5 books every entrepreneur should read

Books help us in so many ways to succeed as an entrepreneur. They can be a source of inspiration, develop skills, and provide tips and business strategies. Reading can also influence the way that we do business through personal development and leadership skills and it helps us to become successful by providing the right knowledge, new ways of thinking, new insights and help us to develop necessary skills. Here are 5 books that should be on every entrepreneur’s reading list:

1. Think and grow rich by Napoleon Hill: For writing this book, Napoleon Hill interviewed “more than five hundred of the most successful men this country has ever known” (including Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison) to suss out the universal building blocks required to amass a fortune. Then he lays out a six-step guide to applying those principles to your own life.

2. How to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie: To succeed in business, you need to know how to deal with people. This classic is a playbook for how to make people like you and then win them over to your way of thinking without causing resentment.

3. 7 habits of highly effective people by Stephen R. Covey: With over 25 million copies sold in 40 languages, this one is a classic. Author Stephen R. Covey presents an approach to being effective in attaining goals by aligning oneself to what he calls “true north” principles based on a character ethic that he presents as universal and timeless.

4. The lean startup by Eric Ries: While most startups fail, a lot of those failures can be prevented. This book offers a new approach that changes the way companies are created and products are launched. Every startup has one thing in common, they want to get through uncertainty to find a path that leads to a sustainable business, but few accomplish this feat.

5. Zero to one by Peter Thiel with Blake masters: The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them. It’s easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. Every new creation goes from 0 to 1. This book is about how to get there.