OurWord — See how people before you handled it.

A knowledge base of the durable rules people have worked out about strategy, money, power, human nature and building things — drawn from 203 figures and classic texts across 2,600 years. Each entry gives the one idea that person is actually remembered for, the story behind it, the sub-principles with worked examples, and how it applies today.

Browse by topic: Modern · The industrial age · Power and organisation · Pre-Qin and classical · Mind and feeling · How the world works · Learning and growth · Qin, Han and the Six Dynasties · Starting and building · Strategy and competition · Money and risk · Body and daily life · Family and relationships · Reading people · Medieval · Early modern

Albert Einstein — Albert Einstein (Germany · 1879–1955) — Imagination. The physicist, and the father of relativity — but the legacy that travels furthest is not a formula, it is a way of working.
Albert O. Hirschman — Albert O. Hirschman (United States · 1915-2012) — Voice. A German-born American economist. He left Berlin in 1933, fought in Spain in 1936, spent 1940 in Marseille forging papers and finding mountain routes for…
Alfred Adler — Alfred Adler (1870–1937 · Austria) — Whose task is this. The founder of individual psychology, an early colleague of Freud's who broke with him over a disagreement about direction.
Anders Ericsson — Anders Ericsson (1993 · the violin study) — Method over hours. A psychologist who spent a career on how the best in any field actually got there. His best-known research reached the public as the ten-thousand-hour rule…
Andy Grove — Andy Grove (1936–2016 · Budapest to Intel) — Strategic inflection point. Intel's third employee and its fourth chief executive. He took over a memory company that Japanese competitors had driven into the wall, and left…
Aristotle — Aristotle (Ancient Greece · 384–322 BC) — Friendship. An ancient Greek philosopher, born in 384 BC in Stagira, in the kingdom of Macedon, and dead in 322 BC at Chalcis on Euboea.
Arlie Hochschild — Arlie Hochschild (1983 · UC Berkeley) — Work nobody counts. A sociologist who twice gave a name to work that had none. The Managed Heart (1983) named emotional labour: jobs that require not only that you do it right but…
Arthur Kleinman — Arthur Kleinman (1941– · Harvard) — Curing fails, care does not. A Harvard medical anthropologist and a practising psychiatrist, with years of fieldwork in China. His whole career splits one thing into two.
Atomic Habits — Atomic Habits (2018 · James Clear) — Change the system, not the goal. James Clear's book on how behaviour actually gets built. Its claim is that people overrate goals and underrate systems, because winners and losers…
Attachment Theory — Attachment Theory (1950s–1970s · Bowlby and Ainsworth) — The early template. Bowlby worked with children who had lost their families in the war and argued that the pull towards closeness is an instinct, not a dependency…
Augustine — Augustine (354–430 · Hippo, North Africa) — Grant me chastity, but not yet. A bishop in Roman North Africa, and the author of the Confessions, which he wrote in his forties about the first half of his own life.
BJ Fogg — BJ Fogg (2019 · Stanford Behavior Design Lab) — Too small to fail. Founder of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford, working on how behaviour gets designed rather than willed.
Bai Gui — Bai Gui (Warring States · 370–300 BC) — Against the crowd. The earliest contrarian in the written record, twenty-two centuries before Graham. He traded farm goods across seasons and across crops, and the Grand Historian…
Bai Juyi — Bai Juyi (Tang · 772-846) — The middle setting. A Tang poet whose work circulated more widely in his own lifetime than almost anyone's - and who did not rate most highly the poems that travelled.
Benjamin Franklin — Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790 · Boston and Philadelphia) — Thirteen virtues, compounded. A rare full-stack life. A printer by trade, he arrived in Philadelphia at seventeen with nothing, was financially independent at…
Benjamin Graham — Benjamin Graham (United States · 1894–1976) — Margin of safety. The father of security analysis, author of Security Analysis and The Intelligent Investor.
Brené Brown — Brené Brown (2010 · University of Houston) — Shame and guilt. A social work researcher who spent twenty years on the thing most people will not touch: making shame into an object that can be studied, across thousands of…
Bruce Lee — Bruce Lee (Contemporary · 1940–1973) — Formless. The film star is the outermost label. He was a martial artist, a writer, a film-maker and a philosophy student, and in thirty-three years he left a worked-out position…
C. Northcote Parkinson — C. Northcote Parkinson (United Kingdom · 1909-1993) — Expansion. A British historian, born in 1909, a specialist in British naval history who held the Raffles Chair of History at the University of Malaya in Singapore…
C.S. Lewis — C.S. Lewis (1898–1963 · Oxford) — The notebooks after she died. A writer and professor at Oxford and Cambridge, author of Narnia and of many books arguing people into belief.
Cal Newport — Cal Newport (2016 · Georgetown University) — Concentration is scarce. A computer science professor who also writes about how knowledge work actually gets done. He sets two things against each other.
Cao Cao — Cao Cao (Late Han · 155–220) — Ability only. The novel made him the archetypal villain. The historical record shows the earliest systematic meritocrat in China: three orders seeking talent, each one saying that…
Carl Jung — Carl Jung (1875–1961 · Zurich) — The afternoon has its own programme. The founder of analytical psychology, Freud's most valued student and his most famous defector.
