A Top 5 Books Reading List: Strategy, Stoicism, and a Chef Who Walked Away

Introduction

Choosing a top five is a brutal exercise. There are so many wonderful books out there that the list could shift every month, but these are the five that kept earning their place: they changed how I think about preparation, patience, control, and the value of other people’s judgment. The list leans non-fiction, mainly because non-fiction satisfies a desire to learn about things that actually happened, but every entry here reads well and rewards rereading.

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

The Art of War is a classic, timeless manual on tactics and strategy, and it is far more legible than the title suggests. This is not a thousand-page theoretical treatise on maneuvering armies. Most of the book is about human psychology: how people think, how they behave under pressure, and how to position yourself accordingly. It is short, easy to read, and it is the kind of book you read five or ten times, taking something new away each time. The translation by Thomas Cleary is a favorite, partly because it includes commentary from other strategists woven into the text.

Sun Tzu’s insight that whatever happens, you need to be on the battlefield first still applies far outside war. Arrive last and your opponent, tired or rushed, hands you the advantage. It works in meetings, negotiations, and everyday life, which is why so many business readers keep a copy on their desk.

The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi

Miyamoto Musashi, a legendary 1600s samurai said to have won as many as a hundred duels, developed a school of swordsmanship that used two swords at once, a longer and a shorter one. His book, known in the West as The Book of Five Rings, describes his view on the way of strategy. Some of it is extremely practical, covering how to hold the sword and place your feet, but the lasting value is his view on life and on dominating an opponent psychologically.

One lesson is worth the price alone. When you reach a stalemate, striking and blocking over the same ground again and again, Musashi says take a step back, clear your mind entirely, and start over as if nothing has happened. Applied to a stubborn coding script that refused to work, this exact advice solved the problem: rewriting the whole thing from memory worked immediately. Stalemates end when you truly reset.

Dokkodo by Miyamoto Musashi

A bonus entry from the same author. Dokkodo, which translates roughly as the solitary way or the way I walk alone, is not really a book but a scroll of 21 precepts that Musashi wrote very shortly before he passed away. It is his entire philosophy of life compressed into 21 statements, some of them remarkably harsh, such as a resolve to never be guided by feelings of love.

Others are genuinely inspiring. Respect Buddha and the gods without counting on their help is a favorite: respect what is above you, but take responsibility for doing the thing yourself. Translation from Japanese ideograms is tricky since the same sign can carry multiple meanings, but good translations are easy to find online, and the whole thing takes minutes to read.

Enchiridion by Epictetus

Epictetus was a slave who became a freedman and then a philosophy teacher, and his student Arrian wrote down what he said, producing eight books of discourses, of which books five through eight are lost. The Enchiridion, a name meaning something you keep close, often translated as the handbook, is those lectures boiled down to the absolute essentials. You can read it in an afternoon, and it lays out the basics of stoicism in short, highly pragmatic bits with no woolly language.

It opens with the famous distinction: some things are within your control and other things are not. If you are worried about something, you are not really worried about that thing, you are worried about your thoughts, and your thoughts are the one thing you can always control. There is even a passage for handling criticism with humor: when someone tells you a certain person spoke badly of you, reply that it is clear this person does not truly know you, otherwise they would have pointed out all your other flaws as well. It is funny, it is true, and it dissolves the sting entirely.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Meditations is a harder read than the Enchiridion, because it is really the diary of the emperor of Rome, written to himself. These are the thought processes of someone talking to himself rather than lectures meant to explain, and Marcus was a more complicated philosopher than Epictetus, influenced by the Stoics but writing with uneven clarity about issues that haunt us.

The rewards are enormous. He reminds himself each morning that today he will meet unpleasant, meddling, ungrateful people, and that since they are all fellow human beings, he should put up with them. He writes that you can always withdraw into your mind and find a safe space there, and that there is always the option of simply not having an opinion about something. My favorite passage is a quote of Democritus: the universe is change; life is opinion. Some passages grab you by the throat. It is moving, sometimes to the point of tears, and written centuries ago about behavior that is unchanged today.

The Devil in the Kitchen by Marco Pierre White

The most surprising pick, and a book I would not normally reach for since autobiographies are not usually my thing. Marco Pierre White trained Gordon Ramsay, became the youngest chef in the UK to hold all three Michelin stars, and is terrifying not because he screams but because he is calm, with an incredible intensity to his look. The book is wonderfully written, eloquent, and unfolds like a movie: a 14-year-old boy sent by his father to train in a hotel, working his way up through London kitchens.

The remarkable moment comes when he sits on a bench by the Thames, realizes that continuing means 16 hours a day in the kitchen and no family life, and concludes that being judged by people who know less than you is worthless. He handed his stars back to Michelin on the spot. He also left behind one of the best lines I have ever read: strategy will compensate for talent, but talent will never compensate for strategy. That line alone blew my mind.

Conclusion

Five choices, none of them random. Sun Tzu teaches you to arrive first, Musashi teaches you to reset when stuck, Dokkodo teaches you to rely on yourself, Epictetus teaches you what you can and cannot control, Marcus Aurelius teaches you how to meet difficult people and accept change, and Marco Pierre White teaches you to question the value of the judgment you chase. Any one of these is a good afternoon’s reading; together they form a short course in how to conduct yourself. Let us know which books would make your own top five.