incREDible Books

what I read

[incrediblebooks]

The Perennial Philosophy

Aldous Huxley

An inspired gathering of religious writings that reveals the "divine reality" common to all faiths, collected by Aldous Huxley

"The Perennial Philosophy," Aldous Huxley writes, "may be found among the traditional lore of peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions."

With great wit and stunning intellect—drawing on a diverse array of faiths, including Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Christian mysticism, and Islam—Huxley examines the spiritual beliefs of various religious traditions and explains how they are united by a common human yearning to experience the divine. The Perennial Philosophy includes selections from Meister Eckhart, Rumi, and Lao Tzu, as well as the Bhagavad Gita, Tibetan Book of the Dead, Diamond Sutra, and Upanishads, among many others.

[incrediblebooks]

Rework

Jason Fried

Most business books give you the same old advice: Write a business plan, study the competition, seek investors, yadda yadda. If you're looking for a book like that, put this one back on the shelf.

*Rework *shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Read it and you'll know why plans are actually harmful, why you don't need outside investors, and why you're better off ignoring the competition. The truth is, you need less than you think. You don't need to be a workaholic. You don't need to staff up. You don't need to waste time on paperwork or meetings. You don't even need an office. Those are all just excuses. 

What you really need to do is stop talking and start working. This book shows you the way. You'll learn how to be more productive, how to get exposure without breaking the bank, and tons more counterintuitive ideas that will inspire and provoke you.

With its straightforward language and easy-is-better approach, *Rework *is the perfect playbook for anyone who’s ever dreamed of doing it on their own. Hardcore entrepreneurs, small-business owners, people stuck in day jobs they hate, victims of "downsizing," and artists who don’t want to starve anymore will all find valuable guidance in these pages.

[incrediblebooks]

The 48 Laws of Power

Robert Greene

Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this piercing work distills three thousand years of the history of power in to forty-eight well explicated laws. As attention-grabbing in its design as it is in its content, this bold volume outlines the laws of power in their unvarnished essence, synthesizing the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun-tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, and other great thinkers.

Some laws teach the need for prudence ("Law 1: Never Outshine the Master"), the virtue of stealth ("Law 3: Conceal Your Intentions"), and many demand the total absence of mercy ("Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally"), but like it or not, all have applications in real life.

Illustrated through the tactics of Queen Elizabeth I, Henry Kissinger, P. T. Barnum, and other famous figures who have wielded--or been victimized by--power, these laws will fascinate any reader interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control.

[incrediblebooks]

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

Ray Kurzweil

For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations.

[incrediblebooks]

Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

Scott Belsky

**How the world’s leading innovators push their ideas to fruition, time and time again. **

Edison famously said that genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration. Ideas for new businesses, solutions to the world’s problems, and artistic breakthroughs are common, but great execution is rare.

According to Scott Belsky, the capacity to make ideas happen can be strengthened by anyone willing to build their organizational habits and harness the forces of community. That’s why he founded Behance, a company that helps creative people and teams across industries develop these skills.

Belsky has spent six years studying the habits of especially productive creative people and teams-the ones who make their ideas happen time and time again. After interviewing hundreds of successful creatives, he has compiled their most powerful-and often counterintuitive-practices, such as:

•Generate ideas in moderation and act without conviction •Reduce all projects to just three primary components •Encourage fighting within your team •Seek competition and share ideas liberally

In an increasingly flexible and entrepreneurial environment, creative minds have the opportunity (and responsibility) to solve and change industries-but they can only do that if they overcome the obstacles. While many of us obsess about discovering great new ideas, Belsky shows why it’s better to develop the capacity to make ideas happen-a capacity that endures over time.

[incrediblebooks]

The Soul of Leadership: Unlocking Your Potential for Greatness

Deepak Chopra

Leadership is the most crucial choice one can make—it is the decision to step out of darkness into the light.      Bestselling author and spiritual guide Deepak Chopra invites you to become the kind of leader most needed today: a leader with vision who can make that vision real. Chopra has been teaching leadership to CEOs and other top executives for eight years, and the path outlined in *The Soul of Leadership *applies to any business, but the same principles are relevant in every community and area of life, from family and home to school, place of worship, and neighborhood. “At the deepest level,” Chopra writes, “a leader is the symbolic soul of a group.”        With clear, practical steps, you are led through the crucial skills outlined in the acronym L-E-A-D-E-R-S: L = Look and Listen E = Emotional Bonding A = Awareness D = Doing E = Empowerment R = Responsibility S = Synchronicity        After identifying your own soul profile and the core values you want to develop, you can use these seven skills to allow your potential for greatness to emerge. Only from the level of the soul, Chopra contends, are great leaders created. Once that connection is made, you have unlimited access to the most vital qualities a leader can possess: creativity, intelligence, organizing power, and love. *       The Soul of Leadership *aims to fill the most critical void in contemporary life, the void of enlightened leaders. “You can be such a leader,” Chopra promises. “The path is open to you. The only requirement is that you learn to listen to your inner guide.” In this unique handbook you are shown how to do just that, in words as practical as they are uplifting. The future is unfolding at this very minute, and the choice to lead it lies with each of us, here and now.

[incrediblebooks]

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Malcolm Gladwell

The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas.

[incrediblebooks]

Life After Death: The Burden of Proof

Deepak Chopra

What happens to the spirit after the body dies?

