Category Report
Which books are shaping founder thinking this year, as mentioned across top entrepreneurship podcasts.
Biggest mover: The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg #8, rising 1032 places.
Lean Learning: How to Achieve More by Learning Less by Pat Flynn was the top newcomer at #4. In total 35 books had their debut mentions.
My First Million drove the most book chatter, with 18% of this years book mentions.
Across podcasts this year, the most discussed books cluster around two connected priorities: building systems for personal effectiveness and understanding the deeper drives behind ambition and success. The prominence of Atomic Habits, alongside The Power of Habit and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, points to sustained interest in moving beyond goal-setting toward small, repeatable behaviors and practical habit design. In parallel, founder and operator autobiographies such as Sam Walton: Made in America and Direct From Dell are being used as case studies in operational discipline, efficiency, and extreme focus. References to The Count of Monte Cristo, Man’s Search for Meaning, Poor Charlie’s Almanack, and The 48 Laws of Power suggest a secondary layer of concern with motivation, meaning, and power dynamics—how chips on shoulders, values, and incentives shape long-term performance and entrepreneurial resilience.
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
James Clear
3
mentions
Sam Walton: Made in America
Sam Walton
3
mentions
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas père, Robin Buss
2
mentions
Lean Learning: How to Achieve More by Learning Less
Pat Flynn
2
mentions
Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger
Charles T. Munger, Peter D. Kaufman, Warren Buffett, John Collison
2
mentions
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Stephen R. Covey, Jim Collins, Sean Covey
2
mentions
Direct From Dell
Michael Dell
2
mentions
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
Charles Duhigg
2
mentions
Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl
2
mentions
The 48 Laws of Power
Robert Greene, Joost Elffers
2
mentions
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones to #1.
Significant outlier with 2.6x as many mentions as the average book.
Lean Learning: How to Achieve More by Learning Less to #4.
Highest ranking new entry to the chart.
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business to #8.
Up 1032 places from #1040 last year.
The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail to #100.
Down from #1 last year
The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail to #100.
No mentions after ranking #1 last year.
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future to #404.
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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