The Unwritten Spec · Suggested Reading
Sharpen the Saw
Four books outside the engineering curriculum that teach the actual subject of this series: people. Covey would call this entry itself an exercise in his seventh habit.
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Why Read Outside Your Field
Theory of Mind
the skill literary reading trains that a technical curriculum doesn't touch
Kidd & Castano (Science, 2013) found that reading literary fiction — not nonfiction, not genre fiction — improved people's performance on tasks measuring “theory of mind”: the ability to infer what someone else is actually thinking and feeling. Later preregistered replications were mixed, so treat the effect as suggestive, not settled.
Settled or not, the underlying point holds regardless: every lesson in this series is about reading people — their incentives, their politics, their attention, their limits. That skill is trained by books about people, not books about systems. An engineering degree optimizes for the latter. This list is here to balance the ledger.
1
The Four Books
The 48 Laws of PowerRequired
Forty-eight chapters, each built from roughly 3,000 years of court politics, military strategy, and con artistry (Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Talleyrand, P.T. Barnum), distilled into an amoral law describing one way power actually moves between people.
Why it's here: it's Machiavellian, and that's the point — you don't have to use a single law on anyone to benefit from knowing all 48 cold. Half the value is defensive: recognizing Law 3 (conceal your intentions) being run on you is far more useful day-to-day than running it yourself. JP considers this one required reading, full stop.
The Power of Full Engagement
Argues that performance is governed by energy management, not time management — physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual energy are each trainable, each renewable, and each depleted by the same thing: working in long, unbroken stretches without real recovery, the way elite athletes never do.
Why it's here: “I don't have time” is usually actually “I don't have energy,” and unlike time, energy is a trainable capacity — directly useful alongside Lesson 2's case for treating your hours as a finite, priced resource.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
A character-based framework moving a person from Dependence (Be Proactive, Begin with the End in Mind, Put First Things First) through Independence to Interdependence (Think Win-Win, Seek First to Understand Then to Be Understood, Synergize) — capped by Habit 7, Sharpen the Saw: continual renewal of yourself across all four dimensions.
Why it's here: dated examples, dated production values, still-correct structure for managing yourself and your relationships. This reading list, as an act of deliberate self-renewal outside your core technical skill set, is Habit 7 in practice.
The Ropes to Skip and the Ropes to Know
Told as a series of short, fictionalized stories following an employee's climb through a mythical company, distinguishing an organization's official rules (the ropes you need to know) from its unwritten social norms (the ropes you learn to skip without ever breaking one).
Why it's here: nearly fifty years old and still assigned in MBA programs, because the org chart software has changed far more than the underlying mechanics of how a corporate culture actually runs. This entire series is, in spirit, a modern, shorter version of the same project.
2
The 48 Laws, Applied to This Series So Far
| Lesson | Law | Why it applies |
|---|---|---|
| No. 1 — Business Is Social | Law 13 | Appeal to self-interest, not mercy or gratitude. Networking and the “old boys network” both run on self-interest dressed as goodwill — assume that, and frame your asks accordingly. |
| No. 2 — Valuing Your Time | Law 16 | Use absence to increase respect. A calendar that's hard to get on signals value; constant availability is the fastest way to price your hour at zero. |
| No. 3 — Show Up in the Room | Law 6 | Court attention at all costs. Physical presence is leverage — the people in the room get remembered; the tile on the screen doesn't. |
| No. 4 — Speak as If They're Listening | Laws 4 & 26 | Always say less than necessary, and keep your hands clean. Discretion and staying out of the blame chain are the same instinct Lesson 4 argues for from a research angle. |
| No. 5 — Leadership Isn't for Everyone | Law 41 | Avoid stepping into a great man's shoes. A management role you haven't grown into is exactly the mismatch the Peter Principle research describes, from the other direction. |
| No. 6 — Working a Room | Laws 9 & 12 | Win through actions, not argument; use selective honesty and generosity to disarm. Demonstrating value beats pitching, and reciprocity is the polite version of disarming someone. |
| No. 7 — The Nuclear Reactor | Law 3 | Conceal your intentions. Managing workplace-romance risk is fundamentally a discretion-and-timing problem, not a suppression problem — same law, lower stakes. |
Bottom Line
Every lesson in this series has been a research-backed argument for something this reading list says in one sentence each: power, attention, and likability are real, learnable mechanics, not personality traits you either have or don't.
None of these four books agree with each other on tone — Greene is cold and amoral, Covey is warm and character-driven, Loehr and Schwartz are clinical about energy, Ritti and Funkhouser just tell company stories and let you draw the conclusions. Read together, they cover the same ground this series does from four different angles: how power actually moves, how to manage yourself well enough to wield it, how to read the unwritten rules of wherever you work, and how to recover so you can keep doing all three. None of it requires becoming someone you're not. It requires knowing the game is being played whether you opt in or not.
Sources: Greene, The 48 Laws of Power (1998) · Loehr & Schwartz, The Power of Full Engagement (2003) · Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) · Ritti & Funkhouser, The Ropes to Skip and the Ropes to Know (1977) · Kidd & Castano, “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,” Science 342 (2013), with mixed preregistered replications noted (Panero et al., 2016; Kidd & Castano, 2019). Law titles and numbering follow Greene's published table of contents; summaries here are original commentary for educational use, not reproductions of the text.