3 Unconventional Books Every Entrepreneur Should Read

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, what's happening? A lot of people have been asking me about what I've been reading lately because I've read a lot of amazing books, and I want to do a quick pod, a quick episode that explains what I'm reading and how it relates to business. Most of these books, we're only going to go through three or four of them. Most of these books are not business related, but there's a lot of learnings for business people. I actually don't read business books. I haven't read a business book in like five years. They bore me.
And lately, I've been reading a ton of like adventure stuff. So things about like, oh, when Americans expanded West or about people discovering North America or ship stories and pirates. I love that type of stuff. The reason I love that type of stuff is because it basically makes my daily life, it turns the volume down. It's kind of like, I like to box and I like to like get into adventures and things like that because it makes my day to day, which is mostly work and business stuff. It makes it way easier because I'm like, damn, I just read this story about Shackleton and how I got deserted on Antarctica for two years. This business stuff is easy. So I like things like that. And so here are three or four books that I've read lately that have had huge impacts on my day to day with business. And I'm gonna explain how and why they did that.
So, the first one is called Undaunted Courage. It's the story of Lewis and Clark.
If you're an American, if you're not American, I actually don't know what you know about Lewis and Clark. If you're an American, you've heard that term, Lewis and Clark, and you know that they were people, two guys that kind of like were sent to discover the West. Well, this story kind of dives deep on it, and it's the story about, in like, I believe, 1804 So it was this guy named Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.
They were tasked by Thomas Jefferson to start in St. Louis and to discover the West of the country. At this point, Jefferson had just bought a bunch of what is now the Western part of America from Napoleon, and of course, Indians and Native Americans, they knew all about it. But no American had actually been really too far west of the Mississippi. And so what's interesting is that Lewis, who is the main guy, Lewis was kind of the captain of the ship. He took 30 folks. So him and William Clark took 30 folks, and they went to California and back.
But no one had ever done that at the time. And what's amazing is that Meriwether Lewis was only 31 years old. And I thought that that was incredibly impressive. And they took two years to do it. So imagine going off on like a two year hiking trip and a place you've never been, not knowing what you're going to find and hoping that you come back. And I found that to be such a good book. The first big thing that I learned is punishment is necessary. And so in today's kind of like tech culture, I think, I used to joke about HubSpot, the company that bought mine. I was like, you guys are too nice, man. You guys are like way too friendly.
And I think that that's like a common theme with like most tech companies is they're way too friendly. They're way too nice.
And I can't stand that. And I think I fall victim to that as well. The reason being is, when I read this book, there's some like a bunch of different stories. So imagine just a 31 year old, Louis, and only 30 guys, it's easy to get like chummy with them. But he was really, really strict. And so there's a story about how they had to set up a fort during the wintertime. And they set it up along with these Native Americans who they got to know. And they set up this fort and they built this wall. And one of Louis's men at nighttime hopped over the fence after he had just gotten done hang out with the Indians.
And an Indian saw him and also hopped the fence. And they're like, hey, man, you can't be here. This is just our space, whatever. And the next morning, Louis heard about it, and they whipped their guy 500 times. It's called flashing. So they basically tied him to a tree and whipped him 500 times, which is like a horrible punishment. And that's like an extreme punishment. But the reason he did it was because he's like, look, you just, A, you broke the rule. We said you can't climb this fence. And B, now they know that they're allowed to do that, too. And so he had really, really strict rules.