10 Essential Books to Win at Business and Life

A few weeks ago, a viewer left me a comment asking what books were my biggest influences. So Steve Davis 7628, here you go. I've been refining this list for nearly 30 years in business. Without them, I would have missed out on millions of dollars in revenue and probably wouldn't own 12 businesses today. So from thousands of hours of reading about business, entrepreneurship, and productivity, here are the 10 books that have formed my view of, well, how the world actually works. Let's do it. Number 1, My Years with General Motors. People don't really talk about this book, but it's written by a guy named Alfred P. Sloan. And if you listen to NPR, you'll know his name because they talk about the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation all the time. He was the executive who basically built General Motors back in the day, nearly 100 years ago, when it was a juggernaut car manufacturer for the US. In doing so, he basically created the modern ideas we have around corporations and departments. At the time, you know, people didn't really know how corporations and stuff were supposed to work. They were basically improvising a lot of those things. And it was guys like Sloan who went through and thought about how it should actually all work together. So when someone says, yeah, every company needs a CEO, you can actually understand, well, why. It's just an amazing foundation for understanding the history of how corporations came about, how they work, and why they work today. And you'll see kind of a theme here that some of these books are like 60 years old. A lot of the stuff in these books just gets repeated in different formats by other people today. It's the same stuff decade after decade. So people today who are giving you like modern-day Think and Grow Rich content, they're just putting spin on stuff that Tony Robbins was saying 20 years ago. And before that, Zig Ziglar and those guys were saying 70 years ago. There's nothing wrong with that, but for me, I like to go back to the source. This guy Alfred Sloan was the first guy doing it, so he had to make a much clearer picture to explain things as he was writing his memoir. Book 2: High Output Management. It's written by Andy Grove, who came to America as an immigrant and went on to found Intel. Andy's philosophy and insight is that a business itself acts as a machine with a job to be done. The people, the systems, the resources— everything that ties into the business that helps that machine, whether it's for the company as a whole or for your team. Your job as a manager is to put each component together and run it like a factory, and that factory's job is to take care of your customers. Andy's thinking ties into many of my beliefs, thinking like how many employees should a manager have. Well, Andy shares his opinion on that. He talks about other things in the book as well, like how do you manage output, how do you consider a team a winning team, and how do you think about business and the disruption that comes to it. All of those are things that he opines on inside of this book, and it's great. Book number 3: How to Win Friends and Influence People. A lot of people say this one book is outdated, but they're totally wrong. Well, what's to like about it? Well, the title kind of says it all. This book was written in 1836, and it turns out the things that are in here still resonate to this day. It covers stuff like how to speak effectively, how to win people over, and even how to change people's minds. These are all things that are crucial in becoming somebody that people want to work with and want to spend time with. Think of people like Charles Koch, great leaders like Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, or modern-day Jeff Bezos. They may be polarized in the media, but people love to work for these people, and the fundamental principles of why they're so loved, they're put together in this book. And there's so many techniques here that are important. And from a practical standpoint, from a life skill standpoint, just an amazing book. Book number 4, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. Look, there's a million books written on Warren Buffett, so here's 2 takeaways that make this one in particular a terrific book. The first is this: it's this idea of how to play a single game for a very long time. And most people struggle to play any game for over a decade, but with a maniacal focus and a patience to push forwards, oftentimes things fall into place. And this for me has worked personally by just focusing over a long period of time getting really good at one particular game, and that is a time-proven guaranteed winning strategy. Personally, the game I've been playing for the past 15 years is building a holding company of businesses, and I've been studying business for 25 years. It turns out that if you just really try hard for that period of time, you get really, really good at business. But this book also serves as an example of what not to do. It can show what goes wrong when you try to be too extreme in any particular area. Buffett, if you read into this, he was actually a pretty crappy husband and a really crappy father. He will admit that and say that, and that's cost to be an extreme 0.001% performer. But in the end, he made that choice. Now, this also leads me to where I am today. I want to live a life of harmony between all the things I do. I don't want to go too extreme in any single area. And reading about somebody like Warren who chooses to be extreme in one dimension, that was actually a lesson in the negative for me. Book 5: Think and Grow Rich. Think and Grow Rich— for me, this is all about the power of positive thinking and what it can do for you. And if you know me, you know I'm a huge optimist in life. This book was written in 1937 during the Great Depression. People were literally starving and the world was in chaos. And it really speaks to the principles of thinking and being positive. It touches on the concept of achieving success simply because you have the right mindset. And all of that left me realizing, oh, I can be somebody who's amazing just by believing it's possible. And this book also helped me think about masterminds, which I think is a totally misused concept, and I hate that word, but it pointed out how important it is to find like-minded people on your journey of growth. Ultimately, I learned I could build these groups, and instead of learning like one person, I started learning like 10. which becomes immensely powerful. Book number 6, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice. Here's another interesting book. So living in San Antonio is awesome. You can go to the Riverwalk, you can go to Fiesta Texas, you can go mountain biking, you can go to Chili's. We have everything here. And the cool thing about San Antonio is it's part of this area called the Texas Hill Country, which has all kinds of great places to live in San Antonio, places north and places west, all the way up to Austin. So come here and be my neighbor. And when you do, All City Real Estate can make that process super easy. Their complete move-in package covers moving, decorating, professional organizing, and tech setup. All you need to do is walk in the door. And if you're selling in the area, they can do everything too, from professional staging to cleaning to moving and taking care of any repairs that come up during the sale. Their goal is to make it super easy