Books for Indie Hackers: what would you recommend?
What great entrepreneurial books would you recommend? And what books are on your wish list for 2018?
What great entrepreneurial books would you recommend? And what books are on your wish list for 2018?
Triaged by number of mentions, here are the books most highly recommended by our interviewees:
Never heard of Start Small, Stay Small, but it sounds perfect for Indie hackers. I'll give it a try!
I must've read most of those and highly recommend 8, although it is a difficult book to read without full concentration.
I'm surprised Steve Blank's Four Steps To The Epiphany isn't on there!
Hope these are useful. Also, Tobias Van Schneider has an awesome list: http://www.vanschneider.com/my-favorite-books-on-creativity-productivity-life
You can read 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey. This is one of those must read books.
As a starting point, I'd recommend:
My list for 2018:
"The Now Habit": solved my extreme procrastination tendency by explaining me the psychological reasons behind it. It's basically a coping mechanism to relieve anxiety, and each time you procrastinate, you can pinpoint the exact type of anxiety you're having: fear of failing, fear of being overwhelmed by more work in case of success, fear of never enjoying life if a work takes too much time.
While in the second part of the book he gives you some fantastic tools to progressively fix procrastination, understanding the root causes of procrastination was enough for me to fix it within a few weeks.
Each time I would think "I'll do this later", I would stop and take a second to reflect. For instance:
Every other article or video I have seen about procrastination either explains how it feels (Tim Urban's TED talk) or give small tricks that are not sufficient to work, such as "divide big projects into small steps". While it is their intention, they are not helpful.
All you need is this book!
It's been 4 years since I read it, and I almost never have been affected by procrastination since -it feels amazing.
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On the business side:
On the hacking side:
I especially recommend #1 from each list.
Yu-kai's Octalysis Framework is by far the most comprehensive and illuminating model of gamification I've ever encountered. It really sheds light on why some gamification tactics are very powerful in the short term and disasters in the long term, why heavily data-driven designs inevitably drift towards black hat techniques and how other ideas from the gaming world, such as Bartle Player Types can be mapped to non-gaming businesses.
Masters of Doom actually had quite a bit of interesting content from a business side and a human side, but its lengthy depiction of John Carmack's progression from a hotshot teenage coder looking for a better life into a software luminary who advanced the state of the art in graphics, networking and realtime computing was eye opening. I have no illusions that I can match the intensity of his work ethic, but simply knowing the ceiling is so high has permanently raised my expectations. The audio version was very entertaining as well.