Non-tech Books For Professional Growth
A list of non-technical books crowdsourced by the Hacker News community.
This book list started as a question on Hacker News but the suggestions were too many to keep track off.
Autobiographies - Biographies
- Elon Musk: Inventing the Future - Ashlee Vance
- iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing by Steve Wozniak.
- Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture - David Kushner
- Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Business
- Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies - Jim Collins, Jerry I. Porras
- Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration - Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace
- Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Everything I Know - Paul Jarvis
- Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win - Jocko Willink, Leif Babin
- Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days - Jessica Livingston
- FYI: For Your Improvement, A Guide for Development and Coaching
- Getting Things Done - David Allen
- Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In - Roger Fisher, William L. Ury
- Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal - Nick Bilton
- How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life - Scott Adams
- How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Business - Douglas W. Hubbard
- Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony - Akio Morita, Edwin M. Reingold, Mitsuko Shimomura
- Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die - Chip Heath, Dan Heath
- Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It - Chris Voss, Tahl Raz
- Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal - Oren Klaff
- Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable - Seth Godin
- Rework - Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson
- Slide: ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations - Nancy Duarte
- Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else
- Team of Teams: The Power of Small Groups in a Fragmented World - Stanley McChrystal, Chris Fussell
- Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well - Douglas Stone, Sheila Heen
- The 4-Hour Workweek - Timothy Ferriss
- The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk - Al Ries, Jack Trout
- The Daily Entrepreneur: 33 Success Habits for Small Business Owners, Freelancers and Aspiring 9-to-5 Escape Artists - S.J. Scott, Rebecca Livermore
- The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done - Peter F. Drucker
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers - Ben Horowitz
- The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail - Clayton Christensen.
- The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution - Walter Isaacson
- The Intelligent Investor - Benjamin Graham
- The Lean startup - Eric Ries
- The Sticking Point Solution: 9 Ways to Move Your Business from Stagnation to Stunning Growth InTough Economic Times - Jay Abraham
- The Way to Wealth - Benjamin Franklin
- Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us - Seth Godin
- Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation from Stifling People and Strangling Profits - Robert C. Townsend, Warren G. Bennis
- What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful - Marshall Goldsmith , Mark Reiter
- Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future - Peter Thiel, Blake Masters
Design
- Designed for Use - Lukas Mathis
- Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability - Steve Krug
- The Design of Everyday Things - Donald A. Norman
Economics
- A Short History of Financial Euphoria - John Kenneth Galbraith
- Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything - Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
- Rationality in Economics: Constructivist and Ecological Forms
- The State - Anthony de Jasay
- The Undercover Economist - Tim Harford
Fiction
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
- Nineteen Eighty-Four
- The Color of Magic (Discworld #1) - Terry Pratchett
- The Martian by Andy Weir
History
- Delta Force: The Army's Elite Counterterrorist Unit - Charlie A. Beckwith, Donald Knox
- Devil Take the Hindmost: a History of Financial Speculation - Edward Chancellor
- Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds - Charles Mackay
- Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies - Jared Diamond
- Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - Steven Levy
- Legionnaire: Five Years in the French Foreign Legion - Simon Murray
- Strange Defeat - Marc Bloch
- The Old Regime and the Revolution
- The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York - Robert A. Caro
- War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Management
Other
- Common Sense (pamphlet)
- Game Over: From Pick-Up Artist to Social Heartist - John Cooper
- Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor - Paul Farmer
- The Bible
- The Complete Yes Minister - Jonathan Lynn, Antony Jay
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces - Joseph Campbell
Philosophy
- A Treatise of Human Nature - David Hume
- Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
- Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
- Metaphysical Horror - Leszek Kołakowski
- Moral letters to Lucilius - Seneca
- On Liberty - John Stuart Mill
- The Book of Mirdad: The Strange Story of a Monastery Which Was Once Called the Ark - Mikhail Naimy, ميخائيل نعيمة
- The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
- The Law - Frédéric Bastiat
- The Machinery of Freedom - David D. Friedman
- The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph - Ryan Holiday
- The Revolt of the Masses - José Ortega y Gasset
- The Tao of Power: Lao Tzu's Classic Guide to Leadership, Influence, and Excellence - R.L. Wing, Lao Tzu
- Walden - Henry David Thoreau
Political Theory/Science
- The Man Versus the State is a political theory book - Herbert Spencer
- On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth
- Sketched With the Quill - Andrzej Bobkowski
Productivity
Psychology
- Ego Is the Enemy - Ryan Holiday
- Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- How to Win Friends and Influence People
- Impro - Keith Johnstone
- Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion - Robert B. Cialdini
- Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
- Outliers: The Story of Success - Malcolm Gladwell
- The Power of Habit
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None - Friedrich Nietzsche
- Thinking, Fast and Slow
- What Every Body is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People - Joe Navarro, Marvin Karlins
Science
- An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth - Chris Hadfield
- Disturbing the Universe - Freeman Dyson
- Geometry: Seeing, Doing, Understanding - Harold R. Jacobs
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter
- Cosmos: Carl Sagan
- The Ascent of Man - Jacob Bronowski
- The key to the universe - Nigel calder
- The Logic of Scientific Discovery - Karl Popper
Science Fiction
Self-Help
- Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School - John Medina
- Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming - Peter Seibel
- 8 to Be Great: The 8-Traits That Lead to Great Success - Richard St. John
- How to Read a Book - Mortimer Adler
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen R. Covey
- The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right - Atul Gawande
- The Speed Reading Book - Tony Buzan