for you to come be a resident here in Texas. So definitely get in touch with Megan Pelly at All City Real Estate. You can email her at megan@mjprealtyteam.com, and that's Megan with an H, so M-E-G-H-A-N. Or you can call her at 210-232-3666. We'll put her contact information below in the show notes. And you can browse beautiful houses for sale in the Texas Hill Country on her website, toptexashillcountryhomes.com. Again, that's toptexashillcountryhomes.com. And thanks to them for sponsoring today's episode. If you hear me talk, a lot of my philosophy is, well, very Zen and Zen Buddhist kind of stuff. I wouldn't say I follow the doctrine of Zen or anything like that, or I'm even religious at all, but there's a bunch of stuff that are fundamental principles that come out of Zen and come out of Buddhism that are, well, super important to me. Stuff like always keeping a beginner's mind. Instead of being a person who closes their mind off to feedback and new things, you try to have a beginner's mind and be always growing. Now, there's a bunch of other things in there about posture, breathing, perception, and non-duality. You know, deep kind of Zen stuff. And those are all topics that are very interesting, but there's another concept that totally strikes me. It's the fact that people want to see things as black and white in this world when the truth is the world is much more shades of gray. All right, book number 7, The Daily Drucker: 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done. And next we have Peter Drucker, who is the OG guy who went in and studied how well to be a manager and how to run a business really well as an effective executive. He also started to consult with corporations and executives on stuff like time management, innovation, outsourcing, and topics like that. What I liked about this book is the level of curation. The author went through, took Drucker's writing, which by the way is incredibly difficult to consume, and broke it down into simple takeaway ideas for us. Drucker's original work, well, it's super academic, and English was not his first language. It's so hard to understand. So this author curated all that and turned it into a book where it was just 366 things that Drucker said. And what's cool is you can read, well, one quote or one idea per day from Drucker, and it was basically the TL;DR of all of Drucker's ideas. If you look at all the ideas captured in this book and the way we think about managing leading and getting things done these days, it all comes from him nearly 80 years ago. So as I've thought about the science of leadership, management, and business, this book has been amazing. And he's truly, well, the OG management consultant. Book 8: HMS Surprise. Then there's this— a series of buddy novels called the Aubrey Maturin series. And HMS Surprise is one of those books from the series. There's like 25 of them. Patrick O'Brien wrote this book about a guy named Captain Jack Aubrey and his surgeon Stephen Maturin. These two were alive— well, they were fictional characters, but they were were alive during the Napoleonic Wars, and they were part of the English Navy. Initially, you think this book is going to capture the adventure between these guys and the things they do sailing the seas and fighting in the war, but the book goes actually much deeper. What you actually see is two guys living a lifetime of friendship for each other, and yet they're incredibly different people. To me, the whole thing is book after book that is just a treatise on how to be a great friend. Basically, as I watch these guys, I learned how to be a great friend, and I'm still working on being a terrific friend. But as I watch these guys' story unfold, I discovered it's about giving. Friendship is about enabling another person to be their best selves. And when this is done by two people, you can easily become lifelong friends. So it's interesting reflecting on some of my lifelong friends now. As I think back, they've only magnified into real friendships that will last the test of time around the time I read these books. So that was emotional. Sorry. Book 9: On the Road. They make you read this book here in Texas in the 8th grade. Also, I have no idea why Goodreads, the Amazon website for book rating, rates this book at 3.61. Like, it's a crazy number. I think it's because they a lot of 8th graders gave it low ratings because they had to read it for school. Anyway, don't worry about that. Look, I think all of the high-performing people in the world, they just have this internal motor. They just get a lot of stuff done. And there is no book of that I think better takes the emotion of people who just go like that and just have a motor that can't be stopped. And you can see this with other professionals who go all in with what they're doing. For me, as I've decided to be a person who just has that motor, I work hard and I get stuff done, and I just want to move fast all the time, as quickly as possible. For example, I recorded this video topic idea on Thanksgiving in the evening and the 10 minutes I had before we ate. And reading this book made me realize I'm not the only one who wants to have this high level of motor and high productivity. And I have no idea why it's 3.61. Literally, it's one of the greatest books of all time. There's a reason they make 8th graders read it. Book number 10: Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. Okay, this is the last book and the only one on the list that I've read in the past 5 years. It's called Barbarian Days and it's by an author named Will Finnegan. The book is a memoir of him being obsessed for his whole life about the practice of surfing. Growing up, he was this journeyman going out to chase days of adventure, doing all this crazy stuff around surfing and living a life above and beyond. He pioneered surf spots all over the globe, in the South Pacific, in Europe, and all these places. And it was just— well, it's amazing to follow along on his journey. And to me, there's two takeaways from it. Number one is life is what you make it. I truly think you have an opportunity to go create the life you want, and I try to live that every day. I want to shape the world rather than letting life come to me. And then I think the second thing here in this book is Finnegan, when he wrote this book, well, he's now in his 60s. And to me, the emotional connection of hearing somebody share their life in that last quarter of it. Well, it's a realization. I'm almost 50, and someday this is all going to end, and it's my job to make the most of every minute going forward. And I think the way Finnegan goes through and describes his whole life and then explains the way he feels at this particular moment as a man in the twilight of his existence, well, it's eye-opening. And now he's feeling his body break down and his mind break down and his energy leave, and he's got health problems. And it's a reminder to me that in the time I have left, I have to make the most of what you know, what I have left on this planet. And no book has done that for me like this one has. So what books did I leave off this list? Leave a comment below if you have some favorites. I tried to pick books that have shaped me that, well, you don't find on other lists that often. And if you made it this far into the video, please leave a like. It will help push this video out into the YouTube algorithm. And there you have it, 10 books that changed how I see the world in business. And I'll see you next time.