A friend started sharing reading lists with his team, and I liked the idea enough to adopt it as my own. Every book here changed something — about how I think about building teams, making decisions, or understanding what high performance actually requires. The order isn’t alphabetical or chronological. It’s an argument.

• Grit, Angela Duckworth

• Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

• The Ideal Team Player, Patrick Lencioni

• Radical Candor, Kim Scott

• Good to Great, Jim Collins

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz

• The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande

• Zero to One, Peter Thiel

Grit — Angela Duckworth Duckworth’s research revealed the one common factor predicting success in any endeavor — she calls it grit. She provides a rubric that helps you determine how gritty you are, which is useful on its own. But the best news in her book is that you can consciously improve it.

Grit tells you that perseverance is developable. Aurelius wrote the book on why it’s worth developing in the first place.

Meditations — Marcus Aurelius Meditations is a Roman emperor’s private journal, never intended for publication. Aurelius writes to himself about duty, discipline, impermanence, and the gap between what we can control and what we cannot. It is the foundational text of Stoic philosophy, and nearly two thousand years later it remains the most honest account of what it actually costs to lead well.

Character is the foundation. The question then becomes what character traits you actually need in the people around you.

The Ideal Team Player — Patrick Lencioni Lencioni identifies three virtues that, when balanced properly, produce an ideal team player. Humility: the most important of the three. Humble team players lack excessive ego, share credit, put the team ahead of themselves, and define success collectively. Hunger: the drive to work hard, take on more responsibility, and go above and beyond without being pushed. Smartness: not raw intellect, but emotional intelligence — understanding group dynamics, knowing how your actions affect others, and exercising good judgment in communication.

Once you have the right people, the question is how you lead them.

Radical Candor — Kim Scott Scott’s central argument is that genuinely caring about the people on your team is what makes honest feedback possible. When someone knows you care about them personally, you can challenge them directly — providing a framework for feedback that drives performance without sacrificing the human connection or making the recip*ient feel disrespected. This approach eliminates the “it’s just business” deflection that always falls flat and too often provides cover for bad leadership.

Scott tells you how to lead individuals. Collins tells you what great organizations actually look like at scale.

Good to Great — Jim Collins After studying companies that made the sustained leap from good to great, Collins found that the distinguishing factor was almost never what people expected. Great companies aren’t built on charismatic visionaries — they’re built on Level 5 leaders who combine fierce professional will with genuine personal humility. His research also shows that getting the right people in the right seats matters more than strategy, and that sustained greatness comes from relentless focus on what you can actually be the best at — not what you want to be the best at.

Collins shows you what great looks like from the outside. Horowitz tells you what it feels like from the inside.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Ben Horowitz The most honest leadership book on this list. Horowitz writes about what building a company actually feels like — not the inspirational version, but the real one. Layoffs, product failures, board pressure, decisions with no good options. His central argument is that there is no formula for the hardest calls, and that the only way through is to make them anyway.

Even with the right people, *the right culture, and the right leadership, complex systems still fail in predictable ways.

The Checklist Manifesto — Atul Gawande Gawande argues that as human knowledge has grown vastly complex, we fail not from ignorance but from ineptitude — failing to correctly apply what we already know. He demonstrates that simple, well-designed checklists are powerful tools that eliminate preventable errors, manage complexity, and save lives across industries where the stakes are high.

Build the right people, the right culture, the right systems — and then ask the hardest question of all: what are you actually building toward?

Zero to One — Peter Thiel Thiel argues that true innovation requires moving from 0 to 1 — creating something entirely new — rather than from 1 to n, which is simply copying what already works. He distinguishes between technology, the hard work of genuine creation, and globalization, the easier work of replication, then outlines a contrarian framework for building a monopoly-driven business on the foundation of something the world has never seen before.

Taken together, these books make the case that high performance is never accidental. It requires people with the right character, cultures built on honesty and purpose, systems that enforce accountability, and leaders willing to do the harder thing at every decision point. None of it is complicated. Almost none of it is easy.

These are eight of the most useful books from my recent reading list. Happy to talk through the rest.