Carl Rogers — Carl Rogers (1902–1987 · United States) — Held first. The founder of humanistic psychology, and the first person to record whole courses of therapy and hand them over to be studied — before that, what happened in the…
Carol Dweck — Carol Dweck (2006 · Stanford) — Ability can grow. The Stanford psychologist behind the distinction between fixed and growth mindsets: whether you believe ability is a fixed quantity or something that grows with effort…
Charles P. Kindleberger — Charles P. Kindleberger (United States · 1910-2003) — Credit. An American economist, born in New York in 1910, on the faculty at MIT from 1948 for half a century, author of more than thirty books.
Charlie Munger — Charlie Munger (Contemporary · 1924–2023) — Invert. Buffett's partner for more than half a century, and the reason Berkshire stopped buying cheap broken companies and started buying good ones at fair prices.
Chris Voss — Chris Voss (2016 · Never Split the Difference) — Label it first. A former lead international kidnapping negotiator for the FBI, with a career spent on sieges, abductions and hostage-takings.
Christina Maslach — Christina Maslach (1946– · UC Berkeley) — Burnout is the job. Burnout became measurable largely because of her work. Her 1981 inventory split it into three components — emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and a…
Chu Shijian — Chu Shijian (1928–2019 · Yunnan) — Up the mountain at seventy-four. A man from Yunnan who ran a cigarette factory from the age of fifty-one and made Hongtashan the best-selling brand in China, known for nailing down the…
Crucial Conversations — Crucial Conversations (2002 · Patterson, Grenny, McMillan and Switzler) — Safety first. Four authors studied more than twenty thousand people across a thousand organisations to answer one question: why can some people…
David Ricardo — David Ricardo (England · 1772–1823) — Dividing the work. English economist. He joined his father on the London Stock Exchange at fourteen, made a fortune dealing in stocks and government loans, and in his early forties…
Donald Winnicott — Donald Winnicott (Britain · 1896–1971) — Good enough. A British paediatrician who became a psychoanalyst. He worked in a London children's hospital for forty years, listening to mothers as much as examining their…
Du Fu — Du Fu (Tang · 712–770) — Left office at forty-eight. A poet, ranked in China beside Li Bai and read for twelve centuries. He arrived in the capital at thirty-five to find a post and spent ten years at it, sitting the…
Duan Yongping — Duan Yongping (Contemporary · 1961–) — The stop-doing list. Founder of BBK, and the source of the culture behind OPPO and vivo, two of the largest phone brands on earth, neither of which invented anything.
Duke Wen of Jin — Duke Wen of Jin (Spring and Autumn · died 628 BCE) — Taking advice. Ruler of the state of Jin, born Chong'er, a son of Duke Xian. Driven out in a palace feud, he fled in 655 BCE and spent nineteen years in exile across…
Edward Deci — Edward Deci (United States · 1942–) — Intrinsic motivation. American psychologist, born in 1942, who took his doctorate at Carnegie Mellon in 1970 and spent his career at the University of Rochester.
Elon Musk — Elon Musk (Contemporary · 1971–) — First principles. Co-founder of PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink. The method is a single move repeated: go back to what is physically true and re-derive everything from there.
Epictetus — Epictetus (c. AD 55–135 · Rome and Nicopolis) — What is yours, what is not. Born a slave; his owner was Epaphroditus, a secretary to Nero. One leg was lame and stayed lame.
Esther Perel — Esther Perel (1958– · Belgium and New York) — Flat isn't broken. Thirty years of couples therapy, nine languages, and a caseload across many cultures. She doesn't work on how to argue — Gottman covered that in detail…
Excellent Sheep — Excellent Sheep (2014 · William Deresiewicz) — Can clear, can't choose. A critique of elite education by someone who taught at Yale for ten years and sat on admissions.
Family Instructions for the Yan Clan — Family Instructions for the Yan Clan (China · late sixth century) — Running a household. A manual of household instruction in twenty sections, written for his own sons by Yan Zhitui late in the sixth century: teaching…
Fan Li — Fan Li (Spring and Autumn · 536–448 BC) — When to go. The most successful exit in Chinese history. He spent more than twenty years helping the king of Yue climb from hostage to hegemon, and walked away on the day it was…
Fan Zhongyan — Fan Zhongyan (Northern Song · 989–1052) — Arguing the case. A Northern Song statesman with a full biography in the History of Song. Born in 989 in Suzhou, he lost his father at two, was taken by his mother into a new…
Feng Dao — Feng Dao (Five Dynasties · 882–954) — Serving ten emperors. The hardest man in Chinese history to grade. He held office through the Later Tang, Later Jin, Later Han and Later Zhou, served ten emperors including the…
Feng Yi — Feng Yi (Eastern Han · died 34 CE) — Not boasting. A founding general of the Eastern Han, from Fucheng in Yingchuan, who read the Zuo Commentary and Sun Tzu.
Finite and Infinite Games — Finite and Infinite Games (1986 · James P. Carse) — Win, or keep playing. A slim book by a professor of religious history at New York University: 101 short sections, no argument, only statements.
Florence Nightingale — Florence Nightingale (Britain · 1820-1910) — Care. The founder of modern nursing. In 1854 she took a party of nurses to the British army hospital at Scutari in the Crimean War and became famous as the Lady with the Lamp.
