Books to Live By
Confession: I spent New Year’s Day 2019 reading one entire book and starting a second (John Maeda’s The Laws of Simplicity and Mitchel Resnick’s Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play, both published by the MIT Press, in case you were curious.).
I’ve always been a bit of a bookworm. Ok, more than a bit. I was the strange girl who spent hours upon hours in libraries and bookstores, who had shelves upon shelves of books. I’d read on the subway, waiting for coffee, and sometimes even while walking. It’s no wonder I never excelled at sports.
As I child, I loved reading adaptations of classic novels — at that age my most prized possession was a pocket sized electronic dictionary. In my teens, I continued loving fiction, especially historical fiction. In my twenties and thirties, I’ve come to enjoy non-fiction, particularly biographies, business books, and books on science (think Oliver Sacks or Mary Roach) and positive psychology (science of happiness).
I have a ton of favorites, so many (about 50 or so) that I usually break them down by category. Of those, there are a handful that I live my life by (and by handful, I mean that only in comparison to the 600+ books I own). These are books that I turn to over and over again for guidance and advice; books I frequently recommend.
Books that guide my life, personal and professional:
- The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life by Rosamund Stone Zander & Benjamin Zander
- The Monk & the Philosopher: Father & Son Discuss the Meaning of Life by Jean-Francois Revel & Matthieu Ricard
- Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, and Ron McMillan
- Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change by Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler
- Have You Filled a Bucket Today? by Carol McCloud and David Messing
- Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment by Martin E. P. Seligman and other books on the art and science of happiness
- Crucial Confrontations: Tools for Resolving Broken Promises, Violated Expectations, and Bad Behavior by Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan & Al Switzler
- Thank you for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion by Jay Heinrichs
- You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation by Deborah Tannen
- The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph From the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge
- What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith
Books that have shaped my vision for building companies:
- The Trusted Advisor by David H. Maister, Charles H. Green and Robert M. Galford
- Trust Based Selling: Using Customer Focus and Collaboration to Build Long-Term Relationships by Charles H Green
- Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t by Jim Collins
- Small Giants: Companies that Choose to be Great Instead of Big by Bo Burlingham
- Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras
- The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas by Robert H. Frank
- Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Yvon Chouinard
- The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More by Barry Schwartz
What books have shaped your views and guide your life? I’m always eager to discover new books.
Yolanda Lau is an entrepreneurship and small business consultant and a co-founder and partner of Lau Labs. Since 2010, she has been focused on “solving” the “problem” of ambitious, educated, talented women and men “opting out” of the traditional workforce for personal reasons. In 2015, she joined forces with two other MIT alumnae to start FlexTeam — a mission-based micro-consulting firm that matches talented mid-career women with meaningful, challenging, temporally flexible, remote project-based work opportunities. FlexTeam’s clients are businesses of all sizes across all industries and sectors and their most requested projects are competitor / market research, financial models, and investor decks.
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