Summary
At the start of 2025 I went on a used bookstore run and came home with eight books that had been sitting on my wish list. The through-line across almost all of them is the same obsession: understanding human behavior, decision-making, and how to reason from first principles. I also have ADHD — what I call attention directed to higher dimensions — and a lot of these books speak directly to how I have learned to turn that into a strength by synthesizing ideas across disciplines.
Transcript
To start off the year I went to a used bookstore and got a big haul — these are books that have been on my wish list that I want to work through throughout 2025.
I really love to read. Reading has changed my life — I used to hate it but I learned some tricks that helped me start enjoying it. I also have ADHD so it is hard for me to pay attention sometimes. I like to read a lot of non-fiction: human behavior, psychology, decision-making, marketing, business. I feel like one of the most powerful things any of us can learn is human behavior and psychology, because it bleeds into all aspects of our lives — our relationships, how we do business, how we create products, how we live a fulfilled life. If you understand human behavior and your own psychology, you can reverse engineer those unconscious aspects of the self to create the reality you want.
I also love what Naval Ravikant and Elon Musk refer to as first principles — learning the foundational structure of how things work so you can reason and build from there. You cannot build skyscrapers without a proper foundation. You cannot be a good dancer without a strong foundational understanding of your body. It is fractal knowledge that applies in all areas of life.
1. Thinking Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman
This book is about decision-making and heuristics. In my journey as an entrepreneur and through a lot of relationships that really broke me, I realized I just want to make better decisions. Kahneman goes into cognitive biases — mental shortcuts we naturally rely on.
Confirmation bias: When I am reading I will look for confirmations of what I already believe to be true and accept that as reality instead of questioning ideas that do not align with my belief systems.
Hindsight bias: When something plays out a certain way we say of course it happened that way, all the signs were there — when in reality we had no way of knowing. It is an illusionary confidence.
Availability heuristic: We experience reality based on what is immediately available to us. If we consume a lot of negative news we develop a negative view of the world because that is all we are seeing. There are a lot of beautiful things happening too, but if we only look at what is available and do not seek out a different perspective, we see life through a closed view.
2. The Beginning of Infinity — David Deutsch
Recommended by Naval Ravikant. This book is really hard for me to read but I want to work through it slowly and really study epistemology — the origins of knowledge. In this age of constant information and AI, I want a solid foundational base for discerning what is a good explanation of something versus a bad one. What is real, what is false. It all comes back to wanting to make better decisions.
3. Surely You Are Joking, Mr. Feynman!
Feynman is a Nobel prize-winning physicist I mention a lot, especially in the context of ADHD. I love his Twelve Favorite Problems mental model — it helped me turn my ADHD into an asset. His genius was in finding answers to complicated physics questions by immersing himself in completely random things: playing the Bongos, dancing salsa, learning to spin plates. He drew deep insights from seemingly unrelated things, and as a person with ADHD that is very fascinating and very familiar to me.
4. Contagious: Why Things Catch On — Jonah Berger
What makes a video go viral is one of my twelve favorite problems. I want to understand the psychology, the economics, the behavioral science behind virality. This book speaks directly to that curiosity.
5. Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business — Gino Wickman
Recommended by a lot of entrepreneurs. I am hoping to get actionable frameworks for creating infrastructure in a business and working with a team.
6. Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire — Luke Burgess
A distillation of René Girard’s theory on mimesis. The idea: we human beings copy each other. The root of all conflict is that we basically want the same things. I was fascinated by this because I am always trying to decode my subconscious — how can I make unconscious processes more conscious so I can understand why I desire and want the things I do?
The social media algorithm is basically a reflection of your consciousness. It sees everything you click on, everything you give attention to, and feeds it back to you — creating an echo chamber of desires that may not even be your own. What desires are truly yours? I am trying to get to the root of that so I can make more conscious, authentic decisions rather than chasing what I have absorbed from social media and other creators.
This book has also directed me toward philosophy — Aristotle, Plato — because I want to develop a spatial awareness of my own consciousness and understand the roots of the thought patterns I have inherited from the world around me.
7. The Medici Effect — Frans Johansson
The premise: why do so many world-changing insights come from people with little or no related experience? Charles Darwin was a geologist when he proposed the theory of evolution. An astronomer figured out what happened to the dinosaurs. Johansson shows how breakthrough ideas most often occur when we bring concepts from one field into a new, unfamiliar territory.
This is combinatorial creativity — taking lessons from different domains and connecting the dots to form new insights. I think this is one of the most valuable natural inclinations of people with ADHD. The evolution of ADHD is synthesis: turning our natural interests and pattern recognition into unique insights that solve real problems.
8. Expert Secrets — Russell Brunson
I already have this one. It is a great book. I picked up another copy to give to a friend.
Thank you for the 50 subscribers. Let me know in the comments what you are reading in 2025 — non-fiction, fiction, anything. I love hearing what other people are curious about. I love you guys like I love myself, and I will see you in the next one.