Friedrich Hayek — Friedrich Hayek (Austria–Britain · 1899–1992) — Dispersed knowledge. The man who turned why planning goes systematically wrong into economics. Not because planners are lazy, but because the knowledge a plan needs sits…
Fukuzawa Yukichi — Fukuzawa Yukichi (Japan · 1835–1901) — Relearning. Educator of the Meiji period and founder of Keio Gijuku. In his early twenties he learned Dutch in Osaka and learned it extremely well; in 1859 he walked into the newly…
Gandhi — Gandhi (India · 1869–1948) — Nonviolence. An Indian lawyer thrown off a train in South Africa who ended up leading an empire out of his country without a battle.
Garry Kasparov — Garry Kasparov (1963– · Baku) — After losing to the machine. World chess champion for fifteen years, from 1985 to 2000. In 1996 he beat IBM's Deep Blue in Philadelphia; in the May 1997 rematch in New York he lost…
Gary Becker — Gary Becker (United States · 1930-2014) — Human capital. The economist who spent a career doing one thing: taking a subject everyone agreed was not about money and putting a price on it - discrimination, crime, marriage…
George Soros — George Soros (1930– · Budapest and New York) — Reflexivity. Founder of the Quantum Fund, and the man who forced the Bank of England to give way, making a billion dollars in a day.
Guan Zhong — Guan Zhong (Spring and Autumn · 723–645 BC) — Granaries first. The first statesman in China to think systematically about the relation between the economy and government.
Guiguzi — Guiguzi (Warring States · c. 400–320 BC) — Open, close, sound out. The founding text of the Warring States persuaders, attributed to a recluse of Ghost Valley about whom nothing verifiable survives.
Guns, Germs, and Steel — Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997 · Jared Diamond) — Environment, not race. Diamond's 1997 book, which took the Pulitzer the following year. It answers a question almost everyone has had and few ask out loud: why did…
Guo Jia — Guo Jia (Three Kingdoms · 170–207) — Count, don't cheer. Cao Cao's most trusted adviser, and the one he called his extraordinary aide. He arrived at twenty-seven and for the next eleven years stood behind almost every…
Guo Ziyi — Guo Ziyi (Tang · 697–781) — Great merit, no threat. The general who put down the An Lushan rebellion, retook the capital twice, held off the Tibetans and kept the Uighurs friendly.
Han Feizi — Han Feizi (Warring States · 280–233 BC) — Law, method, position. The systematiser of Chinese Legalism, who combined law, administrative method and positional authority into one theory of power.
Han Xin — Han Xin (Han · 231–196 BC) — The middle state. The most gifted commander in Chinese history, and the source of half the standard examples: the crawl between a bully's legs, the battle fought with a river at his back…
Hannah Arendt — Hannah Arendt (1906–1975 · Germany to America) — Not thinking. Political thinker. In 1961 she went to Jerusalem to sit through a trial expecting a monster, and found a mediocre man: all stock phrases, unable to produce…
Haruki Murakami — Haruki Murakami (Japan · 1949–) — Writing as physical work. He ran a jazz bar into his early thirties, decided at a baseball game in 1978 that he could write a novel, and in 1981 closed the bar to write full time.
Harvard Study of Adult Development — Harvard Study of Adult Development (1938–present · Harvard Medical School) — Relationships predict the end. The longest study of adult life ever run. It began in 1938 with 268 Harvard sophomores, later merged with 456…
Herbert Simon — Herbert Simon (United States · 1916-2001) — Bounded rationality. American social scientist, born in Milwaukee in 1916, with a doctorate in political science from Chicago.
Howard Marks — Howard Marks (United States · 1946–) — Second-level thinking. Founder of Oaktree Capital, more than two hundred billion dollars under management, working in distressed debt and high yield — a trade that only has any…
Hu Xueyan — Hu Xueyan (Qing · 1823–1885) — The patron. The most famous merchant of the late Qing, self-made, for a time the richest man in China, decorated with an official rank and the yellow riding jacket.
Huineng — Huineng (Tang · 638–713) — Already complete. An illiterate woodcutter from the far south who became the sixth patriarch of Chan Buddhism.
Huo Qubing — Huo Qubing (Han · 140–117 BC) — Undivided. Nephew of Emperor Wu of Han. At seventeen he took eight hundred riders far behind the Xiongnu lines; at nineteen he ran two campaigns through the Hexi corridor; at…
Influence — Influence (1984 · Robert Cialdini) — Triggers. Cialdini spent three years undercover among salespeople, fundraisers and advertisers, studying how persuasion actually happens.
Ivan Illich — Ivan Illich (Austria–Mexico · 1926–2002) — A ceiling. A priest who spent the 1970s taking apart four systems everybody treated as progress: schooling, transport, medicine, and the idea of a tool itself.
Jeff Bezos — Jeff Bezos (United States · 1964–) — The flywheel. Left a Wall Street job in 1994 to sell books out of a garage and built it into a two-trillion-dollar company across retail, cloud, logistics and hardware.
Jensen Huang — Jensen Huang (Contemporary · 1963–) — Zero-billion markets. Founder and chief executive of Nvidia, still in the seat after more than thirty years. In 2006 he made a decision that looked like burning money: build CUDA…
Jesse Livermore — Jesse Livermore (United States · 1877–1940) — Sitting tight. The most famous speculator in American history and the model for Reminiscences of a Stock Operator.
