The overriding impression one gets from Walter Issacson’s biography of the richest human on earth is how relentlessly productive Elon Musk has been in public and private in his 52 years on the Earth he so passionately wants humans to be able to escape. He is currently running no fewer than six companies (Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, The Boring Company, X (formerly Twitter), Neuralink, and X.AI). In his private life, Musk has fathered 11 children with three partners. Mere mortals would consider managing the domestic arrangements a full-time occupation.

The bulk of Isaacson’s book dwells on how Musk willed these organizations into being through sheer force of will and audacious overwork.

To Isaacson, Musk opened his life in all its intricacies without restriction. Musk made absolutely no effort to control the book or the conclusions his biographer reached. And Isaacson does not pull his punches. He depicts Musk in all his ruthless focus, appalling personal habits, casual cruelty, conspiratorial recklessness, and sanctimonious grudge-bearing. A nice guy Elon Musk is not. To engineers who share his outsize ambitions, Musk is an inspiring leader who is entitled to certain excesses because he makes excessive things happen. When it comes to engineering matters, Musk’s instincts are not just correct but often uncannily accurate.

The world according to Musk is bounded by a set of operating principles called “the algorithm.” For product design, that requires questioning every requirement to delete any part or process not essential. It means that all technical managers must have hands-on experience. Musk believes that camaraderie in the office is dangerous; it makes it hard for people to challenge each other’s work. It’s OK to be wrong, Musk says. Just don’t be confident and wrong.

Have you ever wondered if you could have been a fly on the wall of Bernie Madoff’s office, would you have been able to detect a Ponzi scheme in operation? Michael Lewis did that experiment, and he failed. He had unfettered access to Sam Bankman-Fried over a two-year period that saw the implosion of the FTX cryptocurrency platform. The author’s eyes were too glazed by SBF’s fascinating eccentricities to notice that over $10 billion of customer assets were being illegally frittered away under the guidance of the FTX founder. At least that’s the way the jury saw it.

It’s always an ominous sign for authors when the hero of their newest book becomes a villain. Lewis, no doubt, embarked on writing an uplifting account of a quirky yet noble hero in the manner of Moneyball’s Billy Beane and The Big Short’s Michael Burry. Lewis was immediately fascinated by SBF and readers will be too, in the way we are fascinated by a slow motion, multi-car highway crash.

“Going Infinite” makes this list because it succeeds in terms of the question Lewis sets himself to answer: “Who is this guy?” The 30 year-old SBF is depicted as delusional, callous towards his colleagues, a celebrity worshipper, and a hypocrite. While the unholy financial machinations are left for the jury to untangle, readers will come away with an account of a depressingly familiar case of unmitigated arrogance, double talk and double dealing. In the end, the book belongs on this list because it so entertainingly depicts the legal derelictions, rationalizations and ethical compromises of a brilliant but flawed character working without a moral compass.

Subscribers to Shane Parrish’s popular newsletter, “Farnum Street,” will appreciate the structure of this book. Any random page will reward readers with tips and practices to clear thinking. (A clue to the author’s values: Farnum is the name of the street in Omaha of Berkshire Hathaway). The book is all about putting yourself in a better position to make clear decisions. That means clearing away the blinders and blinkers that hobble most of our decision-making.

Through stories and lessons from some of history’s most successful people, coupled with insights from neuroscience, behavioral economics and psychology, the book lays out actionable steps for advisors to make higher quality decisions more quickly. Example: Good decision making actually comes down to two things. The first thing is slippery: Knowing how to get what you want. The second thing is even more elusive: Knowing what’s worth wanting. Dip into this book at any random page and you will be rewarded.

The business of a financial advisor is to trespass on failure. Amy Edmondson, the Novartis professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, defines failure as “an outcome that deviates from desired result.” This incisive book distinguishes failures from errors, mistakes and violations. While failure in any form is never fun, there is a class of what she calls intelligent failures that actually have upsides for advisors. To be intelligent, a failure must take place in new territory in pursuit of a valued goal with adequate preparation and risk mitigation. The book gives advisors a framework to think about and practice failure wisely, minimizing unproductive failure while optimizing the types of failure from which valuable learning can be drawn.

Most books authored by practicing financial advisors are thinly disguised marketing brochures. The Humanity Factor by Cleveland-based advisor Frank Legan stands out for the coherent, actionable value it provides both clients and fellow advisors who, like the author, are less than impressed by the traditional numbers-centric approach to financial planning. The book’s premise is that there’s a human element missing from the performance-driven approach taken by many advisors. The book spells out a strategy to identify that human factor and how to place it at the very core of the financial plan.

The profession would be well served if more advisors put as much thought and clarity into their approaches to the serving clients as Legan does in The Humanity Factor.  When it comes to finances, he argues, one of the worst things a client can do is to measure themselves against a future “ideal” version of themselves. Much better is to measure backward. Doing so encourages a mindset of gratitude for past accomplishments, which helps to foster ongoing positivity about one’s financial standing. Chapter 7—The Experience Index—points the reader to an online 26-item questionnaire designed to highlight the difference between the traditional numbers-centric approach and the book’s preferred humanity-driven model of financial planning. Advisors who are contemplating writing a book of their own would do well to study The Humanity Factor as a model of what’s possible.

The most difficult activity for human beings to sustain is vigilance. This reality is the basis for all human catastrophes, such as Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and, more recently, the Theranos debacle. The difficulty of sustaining vigilance is why the financial services industry and its regulators find it so difficult to recognize, much less prevent, fraud. The author, a professor of forensic accounting at DePaul University, offers dozens of examples of fraud in action, uncovering what makes the three kinds of perpetrators (intentional, accidental, and righteous) tick, institutions so fragile, and compliance departments so ineffective.

