What Matt D’Avella’s reading list tells you about his approach to life
Look at the list above and you will notice something: almost every book is about removing something. Removing clutter. Removing bad habits. Removing ego. Removing the noise that keeps you from doing the work that matters. For a guy who built his entire career around the idea that less is more, the reading list is remarkably consistent.
But there is a second layer if you look closer. Mixed in with the minimalism and productivity books are picks about endurance athletes, stoic philosophy, loneliness, and a novel about a man stranded on Mars. The list is not just about subtraction. It is about figuring out what is worth keeping once you strip everything else away.
A quick bit of background if you landed here without knowing who D’Avella is. He graduated from film school, racked up $97,000 in debt between student loans and some impulsive purchases (a leather jacket and a new car on graduation day, by his own telling), and spent the next five years living in his parents’ basement learning personal finance and filmmaking. He paid off the debt, moved to New York, and worked as a freelance cinematographer. In 2015 he directed Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things alongside Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, better known as The Minimalists. Netflix picked it up. His YouTube channel now has over 3.7 million subscribers, mostly built on videos where he tries lifestyle experiments for 30 days: no phone, no coffee, waking up at 5 AM, cold showers. He also runs a course called Master YouTube and a podcast called The Ground Up Show. He and his wife Natalie split their time between the US and Australia.
That debt-to-minimalism pipeline is the key to understanding his book recommendations. He is not someone who read about simplicity as a philosophy and thought it sounded nice. He arrived at it by spending years digging himself out of a hole he created by doing the opposite.
The books that define his core philosophy
Essentialism by Greg McKeown is probably the single book that best represents how D’Avella thinks. McKeown’s argument is that most of us say yes to too many things and end up doing all of them poorly. The alternative is to figure out what actually matters, say no to everything else, and go all in on the few things you keep. D’Avella applied this when he quit freelance cinematography to focus entirely on YouTube. He had a working career filming commercials and corporate projects. He walked away from it because the channel was the thing that mattered most and splitting his attention was making both worse.
Deep Work by Cal Newport connects directly to Essentialism but gets more specific about how to actually protect focused time. Newport argues that the ability to concentrate without distraction is becoming both rarer and more valuable, which means the people who can do it have a massive advantage. D’Avella’s entire production schedule reflects this. He batches his filming days, limits meetings to certain days of the week, and finishes work by mid-afternoon. That structure did not come from nowhere. It came from books like this one.
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield is about creative resistance, that invisible force that keeps you from sitting down and doing the work. Pressfield calls it Resistance with a capital R and treats it like an enemy you have to fight every single day. For someone who publishes videos on a regular schedule and has talked openly about self-doubt and procrastination, this book is less inspiration and more survival manual. D’Avella has mentioned it in multiple videos as one of the books that changed how he approaches his creative process.
The habit books and why there are so many of them
D’Avella’s YouTube channel is basically a public laboratory for habit formation. He has filmed himself trying one new habit per month for an entire year. So it makes sense that his bookshelf is loaded with books about how habits work.
Atomic Habits by James Clear is the most popular book on this list and for good reason. Clear’s framework is simple: make the habit obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying. D’Avella’s 30-day experiments are essentially Atomic Habits in practice. He picks one change, makes it small enough to stick, and documents what happens. The book gives you the theory. His videos show you what it looks like when someone actually tries it.
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker changed D’Avella’s relationship with rest. He has talked about this on camera. Early in his career he treated sleep as wasted time, hours he could be spending on work. Walker’s research on what sleep deprivation does to memory, immune function, and decision-making scared him straight. He now avoids caffeine for ten hours before bed and aims for a consistent 10 PM bedtime. For a self-improvement YouTuber to say “the most productive thing I do is sleep” is a counter-cultural statement, and Walker’s book is the reason he makes it.
Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from sleep optimization. Goggins is a former Navy SEAL who ran ultramarathons on broken legs and treats comfort as the enemy. D’Avella recommending both Walker and Goggins tells you something honest about his worldview. He does not think there is one correct formula. Sometimes you need to rest. Sometimes you need to push through pain. The trick is knowing which situation you are in. That tension between recovery and intensity runs through a lot of his content.
The stoic philosophy thread
Three books on this list come from the same philosophical tradition, and they show up so often in D’Avella’s videos that they are practically part of his brand at this point.
