The one page worth reading first.

Anything You Want

Derek Sivers

Operating rules for building a company you actually want to own, drawn from Derek Sivers running CD Baby from a favor for friends to a $22 million sale without investors, a plan, or a vision statement.

courseawaiting source

App Mafia: Viral App, $0 to $100k/mo

App Mafia

A reserved rendering and chat slot for the App Mafia course on ideation, design, development, and distribution.

Atomic Habits

James Clear

Operating rules for getting a behavior to repeat itself without negotiation, built on Clear's claim that the lever is the system around the action rather than the resolve behind it.

Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letters, 1977-2024

Warren E. Buffett

Operating rules for deciding what a business is actually worth and where your next dollar should go, taken from forty-seven years of Warren Buffett writing to his own owners, including the places where he changed his mind.

guide

David Senra

Founders Podcast, distilled by summon.guide

A one-page operating system for learning directly from history's most obsessive company builders, then turning what they repeated into decisions you can use.

Deep Work

Cal Newport

Working rules for protecting and spending the few hours a day in which real cognitive work is possible, from Cal Newport's case that undistracted concentration is getting rarer at exactly the moment it becomes most valuable.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

Ashlee Vance

Rules for building physical things when the incumbent price is wrong and the money runs out, drawn from Vance's account of Zip2 through the 2008 crucible and the Model S, with the human cost recorded rather than absorbed.

Fooled by Randomness

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Working rules for reading your own results and everyone else's honestly, from Taleb's first book, whose subject is the lucky fool: the person who took a disproportionate share of chance and credited a precise personal skill instead.

Founders Podcast

David Senra

The pattern that survives across several hundred founder biographies and founder interviews read by one person, together with the six questions the founders themselves answer in flatly opposite ways.

Friendly Ambitious Nerd

Visakan Veerasamy

Rules for being a curious person in public without turning into either a debate addict or a lurker, from a decade of Visakan Veerasamy's essays and threads on friendship, ambition, and taste.

Hell Yeah or No

Derek Sivers

A filter and the habits around it: how Derek Sivers decides what deserves a yes, what gets refused on sight, and how to tell a real want from an inherited one.

How to Live

Derek Sivers

Twenty seven answers to how to live, each argued at full conviction and none of them retracted, with the contradictions kept intact because the contradiction is the method.

Invest Like the Best

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

The discipline that recurs across long-form interviews with investors and operators managing real capital, plus the five live questions on which they take flatly opposite positions.

It's Time to Build

Marc Andreessen

Operating rules for what to do when a system you depend on visibly fails, taken from the April 2020 essay arguing that the missing ingredient is almost never money, market, or skill, but the will to build capacity in advance.

Letters from a Stoic (Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium)

Seneca

Working rules for spending a short life well, drawn from the letters Seneca wrote to Lucilius in his last three years, where every idea is pushed down to something you can test today.

Life of Alexander

Plutarch

What Plutarch's moral biography of Alexander actually teaches a reader: a short set of habits worth copying, a longer account of how absolute success corroded the man who held it, and the killings and betrayals Plutarch refuses to excuse.

Meditations

Marcus Aurelius

Working rules for holding your own judgment steady under provocation, loss and power, together with the stances on death and erasure that the rest of it rests on, taken from the private notebook Marcus Aurelius kept on campaign.

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Carol S. Dweck

Operating rules from Carol Dweck's distinction between believing ability is fixed and believing it is developable, and what each belief does to the tasks you take on, the feedback you accept, and how you read a setback.

guide

Paul Graham

Paul Graham's essays, distilled by summon.guide

A one-page operating system for choosing important work, finding users, making something people want, and protecting the kind of uninterrupted attention ambitious work requires.

Paul Graham: Selected Essays

Paul Graham

A one-page map of the startup, writing, focus, curiosity, and independent-work ideas that recur across Paul Graham's essays.

guide

Pendleton Ward

Public interviews, distilled by summon.guide

A small practice for making strange, kind things with less pressure.

Poor Charlie's Almanack

Charles T. Munger, edited by Peter D. Kaufman

Working rules for keeping your own judgment from failing in the ordinary, repeatable ways, drawn from Charlie Munger's talks on mental models, incentives, inversion, and the twenty-five tendencies that make smart people wrong.

Principles

Ray Dalio

Operating rules for turning recurring problems into written principles and running yourself, and the people who work for you, on them, taken from Ray Dalio's original free document and its roughly two hundred management principles.

Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order

Ray Dalio

Working rules for reading where a country sits in its own long cycle of money, debt and power, and for holding your savings in a way that survives what that cycle has historically done to people who assumed it would not.

