What Sachin's actually reading.

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

by Eric Jorgenson · 2020

Distilled Naval - leverage, wealth, happiness, and the long game. Reads like a founder's manual disguised as Twitter threads. The single best book I know on building specific knowledge.

The Creative Act

by Rick Rubin · 2023

The book that finally explained to me why some of my best episodes feel like they happened without me. Rubin on tuning in, getting out of your own way, and trusting the work.

The Second Mountain

by David Brooks · 2019

For anyone who climbed the wrong mountain successfully. Brooks on what happens after you arrive at the summit you've been chasing - and realise it was the wrong one. This book is the show, basically.

Part memoir, part journal, part life philosophy - and somehow none of those things. McConaughey figured out early that the goal isn't to avoid the red lights, it's to find the meaning in them. Currently on my desk.

Meditations

by Marcus Aurelius · c. 180 BCE

The only book I keep on my desk year-round. Written by the most powerful man in the world to himself, never meant to be read by anyone. Two thousand years later, still the most practical Stoic text in existence.

Letters from a Stoic

by Seneca · 65

Seneca writing to his friend Lucilius about death, time, friendship, and money. 124 letters, none of which feel like they were written 1,960 years ago.

De Botton takes the most unreadable novelist in the Western canon and extracts something genuinely useful from him. Short, sharp, and unexpectedly funny. The argument is that slowing down your attention changes what you're capable of noticing.

I know what you're thinking. Hear me out. Strip away the mysticism and what's left is a serious argument for intentionality and the compounding effect of directed thought. I don't agree with all of it. I come back to it anyway.

Ikigai

by Héctor García & Francesc Miralles · 2017

The book I wish I had read at twenty-two. The Japanese reason for getting out of bed - and how the centenarians of Okinawa actually think about purpose. Less diagram, more discipline.

A neurosurgeon on the science of manifestation, compassion, and how the brain actually changes under directed intention. Bridges the gap between the woo and the evidence. Closer to Meditations than it looks from the cover.

Evans works with All Blacks and elite military - and what he's found is that pressure isn't a performance problem, it's a brain state problem. The most practically useful book on high-stakes performance I've read. Referenced constantly in Sport episodes.

Carter is the greatest rugby player of his generation and one of the least self-congratulatory athletes you'll read. This isn't a memoir - it's a manual. The chapter on identity after the All Blacks shirt is the reason it's on this shelf.