15 Books Bill Gates Thinks Everyone Should Read

Bill Gates is famously a voracious reader, getting through dozens of books a year and publishing detailed recommendations on his blog, GatesNotes. This video collects fifteen of his picks.

What I like about his lists is how little of it is about technology. Gates reads widely - history, public health, psychology, science, biography - and that breadth clearly feeds into how he thinks about hard problems.

There’s a lesson in that for people who work in tech. It’s easy to spend all your reading time on documentation, runbooks and the latest framework. But the engineers I admire most are the ones who read broadly: it’s what lets them see a system in its wider context, communicate clearly, and make good judgement calls under uncertainty - skills that matter far more, over a career, than knowing the syntax of this year’s tooling.

If you’re looking for somewhere to start, his recommendations on GatesNotes are a reliably good source.

• Books
• Inspiration