1. "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" by Arthur Conan Doyle.<p>This may sound like an odd one, but years ago, I almost never took the time to read. My girlfriend, who knew that I loved Sherlock Holmes books when I was younger, convinced me to try this book as an audiobook while I did my ~40 minute commute to work. I was skeptical, but within days, I was hooked. It made my work commute much more interesting (a British person was reading me Sherlock Holmes!); then I started listening to audiobooks during all my driving (instead of wasting time, I can learn!); then I got an iPod, put audiobooks on that, and started listening to them during all sorts of odd chores (e.g. cleaning, walking, biking); after that, I was so hooked on books, that I started making time to read them too. This had a profoundly transformative effect on my career.<p>2. "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries.<p>I got a copy of this book when I went to a talk by Eric Ries. Eric seemed like a humble, down-to-earth person and helped dispel the notion that to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to be a prescient, superhero, god-like visionary. Instead, what you need to do is to treat your startup and product ideas as hypotheses and test them, as quickly and cheaply as you can (i.e. lean development, MVPs, etc). This fit very well with what I had seen in the real world and with how I thought about problem solving as a software engineer, and gave me a lot of confidence to try out many of my ideas. Since then, I've used these ideas to start a company (<a href="http://www.gruntwork.io/" rel="nofollow">http://www.gruntwork.io/</a>) and written quite a bit on what I learned, including an article on The Macro about MVPs (<a href="http://themacro.com/articles/2016/01/minimum-viable-product-process/" rel="nofollow">http://themacro.com/articles/2016/01/minimum-viable-product-...</a>).<p>3. "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser.<p>If Conan Doyle taught me about the fun of reading, then William Zinsser taught me about the fun of writing. If you want to learn how to write, what it's like to write, or why you should write ("Writing is not a special language owned by the English teacher. Writing is thinking on paper."), it's hard to find a better guide. This book significantly improved my writing skills and even gave me the confidence to write a book (<a href="http://www.hello-startup.net/" rel="nofollow">http://www.hello-startup.net/</a>).