Tim Ferriss

Author, Entrepreneur, Investor, Podcaster

Timothy Ferriss is an American entrepreneur, investor, author, podcaster, and lifestyle guru. He became well-known through his "4-Hour" self-help book series including the 4-Hour Work Week, the 4-Hour Body, and the 4-Hour Chef, that focused on lifestyle optimizations, but he has since reconsidered this approach.

Tim Ferriss's 207 Book Recommendations

• Principles
• Stranger in a Strange Land
• Travels with Charley in Search of America
• Zorba the Greek
• Delivering Happiness
• Little, Big
• Four Thousand Weeks
• Of Wolves and Men
• The Graveyard Book
• Poor Charlie's Almanack
• The Things They Carried
• Liar's Poker
• How to Change Your Mind
• Writing Down the Bones
• One Blade of Grass
• Biocentrism
• Where Mountains Roar
• Draft No. 4
• Siddhartha
• The Art of Spirited Away
• We Learn Nothing
• The Art of Memoir
• The Ride of a Lifetime
• The Moth Presents All These Wonders
• Exhalation
• Stories of Your Life and Others
• Consciousness Medicine
• Payoff
• I Wrote This Book Because I Love You
• The Magic of Thinking Big
• The Healing Journey (2nd Edition): Pioneering Approaches to Psychedelic Therapy
• One Simple Idea: Turn Your Dreams into a Licensing Goldmine While Letting Others Do the Work
• On Grief and Grieving
• The E-Myth Revisited
• In Praise of Shadows
• The Lessons of History
• Vagabonding
• Letters to a Young Poet
• Plants of the Gods
• Save the Cat
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things
• How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
• Joy on Demand
• The Prophet
• Getting Past No
• The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
• Wild
• Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
• Hansel and Gretel
• The Neverending Story
• Don't Shoot the Dog!
• A Walk in the Woods
• Happy Money
• Grit
• Night Sky with Exit Wounds
• The Power of Habit
• More Money Than God
• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
• Secrets of Power Negotiating
• Extreme Ownership
• The Smartest Investment Book You'll Ever Read
• Six Thinking Hats
• The Artist's Way
• The Art of Asking
• The Checklist Manifesto
• Levels of the Game
• Radical Acceptance
• The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• The Obstacle Is the Way
• Daily Rituals
• Musashi
• Fahrenheit 451
• Getting Real
• Rework
• Ender's Game
• Motherless Brooklyn
• Leaving Microsoft to Change the World
• Letters from a Stoic
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
• High Fidelity (TV Tie-in)
• On Writing Well
• Dune: “Now, if people ask me, for instance, "Which books should I read on leadership?", I might reply: "Dune and Ender's Game."”
• Gold: “A vibrant selection of poems by the great Persian mystic with groundbreaking new translations by Haleh Liza Gafori. Read 1–2 poems before bed each night and thank me later.”
• Arctic Dreams: “If you're new to his work, I would suggest reading Of Wolves and Men or Arctic Dreams first, as they are nonfiction at its best.”
• The 80/20 Principle: “The 80/20 Principle, Richard Koch, that just never gets old. It just does not get old.”
• The Effective Executive: “One is going to be The Effective Executive from Peter Drucker, classic, old, short, incredible bang for the buck.”
• The Last of the Mohicans: “I absolutely LOVED this book, which I just finished yesterday. First published in 1826, the story and characters still come vibrantly to life in these pages.”
• Excellent Advice for Living: “Sage wisdom from Kevin Kelly, found in his tiny, practical book titled Excellent Advice for Living.”
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: “This was a new find in 2025.”
• The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse: “This short and beautiful book was gifted to me by my mom. It looks like a children's book, and you can read it in 30 minutes, but it's replete with wisdom for adults.”
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: “If you haven't read, I'll simplify the title here, Alice in Wonderland, you should go read Alice in Wonderland. Read the whole thing, not just quotes from it.”
• High Growth Handbook: “Read a book called The High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil. Arguably one of the best certainly angel investors of the last few decades. His hit rate is absolutely insane.”
• Living the 80/20 Way: “There's another book of his up there called Living the 80/20 Principle. It might be Living the 80/20 Way, but he really walks the talk.”
• Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality: “This short book has completely captured me. And just in the last two years, I've probably reread it five or six times. I have an entire shelf in the guest bedroom in my house that is full of copies of this book for guests to take with them when they leave.”
• How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: “This is a menu of options for converting ideas into millions of dollars. I read this, first, when I was in high school, and I have read it many times since—let's call it six-to-twelve. It is like steroids for your entrepreneurial cortex.”