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is a private journal written by a Roman emperor who spent most of his reign dealing with wars, plagues, and betrayal. He wrote it for himself, not for publication, which is why it reads differently from most philosophy. There is no performance in it. It is a man reminding himself, over and over, to focus on what he can control and let go of everything else. D’Avella gravitates toward this because minimalism and stoicism overlap in a very specific place: both say that most of your suffering comes from wanting things you do not need.
The Obstacle Is the Way and Ego Is the Enemy, both by Ryan Holiday, translate stoic ideas into modern language. The Obstacle Is the Way argues that difficulties are not things that happen on the way to success; they are the way. Ego Is the Enemy makes the case that your own self-importance is usually a bigger threat to your goals than any external competitor. D’Avella quit a stable freelance career to bet on YouTube when the channel had almost no audience. That requires a specific kind of relationship with fear and ego. These books did not create that relationship, but they clearly reinforced it.
The business and entrepreneurship books
D’Avella does not talk about business strategy as often as he talks about habits and minimalism, but the books are there if you look.
The Dip by Seth Godin is tiny, maybe 80 pages, and makes one argument: every worthwhile pursuit goes through a painful middle period where progress stalls and quitting looks reasonable. The people who succeed are the ones who can tell the difference between a dip (temporary, worth pushing through) and a dead end (permanent, worth quitting). D’Avella’s YouTube growth followed exactly this curve. He spent years making videos to small audiences before the channel took off. Knowing the dip is normal does not make it comfortable, but it keeps you from quitting at the wrong time.
Shoe Dog by Phil Knight is the memoir of Nike’s founder, and it reads nothing like a business book. Knight writes about near-bankruptcy, lawsuits, broken partnerships, and years of uncertainty. There is very little triumph in it until the final chapters. D’Avella has recommended it as his favorite business book, and the appeal makes sense. Knight’s story is about persistence and obsession, not about having the right strategy. For someone who spent five years in a basement paying off debt while learning to make films, that narrative probably felt familiar.
I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi is the most practical financial book on the list. Sethi’s approach is the opposite of traditional frugality advice. Instead of cutting out small pleasures, he argues for automating your finances, negotiating bigger wins, and spending freely on the things you actually care about while cutting ruthlessly on everything else. That is minimalism applied to money, which is probably why D’Avella connects with it. Sethi and D’Avella actually share an audience: people who want to be intentional with their money rather than just cheap.
The picks that show a different side
Not everything on this list is about productivity or self-improvement, and the outliers reveal more about D’Avella than the expected picks do.
Lost Connections by Johann Hari is about depression, and specifically about the argument that depression is not just a chemical imbalance but a response to unmet human needs: meaningful work, connection to other people, a sense of purpose. D’Avella works from home, often alone, making videos about living with less. That lifestyle can get isolating. Recommending this book suggests he has thought seriously about the loneliness that can come with independence, which is not something most creators in the self-improvement space talk about openly.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez is a novel about seven generations of a family in a fictional Colombian town. It has nothing to do with habits, minimalism, or YouTube. It is just a beautiful, strange, sprawling piece of literature. The fact that it shows up here is a reminder that D’Avella is a filmmaker first. He cares about storytelling. He cares about craft. Not everything he reads has to be useful.
Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed is a collection of advice columns, and it is the most emotionally raw book on this list. Strayed writes about grief, failure, love, and regret with a directness that most self-help authors cannot touch. D’Avella including it signals something important: for all the talk about systems and habits, he knows that the hard parts of life do not get solved by a morning routine.
How the whole list fits together
D’Avella’s reading list follows the same arc as his career. Start with the mess (debt, clutter, no direction). Strip away what does not matter (Essentialism, Minimalism, The Dip). Build better systems for what remains (Atomic Habits, Deep Work, Why We Sleep). Develop the mental toughness to keep going when it gets hard (The War of Art, Can’t Hurt Me, the stoic trilogy). And somewhere in the middle, remember that you are a human being and not an optimization project (Lost Connections, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Tiny Beautiful Things).
If you are looking at 39 books and wondering where to start, pick the problem you are actually dealing with right now. Drowning in stuff and commitments? Essentialism. Know what to do but cannot make yourself do it? The War of Art. Feel productive but weirdly empty? Lost Connections. The list works best when you treat it the way D’Avella treats most things: take what you need, leave the rest.
