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There’s no shame in finding business tips and tricks on TikTok. But if you want to follow in the footsteps of your favorite entrepreneur or tech titan – think Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett or Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, for instance – you might want to crack open one of the books where they picked up some of their most valuable lessons.
Zuckerberg, for instance, wrote in a 2015 Facebook post that he liked to read “first-hand accounts about how people build great companies.” The 37-year-old billionaire turns to those books, he said in another post, for insight into “what causes innovation — what kinds of people, questions and environments,”
He’s far from alone, especially among his fellow successful business leaders.
Below, four entrepreneurs share the books that shaped their careers, business strategies, and — in a few cases — the way they think:
Table of Contents
1. Mark Zuckerberg
In 2015, Zuckerberg read “Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration,” by Alice Wallace and Edwin Catmull, co-founder of Pixar. It tells the story of how the animation studio became a titan of entertainment innovation.
It appears Zuckerberg took at least one lesson from the book: “Don’t wait for things to be before you share them with others,” Catmull wrote in the book. “Show early and show often. It’ll be pretty when we get there, but it won’t be pretty along the way.”
“Done is better than perfect” was painted on Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
Zuckerberg wrote he was also struck by Jon Gertner’s “The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation,” which tells the history of Bell Labs – which was founded by Alexander Graham Bell and is now owned by Nokia.