• Solve for Happy: “I’ve found it very impactful, especially his portion on “I am, therefore I think” as a more useful version of “I think, therefore I am.””
• Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: “And then maybe last but not least, it’s been a long time since I read it, but The Blue Ocean Strategy, probably worth checking out.”
• How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia: “It’s a fascinating novel that is beautifully written.”
• How to Be a Star at Work
• The Man Who Quit Money: “This is a brilliant book, and I appreciate it more each year.”
• Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters: “This book really encouraged me to think a lot bigger.”
• Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art: “This is a really fun book for anyone wanting to get into trickster mythology.”
• The Wayfinders
• Lonesome Dove: “This is one of the best audiobooks I’ve ever found.”
• From Strength to Strength
• Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: “This book is for anyone who’d like to be more creative and see the world with fresh eyes.”
• Steal Like an Artist: “This fast read is for anyone who’d like to be more creative.”
• The Filmmaker Says: Quotes, Quips, and Words of Wisdom: “Short and sweet. I dog-eared a lot of pages in this book”
• Wine & Prayer: Eighty Ghazals from the Divan of Hafiz
• The Lincoln Highway: “it’s one hell of a read, the prose is gorgeous, and you’ll laugh out loud many times.”
• Red Rising: “The book has amazing characters across the board”
• The Ministry of Time: “Time travel + humor + sex + very clever writing.”
• Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History: “This is a treasure.”
• Dungeons & Dragons Worlds & Realms
• The Universe in Verse: “Maria recently turned The Universe in Verse into a gorgeous, thought-provoking book”
• When Breath Becomes Air: “I’m so glad and grateful that one close friend pushed me to finally absorb this beautiful book.”
• Tongues, Volume 1: “This blew my mind.”
• Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression: “I quite unexpectedly came across this book, and it totally captivated me.”
• Easy Strength
• The Artists' Prison
• The Other Face
• Art Is the Highest Form of Hope
• Genentech
• When We Cease to Understand the World
• Novelist as a Vocation: “It’s a gem”
• Seeing Silence
• Lazarus, Vol. 1: Family
• Y: The Last Man, Vol. 1: Unmanned
• Something Is Killing the Children, Vol. 1
• Last Argument of Kings
• Before They Are Hanged
• The Blade Itself
• Pattern Breakers
• The Great Nerve
• Stop Fixing Yourself
• The Mind of a Mnemonist
• Everything Is Its Own Reward
• Outlive
• The Well of Being
• The Easy Way to Quit Caffeine: “that made an impact on me as well”
• A Wizard of Earthsea
• Nonviolent Communication
• Lights Out: “a book that I highly suggest people check out”
• Japanese Verbs & Essentials of Grammar
• The 13 Secrets for Speaking Fluent Japanese
• Your Memory
• Shogun
• The Baron in the Trees
• What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars
• Built to Sell
• Small Giants
• Deluxe
• Guerrilla Financing
• The Power Law
• The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics
• Selling to the Affluent
• The Bear
• The Education of Cyrus
• Saga: Compendium One
• The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss
• Buffalo for the Broken Heart
• The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life
• Occasional Magic
• About This Life
• The Art of Seeing Things
• Tales of the Dervishes
• Anatomy of an Epidemic
• Already Free
• Wizard of the Upper Amazon
• Death by Black Hole
• The Way to Love
• The Gift
• Reality Is Not What It Seems: “I loved this book, and it’s nice and short.”
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “This is a masterpiece.”
• Blood Meridian, Or, The Evening Redness in the West: “one of the most beautifully written books I’ve ever read”
• Good Calories, Bad Calories
• Coyote America
• The Name of the Wind
• Seeking Wisdom
• Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
• You Can Be a Stock Market Genius
• Cat's Cradle: “just an incredible book”
• How to Measure Anything
• Think Twice
• Bad Science: “I recommend to everybody”
• Snow Crash: “Snow Crash is amazing”
• Cryptonomicon
• Essentialism
• The Way of the Superior Man
• Anything You Want: “I’ve read it dozens of times”
• The Art of Learning: “It’s been one of my constant companions since 2007”
• Born Standing Up
• The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership: “I recommend their book”
• Losing My Virginity: “huge impact on me”
• The Screwtape Letters
• The Psychology of Money
• The Art of Possibility
• This Is How You Lose the Time War
• The Overstory: “I recommend it to everyone”
• Joyful Wisdom
• Catching the Big Fish
• Andy Goldsworthy
• The Drama of the Gifted Child
• The $12 Million Stuffed Shark
• Bird by Bird
• The Fellowship of the River

Books written by Tim Ferriss

• Tribe of Mentors
• Tools of Titans
• The 4-hour Body
• The 4-hour Workweek
• The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life