Most Influential Essay You’ve Ever Read?

Compiling Patrick OShaughnessy's tweet replies

I’m trying to be helpful and listing some influential essays and links to them.

Inspired by Patrick Oshaughnessy’s tweet. What is the most influential essay you’ve ever read?

Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag

Most influential essays I've ever read: 1. Walking by Thoreau 2. Self-Reliance by Emerson 3. Katha Upanishad What are yours?

Patrick Oshaughnessy’s Recommended Essays:

• Walking by Henry David Thoreau

• Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Katha Upanishad – Hope this is a good link? Unsure.

Brent Beshore’s Recommended Essays:

• God in the Dock by C.S. Lewis

• Wreck of Time by Annie Dillard

• This is Water by David Foster Wallace

• In Defense of Sanity: Essays of G.K. Chesterton (Amazon Link)

• The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charlie Munger

• Almost everything by Paul Graham

Alex Danco’s Recommended Essays:

• The Inner Ring by C.S. Lewis

• Why Complex Systems Fail by Richard Cook

• Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant by Steve Yegge

• The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S Raymond

Post Market’s Recommended Essays:

• How to Make Wealth by Paul Graham

• General Theory of Reflexivity by George Soros

• Increasing Returns and the New World of Business by W. Brian Arthur

• This is Water by David Foster Wallace

Ryan Reeves’ Recommended Essays:

• Letter from a Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King

• Keep Your Identity Small by Paul Graham

• How to Do What You Love by Paul Graham

• Multidisciplinary Thinking by Peter Kaufman

• Make Your Bed by Admiral William H. McRaven

• God in the Dock by C. S. Lewis

• This is Water by David Foster Wallace

Jason Zweig’s Recommended Essays:

• On Liberty by John Stuart Mill

• Of Parties in General by David Hume

• Politics and the English Language by George Orwell

• Letter from a Region in My Mind by James Baldwin

• And dozens by Montaigne and Twain.

Tren Griffin’s Recommended Essays:

• Investing in the Unknown and Unknowable by Richard Zeckhauser

• A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom by Charlie Munger

• The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charlie Munger

• All Mauboussin Essays

Erik Torenberg’s Recommended Essays:

• On Self Respect by Joan Didion

• Feodor’s Guide: Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky by David Foster Wallace

• Asian Like Me by Wesley Yang (unsure if this is the link)

• Finding the 9th Path by Hunter S Thompson

Zim’s Recommended Essays:

• $2M into $2T by Charlie Munger

• Don’t Eat Before Reading This by Anthony Bourdain

• Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant by Steve Yegge

• The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

• The Philadelphia Incident by Bill Burr

Rishi Gosalia’s Recommended Essays:

• The Power of the Marginal by Paul Graham

• Haters by Paul Graham

• Life is Short by Paul Graham

• Galilean Relativity by Peter Kaufman

• The Master Key Level by Peter Kaufman

• Contrast by Peter Kaufman (Can’t find links for any of these)

Miscellaneous Recommended Essays:

• Tradition and the Individual Talent by T.S. Eliot

• Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast by Tom Wolfe

• Newcomb’s Problem and Two Principles of Choice by Robert Nozick

• Reflections on Writing by Henry Miller (Amazon Link)

• How To Write With Style by Kurt Vonnegut

• Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell

• On The Shortness of Life by Seneca (Amazon Link)

• Creating a Kingdom of Ends by Christine Korsgaard (Amazon Link)

• On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt

• The tyranny of structurelessness by Jo Freeman

• Truth is a Pathless Land by J Krishnamurti

• On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense by Friedrich Nietzsche

• The Spark by David Deutsch (The Beginning of Infinity)

• How to Defend Society Against Science by Paul Feyerabend

• What Has India Contributed to Human Welfare? by Ananda Coomaraswamy

• The Revival of Philosophy – Why? by GK Chesterton

• Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom

• AC Bradley on Shakespeare Tragedy

• How to Solve It by Polya

• Existentialism is a Humanism by Sartre

• Twitching by Mark Twight

• 1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly

• Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan

• The Ballot or the Bullet by Malcolm X

• The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates

• Solitude and Leadership by William Deresiewicz

• What you’ll wish you’d known by Paul Graham

• How to be Successful by Sam Altman

• I, pencil by Leonard Read

• Neuralink by Tim Urban

• On the Suffering of the World by Arthur Schopenhauer

• The Hindu View of Life by S. Radhakrishnan

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You can find my previous posts here. I also interview legends at Compounding Curiosity, lurk on Twitter @scarrottkalani, and have a Discord server for everything Allocators Asia (I’d love for you to join our cool little community we got going).

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