12 books you need to read to get smarter in 2026

If you want to become smarter in all aspects of your life, you can't just read more books. It's time to start reading the right books. I've been writing and even reading professionally for the last 20 years. And after reading hundreds and hundreds of books, I've realized that there's only 12 books that actually made me feel significantly smarter, think better, and have creative ideas that have made me millions of dollars. So this is the countdown of the top 12 books that will make you smarter than 98, maybe 99% of all people. Starting with number 12, it's called Influence by Robert Cialdini. And I know you've heard of it, but I bet you've been using it wrong. This book has six principles. It is known for social proof, authority, liking, scarcity, commitment, and consistency. Here's what most people do. They read like the CliffsNotes. They grab the list of the six things and then they just like move on and apply them. And that's exactly why it doesn't work for them. So the reason you should actually be reading the full book is the studies that are in it. Cialdini walks you through study after study, explained in plain language. And what that does is it actually helps wire the principles into your brain. Instead of just filing them in a list of six things, you'll forget. The greatest thing this book gives you is not actually the six principles, although those are good. It's the ability to see influence attempts in real time before they actually work on you. And once you've read the studies, you become almost immune to lazy persuasion. That's worth more than even knowing how to use the principles yourself. Here's the caveat. I don't agree with everything in this book. Commitment and consistency do not work the way they used to. People have changed, but the book is still essential. Book 11 is zero to one by Peter Thiel. And it's basically required reading. If you've ever had to market something that maybe didn't exist yet. This book is about the hardest problem in business going from nothing to something, not growing what exists, which is hard, but creating what doesn't. It was a cornerstone of the lean startup movement and it's the backbone on which most modern tech companies were built. Now the core argument is that competition is for losers. So your goal isn't to build a slightly better version of what exists. It's to create something so different that you own a category and that thinking will change how you position basically anything you're selling. And the idea that stuck with me, every truly successful business is built on a secret. Something the founder believed was true that almost nobody else believed yet. The question worth asking about anything you're building or selling is this, what do I believe about this market that most people haven't figured out? That's where your real positioning begins. But knowing your secret belief only matters if you can communicate it from the very first line. So the next book is the only one I found that tells you exactly how to do that. Book 10 is The Marvelous Great Leads by Michael Masterson and John Ford Legends, and it might be the most practical writing book ever written. Most copywriting books will tell you to write a great hook. This one shows you the six structural options for doing it, when to use each one and why certain leads or hooks work for certain audiences. Now I have recommended this book to every copywriter I've ever coached and the reaction is always the same. Why did nobody tell me about this earlier? What makes it so useful is that it removes that blank page problem for the hardest part of any piece of writing. You're not asking yourself, how do I start this? You're asking which of these approaches fits this audience. And that is a much more productive question. Here's the insight that changed how I write. The hook you choose isn't just a stylistic decision. It's a strategic one. So different hooks work for different levels of awareness. A cold audience needs a completely different opening than a warm one. Now, most people write the same lead for everyone and wonder, well, why doesn't it convert? That's why. Now we get into two books you need to read at the same time, basically. Don't read one without the other. Books nine and eight are The Challenger Sale and Way of the Wolf, which I know as Straight Line Selling. I bring these two books together because they solve two different halves of the very same problem. So The Challenger Sale is built on a counterintuitive idea. The salespeople who get the most yeses aren't the ones who agree with everything the prospect says. They're the ones who challenge the prospect's thinking, respectfully, and from a place of genuine expertise. Instead of, yes, great idea. We can do that. Totally. It's, I'm not sure that's the right way to think about it. Let me show you what I mean. And that reframe earns more trust, definitely not less. Now, the next one by Jordan Belfort is The Other Half. The whole concept is keeping a conversation on an invisible straight line from where someone is to them saying yes, no veering into the other zones, no opening up questions that pull the conversation off the straight line track. So when you read these together, you get this fuller picture. Challenge better, but keep the challenge tight and on track. A challenge that opens up 10 new rabbit holes is not going to be useful. A challenge that moves someone one step closer to yes, is. Now, this is especially useful for selling over chat or DMS, where it's easy to drift into small talk to friendship zone and lose the thread entirely. The most useful thing from these two books combined is this. Your job in any sales conversation is not to be liked. Likeability is good. Yes, but it's to be trusted. And trust comes from demonstrating that you understand the problem better than the person who has it. The moment you stop trying to agree your way to a yes, and start leading the conversation like an expert, that is when everything changes. Book seven is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. And it will make you so much smarter that you'll be kind of annoying to be around. Now, system one and system two, the intuitive brain and the logical brain are the concepts most people take from this book, and it's great. They're good, but they're also just the beginning. Okay. So what is it? System one is your prospects, fast, emotional pattern, recognizing autopilot that makes snap judgments, while system two is the slower, effortful, logical mind that kicks into justify or override what system one has come close to deciding. So the concept that actually changed how I see everything is not just the systems, but this regression to the mean. It's nerdy. I know, but there's an example in the book. So there's a woman who could read at an eighth grade level when she was four years old. What was her GPA when she graduated from university? Most people, including statisticians who were asked this guessed, well, she read at an eighth grade level when she was four years old, she probably graduated at 3.9 or four, something like that. In fact, she graduated with a 3.4 because the mean GPA is 3.4. An exceptional early performance does not predict exceptional later performance as reliably as we assume. Regression to the mean. This matters for marketing and business because we make huge decisions based on outliers all the time. One viral campaign, one incredible quarter, one nightmare client, and we assume that's the pattern. Regression to the mean reminds us probably not. Now, the thing I use from this book