Best Books of 2025
One dot's a data point, two dots make a line, and three dots create a trend. This week's post is more about showing up and creating momentum when it comes to writing more.
Last week I wrote about reading. This week, I’m sharing my favorite books from 2025. I could take multiple lessons from all of these books, but in the interest of brevity I kept it to one each.
In no order, here were my favorite books of 2025.
The Leadership Secrets of Nick Saban
The Lesson: The opponent doesn't matter, the standard is perfection. There are only two options available: you either get better or you get worse. There's no such thing as maintaining the status quo. You either do something that makes you better and brings you closer to being a champion, or you don't.
How Will You Measure Your Life
The Lesson: The root causes of disasters are almost always because someone choose immediate gratification over the hard things that result in long-term success.
Rockefeller's 38 Letters to His Son
The Lesson: The starting point will affect the outcome, but it does not determine it. Factors such as ability, attitude, character, ambition, method, experience, and luck play an extremely important role in life and the business world.
The Lesson: People say that projects “go wrong,” which they all too often do. But phrasing it that way is misleading; projects don’t go wrong so much as they start wrong.
Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making
The Lesson: Everyone in a company has customers, even if they’re not building anything. You’re always making something for someone—the creative team is making stuff for marketing, marketing is making stuff for the app designers, the app designers are making stuff for the engineers—every single person in the company is doing something for someone, even if it’s just a coworker on another team.
The Lesson: No challenge is permanent. The challenge is finding out a way to keep going and looking toward the future.
The Lesson: Go where others won’t. Pay extreme attention to detail. Put the customer first in everything you do.
Honorable mentions: a few books that I read and enjoyed, but didn’t make the cut for the best of 2025.
- Dream Big: The Brazilian Trio Behind 3G Capital
- Buffet and Munger Unscripted
- Born to Be Wired
- Slow Productivity
Ideas I’m Chasing
There's something here about leaders often needing to do the opposite of what what feels right in the moment. We don't need to yell after a big loss, people know they failed. And after a big win, we need to keep people humble and learning even if you're proud.
The zone of indifference is where you can look yourself in the eye and know you've done everything you can - making yourself indifferent to the outcome.
There’s a difference between a nice guy and a good man.
Ideas I’m Collecting
In school, finance is taught as a science, with clean formulas and logical conclusions. But in the real world, money is an art. -Morgan Housel
In a period of abundance any half-wit with a spoon can please a palate. To truly test a chef’s ingenuity, one most instead look to a period of want. - A Gentleman in Moscow
Intelligence is on tap so agency is now more important than ever. - Gary Tan