Jim Simons — Jim Simons (United States · 1938–2024) — A small edge, repeated. A mathematician first: a doctorate at twenty-three, teaching at MIT and Harvard, code-breaking for the defence establishment, and the Chern–Simons theory…
John Boyd — John Boyd (United States · 1927–1997) — Tempo. A US Air Force colonel known as Forty-Second Boyd, from a standing bet: any pilot, he starts from the disadvantaged position, and if he isn't on their tail within forty…
John Cacioppo — John Cacioppo (1951–2018 · University of Chicago) — Loneliness is a signal. A founder of social neuroscience who spent a career on one question: what loneliness actually is in the body and the brain.
John Gottman — John Gottman (1994 · University of Washington) — Four fatal signals. A psychologist who recorded thousands of couples in a laboratory, coding expression, tone and heart rate frame by frame, then tracked who divorced.
John Maynard Keynes — John Maynard Keynes (Britain · 1883–1946) — Not knowing. British economist, born in Cambridge in 1883, whose General Theory of 1936 founded macroeconomics.
John Ratey — John Ratey (2008 · Harvard Medical School) — Move, then think. A professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who redefined what exercise is for. The primary return, he argues, is not the body but the brain…
Julius Caesar — Julius Caesar (Rome · 100–44 BC) — The crossing. Rome's most famous general and its dictator, and the source of the line about the die being cast.
Karl Popper — Karl Popper (1902–1994 · Vienna and London) — It has to be refutable. A philosopher of science whose opening question was ordinary and whose answer changed the subject. Astrology explains events and so does physics, so…
Kazuo Inamori — Kazuo Inamori (1932–2022 · Kyoto) — The multiplier. Founded Kyocera at twenty-seven and the telecoms company that became KDDI at fifty-two, both of which reached the Fortune 500.
Kevin Kelly — Kevin Kelly (2008 · founding editor of Wired) — True fans. Founding editor of Wired. In 2008 he turned the survival problem of the independent creator into arithmetic: a thousand true fans, a hundred dollars each a…
King Wuling of Zhao — King Wuling of Zhao (Warring States · Zhao · d. 295 BC) — Nomad dress. King of Zhao, one of the seven Warring States, from 325 BC. He handed the throne to his son in 299 and died in the Shaqiu coup in 295; this page…
Konosuke Matsushita — Konosuke Matsushita (Japan · 1894–1989) — Tap water. He left school at nine to be an apprentice, started at twenty-three making a two-socket lamp fitting at home with two helpers, and ended with Matsushita Electric, now…
Kristin Neff — Kristin Neff (2003 · University of Texas) — Self-compassion. The psychologist who in 2003 turned self-compassion from a devotional word into a measurable psychological variable; the scale she built has been used across…
La Rochefoucauld — La Rochefoucauld (France · 1613–1680) — Virtues in disguise. A French duke and a loser of the Fronde. He spent half his life inside aristocratic conspiracies and came out of them with his political career finished and…
Lee Kuan Yew — Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore · 1923–2015) — Survival first. In 1965 Singapore was expelled from the Malaysian federation and forced into independence: an island with no hinterland, no fresh water, no resources, two million…
Lev Vygotsky — Lev Vygotsky (1934 · Soviet psychologist) — One notch higher. A Soviet psychologist who died at thirty-seven and left concepts that shaped the whole of education.
Li Bi — Li Bi (Tang · 722–789) — Close in, never held. The most skilled survivor in the whole tradition of Chinese advisers. He served four emperors, walked out of the court three times of his own accord, was called back…
Li Ka-shing — Li Ka-shing (Contemporary · 1928–) — Cycles. From a plastic flower workshop to a group spanning property, ports, telecoms, retail and energy.
Li Qingzhao — Li Qingzhao (Song · Jinan · 1084-c.1155) — The lyric. The greatest woman poet of classical China, from Jinan, who called herself the Lay Buddhist of Easy Peace.
Li Shimin — Li Shimin (Tang · 598–649) — Taking counsel. The emperor most associated with actually listening, and the author of the Zhenguan period.
Lin Huiyin — Lin Huiyin (Republic of China · Hangzhou · 1904-1955) — Architecture and verse. Architect and poet, born in Hangzhou. She studied in the United States and, back in China, joined her husband Liang Sicheng at the Society…
Lin Xiangru — Lin Xiangru (Warring States · Zhao · dates unknown) — Putting the wrong on their side. Minister of the state of Zhao in the Warring States period, who began as a retainer in the household of the chief eunuch Miao Xian.
Liu Bang — Liu Bang (Han · 256–195 BC) — Using people. The most famous rise from nothing in Chinese history. He began as a minor local officer in charge of a post station and finished as founding emperor of the Han.
Liu Xiu — Liu Xiu (Eastern Han · 5 BC–AD 57) — Absorbing. Founder of the Eastern Han, known as Emperor Guangwu; his annals are in the Book of the Later Han.
Liu Yan — Liu Yan (Tang · 716-780) — Money flowing on the ground. The financial administrator who rebuilt the revenue of the Tang after the An Lushan rebellion had emptied it.
Machiavelli — Machiavelli (Florence · 1469–1527) — What is done. A Florentine diplomat, secretary of the republic's second chancery, and the author of The Prince.
