Hashim's Tool Kit

My Books Journey, past and future

My first book: The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

Subject: Finance

This was the first book I read. It's written in a very easy to understand way and provides invaluable, practical, and actionable advice on how we should think about money, happiness, and success.

It completely reshaped my thinking in many profound ways. Before reading this, I never realized just how valuable and life changing books can be, It's amazing and at the same time keeps making me think, WHY WERE WE NOT TAUGHT THIS STUFF IN SCHOOL?

Second Book: Zero to One by Peter Thiel

Subject: Innovation and startups

This is one of the best books I’ve read on innovation, marketing, and strategy for finding new solutions. Thiel explores the mindset needed to build a successful company, emphasizing the importance of creating monopolies instead of competing, the role of sales and marketing, and, most importantly, how to go from 0 to 1, building something truly new

Third Book: Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki

Subject: Finance

In this book, you'll learn the mindset to handle your personal finances, how to escape the rat race, and why giving is so important. It made me realize why focusing on learning and adding value to myself is crucial. There’s a lot more in this book that I wish I had known earlier

Fourth Book: How to win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Subject: People management & Human nature

Hands down, one of the best books you'll ever read on people management. This book will save you endless frustration and help you get people to see your viewpoint, not through manipulation, but by truly understanding human nature. It reveals the secrets of human relations, the power of seeing from the other person’s perspective, and why humility can be a superpower.

There’s a piece of wisdom Carnegie shared that I hold very closely:

"The reason why rivers and seas receive homage from hundreds of mountain streams is because they keep themselves below them"

Fifth Book: Atomic Habits by James Clear

Subject: Habits

This is one of the finest pieces of text for building new habits and breaking bad ones. It provides a proven system that helps you reshape your life and align it with your goals.

James Clear talks about how designing your environment is crucial and why building a system that supports your goals is more important than the goal itself.

What I love about this book is how James explains everything with groundbreaking insights into the human mind and extremely valuable references. I’ve learned so much about how the human mind works, and honestly, every time I think about it, it’s astonishing.

Sixth Book: The Richest Man in Babylon by George S Clason

Subject: Finance

A profound book which sheds light on the ancient wealth creation mindset and strategies, this is the book which I've gotten my favorite piece of wisdom from, "Your actions cannot be wiser than your thoughts and your thinking cannot be wiser than your understanding"

George talks about giving yourself 10% of what you earn, what does that mean? Isn't everything you earn basically yours to keep? Yes - but we pay to the electric supplier, we pay to the home owners, to the grocery store owners, to Netflix and more. George argues that we should be keeping 10% of our earnings and expand our knowledge to invest our savings smartly, not speculate, invest

Seventh Book: Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss & Tahl Raz

Subject: Negotiation

Don't ignore your ignorance. I've learned this the hard way and still struggle to accept that there is so much in life I don’t know, things that are crucial to achieving my goals. This book is a perfect example. At first glance, the title might not seem like it holds much value for your toolkit, but once you start reading, you realize how brilliantly Chris Voss explains one of the most challenging aspects of daily life, negotiation.

He introduces a structured system that begins with tone control, then moves to calibrated questions, mirroring, tactical empathy, labeling, the accusation audit, and summaries. This book is a must-read because negotiation is not just for high stakes deals. It is something we engage in almost every day.

Eighth Book: Thinking Fast and Slow By Daniel Kahneman

Subject: Psychology & Decision making

In this book, I think the introduction doesn't clearly tell the amount of value this will add to your life. It's absolutely mesmerizing how Daniel breaks down complex concepts into easy to understand processes. System One and System Two, the fast and intuitive side of our brain and the slow, deliberate and analytical part of our mind.

There's so much value in this book, starting from the introduction of crucial cognitive processes and focuses on cognitive biases, decision making, probability assignments, the neglect of base rates in decision making, one of the most effective technique to normalize your probability assignments. The planning fallacy, conjunction fallacy, over confidence, regression to the mean and so much more!!

Ninth Book: Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Subject: Innovation & startups

Ries talks about the fundamental techniques you need to know if you're building a business, if you're responsible for bringing innovative ideas to the table at your current company or if you're interested in innovation yourself personally.

This books gives you the system you need to consistently build, measure and learn from your innovative ideas. How to not fall for vanity metrics, hold yourself accountable through innovation accounting, the minimum viable product and more

Teaches you concepts which will help you avoid a lot of the common pitfalls which one comes across while building a company, most importantly it'll help you validate early, and would steer you in the direction to build something that someone actually wants rather then you investing your time, effort and resources building something no one wants

Tenth Book: The subtle art of not giving a f**k by Mark Manson

Subject: Personal development

I believe this book is a mandatory read for everyone, the title itself doesn't really do the justice for the content, the GOLD that this book is packed with. Talks about one of the most common problems "we" face, yes I quote "we" because if you're going through something in your life, chances are there's someone else going through the same challenges

One of the quotes that have struck me so far, and by the way, I've just read up until roughly 150 pages, is: Everything worthwhile in life is won by surmounting the associated negative experiences, any attempt to silence the negative, to quash it or ignore it, only back-fires

Just read something phenomenal, when I say just I mean at 2:10 PM Ish on 8/9: "Failure is the way forward", sounds pretty cliche, but listen up

Our usual process to doing something is: We get inspired, then we muster up some motivation and then we finally do the action,

Mark suggests to reorient this mindset by "doing something", yes it won't be pretty, yes it won't be fun, but yes you have to do something, and by doing "something" you will actually make a new loop which goes like:

Action -> inspiration -> motivation -> more action

I've just wrapped up this book last week, third week of August'25

It wraps up by talking about our biggest fear, death, incase we've forgotten about it, it's more certain to happen then almost anything else in life.

The point of talking about it is, that one of Manson's friend, close friend, dies early in his life, leaving Manson traumatized, one day he comes in his dream and says "Why do you care that I'm dead, when you're so scared to live?", the author wakes up crying and since then he completely changes his life. He starts taking on new challenges, reads 50 self help book in 50 days 🤯and so on,

The lesson here is: You have one life, we all feel like we're going through some special unique challenges in life, and that we're limited because of those challenges. You need to ask yourself, what part of your life do you have control over, take full responsibility of all your actions and decisions. There's no one coming to save you. Social media only broadcasts the best, which makes us afraid to even start. Remember, everyone starts somewhere and you cannot get good at anything by without going through the associated negative experiences

Do something, you have one life, one thing that starts creeping in as you age is, regret, regret that you didn't pursue the things you thought were right or the things you were passionate about, you have a LOT of time to get stuff done, but it only starts when you start doing something about it, Goodluck! 🚀🚀

Eleventh Book: The purple cow by Seth Godin

Subject: Marketing

I've just started reading this, it's an interesting read, I want to learn more about marketing for my personal brand, I'm just figuring stuff out, so thought about reading this, let's see, I'll keep this updated as I read through, today's 8/25/2025 around 3:35 PM, wish me luck!

Big Ideas, Tiny Emails

Enter your email to receive the new additions to this list, directly in your inbox 🙏