# What I read

By David Hoos. Published 2020-10-05.
Canonical: https://davidhoos.com/blog/what-i-read

One page for the five reading lists that used to live on this site. Books I've taken something from, a crowd-sourced customer psychology shelf, copywriting and brand books, and a few essays that changed how I work.

---
This page merges five older posts into one: my running book list (2019), a wishlist (2020), a customer psychology list I crowd-sourced from marketers (2020), a copywriting and storytelling list (2020), and a handful of essays that were shaping my thinking in 2019. The old links all point here now. The lists are kept as I wrote them, lightly tidied.

## Books I've taken something from

My running list of books I've enjoyed and pulled key ideas from, as of 2019. The grouping is mine; some entries are a pair because I read them back to back.

- Built to Sell
- Small Giants
- Made to Stick
- The Lean Startup
- Key Person of Influence, 24 Assets, Oversubscribed
- Traction
- Pre-Suasion and Influence
- The Pumpkin Plan
- Deep Work, Digital Minimalism
- Promoted
- Scaling Up
- I Will Teach You To Be Rich
- Atomic Habits
- Ready, Fire, Aim
- Reach Out
- Start Here
- Building a StoryBrand
- The Making of a Manager
- In Praise of Slowness

## The wishlist (October 2020)

Books I'd heard good things about and wanted to read soon. Maybe you can benefit from them before I did.

- [Story 10x: Turn the Impossible Into the Inevitable](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1989025587) by Michael Margolis
- [Big Enough: Building a Business that Scales with Your Lifestyle](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1989603181) by Lee LeFever
- [Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1544509960) by Bob Moesta
- [7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0998116319) by Hamilton Helmer
- [Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608685489) by Matthew Dicks

## Customer psychology, sourced from marketers

In early 2020, I told a bunch of expert marketers that I had a friend who wanted to learn more about customer psychology. I asked them what are the best books they would recommend. This is the list that emerged, collected from [this thread](https://twitter.com/davidhoos/status/1227964825914884097).

| Book | Author |
| --- | --- |
| [Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life](https://www.amazon.com/dp/006238841X) | Rory Sutherland |
| [The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy (and Why They Don't)](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0473175045) | Sean D'Souza |
| [The Brain Sell: When Science Meets Shopping](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1857886011) | Dr David Lewis |
| [Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0061353248) | Dan Ariely |
| [Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143113763) | Gerd Gigerenzer |
| [The Choice Factory: 25 behavioural biases that influence what we buy](https://www.amazon.com/dp/085719609X) | Richard Shotton |
| [Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1501109804) | Robert Cialdini |
| [Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1400064287) | Chip Heath, Dan Heath |
| [Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion](https://www.amazon.com/dp/006124189X) | Robert Cialdini |
| [The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1905177445) | Lee Ross, Richard Nisbett |
| [Thinking, Fast and Slow](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374533555) | Daniel Kahneman |
| [Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1594205078) | Robert M. Sapolsky |
| [Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0735219737) | Scott Adams |
| [Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0385523890) | Martin Lindstrom |
| [Atomic Habits](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1847941834) | James Clear |
| [The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062449923) | Barry Schwartz |
| [The Jobs-to-be-Done Handbook](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1499339232) | Chris Spiek, Bob Moesta |
| [Contagious: Why Things Catch On](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1451686587) | Jonah Berger |
| [The Tipping Point](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0316346624) | Malcolm Gladwell |
| [Scientific Advertising](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1603866361) | Claude Hopkins |
| [Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1118113365) | Roger Dooley |
| [Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00N4GP2KK) | Nir Eyal |
| [The Culture Code](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0767920570) | Clotaire Rapaille |
| [Obviously Awesome](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1999023005) | April Dunford |
| [How to Win Friends and Influence People](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0671027034) | Dale Carnegie |
| [The Innovator's Solution](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1422196577) | Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor |
| [Hidden Persuasion: 33 Psychological Influence Techniques in Advertising](https://www.amazon.com/dp/9063695314) | Marc Andrews |
| [The Power of Moments](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1501147765) | Chip Heath, Dan Heath |
| [Start at the End: How to Build Products That Create Change](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0525534423) | Matt Wallaert |
| [Nudge](https://www.amazon.com/dp/014311526X) | Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein |
| [Never Split the Difference](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062407805) | Chris Voss, Tahl Raz |
| [Between Parent and Child](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0609809881) | Dr. Haim G. Ginott |
| [A Treatise of Human Nature](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0486432505) | David Hume |
| [The Interpretation of Dreams](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1420954385) | Sigmund Freud |
| [Basic Writings of Kant](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0375757333) | Immanuel Kant |
| [Man and His Symbols](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0440351839) | Carl Jung |
| [Neuro Design](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0749478888) | Darren Bridger |
| [Neuromarketing For Dummies](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1118518586) | Stephen J. Genco, Andrew P. Pohlmann, Peter Steidl |
| [Marketing to Mindstates](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1544512406) | Will Leach |
| [Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics](https://www.amazon.com/dp/039335279X) | Richard H. Thaler |
| [Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain](https://www.amazon.com/dp/014303622X) | Antonio Damasio |
| [The Undoing Project](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393254593) | Michael Lewis |
| [Irrationality: The Enemy Within](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1780660251) | Stuart Sutherland |
| [Demand-Side Sales 101](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08FRRF68Q) | Bob Moesta |
| [Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143117238) | Geoffrey Miller |

