Category Report
Which books are shaping founder thinking this year, as mentioned across top entrepreneurship podcasts.
Biggest mover: The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness by Morgan Housel #2, rising 1045 places.
Lean Learning: How to Achieve More by Learning Less by Pat Flynn was the top newcomer at #3. In total 92 books had their debut mentions.
My First Million drove the most book chatter, with 14% of this years book mentions.
Across categories in 2026, the most discussed books cluster around personal leverage: habit design, financial mindset, entrepreneurial resilience, and creative originality. Atomic Habits stands out as a clear outlier, invoked in contexts ranging from billionaire routines to gym-going and founder goal-setting, signaling a broad, cross-domain push toward systematizing behavior rather than relying on motivation. The Psychology of Money and Sam Walton: Made in America anchor conversations about money and business building in psychology, frugality, and efficiency rather than tactics alone. Classic titles like The 48 Laws of Power, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Man’s Search for Meaning suggest ongoing concern with influence, interpersonal skill, and purpose beneath success. Meanwhile, Steal Like an Artist and repeated references to The Mythical Man-Month frame creativity and software development as remixing constraints in an AI-accelerated world, not starting from scratch.
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
James Clear
6
mentions
The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness
Morgan Housel
4
mentions
Lean Learning: How to Achieve More by Learning Less
Pat Flynn
3
mentions
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
Phil Knight
3
mentions
The 48 Laws of Power
Robert Greene, Joost Elffers
3
mentions
How to Win Friends and Influence People
Dale Carnegie
3
mentions
Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl
3
mentions
Sam Walton: Made in America
Sam Walton
3
mentions
Steal Like an Artist
Austin Kleon
2
mentions
Mythical Man-Month, The: Essays on Software Engineering
Frederick Brooks Jr.
2
mentions
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones to #1.
Significant outlier with 5.0x as many mentions as the average book.
Lean Learning: How to Achieve More by Learning Less to #3.
Highest ranking new entry to the chart.
The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness to #2.
Up 1045 places from #1047 last year.
The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail to #203.
Down from #1 last year
The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail to #203.
No mentions after ranking #1 last year.
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future to #489.
No mentions after ranking #3 last year.
The shows that surfaced the most book mentions this year.
Mentions recorded per 30-day window (past 8 months)
How many of the mentions were for the top 10 books.
The podcasts included in this report are curated by MavenSignal to represent the trusted voices in this category.
We ingest public RSS feeds, analyze each episode, extract book mentions with AI, and validate with humans. The resulting data is normalized and deduplicated, building the canonical signal for the MavenSignal platform. Every insight and ranking is drawn from that verified layer.
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