Photo by Jaredd Craig on Unsplash

Wouldn’t it be great to gain entry into the minds of contemporary moguls? You might think that scoring an interview will do the trick, but there’s no guarantee that any of them is willing to share their entrepreneurial secrets. However, you don’t need a face to face meeting to know where they got some of their best ideas.

Visionaries like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, or the late Steve Jobs, have never made it a secret that they drew their inspiration from books. What better way to get into their heads if not by reading what they’ve read?

This collection at bookicious.com aggregates tomes recommended by the aforementioned entrepreneurial geniuses and others like them: Jack Dorsey, Sam Altman, Larry Page, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Danielle Morill, Marissa Mayer, Peter Thiel, Keith Rabois, and Elizabeth Holmes.

Many of them have sharpened their tycoon skills through some common lectures. For example, Walter Isaacson’s biography of Einstein is on the reading list of many magnates, as are books about the great inventor Nikola Tesla, writings on yoga, and other topics. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is equally appreciated among juggernauts, for obvious reasons.

It is said that reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. The late Carl Sagan described it best:

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time.”