Read these 12 books every year to maximize your Return on Life

• The average CEO reads 52 books a year, but it’s not about quantity, it’s about quality.
• Reading better involves four steps: read, reflect, integrate, and repeat.
• Key books worth rereading include "Meditations," "The Almanac of Naval Ravikant," and more.
• Each book provides valuable insights to enhance personal and professional growth.
• Finding meaning in life's challenges is crucial for growth and freedom.

I remember years ago getting hit with one of those ads on Facebook from one of the skeezy Internet marketer types saying that the average CEO reads 52 books a year. And at that point, I was living in the back of a van and just looking for a way to turn my life around. So when I heard this, I thought, well, hell, CEOs probably have their shit figured out, so I should probably just take a page out of their book and start reading more. And I did.

But I went a little overboard because for the next three years, I read over 100 books every single year. And I justified this insane amount of research by thinking, well, the average CEO reads 52 books per year. Then I'm going to be twice as good if I read 100. But that's not how it works, not by a long shot. Because I've come to realize something after having met literally hundreds of successful entrepreneurs over the years. Reading more doesn't make you better. Reading better makes you better.

Wow. All right, so let's break it down by learning how to actually read better. And I break this into four different steps: read, reflect, integrate, repeat.

Algh. So step one is to read. Now, a lesson that took me far too long to learn is that it's better to read and understand deeply the 10 best books written on a topic than it is to skim the top 100.

Which is why it's so important to then make time for step two: reflect on what you're reading. And the best way I've found to do this is through writing. See, we read to collect dots, and then we write to connect them. As Leo Tolstoy said, "read less, think more."

Our third step in reading better is to actually put what you've read into action. This is the integration step. And it may be the most important step because, without this, reading is simply mental masturbation. It makes you feel productive. But if you don't implement what you've learned, then you've simply wasted your time being busy and not effective.

The fourth and final step in reading better is one that I struggled with for a really long time. That is repeating the whole process. Magic occurs when you go back to the beginning, reread that book, reflect on it even deeper, integrate again, and then repeat.

These days I read a lot, but I actually read very few books because I just keep going back and rereading the absolute best ones that have had the biggest impact on my life. And in doing so, I've experienced far more personal growth and business growth than I ever did when I was reading hundreds of books at a time.

But what exactly are those books worth rereading over and over again? Well, for all you hyper-focused entrepreneurs out there, I'm going to save you a lot of time and energy and just give you the 12 books that I think are worth rereading every single year.

So let's dive in. The first book on this list is not only one of the greatest books ever written, but it's also one of a kind in that it's the personal journal of a guy who thousands of years ago was the most powerful man in the world. And the beauty of this book is that this man, a Roman emperor, wasn't writing for an audience. He never intended for this book to be published.

In fact, he'd probably be mortified to learn that it was. These were simply the internal thoughts of a man wrestling with the question, "what's it mean to be a good person? To live a life of value?" This was a man who had the world at his fingertips but who understood the only battles actually worth fighting and winning were the ones being waged inside with his temper, his ego, his pride, his place in the universe.

And perhaps most remarkable of all is just the simple and eloquent way in which this book is written. For instance, he says this: "Our life is what our thoughts make it." So simple, so accessible, and so easy to understand. Which is why Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is perhaps one of my favorite books of all time and the one that inspires new wisdom and insight every single time I read it.

The second book on this list was written about 2000 years more recently than the first, but it's equally filled with incredible wisdom that you can instantly start applying to improve your life and business.

The book is called The Almanac of Naval Ravikant, and it's simply a collection of blogs, tweets, and podcast interviews featuring that modern-day entrepreneurial philosopher Naval Ravikant. Now if you're not familiar with Naval, he's a prolific angel investor and one of the most highly regarded entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley over the past two decades.

And what makes him so interesting is just his ability to distill complex topics into simple sound bites that you can easily carry with you and apply in all sorts of situations. One of my favorites is, "play long term games with long term people." His most famous piece of writing is a tweet storm called How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky, and it is, in my opinion, the absolute best step by step guide to building wealth and happiness.

So go check it out. All right, so our third book was written by one of my favorite authors, which is why he has two books on this list. Now, the reason he’s one of my favorites is because he has this incredible ability to take things that we all look at every single day and to turn them on their head, to present them in a way that you’ve maybe never thought about before.

Each of his books creates a paradigm shift, a fundamental change in how you view the world concerning topics like risk, probability, accountability, economics, or investing. But of all of those, the one that's had the most profound effect on my life happens to be the name of the third book on our list. It's called Antifragile by Nicholas Nassim Taleb.

Now, the central premise of this book is that a fragile system is one that breaks or fails when faced with adversity. Like when you drop a light bulb on the floor and it meets resistance, it shatters. A robust system is one step up from a fragile system. That is, it has a higher resistance or tolerance to distress.

