Rare Air Library 40 Books that Shape Leaders

Ancient strategy and philospohy

The Art of War - Sun Tzu

Meditations - Marcus Aurelius

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu

The Republic - Plato

Nicomachean Ethics - Aristotle

The Discourses - Epictetus

Letters from a Stoic - Seneca

The Bhagavad Gita - Anonymous (Hindu Epic)

The Analects - Confucius

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Historical Lessons and Civilizations

The Lessons of History - Will and Ariel Durant

The Story of Philosophy - Will Durant

The Story of Civilization (Series) - Will and Ariel Durant

The Histories - Herodotus

The History of the Peloponnesian War - Thucydides

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Edward Gibbon

Civilization and Its Discontents - Sigmund Freud

The Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith

Democracy in America - Alexis de Tocqueville

Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond

Leadership and Power

The Prince - Niccolò Machiavelli

The Book of Five Rings - Miyamoto Musashi

On War - Carl von Clausewitz

The Federalist Papers - Hamilton, Madison, Jay

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin - Benjamin Franklin

Up from Slavery - Booker T. Washington

Long Walk to Freedom - Nelson Mandela

The Power Broker - Robert Caro

Leadership - Doris Kearns Goodwin

Modern Wisdom and Self Mastery

Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl

The Courage to Be Disliked - Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga

Atomic Habits - James Clear

The 48 Laws of Power - Robert Greene

Mastery - Robert Greene

The War of Art - Steven Pressfield

The Hero with a Thousand Faces - Joseph Campbell

Antifragile - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harari

Honorable mentions to dig deeper

Self-Reliance and Other Essays - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Critique of Pure Reason - Immanuel Kant

The World as Will and Representation - Arthur Schopenhauer

Being and Time - Martin Heidegger

Walden - Henry David Thoreau

The Social Contract

Leviathan - Thomas Hobbes

21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership - John C. Maxwell

Developing the Leader Within You - John C. Maxwell

Leadershift - John C. Maxwell

On Becoming a Leader - Warren Bennis

Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge - Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus

An Invented Life: Reflections on Leadership and Change - Warren Bennis

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

1984 - George Orwell

Unhumans - Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec