Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind | Yuval Noah Harari

Why it is included: To align with a thriving future, we first understand the "source code" of the past. Harari’s central thesis is that Homo sapiens dominates the planet not because we are stronger or smarter individually, but because we are the only species capable of believing in shared fictions. Money, corporations, nations, and human rights do not exist in the physical world; they exist only because we collectively agree they do.

This insight is the ultimate tool for a transition generation. It reveals that the systems we feel trapped by—capitalism, the nation-state, the legal system—are not laws of physics. They are stories. And stories can be rewritten. Sapiens permits us to look at our previous structures not as immutable realities, but as scripts that we have the power to edit. It is the foundational text for liberating the collective imagination.