📚 This Week on BookLab
It's been a good week. Less reading than usual, but tons of lessons learned from the little I read. It was also a week for strategizing about BookLab — I have tons of plans that I'll let you in on very soon!
The stack in the image are some of the books that light my soul these days. I find it to be a good mix of light and dense, broad and wide-scope, thick and thin books. Just as I like it!
🎬 New Video: Zero to One by Peter Thiel
Published the video review for Zero to One — recorded out in nature for a change. And you know what? This book made it to my Great Books List.
Thiel's central argument — that we should aim to create something genuinely new rather than iterating on what exists — hit me harder than I expected. It's a book about courage disguised as a business book.
🚀 New on the Site: Best Productivity Books
Live! A brand new article: 10 Best Productivity Books. I'll continue to massage it, but I'm happy with where it landed. Let me know if I'm missing any of your favorites!
Here's the quick rundown:
Deep Work — Cal Newport
Atomic Habits — James Clear
Essentialism — Greg McKeown
So Good They Can't Ignore You — Cal Newport
Eat That Frog! — Brian Tracy
The 80/20 Principle — Richard Koch
Turning Pro — Steven Pressfield
Flow — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The Compound Effect — Darren Hardy
Four Thousand Weeks — Oliver Burkeman
🧠 Thought of the Week
Even zero-to-one innovation builds on the inventions of others.
The young blind son of a harness maker, Louis Braille, who invented the Braille alphabet, didn't invent in isolation. He adapted and radically improved a French captain's "night writing" code, designed for silent communication in the dark.
A pattern repeats across history:
TCP/IP + Hypertext → The Web
3G + Smartphone → App Store economy
Proof-of-work + Public-key cryptography → Bitcoin
Transformer architecture + Internet-scale data → ChatGPT
Breakthroughs are often recombinations before they look inevitable.
📖 Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold
🔧 Correction & Update
Things were wrong on the Overthinkers page. Iterative process! Now it's improved and new books made the list. Thank you — and especially Daniel who pointed it out.
He added Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman — an obvious fit for the list. Time is limited. Fill your calendar with what you want to do, or other people will fill it for you.
📖 What I'm Reading
Week 20 — Reading List 2026 progress: 22% 📊
📚 Rereading: I'm almost done rereading one of my guilty pleasure books for the fourth time — Levels of Energy by Frederick Dodson. This book is just the best. It always lifts me up and fills me with inspiration. A long walk and this book on Audible is hard to beat.
📚 Continuing: Human Action by Ludwig von Mises. This is a thick book, to be sure. Still haven't really gotten into it, but I really wish I will. 36 hours left on the audiobook…
📚 Continuing: The Process: Six Mechanics of Achievement by Mitesh Jani. Started off really strong. I'm on the second part now. Recommended!
📚 Up next: I have my eyes on The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby — the story of Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the quest for superintelligence. I keep hearing so many good things about it.
Have a great week! ☀️ Feel free to hit reply and say hi — I read every message. Happy reading!
— Bjorn