In* Life After Death*, Deepak Chopra draws on cutting-edge scientific discoveries and the great wisdom traditions to provide a map of the afterlife. He tells us there is abundant evidence that “the world beyond” is not separated from this world by an impassable wall; in fact, a single reality embraces all worlds, all times and places.

“A must-read for everyone who will die.” —Candace B. Pert, Ph.D., author of Molecules of Emotion

“A penetrating and insightful investigation into the greatest mystery of existence. This is an important book because only by facing death will we come to a deeper realization of who we are.” —Eckhart Tolle, author of A New Earth and The Power of Now

“If I had any doubts about the afterlife, I don’t have them anymore. Deepak Chopra has cast his inimitable light on the darkened corners of death. I think this is his greatest contribution yet.” —Marianne Williamson, author of The Age of Miracles and The Gift of Change

[incrediblebooks]

How To Win Friends And Influence People

Dale Carnegie

How to Win Friends and Influence People is one of the first bestselling self-help books ever published. Written by Dale Carnegie and first published in 1937, it has sold 15 million copies globally.[1] Leon Shimkin of the publishing firm Simon & Schuster took one of the 14-week courses given by Carnegie in 1934. Shimkin persuaded Carnegie to let a stenographer take notes from the course to be revised for publication. In 1981 a new revised edition updated the language and updated anecdotes.[2] The revised edition reduced the number of sections from 6 to 4, eliminating sections on effective business letters and improving marital satisfaction.

[incrediblebooks]

Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand

At last, Ayn Rand's masterpiece is available to her millions of loyal readers in trade paperback.

With this acclaimed work and its immortal query, "Who is John Galt?", Ayn Rand found the perfect artistic form to express her vision of existence. Atlas Shrugged made Rand not only one of the most popular novelists of the century, but one of its most influential thinkers.

Atlas Shrugged is the astounding story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world--and did. Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, Atlas Shrugged stretches the boundaries further than any book you have ever read. It is a mystery, not about the murder of a man's body, but about the murder--and rebirth--of man's spirit.

Atlas Shrugged is the "second most influential book for Americans today" after the Bible, according to a joint survey conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club

[incrediblebooks]

The Four Steps to the Epiphany

Steven Gary Blank

The essential book for anyone bringing a product to market, writing a business plan, marketing plan or sales plan. Step-by-step strategy of how to successfully organize sales, marketing and business development for a new product or company. The book offers insight into what makes some startups successful and leaves others selling off their furniture. Packed with concrete examples, the book will leave you with new skills to organize sales, marketing and your business for success.

[incrediblebooks]

Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers

Alexander Osterwalder

Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow’s enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don’t yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation. Co-created by 470 “Business Model Canvas” practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model—or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you’ll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition. Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you’re ready to change the rules, you belong to “the business model generation!”

[incrediblebooks]

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

Eric Ries

**Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable.  The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. ** Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.

The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively.  Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.

Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs - in companies of all sizes - a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

[incrediblebooks]

Diablo Archive

Richard A. Knaak

Since the beginning of time, the angelic hosts of the High Heavens and the demonic hordes of the Burning Hells have been locked in a struggle for the fate of all Creation. That war has now come to the mortal realm…and neither Man nor Demon nor Angel will be left unscathed…. LEGACY OF BLOOD: Norrec Vizharan has become a living nightmare. While on a quest for magical treasure, he discovers an artifact beyond his wildest dreams: the ancient armor of Bartuc, the legendary Warrior of Blood. But the mysterious armor is cursed, channeling a malevolent power into Norrec’s tortured soul. Pursued by demons who covet the dark armor for their own purposes, Norrec must overcome a bloodlust he can scarcely control and learn the truth about his terrifying curse before he is lost to darkness forever. THE BLACK ROAD: Darrick Lang is coming home. Years ago he left the town of Bramwell to walk the wide world as a champion of the realm. But Bramwell is not as he left it. Something dark and terrifying has ensnared the townsfolk, something very old and very patient, tangling innocents in a web of malice and profaning the very earth itself. Now that same power calls to Darrick…and his only hope may be to walk the same perilous path of damnation. THE KINGDOM OF SHADOW: Legend speaks of a long-dead city known as Ureh, thought by many to have been a gateway to the High Heavens. It is said that every two thousand years, Ureh is reborn — and all its lost riches are revealed to those brave enough to seek them out. Now the Vizjerai sorcerer Quov Tsin has come to witness Ureh’s rebirth for himself with Kentril Dumon and his band of mercenaries in tow. But what awaits them is like nothing they imagined. DEMONSBANE: What was to have been a victorious last stand against a demonic invasion of Blackmarch has instead become a massacre. Only Siggard remains, a warrior unable to remember the final hours of the battle. As he hunts the demon lord who butchered everything dear to him, Siggard pieces together the truth of that terrible battle…and finds that his nightmare is only beginning.

[incrediblebooks]

The Legend of Drizzt: Collected Stories

R.A. Salvatore

Classic short stories that expand the epic Legend of Drizzt®!

For years, the Legend of Drizzt has included short stories published in Forgotten Realms® anthologies and Dragon™ magazine. Collected here for the first time are all the classic stories—and one all new tale—by The New York Times best-selling author R.A. Salvatore!

From the startling origin of Drizzt’s panther companion, to the tale of Jarlaxle and Entreri’s first encounter with the dragon sisters, the tales in The Collected Stories enrich this epic series, and many are available here for the first time in years.