SVIC Library
The Silicon Valley Investors Club has created this library to share books that will make you a better investor and thinker. Note: We use Amazon affiliate links below to keep the lights on!
Risk

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In this book you’ll learn that our lives are influenced by randomness and financial projections aren’t worth the paper they are written on.

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Most of the worlds issues are based on people making decisions for others when they dont face the consequences of their bad decision making.

What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars
by Jim Paul & Brendan Moynihan
Story of a commodities trader that had a run of good luck that catapulted him into riches, but then his luck turned on him and he lost everything. This book teaches you how to properly speculate without losing everything and how to enter and exit investments.

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Most of the worlds issues are based on people making decisions for others when they dont face the consequences of their bad decision making.

The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: “On Robustness and Fragility”
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The author explores subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory.

Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions
by Gerd Gigerenzer
In this book you will learn the surprising conclusion that the best results often come from considering less information and listening to your gut.

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places
by Michael Mauboussin
This book teaches you tools that will help you better understand the concepts of choice and risk.

Mastering the Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side
by Howard Marks
This book teaches you how to identify and master the cycles that govern the markets.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds
by Charles Mackay
This book explores various economic bubbles, such as the infamous Tulipomania, wherein Dutch tulips rocketed in value amid claims they could be substituted for actual currency.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing
by Burton G. Malkiel
This book teaches you how to diversify and take advantage of investment opportunities. It will help you chart a calm course through the turbulent waters of today’s financial markets.
Real Estate

The Millionaire Real Estate Investor
by Gary Keller, Dave Jenks, and Jay Papasan
This book represents the collected wisdom and experience of over 100 millionaire investors from all walks of life who pursued financial wealth and achieved the life-changing freedom it delivers.

The Book on Managing Rental Properties: Find, Screen, and Manage Tenants with Fewer Headaches and Maximum Profits
by Brandon and Heather Turner
This book will change the way you think about being a landlord. Written with both new and experienced landlords in mind, it takes you on an insider tour of the Turners’ management business, so you can discover exactly how they have maximized their profit, minimized their stress, and how they have a blast doing it!

The Book on Negotiating Real Estate: Expert Strategies for Getting the Best Deals When Buying & Selling Investment Property
by J Scott, Mark Ferguson, and Carol Scott
This book teaches you how to use negotiation skills to get the best deals no matter what the housing market throws your way.

Hold: How to Find, Buy, and Rent Houses for Wealth
by Steve Chader, Jennice Doty, and Jim McKissack
This book will teach you how to obtain financial freedom through real estate. It teaches a proven, reliable real estate investing process to achieve financial wealth.

The Book on Rental Property Investing: How to Create Wealth with Intelligent Buy and Hold Real Estate Investing
by Brandon Turner
This book imparts the practical and exciting strategies that investors across the world are using to build significant cash flow through real estate investing.

The Book on Tax Strategies for the Savvy Real Estate Investor: Powerful techniques anyone can use to deduct more, invest smarter, and pay far less to the IRS
by Amanda Han and Matthew MacFarland
This book will teach you how to obtain financial freedom through real estate. It teaches a proven, reliable real estate investing process to achieve financial wealth.

The Complete Guide to Buying and Selling Apartment Buildings
by Steve Berges
This book helps you map out your future, find apartment buildings at a fair price, finance purchases, and manage your properties.

Hold: How to Find, Buy, and Rent Houses for Wealth
by Steve Chader, Jennice Doty, and Jim McKissack
This book will teach you how to obtain financial freedom through real estate. It teaches a proven, reliable real estate investing process to achieve financial wealth.

The California Landlord’s Law Book: Rights & Responsibilities
by David Brown, Ralph Warner, and Janet Portman
This a concise legal guide will help anyone who owns or manages residential rental property in California.

Every Landlord’s Legal Guide
by Ralph Warner, Janet Portman, and Marcia Stewart
This book is the most comprehensive and up-to-date legal and practical guide for residential landlords.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities
by Jane Jacobs
In this book, you will discover what Jane Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood, and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
by Matthew Desmond
This book will transform your understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America’s most devastating problems.
Economics

A Short History of Financial Euphoria
by John Kenneth Galbraith
Great tales of financial disaster and what you can do to not make the same mistakes.

Crashes and Crises: Lessons from a History of Financial Disasters
by JConnel Fullenkamp and The Great Courses
This course explains the history behind financial crises. You will have to listen to a few lessons over again to absorb it, but it provides you with great context on how we got here.

