People assume the books that shaped how I build with AI are AI books. I’ve read plenty of those, and I’ve reviewed Life 3.0 and The Worlds I See on my YouTube channel. But when I look at how I think about agents (what to build, what to hand off, what to protect), the fingerprints belong to books that have nothing to do with AI.
Here are five. For each one: what it says, and what it means for how I work.
1. Guerrilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson
This was one of the original books that got me into reading. I named my first business Guerrilla Business Solutions after it.
Levinson’s argument is that time, energy, and imagination can beat money. Small teams with conviction can outmaneuver big ones with budgets. I’ve always been fascinated by guerrilla armies versus traditional ones.
What it means now: it’s still my inspiration for guerrilla tactics with generative AI.
2. Who Not How by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy
This book broke my brain in the best way. I spent years asking “How do I do X?” when the right question was “Who can do X for me?”
The shift from how-thinking to who-thinking is the exact mental model for building AI employees. The “who” can now be an agent. But a person or an agent can only take over what you’ve made explicit. I learned that the hard way when I put 25 things on a whiteboard that were stopping me from stepping away from my own company, and every one came back to me. (I wrote about that here.)
What it means now: Yobi’s entire product is an answer to “Who will answer the phone, schedule the appointment, handle the follow-up?” The who is AI.
3. Indistractable by Nir Eyal
Nir wrote Hooked first, teaching companies how to build habit-forming products. Then he wrote this book, teaching people how to resist them. That arc tells you everything about the tension between tech and attention. The breakthrough for me was the internal triggers framework: distraction isn’t caused by technology, it’s caused by discomfort. That reframe changed how I think about my own phone habits, and how Yobi’s AI should interact with people.
What it means now: in early 2025 I posted that my AI chief of staff uses ideas from Indistractable to keep me focused. An agent should remove interruptions, not create new ones. An assistant that pings you all day is just a better-dressed distraction.
4. The Worlds I See by Fei-Fei Li
My review of this book is one of the most-watched videos on my channel. Fei-Fei Li’s story is an immigrant’s story, and the turn in it is about humility. Computer vision researchers were competing on cleverer algorithms. She bet that the bottleneck was data, and spent years on the unglamorous work of building ImageNet. Most of her colleagues thought it was a waste of time.
What it means now: knowledge beats cleverness. Li’s commitment to human-centered AI is also close to what I believe about Yobi: AI should work for people, not the other way around.
5. Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
The uncomfortable one. This book scared me straight about sleep. The data on what sleep deprivation does to every system in the body is overwhelming. CEO culture glorifies sleep deprivation; Walker shows it’s self-destruction.
I’m not going to pretend I live it perfectly. Last December I posted, happily, about burning the midnight oil with my “agentic homies” while everyone else was on break.
What it means now: a well-briefed agent can keep working at 3 a.m. so I don’t have to.
The pattern
Put these five together and you get a philosophy of AI that no AI book handed me:
- Imagination beats budget (Guerrilla Marketing).
- Hand off the who, but only once you’ve written down the how (Who Not How).
- Protect attention like it’s the scarcest resource you have (Indistractable).
- Knowledge beats cleverness (The Worlds I See).
- The point of leverage is a better life, not a longer day (Why We Sleep).
Which book changed how you work with technology, without ever mentioning it?
Ahmed Reza is CEO of YiB Inc., the home of Yobi. He reviews books on YouTube. More about Ahmed.