Category Report
Which books are shaping founder thinking this month, 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 159 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 months book mentions.
January’s cross-category list tilts strongly toward behavior, motivation, and founder psychology. Habit frameworks dominate the conversation, with Atomic Habits, The Power of Habit, and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People used as shorthand for moving beyond goal-setting to systems, cues, and small, compounding changes. In parallel, there is a pronounced interest in hard-edged entrepreneurial narratives: Sam Walton: Made in America and Direct From Dell are mined for lessons on efficiency, frugality, and outsized ambition, while The Count of Monte Cristo and The 48 Laws of Power surface in discussions about chips-on-the-shoulder, revenge, and power dynamics that often underlie extreme drive. Lean Learning reflects anxiety about information overload and a desire for fewer but more transformative inputs, and references to Man’s Search for Meaning underscore that many hosts and guests are linking performance and business success to deeper questions of purpose and meaning.
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 159 places from #167 last month.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to #6.
Down from #1 last month
The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World to #99.
No mentions after ranking #3 last month.
The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail to #100.
No mentions after ranking #4 last month.
The shows that surfaced the most book mentions this month.
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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