Reading List

Special operations isn't just about being hard to kill. It's about being hard to outthink.

SOF operators aren't mindless drones. They must be intelligent, adaptable, and capable of acting independently while carrying out the "commander's intent" to accomplish a mission.

They're human Swiss Army knives that must possess a wide range of knowledge and skills, including medicine, electronics, ballistics, languages, skydiving, underwater navigation, counterintelligence, and more. This is why the typical successful SOF candidate has an IQ around the 80th percentile.

Just as a diverse athletic background makes for more capable athletes than those who specialize from a young age, the most cognitively adaptable special operators draw from a broad knowledge base. This is particularly notable among accomplished leaders, such as Admiral Robert Harward, (ep. 62 of our podcast), one of the most decorated SEALs in history, who can easily thread Greek philosophy and modern literature into a conversation about Dev Gru selection.

A broad knowledge base is critical to be a good coach, and for anyone who wants to be a capable and well-rounded person.

Different people will pick and choose books from this list in very different ways, depending on their personal interests and where they are in their careers. Start with what interests you, and with anything that feels like a significant knowledge gap for you.

Just like physical training, reading is freely available but something few people consistently do.

According to Andreas Schleicher of the OECD, 30% of American adults read at a level expected of a 10-year-old child.

Writing is the output process of deliberate thinking, and reading is its input. Without reading well and widely, we not only lose a source of information but also severely weaken our ability to reason. We'd struggle to evaluate the strength of an idea and discern fact from fiction or opinion. In short, the practice of reading is critical to the ability to think.

As they put it in Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son, "You'll find that education's about the only thing lying around loose in this world, and that it's about the only thing a fellow can have as much of as he's willing to haul away. Everything else is screwed down tight and the screwdriver lost."

This is a strength you are free to accumulate throughout your lifetime. It's limited only by your effort and the trades you're willing to make.

If you plan on a career in SOF, this is part of your job.

As General James Mattis said, "If you haven't read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren't broad enough."

This helps you develop what Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's longtime business partner at Berkshire Hathaway, called "a latticework of mental models." The idea is that no single way of thinking is enough to understand the world. Instead, you build a lattice, a mental framework, by learning and integrating models from many different disciplines: economics, psychology, biology, mathematics, history, and so on.

Each model offers a lens. The more lenses you have, the clearer and less distorted your view of reality becomes. When these models interconnect, they help you solve problems, avoid errors, and make better decisions by seeing situations from multiple perspectives instead of being trapped in one narrow way of thinking.

This requires reading books that fall outside your comfort zone or don't align with your usual preferences and biases, including those with which you may largely disagree.

We should read, as Seneca wrote, "like a spy in the enemy's camp."

Medal of Honor recipient James Stockdale had this strength when he was imprisoned and tortured for seven years in the infamous Hanoi Hilton POW camp in Vietnam.

Not only had Stockdale's past reading given him the foundation of Stoicism that carried him through his captivity, but since he'd also studied the political philosophies of his eventual captors, he was able to resist and counter them more effectively, because he knew their arguments better than they did.

In a letter to his parents while he was still in college, he echoed back a lesson they'd taught him as a child that related to the reading he'd been doing, and said, "You really can't do well competing against something you don't understand as well as something you can."

If you could do one thing to improve your mental health and make yourself better at thinking, it would be to leave your phone alone and pick up a book in spare moments instead of reflexively scrolling through social media and clickbait news.

We're in an unprecedented era of devices and technologies that harm our cognitive function and mental health. There is an army of intelligent, focused people working to make the phone in your pocket as addictive as possible, no matter the cost to society. Scrolling social media, even if you're trying to use it as a source of information or education, damages everything from your working memory to your ability to process verbal information to your attention span.

This is not a complete or definitive list; it's simply our recommendations based on books that we've read ourselves.

The most striking thing about it may be how many great books aren't on it. Alternatives to the titles you'll find here are nearly endless, and that's good to keep in mind. The unread books on our shelves are often the most important. They serve as physical reminders for intellectual humility because each one of them contains something that you don't yet know. As Nassim Taleb put it, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Anyone with no unread books should be regarded as dangerously ignorant and overly confident at the same time.