These are nine of the books I've returned to over time, some every summer, some in hard moments, some when I needed to be reminded of what actually matters.

So I want to share them with you as a meaningful summer reading list because the best things I've ever received came from someone saying: Here, this changed how I see things. Maybe it'll do the same for you.

Before we get to the list, a word about the thread that runs through it...

Most of us think of philosophy as something that happens in universities. Abstract. Theoretical. Something you read about rather than do. The Stoics had a different definition entirely… For them, philosophy was never meant to be observed from a distance or explained in lecture halls. It was meant to be lived — in how you carry yourself under pressure, in what you choose when it costs something, in who you are when no one is watching.

So… Pick one, or more. Go somewhere quiet. Read slowly. Enjoy :)

The list in three groups

Stillness & Presence

• Ryan Holiday — Stillness is the Key
• Seneca — On the Shortness of Life
• Epictetus — Enchiridion

Clarity of Thought

• David Clark — The Tao of Charlie Munger
• Charlie Munger — Poor Charlie's Almanack
• Marcus Aurelius — Meditations

Meaning, Purpose & Structure

• Viktor Frankl — Man's Search for Meaning
• Ryan Holiday — Ego is the Enemy & The Obstacle is the Way
• Stephen Covey — The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

STILLNESS & PRESENCE

For the summer. For the dock. For the moments when you finally stop.

Ryan Holiday — Stillness is the Key

The best bridge between the science of rest — which we covered in the last article — and the philosophy of it. Holiday argues that stillness is not the absence of activity. It is the precondition for clarity. For great decisions. For being fully present to the people around you.

Every leader I've admired has had this quality. Not slowness. Stillness. There's a difference.

Seneca — On the Shortness of Life

The most urgent thirty pages you'll read this summer.

Seneca's argument is simple and devastating: we do not have a short life. We make it short.

"It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough."

What stopped me the first time I read this wasn't the quote. It was the implication. We don't die one day in the future, we die a little every day — in every hour given to something that didn't matter, every conversation spent distracted, every summer that passed before we were fully in it.

Seneca's challenge is not comfortable: how much of your time is actually yours?

Epictetus — Enchiridion

The original source behind what most people misattribute to Marcus Aurelius. The popular paraphrase — "you have power over your mind, not outside events" — is a modern compression of the opening line of the Enchiridion, which reads:

"Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion… Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command."

That's the whole philosophy. Everything else is application.

Epictetus was a slave. He had no power over his circumstances — only over how he met them. That context matters. When the most constrained man in the room develops the most liberating philosophy in history, you pay attention.

As a practical tool for a leader, before returning from summer to a full inbox and three urgent matters, this is the first thing I'd reach for now to be prepared then.

CLARITY OF THOUGHT

For how you think. For the mental models you actually use.

David Clark — The Tao of Charlie Munger

If you're new to Munger, start here. Accessible, aphorism-driven, readable in a week. Commentary that brings his thinking to life without requiring you to have read everything he's ever said.

Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome is one line. This book is a hundred more like it.

Charlie Munger — Poor Charlie's Almanack

The full picture. Mental models in their complete form. This is less a book to read straight through than a book to live with — pick it up, read a speech, put it down, think for a while.

Munger's core argument: the antidote to poor thinking is a latticework of mental models drawn from multiple disciplines. You can't think well with one lens. You need many. This book gives you the collection.

Marcus Aurelius — Meditations

My annual summer reading, and at more time as well. I return to it every year and get something different from it each time.

What makes it unique is what it is: a Roman emperor's private notebook. Never meant to be published. Never written for an audience. Written to remind himself — the most powerful man in the world — of what mattered and who he wanted to be.

Ryan Holiday, who has read it over a hundred times, puts it well: "We never read the same book twice — because while the contents don't change, we do."

Three passages I keep returning to:

"Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one."

"Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn't matter."

"The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way."

That last one became the foundation of Holiday's entire Obstacle book. Read Meditations first, then you'll understand where it came from.

MEANING, PURPOSE & STRUCTURE

For how you live. For the questions summer gives you space to actually ask.

Ryan Holiday — Ego is the Enemy & The Obstacle is the Way

Read them together.

Ego is the Enemy first — because ego is what blinds us to the obstacles in front of us. It makes us defensive when we should be learning, certain when we should be questioning, focused on our image when we should be focused on our work.

Then The Obstacle is the Way.

The common reading of this book is too shallow: "turn challenges into opportunities." That's a bumper sticker, not a philosophy. Holiday's actual argument — rooted directly in Marcus Aurelius — is more demanding: the obstacle is the material on which you practice your values. Courage. Discipline. Justice. Wisdom.

The obstacle doesn't get removed. It gets used. And in using it, become the person that philosophy tried to make us.

Viktor Frankl — Man's Search for Meaning

Read both parts. The first is his account of life in the Nazi concentration camps — Auschwitz among them. The second is logotherapy: the philosophy he built from what he witnessed and survived.

His central insight, earned at the highest possible cost:

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

And the practical corollary:

"Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'."

This is not a leadership book. It is a book about what holds a human being upright when everything else is stripped away. That is exactly the question worth sitting with quietly in July — not what your strategy is, but what your why is.

Stephen Covey — The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Most people read this as a productivity book. That's a misreading.

Covey's deepest argument is about identity and purpose — about designing a life, not just a schedule. Habit 2, Begin with the End in Mind, is not about project planning. It asks you to imagine your own funeral and write the eulogy you'd want delivered. To work backwards from that into how you live today.

That is not an organizational question. That is an existential one.

Read it that way. The stories and examples alone — on integrity, on legacy, on what it means to live in alignment with your values — are worth the summer.

A closing thought

None of these books will improve your Q3, H2, or whatever KPIs are on the board.

They'll do something harder and more important: they'll give you a clearer answer to the question of who you want to be. Not what you want to achieve — but who you want to be while achieving it. And how you want to carry yourself when things go wrong.

That clarity is available to most of us, so go and grab it now while you have about three to four weeks of well earned summer vacation.

Use them well.

Pick one book.

Go somewhere quiet.

Read slowly.

Enjoy.​
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And if you want to browse the archive go here.

/Jonas