## Copywriting, brand, and storytelling

A mix of books recommended to me and books I've read, shared as a public collection on the topic.

- [Ogilvy on Advertising](https://www.amazon.com/dp/039472903X)
- [The Boron Letters](https://morgancrozier.com/boron-letters/)
- [The Copywriter's Handbook](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250238013)
- [CA$HVERTISING](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1601630328)
- [The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don't)](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0473175045)
- [Writing Without Bullshit](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062477153)
- [Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1119164001)
- [Copyhackers](https://copyhackers.com/)
- [Building a StoryBrand](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0718033329)
- [How to Write Copy That Sells](https://www.amazon.com/dp/161448502X)
- [Storyworthy](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608685489)
- [Friction: Passion Brands in the Age of Disruption](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1576878368)
- [Everybody Writes](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1118905555)
- [The Adweek Copywriting Handbook](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0470051248)
- [The Ultimate Sales Letter](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1440511411)

## Essays that were shaping me in 2019

**[How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit](https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit/)**, First Round Review. The Marc Andreessen passage it opens with is still the best description of what fit feels like from the inside: "You can always feel when product/market fit is not happening... And you can always feel product/market fit when it is happening."

**[The Never-Ending Now](https://www.perell.com/blog/never-ending-now/)**, David Perell. This essay hit me like a ton of bricks and helped me radically rethink my smartphone and social usage. "The structure of our social media feeds place us in a Never-Ending Now. It sucks us into a temporal myopia."

**[You Could Have Today. Instead You Choose Tomorrow](https://medium.com/s/story/you-could-have-today-instead-you-choose-tomorrow-4cb5ac429a5a)**, Ryan Holiday. "I've always found it's better to think about what I want my ordinary life to look like most of the time. Then I try to make decisions based on the simple metric of whether they allow for more or less of that right now."

**[The Surprising Power of the Long Game](https://fs.blog/2018/10/long-game/)**, Farnam Street. "In everything you do, you're either playing a short term or long term game. You can't opt out."

**[Yes, It's All Your Fault: Active vs. Passive Mindsets](https://fs.blog/2019/03/active-mindset/)**, Farnam Street. A principle I've tried to live by for a long time, first picked up from Dick Winters in Band of Brothers and his "first in, last out" style of leadership. It's not only for leadership. It's for taking ownership of the problems in your own life rather than letting them overcome you.

**[Five Percent Better: The Compounding of Consistent Incremental Progress](https://fs.blog/2016/03/five-percent-better/)**, Farnam Street. It resonates because I see the principle in action at work every day, and I believe in it personally as much as professionally.

**[The Moral Peril of Meritocracy](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/moral-revolution-david-brooks.html)**, David Brooks. "The first mountain is about building up the ego and defining the self, the second is about shedding the ego and dissolving the self. If the first mountain is about acquisition, the second mountain is about contribution."

**[Flywheel Effect: Why Positive Feedback Loops Are a Meta-Competitive Advantage](https://medium.com/evergreen-business-weekly/flywheel-effect-why-positive-feedback-loops-are-a-meta-competitive-advantage-6d0ed55b67c5)**, Evergreen. Jim Collins's flywheel from Good to Great, and how incremental gains on each piece of it add up to a competitive advantage nobody can copy quickly.