, the patina on old wood, the asymmetry that makes something alive.
  • meraki (Greek) — doing something with soul, creativity, or love. when you leave a piece of yourself in your work.
  • saudade (Portuguese) — the longing for something you love that is absent. not sadness exactly. a bittersweet incompleteness. the feeling of being between india and america.
  • jugaad (Hindi) — frugal innovation. making it work with what you have. the indian cousin of fingerspitzengefühl but scrappier.
  • ubuntu (Zulu/Xhosa) — "i am because we are." personhood is defined through others. the philosophical foundation of community.
  • ikigai (Japanese) — the intersection of what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. not a venn diagram. a daily practice.
  • amor fati (Latin/Nietzsche) — love of fate. not just accepting what happens but embracing it. the philosophical cousin of pronoia but harder-edged.
  • sprezzatura (Italian/Castiglione) — studied carelessness. the art of making the difficult look effortless. the opposite of trying hard and showing it.
  • flâneur (French/Baudelaire) — the art of wandering a city with no purpose, observing everything. the opposite of productivity culture.
  • duende (Spanish/Lorca) — a heightened state of emotion and artistic expression. what happens when art stops being performance and becomes possession.
  • hygge (Danish) — the quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of wellbeing. the art of making a room feel like home.
  • tsundoku (Japanese) — acquiring books and letting them pile up unread. a word for your condition.
  • baraka (Arabic) — a spiritual presence or divine blessing. the feeling that grace is flowing through a moment.
  • dharma (Sanskrit) — not just duty. the deep structure of what you are meant to do. your cosmic job description.
  • tapas (Sanskrit) — the heat of disciplined practice. the fire that purifies. the burn that transforms.
  • rasa (Sanskrit) — aesthetic flavor or emotional essence. the nine rasas of indian classical art: love, humor, anger, compassion, disgust, horror, heroism, wonder, and peace. every great piece of work has a dominant rasa.
  • shoshin / beginner's mind (Japanese) — approaching a subject with openness and eagerness even when studying at an advanced level. the courage to look dumb, formalized.
  • gestalt (German) — the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. the pattern that emerges only when you step back far enough to see it. your experiences individually are just events. together they form a gestalt that is distinctly you.

quotes

  • “You must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long.”

    — Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

  • “What are the important problems in your field? And why aren't you working on them?”

    — Richard Hamming, You and Your Research

  • “But how can you live and have no story to tell?”

    — Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

  • “If people around you don't think what you're doing is a bit strange, maybe it's not strange enough.”

    — Patrick Collison

  • “Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity rather than whatever is hot right now.”

    — Naval Ravikant

  • “Life can be improved by adding, or by subtracting. The world pushes you to add, because that benefits them. But the secret is to focus on subtracting.”

    — Derek Sivers

  • “Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.”

    — Karl Popper

  • “Not all who wander are lost.”

    — J.R.R. Tolkien

  • “Stop being patient and start asking yourself, how do I accomplish my 10-year plan in 6 months?”

    — Peter Thiel

  • “An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant the opposite.”

    — Nassim Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

  • “Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.”

    — Nassim Taleb

  • “Games were created to give nonheroes the illusion of winning. In real life, you don't know who really won or lost, except too late, but you can tell who is heroic and who is not.”

    — Nassim Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

  • “Every man has enough power left to carry out that of which he is convinced.”

    — Goethe, Maxims and Reflections

  • “We look back upon our life only as on a thing of broken pieces, because our misses and failures are always the first to strike us, and outweigh in our imagination what we have done and attained.”

    — Goethe, Maxims and Reflections

  • “Knowledge workers don't pursue virtuosity as rigorously as athletes or musicians.”

    — Andy Matuschak

  • “Success is simply having the freedom to focus on the ongoing grind you actually enjoy.”

    — Julian Shapiro

  • “For I have a single definition of success: you look in the mirror every evening, and wonder if you disappoint the person you were at 18, right before the age when people start getting corrupted by life.”

    — Nassim Taleb

  • “Keep going and pushing yourself. I spent from the time I was 12 until 30 starting many companies. They all failed. It's ok. You are learning every step of the way.”

    — Tony Fadell

  • “Don't be afraid to fail. Don't be afraid to change your mind. Learn in public. Stand for something, but don't let it define you.”

    — Conor White-Sullivan, Roam Research

  • “The scariest moment is always just before you start.”

    — Stephen King, On Writing

  • “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

    — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

  • “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

    — Will Durant, commonly attributed to Aristotle

  • “Read 500 pages every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest.”

    — Warren Buffett

  • “A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.”

    — Charles Darwin

  • “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

    — F. Scott Fitzgerald

  • “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

    — Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

  • “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

    — Mary Oliver

  • “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

    — Gustave Flaubert

  • “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

    — W.B. Yeats

  • “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

    — Henry David Thoreau, Walden

  • “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

    — Annie Dillard

  • “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.”

    — Theodore Roosevelt

  • “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”

    — Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

  • “Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.”

    — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

poems

  • Madhushala — Harivansh Rai Bachchan (मदिरालय जाने को घर से चलता है पीनेवाला (The one who drinks sets out from home to reach the tavern))
  • Musée des Beaux Arts — W.H. Auden (About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters)
  • Scaffolding — Seamus Heaney (Masons, when they start upon a building, / Are careful to test out the scaffolding)
  • The Rainy Day — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Be still, sad heart, and cease repining; / Behind the clouds is the sun still shining)
  • The Tables Turned — William Wordsworth (One impulse from a vernal wood / May teach you more of man)
  • If — Rudyard Kipling (If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs)
  • Sitaron Se Aage Jahan Aur Bhi Hain — Allama Iqbal (Sitaron se aage jahan aur bhi hain / Abhi ishq ke imtihan aur bhi hain)
  • Phire Junoon Ka Natija Zaroor Niklega — Ameer Qazalbash (Phire junoon ka natija zaroor niklega / Mera junoon meri daulat hai, meri izzat hai)
  • The Road Not Taken — Robert Frost (Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by)
  • Ozymandias — Percy Bysshe Shelley (Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! / Nothing beside remains)
  • Invictus — William Ernest Henley (I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul)
  • Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night — Dylan Thomas (Do not go gentle into that good night, / Rage, rage against the dying of the light)
  • Gitanjali, Poem 35 ("Where the Mind Is Without Fear") — Rabindranath Tagore (Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high)
  • The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock — T.S. Eliot (Do I dare / Disturb the universe?)
  • Still I Rise — Maya Angelou (You may write me down in history / With your bitter, twisted lies, / But still, like dust, I'll rise)
  • Desiderata — Max Ehrmann (You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars)
  • The Guest House — Rumi (This human being is a guest house. / Every morning a new arrival)
  • A Psalm of Life — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Life is real! Life is earnest! / And the grave is not its goal)
  • Ithaka — C.P. Cavafy (As you set out for Ithaka / hope your road is a long one)
  • The Waste Land (Excerpts) — T.S. Eliot (April is the cruellest month)
  • The Hollow Men — T.S. Eliot (This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper)
  • Ulysses — Alfred Lord Tennyson (To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield)
  • The Second Coming — W.B. Yeats (Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold)
  • Song of Myself (Excerpts) — Walt Whitman (I am large, I contain multitudes)
  • When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer — Walt Whitman (I wander'd off by myself, / In the mystical moist night-air)
  • The Lake Isle of Innisfree — W.B. Yeats (I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree)
  • Phenomenal Woman — Maya Angelou (I'm a woman / Phenomenally. / Phenomenal woman, / That's me)
  • A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning — John Donne (Our two souls therefore, which are one, / Though I must go, endure not yet)
  • High Flight — John Gillespie Magee Jr. (I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth / And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings)
  • Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening — Robert Frost (And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep)
  • All the World's a Stage — William Shakespeare (As You Like It) (All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players)
  • To Be, or Not to Be — William Shakespeare (Hamlet) (To be, or not to be, that is the question)
  • Sigh No More, Ladies — William Shakespeare (Much Ado About Nothing) (Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, / Men were deceivers ever)
  • Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow — William Shakespeare (Macbeth) (Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day)
  • Lab Pe Aati Hai Dua — Allama Iqbal (Lab pe aati hai dua banke tamanna meri / Zindagi shama ki soorat ho khudaya meri)
  • Hum Dekhenge — Faiz Ahmed Faiz (Hum dekhenge / Lazim hai ke hum bhi dekhenge)

questions i think about

  • what is worth wanting?
  • what does it mean to live a flourishing life?
  • how do you build conviction from first principles rather than borrowing someone else's map?
  • what is the relationship between giving and meaning?
  • how do you hold two identities without losing either one?
  • what makes some people die at 80 feeling like they lived 300 years, while others feel like they lived 30?
  • how do you know when you're consuming to avoid creating?
  • what's the difference between discipline and rigidity?
  • what would the person i was at 18 think of the person i am today?
  • how do you stay pronoid when the evidence points the other way?
  • what are the important problems in my field, and why am i not working on them?
  • what would i do if i weren't afraid of looking dumb?
  • where to live, who to marry, whether to have kids, what to want
  • can you be simultaneously ambitious and at peace?
  • what does it mean to be indian in america and american in india?
  • how do you distinguish between patience and avoidance?
  • what would i build if i knew nobody would see it?
  • what am i pretending not to know?
  • what's the difference between mentorship and dependence?
  • which of my beliefs would i be embarrassed to have in 10 years?
  • what does it mean to be useful versus impressive?
  • if i could only teach one thing, what would it be?
  • what's the smallest unit of meaning in a day?
  • what am i consuming out of genuine curiosity versus anxiety?
  • what would i do with my time if money were irrelevant?
  • who do i become when nobody is watching?
  • what is the relationship between vulnerability and strength?
  • can you be both deeply rooted and genuinely free?
  • what stories do i tell myself that are no longer true?
  • how much of my ambition is mine and how much is inherited?
  • what does home mean when you live in two places?
  • what's the cost of never being bored?
  • when is enough, enough?

essays by others

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