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’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
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
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
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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