Reason Is Fun: Selected Essays

Lulie Tanett

Rules for handling your own resistance, motivation and self-criticism, built on Lulie Tanett's argument that forcing yourself is a symptom of an unresolved disagreement inside you rather than a virtue to cultivate.

Siddhartha

Hermann Hesse

What a novel about the impossibility of transmitted wisdom actually demonstrates: when to refuse a teacher you believe is right, why the ruinous years were the path, and what a person cannot be spared.

Skin in the Game

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Rules for deciding whose judgment to accept and what exposure to refuse, built on Taleb's single test: does the person recommending this also carry the downside if it goes wrong.

Starter Story

Pat Walls

The repeated pattern across dozens of Starter Story founder interviews: how people with no capital and no audience got a business to its first real money, and the six questions they answer in flatly opposite ways.

Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson

Working rules for making a product that has a point of view, taken from Isaacson's account of the Apple I through the iTunes Store years, including what the conviction cost the people around him.

Tao Te Ching

Laozi

Operating rules for getting results without pushing, drawn from the Tao Te Ching's claim that yielding, subtracting, and taking the low position are not soft alternatives to force but the mechanism by which anything durable actually works.

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin

Operating rules for building yourself and then building institutions around you, taken from the systems Franklin actually ran: the thirteen virtues, the Junto, and a career of getting things funded by never signing his name to them.

The Beginning of Infinity

David Deutsch

Operating rules for telling a good explanation from a bad one, for treating every failure as missing knowledge rather than a ceiling, and for keeping the correction mechanism alive in whatever you build, taken from David Deutsch's argument that progress has no fixed limit.

The Bible: Wisdom & Teaching

the biblical authors

Operating rules drawn from the Bible's advice-oriented core, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the wisdom Psalms, and the Sermon on the Mount, including the places where those authors genuinely do not agree with each other.

The Black Swan

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

How to arrange your exposure when the events that decide the outcome are the ones nobody forecast, drawn from Taleb's argument that a handful of rare, high-impact, retrospectively-explained events account for almost everything consequential.

The Fabric of Reality

David Deutsch

Working rules for demanding an explanation rather than settling for a prediction, deciding what counts as real, and arguing without waiting for a justification, taken from David Deutsch's case that quantum physics, epistemology, computation and evolution are one theory.

The Nvidia Way

Tae Kim

Operating rules for staying alive through the years between placing a technology bet and the market arriving, drawn from Kim's account of three near-death experiences, the six-month cadence, and the decade Nvidia spent funding CUDA against its own margins.

The Pathless Path

Paul Millerd

Concrete rules for getting off the standard career track without romanticizing it, from a former McKinsey consultant who quit badly, ran out of money, and rebuilt around cost, prototypes, and a small number of income streams.

The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

Marc Andreessen

What the 2023 manifesto actually asks a reader to do, separated from the belief claims it asserts, so the program and the premises underneath it can be evaluated apart from each other.

The War of Art

Steven Pressfield

Pressfield's operating rules for doing the work anyway, drawn from his claim that the force stopping you is permanent, impersonal and beatable only by turning pro and showing up daily.

Think and Grow Rich

Napoleon Hill

The operationally useful core of Hill's 1937 book, definiteness of purpose, fast decisions, plan revision after defeat, and trained persistence, separated from the metaphysical machinery it is wrapped in.

Thinking in Bets

Annie Duke

A working method for separating the quality of a decision from the quality of its outcome, from a professional poker player's account of why we learn so little from experience and what to build so that we start.

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

Ron Chernow

Operating rules for compounding money over decades, drawn from Chernow's account of the ledger, the choke point and the buying of distressed rivals, together with an honest reckoning of what the same relentlessness cost.

Tools of Titans

Timothy Ferriss

Working rules pulled from what several hundred world class performers actually do with their mornings, their bodies, their prices and their fear, together with the places where two of them flatly contradict each other.

Tribe of Mentors

Timothy Ferriss

What emerges when more than a hundred accomplished people answer the same eleven questions about failure, refusal, habits and bad advice, including the five questions on which they answer in flatly opposite ways.

Useful Not True

Derek Sivers

Derek Sivers's method for picking beliefs by their effect rather than their accuracy, including how he strips a claim back to the observable event and what his own definition of useful rules out.

Why Software Is Eating the World

Marc Andreessen

Operating rules for reading your own industry as a software competition already in progress, drawn from the 2011 essay that argued software-powered companies were positioned to take over sector after sector.

Y Combinator

The startup playbook as YC partners and alumni founders actually teach it, reduced to what they agree on, plus the five questions where the lectures contradict each other outright.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

Peter Thiel with Blake Masters

Operating rules for building a company that has no close substitute, drawn from Peter Thiel's argument that competition destroys profit and only the singular business creates it.