50+ Books That Will Change Your Life
(Or 59 Books That Changed Mine)
Welcome to 2025!
This is my personal insider newsletter called Dream Impossible! for friends, business contacts and fellow artists & instigators who are also inspired by the amazing mantra: it always seems impossible until it’s done.
You are on my personal newsletter list because you are a friend or contact from my linkedin or gmail and I thought you’d be interested in the innovation topics discussed here. If you don’t wish to get my insider newsletters, it’s super easy to unsubscribe below.
I’ve been blogging off and on since 2004, and one of my goals is to start sharing my ideas more regularly this year with people like you who also care about doing big things in the world. So a few times a month, I plan to post essays and insights on innovation topics like AI, wearable tech, robotics, AR/VR, biotech, health moonshots, neurotech, food tech, design and culture, and discuss ideas / tools / concepts I hope spark more big thinking and positive impact.
Below is my first Dream Impossible! essay of 2025. It’s titled 50+ Books That Changed My Life. Perhaps some of them may change yours too…
P.S. I’ll be running around CES in Vegas and JPM Healthcare Conference in SF the next two weeks meeting with StartUp Health members, Health Transformers, and people looking to do big sh*t in 2025. If you are attending either conference, ping me on LinkedIn or reply to let me know where you will be hanging out. I hope I get the chance to chat about what’s on your 50+ list…
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50+ Books That Changed My Life
Just before my 50th birthday, I started working on what began as a daunting list: 50+ Books That Changed My Life. While I planned to share this list with friends and family, I never published it.
A year later, as I celebrate my 51st birthday, I thought it would be fun to kick off 2025 by finally sharing this essay publicly for the first time.
What started as a casual list quickly turned into a literary Rorschach test of my life——a mirror reflecting how I think, feel, and see the world.
The books featured on my list may not be the most famous or universally acclaimed, but these are all books that have made me who I am and inspired me to Dream Impossible! in different ways.
If you take the time to read the (way too long) PDF, you’ll find reflections on 59 books——each paired with key themes, memorable messages, and personal anecdotes about their impact. Whether you’re an avid reader, a curious explorer, or someone seeking fresh inspiration for your journey, I hope you find a few useful nuggets.
I could easily add 50 more titles to this list, but these are simply the ones that first came to mind when I sat down to write this essay.
Finally, as we enter a new year, may your own journeys be as delightfully unpredictable as mine. If nothing else, as I learned from more than one of my favorite reads: whether you’re on the bus or off the bus, the journey itself is always part of the story. And, in many cases, it is the story.
If that isn’t nice, what is?
Here’s a sneak peak at The 50+ Books…but you’ll have to download and read the essay, if you want to learn why…
The Hero's Journey – by Joseph Campbell
Harpo Speaks! – Autobiography of Harpo Marx with Rowland Barber
Chronicles – by Bob Dylan
Man’s Search for Meaning – by Viktor Frankl
The Fountainhead – by Ayn Rand
Getting Real – by 37signals (Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson)
The Joy of Sex – by Alex Comfort
The Joy of Cooking – by Irma Rombauer
Siddhartha – by Hermann Hesse
The Art of War – by Sun Tzu
Rich Dad Poor Dad – by Robert Kiyosaki
The Far Side – by Gary Larson
Merde! The Real French You Were Never Taught in School – by Geneviève and Adrien Clautrier
The Anarchist Cookbook – (Authorship disputed)
Poor Man’s James Bond – by Kurt Saxon
Too Far From Home – by Tom N. R. Rogers
Dressing the Man: Mastering the Art of Permanent Fashion – by Alan Flusser
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – by Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow – by Yuval Noah Harari
The Giving Tree – by Shel Silverstein
Where the Sidewalk Ends – by Shel Silverstein
The Automatic Millionaire – by David Bach
The Way to Wealth – by Benjamin Franklin
Stealing Fire – by Stephen Kotler
Don’t Make Me Think – by Steve Krug
Le Petit Prince – by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
L'Étranger (The Stranger) – by Albert Camus
Women – by Charles Bukowski
OJ is Guilty But Not of Murder – by William C. Dear
Don’t Think of an Elephant – by George Lakoff
The Beautiful and Damned – by F. Scott Fitzgerald
On Writing – by Stephen King
On Writing Well – by William Zinsser
The Dip – by Seth Godin
Daily Afflictions: The Agony of Being Connected to Everything in the Universe – by Andrew Boyd
The Power of Now – by Eckhart Tolle
Chaos: Making a New Science – by James Gleick
Food Rules – by Michael Pollan
Dinkelman's Rules – by Joe Lamport
The Inevitable – by Kevin Kelly
The Innovator's Dilemma – by Clay Christensen
Hercules – (Various adaptations and retellings)
Be Here Now – by Ram Dass
Getting to Yes – by Roger Fisher
The E-Myth – by Michael E. Gerber
The Innovation Stack – by Jim McKelvey
The Fourth Turning – by William Strauss and Neil Howe
Let’s Go Europe – (Various editions)
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – by Tom Wolfe
On the Road – by Jack Kerouac
High Weirdness – by Erik Davis
If This Isn’t Nice, What Is? – by Kurt Vonnegut
Get to the Point – by Andrew Gilman and Karen Berg
The Last Question – *Short Story by Isaac Asimov
Hooked on Phonics – (Educational program)
The Catcher in the Rye – by J.D. Salinger
The Republic – by Plato
Turn Your Life Into Art - by Caveat Magister
Pucci – by Taschen
Dinkelmann hasn’t made his way onto too many best book lists so imagine my surprise to find him here, and in such fine company no less, nestled between Eckart Tolle and Ram Das. It’s an interesting way to glimpse the person you’ve become so see the wide ranging sources of inspiration you’ve drawn from.
Hope all is going well and please give my best to Steve. Happy New Year!
Fascinating list by a probing intellect. I have to read Daily Afflictions, thanks.