Mao Zedong — Mao Zedong (Modern · 1893–1976) — Concentrate. Between 1936 and 1949 he wrote a set of essays that survive as method rather than as history: On Contradiction, On Practice, On Protracted War, and the strategy papers…
Marcus Aurelius — Marcus Aurelius (121–180 · Rome) — Restraint. Roman emperor from 161 to 180, and the most quoted of the Stoics, largely on the strength of a notebook he never intended anyone to read.
Maria Konnikova — Maria Konnikova (2016 · The Confidence Game) — Why we fall for it. A writer with a psychology background who studies confidence tricks. Her conclusion turns the usual question round: whether you get taken in has little…
Maria Montessori — Maria Montessori (1907 · Casa dei Bambini, Rome) — The room, not the discipline. One of Italy's first women doctors, who began with children with intellectual disabilities and then applied the same methods to ordinary…
Marie Curie — Marie Curie (1867–1934 · Warsaw and Paris) — She took his course. Physicist and chemist, born in Warsaw, in Paris from 1891, and in 1903 a Nobel laureate in physics alongside her husband Pierre.
Mark Granovetter — Mark Granovetter (1973 · American Journal of Sociology) — Weak ties. A sociologist whose 1973 paper, The Strength of Weak Ties, has been cited tens of thousands of times.
Mencius — Mencius (Warring States · 372–289 BC) — Winning the people. The man who turned Confucius into an operating manual for government. Benevolence in his hands is not a slogan about virtue but the condition on which a regime…
Michael Porter — Michael Porter (United States · 1947–) — Competitive strategy. American scholar, born in 1947, trained as an economist and long a professor at Harvard Business School, widely regarded as the founder of the modern study…
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990 · University of Chicago) — Flow. The psychologist who named flow. He studied when people are most absorbed by experience sampling: several thousand people carrying pagers, recording what…
Miyamoto Musashi — Miyamoto Musashi (Japan · 1584–1645) — Unattached. The most famous swordsman in Japanese history: more than sixty duels, none of them lost, the first at thirteen.
Montaigne — Montaigne (1533–1592 · Bordeaux) — Weaknesses on the table first. French writer, and the inventor of the essay. At thirty-eight he resigned as a magistrate, went home to the family estate and turned the third floor of a…
Mozi — Mozi (Spring and Autumn to Warring States · Lu · c.470–391 BC) — Against war. Philosopher at the turn of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, founder of the Mohist school, from the state of Lu.
Murray Bowen — Murray Bowen (1978 · Family systems theory) — Differentiation. The psychiatrist who assembled family systems theory. His central concern is differentiation of self: whether a person can stay in contact with the people…
Napoleon — Napoleon (France · 1769–1821) — Concentration. A poor Corsican who at twenty was not even a Frenchman by birth, emperor ten years later, and dead alone on Saint Helena ten years after that at fifty-one.
Nassim Taleb — Nassim Taleb (1960– · Lebanon and New York) — Antifragile. Lebanese, an options trader before he was a theorist of risk. He watched the Lebanese civil war, the 1987 crash and the 2008 crisis at close range, and built a…
Naval Ravikant — Naval Ravikant (Contemporary · 1974–) — Leverage. Co-founder of AngelList and an early investor in Twitter, Uber and Notion. In 2018 he posted a numbered thread called how to get rich without getting lucky, which has…
Neil Postman — Neil Postman (United States · 1931-2003) — Cost. An American media critic who taught at New York University; Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) and Technopoly (1992) are the two hard ones.
Nelson Mandela — Nelson Mandela (South Africa · 1918–2013) — Reconciliation. Twenty-seven years in prison, and no revenge on the way out. He chose reconciliation and built the rainbow nation instead, which is the strongest demonstration…
Nietzsche — Nietzsche (1844–1900 · Germany) — Overcoming. The most misread philosopher there is. The Nazis used his overman to underwrite racism, while he himself loathed antisemitism and broke with his own sister over exactly…
Nonviolent Communication — Nonviolent Communication (1999 · Marshall Rosenberg) — Observation first. Rosenberg was a clinical psychologist who spent his working life mediating in race conflicts, divorces, prisons and war zones.
Norbert Wiener — Norbert Wiener (1894–1964 · United States) — He warned them first. The founder of cybernetics: Cybernetics in 1948, The Human Use of Human Beings in 1950. His position here is unusual — he is both the person who put…
On War — On War (Prussia · 1832) — Friction. Clausewitz joined the army at twelve, lived through the catastrophe at Jena and the destruction of Napoleon's army in Russia, and spent a career studying defeats.
Otto von Bismarck — Otto von Bismarck (Prussia · 1815–1898) — Alliance geometry. The man who treated Europe as a geometry problem. He did not want friends, he wanted an arrangement in which three other parties could not do without him.
Paul Graham — Paul Graham (United States · 1964–) — Do things that do not scale. A Lisp hacker who built Viaweb in 1995 — the first commercial software that ran inside a browser — and sold it to Yahoo in 1998.
Peter Drucker — Peter Drucker (1909–2005 · Vienna to America) — Results, not activity. The man who turned management from supervising people into being answerable for results. He did not write job descriptions.
Peter Lynch — Peter Lynch (United States · 1944–) — Turning over rocks. He ran Fidelity's Magellan fund for thirteen years, from 1977 to 1990, compounding at twenty-nine per cent a year and taking it from twenty million dollars to…
Peter Thiel — Peter Thiel (Contemporary · 1967–) — Zero to one. Co-founded PayPal, was the first outside investor in Facebook, and is the most consequential contrarian in the Valley.