So instead of dropping a light bulb on the floor, if we drop a rock, it's probably not going to hurt it all that much. That's not to say that the rock can't be hurt, but it's going to require way more adversity. And the next level up from that is a resilient system or one that can recover or adapt from failure.

The example that Taleb gives in the book is that of the Phoenix, which dies in a fiery blaze, only to be reborn shortly thereafter from the ashes. What's important to know about the resilient system is that it bounces back to where it was before the stress, not better, not worse.

And this is where we arrive at the antifragile system, which is one that capitalizes on adversity and chaos to actually come back stronger than before the adversity. And sticking with mythology, this is the story of the hydra, where for every head you chop off, another two take its place. It actually gets stronger when you hurt it.

A practical, real-life example of an antifragile system is your bones and muscles, which only ever get stronger after they've been stressed and damaged an appropriate amount. Now, obviously, you can only stress these systems so much before they ultimately give out; your bones break or your muscles tear.

But the core concept here is still so damn valuable because these types of antifragile systems are exactly what we want to design into our lives, into our businesses, so that we can ultimately thrive amidst inevitable chaos. This book is the best book I've come across to help you do just that.

All right. Now, the fourth book on our list has not only made me more money than any other book I've ever read, but it's also given me a framework to understand why humans do what humans do. Which is important because I believe every single one of us has a core desire to be seen, to be heard, to be valued, to connect meaningfully.

I mean, there are very few feelings in the world worse than being in a room full of people you love and respect and yet feeling absolutely invisible, feeling like nobody values your ideas or that your words are falling on deaf ears.

This book, influenced by Robert Cialdini, gives you the tools necessary for communicating your message to the world both persuasively and with impact. In particular, it teaches the six weapons of influence which are reciprocity, commitment, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity. Truly, if you don't understand those six concepts, you will always be at the mercy of the person who does. So pick up this book and arm yourself.

Next up is the fifth book on our list, and this is maybe the best one I've ever come across for understanding how we make decisions. Now that might not seem like a big deal, but as Naval says, in an age of infinite leverage, judgment becomes the most important skill. So anything that we can do to help improve the quality of our judgment, and therefore our decisions, is always worth the time and energy.

This book is called Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. In it, he explains two types of systems that govern our thinking. System one is our intuition. It's fast, automatic, emotional, stereotypical, and most importantly unconscious. It's not something we can control in the heat of the moment.

Thankfully, system one thoughts are generally pretty accurate, or at least accurate enough to get us through 90% of life. For that other 10%, that's where system two thinking comes in, and it's much slower, much more effortful, and way more deliberate.

It requires intention, and the key to thriving in the modern world is to recognize those moments in life when we need to override our system one intuition and instead turn to the more deliberate system two. To help with this, Kahneman shares a number of heuristics and cognitive biases that we all unknowingly default to.

Things like the anchoring effect, which shows that we can be easily influenced by completely irrelevant numbers, or the loss aversion bias, which describes why the pain of losing is psychologically twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining. What I find so fascinating about this book is it's like reading the human brain's operating manual, which gives you an incredible advantage in the world of business, not to mention just life in general.

Algh. Moving on. Our sixth book is about a brutally basic concept that I found to be the main difference between average performers and elite performers. The reason I reread this book every single year is that its core lesson is one that I personally struggle with. I find it valuable therefore to annually revisit this book and put this concept back at the forefront of my mind.

The book is called The One Thing by Gary Keller, and it can be summarized with these words: "What is the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?" Until my one thing is done, everything else is a distraction.

Now in my personal pursuit of greatness, I've come to realize that the thing holding me back from achieving all my goals is not that I don't have enough time; it's simply that I don't have enough focus—specifically enough focus on the right things. This book provides a framework that's going to help you figure out what that most important thing is so that you can move towards it with clarity.

Now, personally, I like to reread this book at the beginning of each year when I'm sitting down to set my annual goals because it helps me get into the right mindset for planning what I'm going to focus on. Bonus points because it's a super quick and easy read, just like our seventh book on this list, which comes from the mind of one of history's greatest investors that most people have never heard of.

I'm talking about the founder of Oaktree Capital, Howard Marks, and his book is called The Most Important Thing. One of the things I love about Howard Marks is that he's been posting his annual investor memos every year for the past 30 plus years absolutely for free. You get to step into the mind of this incredible investor in real-time to see how he navigated the 2000.com boom or the great financial crisis of 2007.

Which is important because, as Howard himself says, “good times teach only bad lessons that investing is easy.” These memos are a masterclass of investing wisdom, and in his book The Most Important Thing, it's simply a collection of some of those most impactful ones. This is hands down the best book I've ever read about the psychology and principles of investing.

Most importantly, it's written in simple, plain language that most of us non-experts can easily understand. Alright, so this is a good time to revisit our boy Nicholas Nassim Taleb, who is such a fantastic writer and thinker that he features on this list twice. And if I had to sum up this eighth book in a single sentence, it would be “nobody accepts randomness in his own success only as failure.” Or put another way: we blame luck when we lose and skill when we win.

