My apologies, the book name was Great by Choice, as someone else pointed out. Both books are excellent and worth the read though.

Outliers, definitely the freakenomics books, I enjoyed Rich Dad Poor Dad, The Lean Startup, Power of Habit, Defining Decade (if your in your 20's, fantastic book), The Happiness Advantage, Great by Choice from Jim collins...

I recommend reading Great by Choice [1] which talks more about Southwest Airlines and what makes them great. The book is about "10X companies" and what they have in common, but also what they do differently from their competitors. For example, Southwest Airlines copied PSA's business model verbatim but PSA [2] went out of business. The book talks about why. The main reason I like the book and others in the series [1] is that it is like reading a really long research paper about what makes great companies great with entertaining anecdotes sprinkled in.

1. http://www.jimcollins.com/books.html

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Southwest_Airlines

Great (and extremely thorough) summary of Great By Choice - a book I think everyone building sustainable businesses should read. While a lot of the points Collins makes will be familiar to those familiar with the Lean Startup, GBC provides some awesome, real-world examples of how to translate those "lean principles" into action.

However, I think you gave one of the most valuable and counter-intuitive points in the book too light a treatment: That successful 10X'ers not only consistently hit their goals, but actively tried not to exceed them.

Living in the start up echo chamber you'd think that "speed" was everything; we do "agile" development, we take venture rounds to "supercharge growth". Hockey stick graphs are treated like the tech world's pornography, depicting circumstances just a tad too good to be real. The mantra is that if a little growth is good, a lot of growth is really good.

GBC turns that on its head. Growth is good, but only a little bit. Only as much as you can handle. Explosive growth can quickly become uncontained growth can quickly become webvan. Facebook limited itself to college campuses, taking years to go public. Southwest started with 3 planes and didn't expand their routes until they had to. Zipcar stayed in Boston until it was absolutely sure it was ready to go to NYC.

The 20 mile march is as much about having discipline in self-restraint as it is about pushing forward.

Traction by Justin Mares, Gabriel Weinberg - would probably reread

Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday

How to Fail at Almost Everything by Scott Adams - great read
Scaling Up By Verne Harnish

Great By Choice by Jim Collins - love the whole series

The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes - probably worth a reread

How to Win at the Sport of Business By Mark Cuban - good read

Elon Mush by Ashlee Vance - need I say more

The Hard Thing about Hard Things By Ben Horowitz

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg - probably need to deeply absorb this - a lot of good stuff

Copy This! By Paul Orfalea - another good "small business" entrepreneur book

The E-Myth Revisited By Michael Gerber - 2nd time read. Got more out of it this time.

The People's Tycoon (Ford) by Steven Watts - I love reading about businessmen from this age

Scrum by JJ Sutherland Jeff Sutherland - good read for development teams

There's a great article in the October 17th, 2011, issue of Fortune entitled "Collins on Chaos" that is an excerpt of the book "Great by Choice". It seems quite relevant to this discussion.

The authors compare the leadership at companies that consistently outperformed their competitors during good times and bad, with the leadership at the nominally-performing companies.

The outperforming leaders set a benchmark defining "consistent progress", e.g. profitable every year (Southwest Airlines), 20% growth per year (Stryker), etc. They then fought to achieve that benchmark even during the toughest years (perhaps obvious), but they also restrained themselves so as to not exceed (by much) their benchmark during the "boom" years. Even though it might seem counter-intuitive, these "restrained" companies performed better over the long run than those companies which grew quickly during the good times.

The point is perhaps that you might achieve more by both committing to, and limiting yourself to, some more reasonable number of hours per week.