Pu Songling — Pu Songling (1640–1715 · Shandong) — The side thing won. At nineteen he came first in three examinations and was locally famous. Then he sat the provincial examination for forty years and never passed, supporting his…
Rat Park — Rat Park (1978 · Simon Fraser University) — Look at the cage. A set of experiments from the late 1970s, plus a natural experiment nobody designed, which together unsettled a piece of common sense about addiction.
Ray Dalio — Ray Dalio (Contemporary · 1949–) — Principles. Founder of Bridgewater Associates, for years the largest hedge fund in the world, and author of Principles.
Records of the Grand Historian — Records of the Grand Historian (Western Han · 104–91 BC) — A record with a verdict. One hundred and thirty chapters, about half a million characters, covering some three thousand years from the Yellow Emperor to Emperor…
Ren Zhengfei — Ren Zhengfei (Contemporary · 1944–) — Endurance. In 1987, at forty-three, he put twenty thousand yuan into a Shenzhen company reselling other people's telephone switches.
Richard Feynman — Richard Feynman (1918–1988 · United States) — Do not fool yourself. Nobel physicist, Manhattan Project, and the member of the Challenger commission who insisted his own dissenting appendix be printed with the report.
Robert Axelrod — Robert Axelrod (United States · born 1943) — Reciprocity. An American political scientist, born in 1943, who spent his career at the University of Michigan chasing one question: how can two sides who distrust each…
Robert K. Merton — Robert K. Merton (United States · 1910-2003) — Self-confirming. An American sociologist, born in a poor quarter of Philadelphia in 1910 to immigrant parents, who taught at Columbia from 1941 until he retired.
Robert Sapolsky — Robert Sapolsky (1994 · Stanford) — Stress is a mismatch. A neuroendocrinologist who spent thirty years with a troop of wild baboons in East Africa while studying human stress physiology.
Ronald Coase — Ronald Coase (Britain · 1910–2013) — Transaction costs. British economist, born in London in 1910, who moved to the United States, taught at the University of Chicago until he retired in 1982, won the Nobel Prize in…
Ruth Schwartz Cowan — Ruth Schwartz Cowan (United States · 1941-) — Household technology. American historian of technology, born in Brooklyn in 1941, who taught at SUNY Stony Brook from 1967 to 2002 and is now professor emerita at the…
Sapiens — Sapiens (2011 · Yuval Noah Harari) — Fictions. An Israeli historian's account of sixty thousand years, with an argument short enough to hold in one hand.
Scarcity — Scarcity (2013 · Mullainathan and Shafir) — Bandwidth. A behavioural economist and a psychologist, writing not about how to make money but about what happens once there is not enough.
Seneca — Seneca (4 BC–AD 65 · Rome) — Count the hours first. Nero's tutor, one of the richest men in Rome, and the Stoic who left the most letters behind.
Shang Yang — Shang Yang (Warring States · 390–338 BC) — Credit before command. The designer and enforcer of the reforms that turned Qin from a backward frontier state into the machine that conquered China.
Shi Tiesheng — Shi Tiesheng (1951–2010 · Beijing) — Illness is the job, writing the sideline. A writer. His legs stopped working at twenty-one, and for fifteen years after that he wheeled himself almost daily to the old Temple of…
Sima Qian — Sima Qian (Han · c. 145–86 BC) — Disgraced, and finished the book. Court historian to Emperor Wu of Han, and the author of the Records of the Grand Historian, the founding work of Chinese history writing.
Sima Yi — Sima Yi (Three Kingdoms · 179–251) — Patience. He outlasted four rulers of Wei and at seventy took control of the state in a single morning.
Simone Weil — Simone Weil (France · 1909-1943) — Attention. A French philosopher who qualified to teach philosophy at twenty-two and then spent a decade putting herself inside the situations she wanted to understand: a year as a…
Simone de Beauvoir — Simone de Beauvoir (France · 1908–1986) — Not born. A French philosopher and writer, born in Paris in 1908. She passed the philosophy agrégation in 1929 and taught in schools in Marseille, Rouen and Paris.
Socrates — Socrates (Athens · 470–399 BC) — Knowing you do not know. He wrote nothing. Everything we have comes through other people's dialogues. He charged no fees, which made him the poorest professional philosopher in Athens…
Steve Jobs — Steve Jobs (Contemporary · 1955–2011) — Subtract. Co-founded Apple, was pushed out of it, spent twelve years at NeXT and Pixar, came back and turned a company weeks from insolvency into the most valuable one in the…
Strategies of the Warring States — Strategies of the Warring States (Warring States · 453–221 BC) — Persuasion. A collection of the persuasions that travelling strategists used on the rulers of the warring kingdoms, recorded close to the ground.
Su Shi — Su Shi (Northern Song · 1037–1101) — Unbowed. One of the great Chinese poets, and also a calligrapher, a painter, a hydraulic engineer, a cook and a provincial governor.
Su Yu — Su Yu (China · 1907–1984) — Outnumbered. A field commander who was almost always the smaller force and who is worth reading for exactly that reason.
