books, and generous mentors
I grow up without mentor, yet find mentor in the darkest of all places – inside books. Most of my mentors help me to better navigate this place called earth through their thoughts and generosity.
I seek to be the mentor I don’t have to the next upcoming folks who would be kind enough to flip a book, or be curious enough to search through the internet for questions.
The list below is my direct north, you can’t go wrong with them.
- Bret Victor – Magic Ink
- Lombardo C. Todd – Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction while Embracing Uncertainty
- Cockburn Alistair – Writing Effective Use Cases
- Edward Tufte – The visual display of quantitative information
- Coelho Paulo – The Alchemist
- Robert B. Cialdini – Influence, the psychology of persuasion
- Pressfield Steven – The war of art
- Easterly William – The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
- Haruki Murakami – The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel
- Graham Paul – Hackers and Painters
- Wiseman Liz – Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter
- McLuhan Marshall – Understanding Media: The extension of man
- Sun Tzu – The art of war
- Slywotzky Adrian – The art of profitability
- Munari Bruno – Design as Art
- Brunson Russell – DotCom Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Growing Your Company Online
- McCloud Scott – Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
- Roam Dan – Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don’t Work (I’ve been coming back to Dan’s work over and over again)
- Donald C. Gause – Are Your Lights On?: How to Figure Out What the Problem Really Is
- May Rollo – Man’s Search for Himself
- S.I. Hayakawa – Language in Thought and Action: Fifth Edition
- Baxter Robbie Kellman – The Membership Economy: Find Your Super Users, Master the Forever Transaction, and Build Recurring Revenue
- Alexander Christopher – The Timeless Way of Building
- Campbell Joseph – The Hero with a Thousand Faces (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell)
- Sierra Kathy – Badass: Making Users Awesome
- McKeown Greg – Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
- Eliyahu M. Goldratt – The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
- Gitomer Jeffrey – Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness
- Seth Godin
- Eugene Schwartz
- Mel Conway
- Nobl