This month, I leaned hard into entrepreneurship in my September Reading List: 4 Best Books I Read in September 2025.
I started my September reading list with Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in His Own Words—a collection of his speeches, interviews, and emails revealing the man behind Apple’s success.
Next, I read The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King—a fascinating story of how hustle pays off.
My third pick was Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points that Challenge Every Company—an inside look at how a CEO thinks about market competition.
Lastly, I read Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire—a portrait of how Amazon became a behemoth through relentless focus on invention and putting the customer first.
Now, let’s dive into the September reading list.
Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs In His Own Words
Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs In His Own Words collects Steve Jobs’ speeches, interviews, and emails revealing who he was, how he thought, and why he remains one of the most creative people of all time.
Available as a free PDF, the book covers his childhood, being ousted from Apple, leading Pixar and NeXT, and his eventual return to Apple.
It’s an inspiring start, showing how vision and perseverance intersect—a thread that ties together every entrepreneurial story I read this month.
The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King
The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King by Rich Cohen is outstanding.
Cohen tells the incredible tale of Samuel Zemurray—the self-made banana tycoon who went from penniless Russian immigrant to rainmaker.
Zemurray arrived in the U.S. in the late 1800s. He was tall, awkward-looking, and had no money.
When Zemurray died nearly 70 years later, he was among the richest men in the world.
He worked his way up from fruit peddler to head of United Fruit Company—becoming a symbol of everything people loved and hated about America: opportunity and ambition on one hand, ruthlessness on the other.
Zemurray’s story is one of the most captivating I’ve ever read.
He started with a cart full of nearly rotten bananas in Mobile. He went on to build a sprawling banana empire—populated by cowboys, mercenaries, Honduran peasants, CIA agents, and American statesmen.
The book captures the essence of Sam Zemurray’s hustle—turning waste into wealth, an idea that echoes through every entrepreneurial story I read this month.
Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points that Challenge Every Company
Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points that Challenge Every Company by Andy Grove shares his strategy for success.
The book takes you deep inside Grove’s company, Intel.
Under his leadership, Intel became the world’s largest chip maker—and one of its most admired companies.
Grove shares the nightmare moment every leader dreads—when massive change occurs.
He argues that companies must adapt—often overnight—or risk dying. And when they do adapt, it has to be in a completely new way.
Strategic inflection points can be set off by nearly anything—competition, regulations, technology.
When one of these points hits, the rules of business engagement go out the window.
However, if one of these points is managed correctly, it can be an opportunity to win in the market.
Grove’s mindset fits right alongside the Sam Zemurray hustle: adapt fast, act decisively, and see opportunity before others do.
Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone offers an in-depth look at one of the most influential businesses of all time.
The book covers how a retail upstart in the 1990s became a powerful and feared company across the globe.
Stone explores Bezos’s evolution—from geeky technologist obsessed with building Amazon to billionaire with global ambitions (and an enviable physique).
Bezos ruled Amazon with an iron fist, driven by relentless discipline and global ambitions.
What’s incredible is how he compartmentalized everything when his marriage unraveled and his personal life spilled into the press.
Amazon Unbound closes out the September reading list with a reminder that ambition and focus—like Sam Zemurray’s hustle—can scale from a fruit cart to a trillion-dollar company when paired with discipline and vision.
Each central character—Jobs, Zemurray, Grove, and Bezos—reminds me that success always starts the same way: with curiosity, courage, and relentless hustle.