Sun Tzu — Sun Tzu (Spring and Autumn · c. 500 BC) — Win first, then fight. Thirteen short chapters, and the most quoted strategy book in the world. The argument underneath it is not about cunning: the winner has already secured…
Søren Kierkegaard — Søren Kierkegaard (Denmark · 1813–1855) — Choosing. A Danish philosopher, born in Copenhagen in 1813 and dead in the same city in 1855. In 1843 he published Either/Or under a pseudonym, and that year also Fear and…
Taiichi Ohno — Taiichi Ohno (1912–1990 · Toyota, Japan) — Ask why five times. The principal architect of the Toyota Production System. Three things he worked out on the shop floor became common sense across manufacturing: ask why five…
Tao Te Ching — Tao Te Ching (Spring and Autumn · c. 500 BC) — Subtract. Five thousand characters, and after the Bible the most translated book there is. Where most instruction is addition — learn more, do more, add another method…
Tao Yuanming — Tao Yuanming (365–427 · Xunyang) — Eighty days, then poor for life. A poet, and the founder of the Chinese poetry of retreat. At forty-one he took the magistracy of Pengze and held it a little over eighty days.
Technological Revolutions — Technological Revolutions (2002 · Carlota Perez) — The bubble pays for the build. Carlota Perez uses two hundred years and five technological revolutions to argue something counter-intuitive: the financial bubble is not…
Tending the Roots of Wisdom — Tending the Roots of Wisdom (Ming · c. 1590s) — A method of ease. Three hundred-odd short entries by Hong Yingming, written in the Wanli years of the Ming, on how to live among other people.
The Analects — The Analects (Spring and Autumn · 551–479 BC) — The answer fits the asker. A record of a teacher answering particular students, compiled after his death. In English it usually arrives as loose maxims, which loses the…
The Annals of Lu Buwei — The Annals of Lu Buwei (China · c. 239 BCE) — Judging men. A large compendium assembled around 239 BCE by the three thousand retainers of Lu Buwei, chancellor of Qin, in twelve almanacs, eight surveys and six discourses.
The Art of Worldly Wisdom — The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647 · Baltasar Gracián) — Concealment. Three hundred maxims by a Spanish Jesuit, published in 1647 and in print ever since. Schopenhauer translated it into German himself and called it a…
The Bhagavad Gita — The Bhagavad Gita (India · c. 200 BC–200 AD) — A right to the act, not the fruit. Seven hundred verses in eighteen chapters, embedded in the Indian epic the Mahabharata, and dated by most scholars somewhere between the…
The Book of Rites — The Book of Rites (Western Han · compiled by Dai Sheng · 49 chapters) — One tension, one release. A collection of Confucian writings on ritual, fixed at 49 chapters by Dai Sheng in the Western Han.
The Comprehensive Mirror — The Comprehensive Mirror (Northern Song · 1065–1084) — Why regimes fall. Sima Guang directed the compilation for nineteen years: two hundred and ninety-four volumes covering the thirteen hundred and sixty-two years from…
The Crowd — The Crowd (1895 · Gustave Le Bon) — How a crowd runs. The founding book of crowd psychology, written a century after the French Revolution and just before the age of mass politics it predicted.
The Duke of Zhou — The Duke of Zhou (Early Zhou · c. 11th century BC) — Regency. Son of King Wen and brother of King Wu of Zhou, named Dan, later enfeoffed in the state of Lu.
The I Ching — The I Ching (Zhou to Warring States · China) — When to move, when to wait. Sixty-four hexagrams, six lines each, and underneath the divination they are all asking one question: given where you are standing, what should…
The Innovator's Dilemma — The Innovator's Dilemma (1997 · Clayton Christensen) — Disruption. Clayton Christensen asked one of the most useful questions in business history: why do excellent companies fail?
The Last Hot-Metal Edition — The Last Hot-Metal Edition (New York · 1978) — A trade erased. On 1 July 1978 the New York Times set its last edition in hot metal, and photocomposition took over the same day.
The Old Regime and the Revolution — The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856 · Alexis de Tocqueville) — Improvement breeds discontent. Tocqueville (1805–1859) came from the old French nobility and had family who went to the guillotine.
The Sovereign Individual — The Sovereign Individual (1997 · Davidson and Rees-Mogg) — Exit. Published in 1997, eleven years before the Bitcoin paper. Two British authors explain the whole of human history with one variable: the cost of using…
The Wealth of Nations — The Wealth of Nations (1776 · Adam Smith) — The invisible hand. Adam Smith was professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, not an economist, because the subject did not yet exist.
The Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic — The Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic (Warring States to Western Han · attributed to the Yellow Emperor) — Treat what is not yet ill. A medical classic written as questions from the Yellow Emperor and answers from Qi Bo…
Thinking in Systems — Thinking in Systems (2008 · Donella Meadows) — Leverage. A book about why good people with good intentions produce bad results. Meadows was a lead author of The Limits to Growth and one of the clearest writers systems…
Thinking, Fast and Slow — Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011 · Daniel Kahneman) — Fast mind, slow mind. Daniel Kahneman's summary of forty years of work with Amos Tversky, and the founding text of behavioural economics.
Thomas Gordon — Thomas Gordon (1962 · Parent Effectiveness Training) — The I-message. A student of Carl Rogers who turned humanistic psychology into a course ordinary parents could take.
Thomas Schelling — Thomas Schelling (United States · 1921–2016) — Commitment. In the most dangerous years of the Cold War the most influential strategist was not a general but an economist.
