I’m trying to be helpful and listing some influential essays and links to them. 🙂
Inspired by Patrick Oshaughnessy’s tweet. What is the most influential essay you’ve ever read?
Patrick Oshaughnessy’s Recommended Essays:
- Walking by Henry David Thoreau
- Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Katha Upanishad – Hope this is a good link? Unsure.
Brent Beshore’s Recommended Essays:
- God in the Dock by C.S. Lewis
- Wreck of Time by Annie Dillard
- This is Water by David Foster Wallace
- In Defense of Sanity: Essays of G.K. Chesterton (Amazon Link)
- The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charlie Munger
- Almost everything by Paul Graham
Alex Danco’s Recommended Essays:
- The Inner Ring by C.S. Lewis
- Why Complex Systems Fail by Richard Cook
- Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant by Steve Yegge
- The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S Raymond
Post Market’s Recommended Essays:
- How to Make Wealth by Paul Graham
- General Theory of Reflexivity by George Soros
- Increasing Returns and the New World of Business by W. Brian Arthur
- This is Water by David Foster Wallace
Ryan Reeves’ Recommended Essays:
- Letter from a Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King
- Keep Your Identity Small by Paul Graham
- How to Do What You Love by Paul Graham
- Multidisciplinary Thinking by Peter Kaufman
- Make Your Bed by Admiral William H. McRaven
- God in the Dock by C. S. Lewis
- This is Water by David Foster Wallace
Jason Zweig’s Recommended Essays:
- On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
- Of Parties in General by David Hume
- Politics and the English Language by George Orwell
- Letter from a Region in My Mind by James Baldwin
- And dozens by Montaigne and Twain.
Tren Griffin’s Recommended Essays:
- Investing in the Unknown and Unknowable by Richard Zeckhauser
- A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom by Charlie Munger
- The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charlie Munger
- All Mauboussin Essays
Erik Torenberg’s Recommended Essays:
- On Self Respect by Joan Didion
- Feodor’s Guide: Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky by David Foster Wallace
- Asian Like Me by Wesley Yang (unsure if this is the link)
- Finding the 9th Path by Hunter S Thompson
Zim’s Recommended Essays:
- $2M into $2T by Charlie Munger
- Don’t Eat Before Reading This by Anthony Bourdain
- Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant by Steve Yegge
- The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
- The Philadelphia Incident by Bill Burr
Rishi Gosalia’s Recommended Essays:
- The Power of the Marginal by Paul Graham
- Haters by Paul Graham
- Life is Short by Paul Graham
- Galilean Relativity by Peter Kaufman
- The Master Key Level by Peter Kaufman
- Contrast by Peter Kaufman (Can’t find links for any of these)
Miscellaneous Recommended Essays:
- Tradition and the Individual Talent by T.S. Eliot
- Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast by Tom Wolfe
- Newcomb’s Problem and Two Principles of Choice by Robert Nozick
- Reflections on Writing by Henry Miller (Amazon Link)
- How To Write With Style by Kurt Vonnegut
- Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell
- On The Shortness of Life by Seneca (Amazon Link)
- Creating a Kingdom of Ends by Christine Korsgaard (Amazon Link)
- On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt
- The tyranny of structurelessness by Jo Freeman
- Truth is a Pathless Land by J Krishnamurti
- On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense by Friedrich Nietzsche
- The Spark by David Deutsch (The Beginning of Infinity)
- How to Defend Society Against Science by Paul Feyerabend
- What Has India Contributed to Human Welfare? by Ananda Coomaraswamy
- The Revival of Philosophy – Why? by GK Chesterton
- Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom
- AC Bradley on Shakespeare Tragedy
- How to Solve It by Polya
- Existentialism is a Humanism by Sartre
- Twitching by Mark Twight
- 1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly
- Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan
- The Ballot or the Bullet by Malcolm X
- The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Solitude and Leadership by William Deresiewicz
- What you’ll wish you’d known by Paul Graham
- How to be Successful by Sam Altman
- I, pencil by Leonard Read
- Neuralink by Tim Urban
- On the Suffering of the World by Arthur Schopenhauer
- The Hindu View of Life by S. Radhakrishnan
