After watching Duneier’s rather inspiring TED Talk about breaking goals down into the smallest constituent task (one word instead of a book), I wanted to know what books a man who thought so deeply about decision making read when he set himself the challenge of reading 50 books in a year.
With much searching, the only reference to those books was a blurry slide in his presentation that I pulled and tried to decipher the books from.
As you can tell from the list below, I couldn’t quite tell/guess every single one, but those I could I’ve written below and included a link to them so you can pick them up. If you do recognise any of the books, please do let me know on twitter!
These are (mostly) all the books :
50 books in 1 year | Stephen Duneier
- Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer [get here]
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams [get here]
- ?
- The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin [get here]
- ?
- Banker to the Poor by Muhammad Yunus [get here]
- The Art of Happiness by The Dalai Lama [get here]
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac [get here]
- ?
- My Voice Will Go With You by Milton H Erickson [get here]
- ?
- Beautiful Boy by David Sheff [get here]
- ?
- Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu [get here]
- Animal Spirits by George A Akerlof [get here]
- Michael?
- Predictably Irrational by Dan Arieley [get here]
- Napalm & Silly putty by George Carlin [get here]
- Rubies in the Orchard by Lynda Resnick [get here]
- Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto [get here]
- Whatever it Takes by Paul Tough [get here]
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig [get here]
- Blink by Malcolm Gladwell [get here]
- ?
- Idiot America by Charles Pierce [get here]
- Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein [get here]
- My Life as an Experiment by A J Jacobs [get here]
- Sidewalk by Mitchell Duneier [get here]
- On Being Certain by Robert Burton [get here]
- Outlier by Malcolm Gladwell [get here]
- A Little History of the World by E H Gombrich [get here]
- Distracted by Maggie Jackson [get here]
- Born to Run by Christopher McDougall [get here]
- How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman [get here]
- ?
- ?
- 1984 by George Orwell [get here]
- Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire by Race Esquith [get here]
- Work hard. Be Nice. By yJ Matthews [get here]
- Happier by Tai Ben-Shahar [get here]
- House of Cards by William D Cohan [get here]
- Deep Survival by Luarence Gonzales [get here]
- What Makes You Not a Buddhist by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse [get here]
- Relentless Pursuit by Donna Foote [get here]
- ?
- Nose Down Eyes Up by Merrill Markoe [get here]
- Solo?
- Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali [get here]
- ?
- ?
If you haven’t watched the TED Talk by Duneier, the one on breaking goals down to achieve anything is wonderful and inspiring, you can find that here. As is his talk on decision making, which you can watch here.
The screenshot of the books from his talk is below, please get in touch if you recognise any of them I haven’t identified yet!
