← Haseeb Chaudhry
Reading
Books I'm currently engaging with. The list reflects what I'm thinking about now, not a lifetime inventory.
Risk, capital, markets
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Nassim Taleb — The Incerto (Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Antifragile, Skin in the Game)
— Great first principles behind these, can be sort of uber-intellectual at times though when it could be written much simpler.
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Peter Bernstein — Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
— Historical perspective on risk and how society's perspective on it has changed throughout history, really good read.
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Benoit Mandelbrot — The Misbehavior of Markets
— More relevant now than ever; the age of volatility and leverage is coming to an end and the Gaussian framework is going to break in public.
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Gregory Zuckerman — The Man Who Solved the Market
— Decent book. Key takeaway: Jim Simons figured out how to process information better than anyone else, so he won.
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Annie Duke — Thinking in Bets
— Poker applied to real life, actually entertaining to read. Premortems and backcasting are great concepts; relates to Munger's inversion.
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Ray Dalio — Principles; Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order
— The Changing World Order is fantastic, great macroeconomic analysis of what's coming next. Principles itself is a bit overrated imo — still good but crazy overhyped.
Islamic thought
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Ibn Khaldun — The Muqaddimah
— Sociology before sociology existed. Insanely dense tbh, takes a while to get to the point so definitely skim, but asabiyyah is probably one of the most important concepts ever created; explains why empires (also countries, companies) rise and fall better than most modern political science.
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Al-Ghazali — The Revival of the Religious Sciences (especially on the diseases of the heart); Deliverance from Error
— Deliverance is the best account of real spirituality I've read. The diseases-of-the-heart sections in the Ihya are something every Muslim should aim to read; TLDR all of them stem from the desire for social validation.
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Al-Farabi — The Virtuous City
— Densest book ever yet best book ever. Talks about the First Ruler, the Active Intellect, and the philosopher-king. Reads very modern if you swap "city" for "company".
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Muhammad Iqbal — The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam; the poetry
— Asrar-i-Khudi, Javid Nama, Jawab-e-Shikwa all brilliant. Gabriel and Iblis also fantastic but dense, took me a few passes; wouldn't recommend a lot of his poetry without a strong spiritual base.
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Muhammad Asad — The Road to Mecca; Islam at the Crossroads; The Message of the Qur'an
— Road to Mecca is the best autobiography I've ever read. Islam at the Crossroads is another I'd recommend to any young Muslim balancing the East and the West.
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Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas — Islam and Secularism; Prolegomena to the Metaphysics of Islam
— Still understanding these, not fully confident yet.
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Al-Majalla (Hanafi fiqh)
— Reference more than a read-through, but the first principles (reliance on isnad) are very useful.
Founders and builders
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Ron Chernow — Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
— Haven't read fully; most ruthless person I've read a biography of though.
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Peter Thiel — Zero to One
— Best startup book ever written, most of the rest of the genre is footnotes. Find a secret, build an order-of-magnitude better product, find a wedge that has monopoly properties, profit.
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Clayton Christensen — The Innovator's Dilemma; The Prosperity Paradox
— Innovator's Dilemma is the one everyone quotes, I think a bit overrated. Prosperity Paradox is the underrated one — basically a theory of how poor countries actually develop, very useful.
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Walter Isaacson — biographies of Jobs, Musk, Da Vinci
— Da Vinci is the best of the three by a wide margin. Jobs is the most quoted but Da Vinci is the one that shows you what a mind actually looks like. Musk is good but the amount of glaze is insane.
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Niall Ferguson — The Square and the Tower
— Networks vs hierarchies as the engine of history. 100% recommend, very interesting read.
Strategy, war, statecraft
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Julius Caesar — Commentaries on the Gallic War
— Literally wrote it in the third person about himself; chad does what chad wants, the propaganda is the point. Still the best book on strategy I've read.
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Arrian — The Campaigns of Alexander
— The closest thing we have to a real account from him. Good book; I recommend The Campaigns of Napoleon as a better read though.
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David Chandler — The Campaigns of Napoleon
— Eleven hundred pages, worth every one. The corps system chapter alone explains why Napoleon won for fifteen years. His mental organization (close and open cupboards) — I use something very similar. Brilliant book.
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Las Cases — The Memorial of Saint Helena
— Napoleon narrating his own life in exile. Self-mythologizing but also a primary source from the man himself; really interesting to see his mood shift at the end of his life.
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Plutarch — Parallel Lives
— The original great-man biography form, still the best version of it. Still reading through this.
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Homer — The Iliad
— Achilles' choice between a long obscure life and a short glorious one is the most important question humans can ask. Wrote an essay on it in Why founding. Interesting note on all of these btw: Achilles inspired Alexander, Alexander inspired Caesar, Caesar inspired Mehmet II and Charlemagne, Charlemagne inspired Napoleon. All started from Achilles — we don't even know if he was real, so that's crazy to think about.
Philosophy and the self
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Søren Kierkegaard — Fear and Trembling
— Abraham and the knight of faith. True faith transcends rational ethics; you must make an absurd leap into the unknown. Aligns with Islamic thought very well.
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Albert Camus — The Myth of Sisyphus
— The most honest atheist argument for meaning. Entirely wrong, I think, but interesting to engage with.
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Kishimi and Koga — The Courage to be Disliked
— Adlerian psychology in dialogue form. Let go of social validation to be truly happy; aligns with Ghazali.
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Maxwell Maltz — Psycho-Cybernetics
— Self-image as the governor of performance. Written in the '60s by a plastic surgeon; still holds up and 100% influenced me.