Let’s check out a few of the best Peter Thiel book recommendations.
Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur known for creating PayPal. He is also a venture capitalist with Facebook topping his portfolio as one of the first investors. Lastly, he is a political activist and lawyer.
He wouldn’t have gotten where he is today without reading. Peter Thiel isn’t just a reader, though. He has also published two books: The Diversity Myth, and Zero to One. He also wrote a chapter in Tim Ferris’s book, Tools of Titans.
In a Reddit AMA when asked what his favorite kinds of books were, he said, “Lots and lots of them. I like the genre of past books written about the future, e.g.: Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis JJ Servan-Schreiber, The American Challenge Norman Angell, The Great Illusion Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age.”
Those are a couple of Peter Thiel’s recommended books, but we are going to do a deep dive into a few more.
List of Peter Thiel Book Recommendations
- Originals by Adam Grant
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
- 100 Plus by Sonia Arrison
- The Decadent Society by Ross Douthat
- Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder
- The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World by Edward Creasy
- Zero to One by Peter Thiel
Originals by Adam Grant
Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World is a #1 New York TImes Bestseller by Adam Grant that was published in 2017, and is 352 pages long.
Peter Thiel tweeted that he enjoyed Originals by Adam Grant, writing, “It can sometimes seem as if one must learn everything old before one can try anything new. Adam Grant does a masterful job showing that is not the case; we are lucky to have him as a guide.”
In Originals, Adam Grant tries to change the world for the better by going against the grain, battling conformity, and dumping outdated ideas.
He claims those that will succeed are those who stand out. Adam Grant uses studies and first hand accounts from businesses, entertainers, and politicians to prove his theory. Some other stories include a woman who challenged Steve Jobs, a CIA agent who challenged the secrecy, and a TV executive who saved Seinfield.
Originals will teach you all about finding good ideas that go against the norm, how to use your voice to amplify it, build a solid network, and how to silence your fear and doubt.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz was published in 2014, and has 304 pages.
Peter Thiel recommended the book saying, “Every management guide presumes that all great companies follow a formula. But successful startups don’t imitate; they build innovations that can’t be copied. Ben Horowitz knows no recipe guarantees success. He has written the first true guide for protecting a startup from self-sabotage.”
Ben Horowitz is a Silicon Valley legend, so he’s got the golden knowledge of starting a business that works that you won’t learn in school. He’s got the answers to the hardest questions.
In The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben answers those questions. He admits it’s really hard to start a business and even harder to start one that’s remotely successful.
Half business book, half story of Ben’s life, he reminisces on times he had to fire a friend, when he got business advice from a rap song, and how he raised businesses from the ground up to cash them out for millions.
Full of his natural humor, Ben Horowitz is bound to teach you a lesson or two to make your business great!
100 Plus by Sonia Arrison
100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith by Sonia Arrison is another Peter Thiel book recommendation.
Peter Thiel said, “First published in 2011, but its message is evergreen: how scientists are directly attacking the problem of aging and death and why we should fight for life instead of accepting decay as inevitable. The goal of longer life doesn’t just mean more years at the margin; it means a healthier old age.”
100 Plus is a book about age. Can you believe that the first person to make it to 150 years old has already been born?
If you knew you were going to live to be 150 years old, what would you do? Would we still retire at 65? Or would we continue to learn and get another job? Would we even be healthy?
100 Plus also takes a look at a few other aspects of humanity’s longer age of life like would the world get overpopulated? Will it be possible to have a child and grandchild be the same age?
Sonia Arrison takes a deep dive into the progress humans have already made to slow aging, and make some of these questions a reality. Did you know it will soon be possible to grow human organs in a lab from stem cells?
Most of this book will sound like something out of a science fiction novel, but rest assured, it is all very real. Science fiction is becoming science nonfiction.
The Decadent Society by Ross Douthat
The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success is a 2020 book by Ross Douthat
Peter Thiel likes this book because he said it made him ask many questions. He said, “Sets the stakes for the most urgent public debate of the 2020s: How do we get back to the future?”
Have you ever wondered what would happen if our society ever stopped advancing? The answer to that question is given to us by Ross Douthat in The Decadent Society.
Now, you may be thinking that social media or the traditional media is what could cause society to stop advancing, but that’s not it. There is something much deeper going on. Wealth, technological proficiency, political stalemates, and poor economics can cause the stagnation of society.
Notice how all the new movies aren’t really new movies at all? The same Star wars and Marvel movie recycled over and over again, and how many Batman movies are there now? Why does it seem like all the new games on the PlayStation 5 are remakes or remasters? Are we running out of ideas?
Is the future going to be exciting or are we just on the path to decadence? Is comfort making us grow old unhappy? How will our society escape stagnation, whether through disaster or enlightenment?
Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder
Bloodlands was written by Timothy Snyder, published in 2012, and is hefty at 560 pages.
When Peter Thiel recommended the book, he said, “He tells how the Nazis and the Soviets drove each other to ever more murderous atrocities as they fought to dominate Eastern Europe in the 1930s and ’40s. Even as he calculates the death toll painstakingly, Mr. Snyder reminds us that the most important number is one: Each victim was an individual whose life cannot be reduced to the violence that cut it short.”
Did you know that Americans call the Second World War “The Good War”?
But things weren’t so good before it even started. And they hardly improved during.
Josef Stalin, America’s wartime buddy, was actually killing his own people before and during the war. And let’s not forget about Hitler, who killed millions of Jews and Europeans. Both Germany and the Soviet Union had secret killing spots, which left the history of mass killing in darkness.
Bloodlands takes a new route in order to teach about European history. It shows how the German and Stalinist regimes were both really extremely efficient at mass murder, unfortunately, and it all happened in the same area at the same time.
It’s a super well-researched and really informative book that everyone should read if they want to really understand what happened in modern history.
The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World by Edward Creasy
The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World by Edward Creasy was published in 1851, and is 400 pages long.
Funnily enough, Peter Thiel recommended this book to Ryan Holiday. On a podcast Ryan said, “Peter would, at one point, pass me a copy of ‘The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World’, the book he had read as he’d mulled his options over.”
Get ready to learn about some (fifteen to be exact) epic battles that changed the course of history!
This interesting war book tells the story of how Britain became so powerful. Britain has had a huge impact on most of the world that can still be seen to this day.
He’s really fair and tells both sides of the story. Plus, he gives us some extra info in between the battles. This book is super popular and teaches us about some of the most important events in world history and how they impact the world today.
It’s been loved by generations of people who love history, whether they’re students or just like reading about it for fun.
Zero to One by Peter Thiel
Zero to One is the second book written by Peter Thiel. He published this one in 2012.
Peter Thiel thinks that progress can help any industry, not just computers, as long as the person in charge can think for themselves.
He believes that the next big inventors won’t just copy what others have already done, but will create something new and unique. And some of these inventions might seem weird to people at first… *cough* the metaverse *cough*
These inventors won’t have competition because they will be doing something that no one else is doing.
Reading Zero to One can help you find ways to make your business unique, valuable, and stand out from all of your competitors.
Fun fact: This book actually started out as one of Peter Thiel’s student’s notes on a class he taught at Stanford.