This book defines the spectrum of perps (intentional, accidental, righteous), prey (innocent bystanders and organizational targets), and whistleblowers (accidental, noble, vigilante, crossover). Every perp is different, every victim is different, and every whistleblower is different.

The book also includes steps managers can take to protect themselves and their companies.

For advisors, language is a landmine. Seemingly innocuous words may alienate a prospect or client. A question such as “Does your wife work?” will make a gay man with a husband question whether you are a good fit to manage their investments.  If the advisor simply substituted “spouse” instead of “wife,” the prospect would probably have resonated to the inclusive word choice. Author Suzanne Wertheim earned her doctorate in linguistics at UC Berkeley.

The Inclusive Language Field Guide offers six principles to help advisors avoid problematic words and phrases.  The six basic guidelines are: 1)  reflect reality, 2) show respect, 3) draw people in, 4) incorporate other perspectives, 5) prevent erasure, and 6) recognize pain points. The book is a guide to help advisors avoid gendered language and awarely applying pronouns. Call it “woke” if you like, but it’s just good business sense not to needlessly antagonize prospects and clients. The book shows advisors how to avoid unconscious demoting, how to deal with “difficult” proper names, and how to comfortably address a prospect with a disability. It’s so easy to find alternatives to distancing terms such as “you guys,” “wheelchair-bound,” “master bedroom,” or “Oriental rugs.” The book is at its best when it shows how semantic frames map as problematic seemingly positive terms such as “professional.” Or challenges you to think about what it assumes for a Band-Aid to be called flesh-colored?

Have you ever questioned the utility of categories such as “Boomers,” “Gen X,” “Millennials” and “Gen Z”? Here’s a book that offers evidence why you should no longer base retirement planning on foundations of linear lives defined by compartmentalized stages. In fact, the author, a professor of management at the Wharton School, is skeptical of the concept of traditional retirement itself. In today’s world of portfolio careers, enabling technology and increasing longevity, assumptions about retirement need to be completely reframed.

The central takeaway of this book is that we will witness the proliferation of perennials, an ever-blooming group of people of all ages, stripes, and types who transcend stereotypes and confound any attempts by advisors to categorize them by age. Guillén presents evidence that the convergence of rising life expectancy, better physical and mental fitness of seniors, the gig economy and remote work fundamentally alters the dynamics over every aspect of human flourishing, liberating individuals in how they live, study, consume, invest and retire. Advisors who accept the evidence and, nevertheless, resist boarding the perennial train deserve to be left behind.

Advisors succeed and fail on the quality of the stories they tell. Same As Ever delivers a striking message: If you want to understand a changing world, start with what stays the same. That can be an uncomfortable lesson for advisors, who have been trained to discern what’s going to change in the next decade. But, this book argues, a much better question is, “What’s not going to change in the next decade?” Advisors who can get a bead on that question will have a durable competitive edge.

What gives the book real heft is that Housel, the author of The Psychology of Money, offers hundreds of pithy stories in 24 tight chapters. Every one of these chapters delivers stories and examples that advisors can add to their quiver of anecdotes. A sampling: Risk Is What You Don’t See (We are very good at predicting the future, except for the surprises—which tend to be all that matter);  Expectations and Reality (The first rule of happiness is low expectations); Wild Numbers (People don’t want accuracy, they want certainty); Best Story Wins (Stories are always more powerful than statistics); and Casualties of Perfection (There is a huge advantage to being a little imperfect).

For advisors, Same As Ever presents lessons on decision-making, seeing around corners, optimizing opportunity, and, by knowing when enough is enough, living a value-driven life.

Herschel Caine is a master-of-the universe hedge fund manager on the brink of untold riches and social status. In truth, the latter is more important to him than the former. Caine is desperate to be accepted among the New York City’s financial elite. To secure his wealth, he puts his faith in his company’s black box proprietary technology that can accurately predict the movement of equity prices. To impress his upscale neighbors, he embarks on an impulsive and self-destructive course that reflects the crumbling moral order in which he operates. There is plenty of delightful back-office drama to foreshadow Caine’s destruction. His company is named “Atra Arca” (in Latin: black box), a nod to the enigmatic financial algorithm that he seeks to unleash on the world.

It’s on the domestic front that Caine confronts his true nature. He has finally succeeded in inviting for dinner a power couple he especially wants to impress. The problem: Caine’s wife has also invited, last minute, a tipsy British playwright named Birdie who is ruining the dinner with her drunken blather. Determined to get Birdie to stop talking so much, Caine roofies her vodka cocktail with the sleep aide ZzzQuil. This tactic blows up on Caine when the playwright excuses herself and, on the street, she slips, cracks her head on the curb, and winds up in a coma. Will Birdie wake up?  Will Caine be exposed by a blood test?

Overwhelmed by guilt, Caine tries to atone for the injury to Birdie by becoming a vegan so that he can no longer inflict injury on another animal, beast or fowl. (Now her name makes sense.) The plot sounds outlandish, but in a world spinning out of his grasp, his diet is the one thing Caine can control. Soon he thinks he can talk to animals. The book is utterly compelling in its depiction of an inherently decent man who is so morally compromised his bearings become unmoored from reality. In the end, the good end happily and the bad unhappily. This is what, Oscar Wilde observed, fiction means.