Reading List for the busy professional

Numerous websites offer excellent reading lists, featuring hundreds of good books. However, this amount of information is actually a problem, especially for busy professionals

This list is intended to provide a straightforward path to “easy wins” and the most “bang-for-the-buck” for your professional life.

The list starts out short and simple, but it will expand over time.

Below, I will include more advanced options for you to explore or use as a reference when you’re ready to dive deeper into specific topics.

Note: You are encouraged to provide comments, suggestions, questions in the comments underneath each book. Keep it constructive.

Start here: Probability and Statistics

The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives Leonard Mlodinow Princeton University Press, 2016 This book will expose you to a good number of essential concepts and fallacies in probabilities and statistics. (Amazon Link)

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, Nassim Taleb

While there are other books that discuss how to think about chance, there are a couple of good reasons to read this one (in spite of the prose style that is not everyone’s favorite):
a. Nassim Taleb and his concepts have (rightly) entered into the collective awareness. You should be in-the-know and also form your own opinion;
b. This book is the first of a series where much more advanced, important, new concepts (in particular Anti-Fragility) are discussed;
c. The real strength of Nassim Taleb is “Transversality” (my term), the ability to apply knowledge and concepts from one field to another field and recognize that the underlying structure is the same. This is a very rare ability – and this book offers numerous examples.