What I read

This page merges five older posts into one: my running book list (2019), a wishlist (2020), a customer psychology list I crowd-sourced from marketers (2020), a copywriting and storytelling list (2020), and a handful of essays that were shaping my thinking in 2019. The old links all point here now. The lists are kept as I wrote them, lightly tidied.

Books I've taken something from

My running list of books I've enjoyed and pulled key ideas from, as of 2019. The grouping is mine; some entries are a pair because I read them back to back.

• Built to Sell
• Small Giants
• Made to Stick
• The Lean Startup
• Key Person of Influence, 24 Assets, Oversubscribed
• Traction
• Pre-Suasion and Influence
• The Pumpkin Plan
• Deep Work, Digital Minimalism
• Promoted
• Scaling Up
• I Will Teach You To Be Rich
• Atomic Habits
• Ready, Fire, Aim
• Reach Out
• Start Here
• Building a StoryBrand
• The Making of a Manager
• In Praise of Slowness

The wishlist (October 2020)

Books I'd heard good things about and wanted to read soon. Maybe you can benefit from them before I did.

• Story 10x: Turn the Impossible Into the Inevitable by Michael Margolis
• Big Enough: Building a Business that Scales with Your Lifestyle by Lee LeFever
• Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress by Bob Moesta
• 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy by Hamilton Helmer
• Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling by Matthew Dicks

Customer psychology, sourced from marketers

In early 2020, I told a bunch of expert marketers that I had a friend who wanted to learn more about customer psychology. I asked them what are the best books they would recommend. This is the list that emerged, collected from this thread.

Book	Author
Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life	Rory Sutherland
The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy (and Why They Don't)	Sean D'Souza
The Brain Sell: When Science Meets Shopping	Dr David Lewis
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions	Dan Ariely
Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious	Gerd Gigerenzer
The Choice Factory: 25 behavioural biases that influence what we buy	Richard Shotton
Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade	Robert Cialdini
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die	Chip Heath, Dan Heath
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion	Robert Cialdini
The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology	Lee Ross, Richard Nisbett
Thinking, Fast and Slow	Daniel Kahneman
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst	Robert M. Sapolsky
Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter	Scott Adams
Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy	Martin Lindstrom
Atomic Habits	James Clear
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less	Barry Schwartz
The Jobs-to-be-Done Handbook	Chris Spiek, Bob Moesta
Contagious: Why Things Catch On	Jonah Berger
The Tipping Point	Malcolm Gladwell
Scientific Advertising	Claude Hopkins
Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing	Roger Dooley
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products	Nir Eyal
The Culture Code	Clotaire Rapaille
Obviously Awesome	April Dunford
How to Win Friends and Influence People	Dale Carnegie
The Innovator's Solution	Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor
Hidden Persuasion: 33 Psychological Influence Techniques in Advertising	Marc Andrews
The Power of Moments	Chip Heath, Dan Heath
Start at the End: How to Build Products That Create Change	Matt Wallaert
Nudge	Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein
Never Split the Difference	Chris Voss, Tahl Raz
Between Parent and Child	Dr. Haim G. Ginott
A Treatise of Human Nature	David Hume
The Interpretation of Dreams	Sigmund Freud
Basic Writings of Kant	Immanuel Kant
Man and His Symbols	Carl Jung
Neuro Design	Darren Bridger
Neuromarketing For Dummies	Stephen J. Genco, Andrew P. Pohlmann, Peter Steidl
Marketing to Mindstates	Will Leach
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics	Richard H. Thaler
Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain	Antonio Damasio
The Undoing Project	Michael Lewis
Irrationality: The Enemy Within	Stuart Sutherland
Demand-Side Sales 101	Bob Moesta
Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior	Geoffrey Miller

Copywriting, brand, and storytelling

A mix of books recommended to me and books I've read, shared as a public collection on the topic.

• Ogilvy on Advertising
• The Boron Letters
• The Copywriter's Handbook
• CA$HVERTISING
• The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don't)
• Writing Without Bullshit
• Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This
• Copyhackers
• Building a StoryBrand
• How to Write Copy That Sells
• Storyworthy
• Friction: Passion Brands in the Age of Disruption
• Everybody Writes
• The Adweek Copywriting Handbook
• The Ultimate Sales Letter

Essays that were shaping me in 2019

How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit, First Round Review. The Marc Andreessen passage it opens with is still the best description of what fit feels like from the inside: "You can always feel when product/market fit is not happening... And you can always feel product/market fit when it is happening."

The Never-Ending Now, David Perell. This essay hit me like a ton of bricks and helped me radically rethink my smartphone and social usage. "The structure of our social media feeds place us in a Never-Ending Now. It sucks us into a temporal myopia."

You Could Have Today. Instead You Choose Tomorrow, Ryan Holiday. "I've always found it's better to think about what I want my ordinary life to look like most of the time. Then I try to make decisions based on the simple metric of whether they allow for more or less of that right now."

The Surprising Power of the Long Game, Farnam Street. "In everything you do, you're either playing a short term or long term game. You can't opt out."

Yes, It's All Your Fault: Active vs. Passive Mindsets, Farnam Street. A principle I've tried to live by for a long time, first picked up from Dick Winters in Band of Brothers and his "first in, last out" style of leadership. It's not only for leadership. It's for taking ownership of the problems in your own life rather than letting them overcome you.

Five Percent Better: The Compounding of Consistent Incremental Progress, Farnam Street. It resonates because I see the principle in action at work every day, and I believe in it personally as much as professionally.

The Moral Peril of Meritocracy, David Brooks. "The first mountain is about building up the ego and defining the self, the second is about shedding the ego and dissolving the self. If the first mountain is about acquisition, the second mountain is about contribution."

Flywheel Effect: Why Positive Feedback Loops Are a Meta-Competitive Advantage, Evergreen. Jim Collins's flywheel from Good to Great, and how incremental gains on each piece of it add up to a competitive advantage nobody can copy quickly.