The Origin of Financial Crises: Central Banks, Credit Bubbles, and the Efficient Market Fallacy
This book talks about the myth of the efficient market and how central banks can create economic booms and busts.

How Money Walks – How $2 Trillion Moved Between the States, and Why It Matters
by Travis H. Brown
How Money Walks explores the hows, whys, and impact of this massive movement of American working wealth. Consider these facts. Between 1995 and 2010: -The nine states with no personal income taxes gained.
Career Skills

The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism
by Olivia Fox Cabane
This book explores science and technology when it comes to understanding charisma. In controlled laboratory experiments, researchers could raise or lower people’s level of charisma as if they were turning a dial.

Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Second Edition
by Kerry Patterson
Crucial Conversations has taught millions of people how to communicate when stakes are high. This new edition gives you the tools to prepare for high-stakes situations, transform anger and hurt feelings into powerful dialogue. Be persuasive, not abrasive.

The 48 Laws of Power
by Robert Greene
The authors have distilled three thousand years of the history of power into 48 essential laws by drawing from the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and Carl Von Clausewitz and also from the lives of figures ranging from Henry Kissinger to P.T. Barnum.

Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success
by Adam Grant
This book examines the surprising forces that shape why some people rise to the top of the success ladder while others sink to the bottom.
Personal Development

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win
by Jocko Willink
This book has revolutionized leadership development and set a new standard for literature on the subject. It has become an integral part of the official leadership training programs for scores of business teams, military units, and first responders.

Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level
by Mark Divine
This book was originally intended to train special operations candidates in the mental, emotional and spiritual strength to become an elite warrior. You will discover how Unbeatable Mind training has led to profound transformation and breakthroughs for thousands from all walks of life.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
by Cal Newport
This book explores the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time.
History

Guns, Germs, and Steel
by Jared Diamond
The author is able to merge multiple disciplines into one grand narrative of why the world is the way it is today. The book is a long masterpiece, but if you read it, you’ll learn how the west dominated the world through technology and germs.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years
by David Graeber
This book was written by an Anthropologist, who decides to challenge our conception of debt. Maybe read the first few chapters of this book and stop, but you’ll think of the concept of debt differently, which is worth the slog.

Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
by Joseph J. Ellis
This book shares how a group of greatly gifted but deeply flawed individuals: Hamilton, Burr, Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Adams, and Madison, confronted the overwhelming challenges before them to set the course for our nation.

The House of Rothschild
by Niall Ferguson
The author, Niall Ferguson uncovers the secrets behind the Rothschild family secrets and phenomenal economic success.
Psychology

The Undiscovered Self: The Dilemma of the Individual in Modern Society
by C. G. Jung
This book helps us reveal how to embrace our own humanity and resist the pressures of an ever-changing world.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
by Jonathan Haidt
In this book, you will learn that based on our genetics we are hardwired to think a certain way, and this impacts our investing

The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book)
by Don Miguel Ruiz
The author reveals the source of self-limiting beliefs that rob us of joy and create needless suffering. This book offers a powerful code of conduct that can rapidly transform our lives to a new experience of freedom, true happiness, and love.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds
by Charles Mackay
This book explores various economic bubbles, such as the infamous Tulipomania, wherein Dutch tulips rocketed in value amid claims they could be substituted for actual currency.

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks
by Joshua Cooper Ramo
This book is the story of what all of today’s successful figures see and feel: the forces that are invisible to most of us but explain everything from explosive technological change to uneasy political ripples.

Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less
by Guy Claxton
The author makes an appeal that we be less analytical and let our creativity have free rein. You will discover interesting anecdotes, a dozen puzzles to test your reasoning, and the latest related research.

Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life
by John B. Arden
This book shows you how you can rewire parts of the brain to feel more positive about your life, remain calm during stressful times, and improve your social relationships.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
by Robert B. Cialdini
In this book, you’ll learn the six universal principles of influence and how to use them to become a skilled persuader.

I’m OK-You’re OK
by Thomas Harris
The author explores the structure of our personalities and understanding old decisions. The belief is that we can find the freedom to change our lives.

Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade
by Robert Cialdini
This book explains how to prepare people to be receptive to a message before they experience it. Optimal persuasion is achieved only through optimal pre-suasion. In other words, to change “minds” a pre-suader must also change “states of mind.”

Get Out of Your Own Way: Overcoming Self-Defeating Behavior
by Mark Goulston, Philip Goldberg
The authors share practical, proven self help steps show how to transform 40 common self-defeating behaviors, including procrastination, envy, obsession, anger, self-pity, compulsion, neediness, guilt, rebellion, inaction, and more.