constantly is this before making any decision based on a recent result, ask yourself whether that result was actually exceptional or just normal variation. Most of what we call strategy is really just a reaction to noise. Kahneman teaches you to tell the difference. Now, most people apply this thinking to everyone else's decisions and never to their own assumptions, but what they should be doing themselves. The next three books fix that. Books six, five, and four, we're grouping together and they are written by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. These books are who not how 10 X is easier than two X and the gap in the game. And they work together in a way that's hard to explain until you've read all three. So go read them. Who not how is the one I'd start with. I'll share the main thesis with an example. So I had a whole problem with YouTube. I did not know how to grow a channel and I didn't want to learn. So I hired a hoop and I didn't just two X on views. I 100 X on views. The shift it proposes is simple. Stop asking how to do something and start asking who can do this for me. Now it sounds obvious, but we don't often do it. Most people default to learning every skill themselves, which is slow and which limits what they can actually build. Then we have 10 X is easier than two X, which sounds like hype, but it's not. The argument is that aiming for 10 X forces you to cut everything that doesn't matter because you literally can't get there by doing more of the same. Two X just means, okay, we're going to work harder. We're going to set a two X goal. 10 X forces you to think differently. And lastly, the gap and the gain is the emotional anchor for the other two. Now here's the gist. The gap is the distance between where you are and your ideal. The gain is how far you've already come. Most ambitious people live in the gap, which makes them miserable focusing on where they should be, not how far they've come and that makes them less effective. Now together, these books create a complete operating system. Find the right who, aim for 10 X and measure yourself against your past and your progress rather than your ideal state. That combination turns into results real fast. Read who not how first, then 10 X, then gap and gain. They build on each other in that order. Now the next one gives you a new way to think about every problem you may ever face. Book three is The Great Mental Models by Shane Parrish. It's actually several books. It's a toolbox for thinking that most people never get access to. So a mental model is just a cognitive framework, a different way of approaching a problem. This book, the first one has nine foundational mental models. And while they're all genuinely useful, these three stand out. The first, possibly the best is inversion thinking. Instead of asking, how do I succeed? Ask what would guarantee failure and then avoid those things. I mean, it sounds simple and it actually is, but almost nobody does it. So how do I get this client to say yes is a harder question than what would definitely make them say no. Next is first principles thinking. Strip a problem down to its fundamental truths and reason from there rather than from convention. Now in marketing, that means asking what is actually true about this customer, not what we've always assumed. The third one is called the circle of competence, which is about knowing exactly where your knowledge ends. The smartest people in any room are rarely the ones who are pretending to know everything. They're the ones who know precisely what they don't know. What this book does is make you a better problem solver without giving you any new information about the problem itself. And that's a rare kind of smart. So pick two mental models from this book and try to apply them to one real problem you're working on this week. Thinking more clearly changes what you create. The next book will change how you think about what you're creating for. Book two is 101 things I learned in architecture school, and it's exactly what it sounds like. 101 short insights from the world of architecture, quick notes, clean instructions, ideas that make you stop and think it has really great lines. Like the opposite of beauty is not ugly. It's carelessness. Uh, just drop that in a meeting and watch what happens. Another one. The worst thing that ever happened to beauty was the idea that it's in the eye of the beholder. That one will change how you think of standards and craft. If you haven't worked inside a creative organization, this book teaches you how to speak creativity. You'll understand what the best creative people on your team are actually thinking about, and that will make you a better collaborator, a better reviewer, and honestly, just a more interesting person to have lunch with. It's also great divergent thinking fuel, which matters for everything we've talked about in the creativity formula. The best way to use these books is to keep them on your desk. Then open it to a random page. When you're stuck, it actually works. Now, the last book, my number one recommendation to anyone who asks, this is not a marketing book, and that's exactly why it belongs here. The number one book is Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara. The book opens at an award ceremony. It's bookending. It's the top 50 best restaurants in the world, and the list counts down from 50 to one. Now, Will, the author and his co-founder sit there waiting to hear their name and they hear it first, which means they're number 50 dead last. So, still good, but for a restaurant with its ambitions, this is a gut punch. The question the whole first act is sitting with is how do you go from the bottom of the list to the top of it? Now, the answer they land on has very little to do with the kitchen. The author runs front of house, not the menu. So his obsession becomes the guest experience, not just good service. Unreasonable Hospitality, the kind where you overhear a table mention they've never had a New York hot dog and you send someone out to get one mid-meal just to surprise them with it on a silver platter. The second act is built on moment after moment of that, finding the unexpected thing nobody asked for and doing it anyway. The third act, by the end, spoiler alert, same award ceremony years later. They're of course number one in the world. And the reason, again, not only the food, is that nobody who went there to eat ever forgot how it felt to be a guest. Now I listened to this while I run and I had to stop, not because of the restaurant stuff, because the whole time I was thinking about my students, my clients, everyone I work with, the question the book kept asking me was, am I competing on the expected or the unexpected? Am I doing what I promised or am I doing the thing that nobody saw coming? Now that's the bar this book sets. Not did I deliver, but did they feel something they didn't expect to feel? In your content, in your client work, in your emails, that question is worth asking and answering well every single time. So read this one and then write down one way you could make the experience of working with you or consuming your content genuinely surprising, not just better, but surprising. There is a difference. Now you've got the 12 books that will make you smarter than 98% of people, but knowing these ideas isn't the same as using them. Most people read books. Very few turn what they read into original valuable ideas. In the next video, I'll show you the seven step creativity formula that turns everything you just learned into million dollar ideas. You can actually execute.