Thorstein Veblen — Thorstein Veblen (USA · 1857–1929) — Display. An American economist born in 1857 on a Norwegian immigrant farm in Wisconsin, where Norwegian was spoken at home.
Thucydides — Thucydides (Ancient Greece · c. 460–400 BC) — History. An Athenian general who lived through the Peloponnesian War and wrote its history, regarded as the founder of critical history and a source of political realism.
Viktor Frankl — Viktor Frankl (1905–1997 · Vienna) — Meaning. Psychiatrist, camp survivor, and the founder of logotherapy. In Auschwitz he watched something he could not explain with physiology: under identical extreme conditions…
Virginia Satir — Virginia Satir (1964 · A founder of family therapy) — Under the iceberg. One of the people who invented family therapy. Her turning claim is that when one member of a family develops a problem, the system is often…
Wang Jian — Wang Jian (Qin · c. 280–220 BC) — Self-preservation. The leading general of Qin, who took Zhao, took Yan, took Chu and had a hand in the fall of five states: the man who actually executed the unification.
Wang Xing — Wang Xing (Contemporary · 1979–) — Nine losses, one win. Founder of Meituan. Before it he had failed eight times: a Chinese Facebook, sold; a Chinese Twitter, shut down.
Wang Yangming — Wang Yangming (Ming · 1472–1529) — Knowing is doing. A philosopher who was also the most effective general of his generation — an almost unheard-of combination.
Warren Buffett — Warren Buffett (Contemporary · 1930–) — The moat. Sixty years of compounding, and a method simple enough to say in a sentence: buy a business with a durable advantage at a sensible price and then do nothing for a very…
Wei Zheng — Wei Zheng (Tang · 580–643) — Plain speaking. A leading minister of the early Tang, with biographies in both Tang histories. He served Li Mi and Dou Jiande before ending up in the household of the Crown Prince…
Why Nations Fail — Why Nations Fail (2012 · Acemoglu and Robinson) — Institutions. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, published in 2012. The argument is blunt: whether a country is rich or poor turns on neither geography nor climate nor…
Winston Churchill — Winston Churchill (1874–1965 · Britain) — Ten years out, back at 65. Politician and writer. He went out with the government in 1929, lost the Exchequer, and held no office for ten years — the wilderness years.
Wu Zetian — Wu Zetian (Tang · 624–705) — Breaking the frame. The only woman to rule China as emperor in her own name. She entered the palace at fourteen as a junior concubine and abdicated at eighty, and in between she broke every…
Xiang Yu — Xiang Yu (Chu · 232–202 BC) — Unbending. The most complete loser in Chinese history, which is why he is worth the time. He brought down the Qin almost single-handedly, something his rival could not have done…
Xiao He — Xiao He (Western Han · died 193 BC) — The back office. Chancellor to the first Han emperor, from Pei, who was a county clerk under the Qin and joined Liu Bang's rising from the start.
Xu Xiake — Xu Xiake (Ming · Jiangyin · 1587-1641) — The long road. A Ming-dynasty traveller from Jiangyin who never took office. From his early twenties he set out on foot, and over thirty years crossed most of China, writing a…
Xunzi — Xunzi (Warring States · 313–238 BC) — Shaped, not born. Mencius said people are naturally good. Xunzi said people are naturally workable. The word usually rendered as artifice means made on purpose: rites, law, teachers…
Yan Ying — Yan Ying (Spring and Autumn · Qi · d. 500 BC) — Remonstrance. Chief minister of the state of Qi under three dukes, paired with Guan Zhong in Sima Qian's Biographies of Guan and Yan.
Zeng Guofan — Zeng Guofan (Qing · 1811–1872) — Dull and unbreakable. The most famous case in Chinese history of an ordinary man getting there by grinding. He was not gifted — he sat the county examination seven times, by the usual…
Zhang Juzheng — Zhang Juzheng (Ming · 1525–1582) — Reform and the reckoning. In two hundred and seventy years of Ming rule he is the one chief minister who actually changed the state.
Zhang Liang — Zhang Liang (Han · c. 250–186 BC) — Asking for less. The cleverest of the three men credited with founding the Han, and the only one of them who died in his bed.
Zhang Yiming — Zhang Yiming (Contemporary · 1983–) — Delayed gratification. Founder of ByteDance, the company behind Toutiao and TikTok. Relentlessly rational, hostile to vague language, willing to let a recommendation engine decide…
Zhu Yuanzhang — Zhu Yuanzhang (Ming · 1328–1398) — Nothing to lose. The most complete rise from the bottom in Chinese history. Starting point: a sixteen-year-old orphan whose family had died in a famine, begging, then a monk.
Zhuangzi — Zhuangzi (Warring States · c. 369–286 BC) — Free and equal. The second peak of Daoism, and a very different writer from Laozi. Where Laozi addresses the person who has to govern, Zhuangzi addresses the individual who…
Zhuge Liang — Zhuge Liang (Three Kingdoms · 181–234) — The Longzhong plan. The most admired administrator in Chinese history, and the standard image of both strategic foresight and working yourself to death.
Zichan — Zichan (Spring and Autumn · Zheng · d. 522 BC) — Standing on the rule. Gongsun Qiao, known as Zichan, ran the state of Zheng for over twenty years in the sixth century BC.

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