Man’s Search for Meaning
by Viktor E. Frankl
The author’s theory of logotherapy (from the Greek word for “meaning”) is a conviction that the primary human drive is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but rather the discovery and pursuit of what the individual finds meaningful. Today, as new generations face new challenges and an ever more complex and uncertain world, this classic work continues to inspire us all to find significance in the very act of living, in spite of all obstacles.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
by Robert M. Sapolsky
The author explores the factors that bear on a person’s reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its evolutionary legacy.
Philosophy

The Evolution of God
by Robert Wright
The author takes the reader from the Stone Age to the Information Age. You will find explanations to why spirituality has a role today, and why science, contrary to conventional wisdom, affirms the validity of the religious quest.

The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The author expresses their view of modern civilization’s hubristic side effects. You will learn about why we are modifying humans to satisfy technology, blaming reality for not fitting economic models, and convincing people that employment is not slavery.

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
by Eric Hoffer
This book looks into the mind of the fanatic and a penetrating study of how an individual becomes one.

René Girard’s Mimetic Theory
by Wolfgang Palaver
This book explains the three main pillars: Mimetic desire, the Scapegoat Mechanism, and the Biblical “difference,” with the help of examples from literature and philosophy.

When the Shoe Fits: Stories of the Taoist Mystic Chuang Tzu
by Osho
The author offers penetrating commentary on the stories of Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu, the tradition’s founder, as well as inspirational anecdotes on the quest for love, spiritual understanding, and true happiness.

Thomas Paine : Collected Writings : Common Sense / The American Crisis / The Rights of Man / The Age of Reason / A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal
by Thomas Paine
The author uses writings that forged the spirit of the American nation: Common Sense, The American Crisis, The Rights of Man, The Age of Reason. Through these writings, Paine proved the pen is mightier than the sword.

The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
by James Dale Davidson
In this book you will explore the greatest economic and political transition in centuries, the shift from an industrial to an information-based society.

Ideas Have Consequences
by Richard M. Weaver
This book uses “words hard as cannonballs” to present an unsparing diagnosis of the ills of the modern age. Widely read and debated at the time of its first publication,the book is now seen as one of the foundational texts of the modern conservative movement.
Business

The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America
by Lawrence A. Cunningham
This is the book Buffett autographs most, its popularity and longevity attest to the widespread appetite for this unique compilation of Mr. Buffett s thoughts that is at once comprehensive, non-repetitive, and digestible. You will gain an invaluable informal education by perusing this classic arrangement of Mr. Buffett’s best writings.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters
This book teaches you that by creating something new you can escape the margin lowering effects of competition.

The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter
by Michael D. Watkins
The author offers proven strategies for conquering the challenges of transitions, no matter where you are in your career.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
by Ben Horowitzr
The author is one of Silicon Valley’s most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup. You will learn practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog.

Rework
by Jason Fried
This book is the perfect playbook for anyone who’s ever dreamed of doing it on their own. Hardcore entrepreneurs, small-business owners, people stuck in day jobs they hate, victims of “downsizing,” and artists who don’t want to starve anymore will all find valuable guidance in these pages.
Probabilities

Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts
by Annie Duke
The author is a former World Series of Poker champion turned business consultant that draws on examples from business, sports, politics, and (of course) poker to share tools anyone can use to embrace uncertainty and make better decisions.

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
by Philip E. Tetlock
The authors offer a masterwork on prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a massive, government-funded forecasting tournament.

How to Lie with Statistics
by Irving Geis
In this book you will learn runs of the gamut of every popularly used type of statistic, probes such things as the sample study, the tabulation method, the interview technique, and points up the countless number of dodges, which are used to fool rather than to inform.
Startups

Crossing the Chasm
by Geoffrey A. Moore
This book shows that in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, which begins with innovators and moves to early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards; there is a vast chasm between the early adopters and the early majority.

Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries
by Peter Sims
In this book, you will explore a fascinating range of research, from the psychology of creative blocks to the influential field of design thinking. The author offers engaging and illuminating accounts of breakthrough innovators at work, and a whole new way of thinking about how to navigate uncertain situations.

Contagious: Why Things Catch On
by Jonah Berger
The author reveals the secret science behind word-of-mouth and social transmission. Discover how six basic principles drive all sorts of things to become contagious, from consumer products and policy initiatives to workplace rumors and YouTube videos.