TechLit Reading List

Hey all, we’re starting a library!

Books / Resources

The First Days of School is highly recommended from teachers. It explains how to organize and manage your classroom so that kids spend more time learning. These ideas can make your job easier, more fun, and more impactful.

Make it Stick explains the psychological research about learning, and specifically how we are learning (and teaching) wrong. You will learn some unexpected things about retrieval and reinforcement that will probably change the way you introduce subjects, assess performance, and even learn things yourself.

Thinking Fast and Slow is written by a veteran psychologist. He explains two systems of thinking: Type 1 and Type 2. This book will help you be less dumb. I honestly cannot believe you haven’t read this yet!

100 Mental Models is the most useful blog post I have ever seen. If you learn all of these mental models, you will think and communicate much better. I would even say that this blog post is a prerequisite for intellectual conversation.

Why Nations Fail compares rich and poor countries from all of written history, and tries to find common explanations for why countries succeed, fail, grow, shrink, etc. You might like the core idea: “inclusive” vs “extractive” institutions.

The Looting Machine exposes the actual people and companies who have recently looted Africa. I think this is the red-pill for understanding why so many African countries have resources and talent, but no money or power. You may not feel great after reading this, but you will be informed.

Guns, Germs and Steel answers this question: “Why did Europeans conquer the world and not some other group of people?” It combines the history of economic growth, tech innovation, and diseases around the world to explain what factors made Europe lucky and other places (like East Africa) unlucky.

The Mom Test. Have you ever wanted to ask someone a question that you know they won’t answer truthfully? This book teaches you how to get answers from people without asking directly. It’s written for entrepreneurs, but I think it’s valuable for everyone!

The Lean Startup is cannon for business people. You will learn how to test new ideas quickly and how to make your own business (especially a new kind of business — like TechLit).

Y Combinator & Paul Graham (not a book; videos and blogs). Y Combinator is a successful venture capital firm that shares a lot of advice for startup founders. They have helped create 67 unicorns (companies worth more than a billion dollars).

The Success Principles is written by the author of “Chicken Soup for the Soul”. It is a collection of 100+ ideas and stories that will make you a better leader, teacher, parent, etc.

Never Split the Difference will teach you how to negotiate better. It is written by an FBI hostage negotiator, so it’s serious, high-stakes stuff!

How to Win Friends and Influence People is the classic how-to book for getting people to like you. If you haven’t read this, you probably should.

The Road to Reality explains modern physics from the ground up, without taking many shortcuts. You learn basic math with ancient greeks, then build up to modern math theory so you can understand general relativity and quantum mechanics. This one is difficult.

Godel, Escher, Bach is awesome! Similar to “The Road to Reality,” it builds a foundation for understanding Godel’s incompleteness theorem with lots of silly stories. Your brain might not survive this one, it’s intense.

SICP (The Purple Wizard Book) teaches you how to program computers using LISP. It was the intro book for computer science at MIT for a long time.