I actually did a video on this recently where I broke down the four different types of luck and how to get lucky by design. That video is called The Only Reason Alex Hermosi is Successful. I'm going to drop a link in the description below. Go check it out after you finish this one.

And while you're down there, don't forget to subscribe. Alright, back to this mythical book by Taleb called Fooled by Randomness. The simple premise of this book is that everything in life happens along a curve of probability. Some things are just more likely to occur than others.

Which isn't to say that just because something is unlikely to happen, it therefore won't happen. The important thing for our purposes is just to understand that most of life is determined by the consequences of those very few outlier events that were never supposed to happen but did. Think of things like Covid or the Great Financial Crisis or 9/11.

The problem is we humans are absolutely horrible at calculating probabilities in real-time, which simply means that we tend to skew the likelihood or unlikelihood of a particular event occurring. The reason I find this book so valuable is that it helps us see through that matrix of probability so we can position ourselves to benefit in life, regardless of what does or does not happen.

Truly, Fooled by Randomness is a mind-bending book that's going to give you a new lens through which to look at the world. But the ninth book on our list is going to give you dozens of new lenses, which is invaluable because, as Charlie Munger always says, “to the man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”

So our goal should be to equip ourselves with as many tools as possible so we can be prepared to solve any and every problem that might come our way. To do this, we want to cultivate what Munger refers to as a lattice work of mental models. And this is going to empower us to see every problem through a variety of lenses and possible options.

Now, the book that's gonna give us those tools is called The Great Mental Models by Farnam Street. It actually comes in two different volumes. This gives you a ready-made toolbox of mental models you can immediately start applying to your own life.

And that's the ultimate goal because, as this book points out, understanding only becomes useful when we adjust our behavior and actions accordingly. Which is why I encourage you to get down to the comments once this video is over and share with us your top three takeaways and how you plan to implement those into your life moving forward.

This is called an implementation intention, which studies have shown again and again increases the likelihood of achieving a goal. But without a doubt, the single thing that will ultimately determine whether you are successful in achieving a goal or just failing miserably is what you do in this present moment.

And that brings us to the topic of our tenth book, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Now this is hands down the most fu fu book on our list. And for many, many years I resisted reading it despite dozens of recommendations from friends. That was a mistake. I wish I had read this sooner.

Truly, in many ways, this book reshaped my perception of reality. In particular, it formed my opinion that time is not, in fact, your most valuable asset; your focus is. And the reason I came to that conclusion is because, as this book points out, time is merely an illusion. As Tolle said, "nothing has happened in the past, it happened in the now. Nothing will ever happen in the future."

It will happen in the now. This might seem like a game of semantics, but I assure you it's not. There's a deep and profound shift that occurs when you realize this singular moment, right this instant, is all you have. And life changes in unimaginable ways when you make the now the primary focus of your life.

Which is very easy to say and very hard to do. So good luck. I recommend you pick up this book. It's going to help you on that journey. Now this leads us to the 11th book on our list and one of my all-time favorites for all you creators, artists, and entrepreneurs out there. It's called Show Your Work by Austin Kleon.

This is the shortest book on our list. In fact, it probably takes you less than 30 minutes to read, but it packs a powerful punch for all of you people out there who have some kind of message you want to share with the world. But for whatever reason, you're falling prey to that internal resistance which convinces you that nobody cares what you have to say and that nobody is going to pay attention.

But here's the thing: right now, if you are not sharing your thoughts, your ideas, your writings, your art, or your business with the world, then guess what? Nobody is paying attention anyway.

So here's how I think about it: nobody is remembered for the things they didn't do, so you literally have nothing to lose and everything to gain by sharing your work with the world. But I do understand this is all easier said than done, which is why most people don't do it.

This book will help you get out of your way so your work finally has the opportunity to change the world. Now, speaking of changing the world, the twelfth and final book on our list makes the argument that changing the world begins simply by changing your perspective to find meaning and purpose in your life, regardless of circumstance.

This is a grand claim that's easily dismissed as hyperbole if not for the fact that Viktor Frankl wrote this book, Man’s Search for Meaning, after having survived the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp of World War II. The core thesis of this book is that the ultimate test for each one of us is to find meaning in our lives.

And as Frankl says, "between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space lies our power to choose our response." And in our response lies our growth and our freedom in a very real way. Our suffering ceases to be suffering the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.

I find this book so incredible because I can't really put myself in Victor's shoes. To truly appreciate what he endured defies comprehension. But it puts into perspective that our problems in life are only ever as big or as small as we allow them to be.

And that at the end of the day, it's our responsibility to drive meaning from our lives. Which is a lesson I don't think any of us can be reminded of too often. And because I believe, as Samuel Johnson said, "we need to be reminded more often than we need to be instructed," I do hope that you take this list of 12 books and you revisit them every single year to uncover the many beautiful lessons each one has to share.