Books I read in 2018
Copying Tommy Collison’s “2018 Review of Books” (which copied Aaron Swartz’s annual reviews of books), I’m listing all the books that I read (and listened to since I’ve started using audiobooks this year) in 2018. The books that I particularly recommend are marked with ⭐.
Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed, by Alexis Ohanian. What makes today’s entrepreneurship different from the previous generations’? It’s the internet. It gives everyone access to make pretty much everything, changing the landscape of entrepreneurship forever by allowing us to start a business without having to get permission, from basically anyone.
The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup, by Noam Wasserman. The book did a great job in laying out many different paths that founders could take in building startups. But, despite the declarative title — remember that this is a book by an academia — you’ll hardly get practical advices or bold conclusions from here.
⭐️ Problem Solving 101: A Simple Book for Smart People, by Ken Watanabe. This is a business book under a camouflage; it presents practical techniques in problem solving using children use cases. Despite of its childlike presentation, I really think this is the book most adults must read.
⭐ The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, by Brad Stone. Although Bezos seemed to always demonstrate ambitious goals even way before founding Amazon, those goals were actually very calculated. He was committed to those goals and executed like no one had ever seen.
The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, by Eric Ries. The Lean Startup systemizes the way we do business in startup world. It pointed out the importance of launching the product as soon as possible (MVP, or the minimum viable product) to get feedbacks which will then be considered for the next decision making: whether to pivot or persevere. Most startups fail, and The Lean Startup offers approaches to prevent those failures.
⭐ Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson. As an entrepreneur, Steve Jobs experienced a lot of extreme ups and downs: from (a) a sloppy hippie who created Apple with his friend, to (b) a self-seeking second-time founder when he started Next and Pixar after getting expelled from the company he founded, to (c) a matured man after returning to Apple for the second time and changing the world. Steve wasn’t always right, but his story is definitely interesting.
⭐ Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar … : Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes, by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein. I still cannot believe that I actually learned philosophy from a joke book.
Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs, by John Doerr. In order to succeed, you have to first have a specific goal (objective) and focus to achieve that goal by executing while measuring things that matter (key results).
Principles, by Ray Dalio. People need principles in their life. Dalio suggested that you should make your own principles by learning lessons that life has taught you.
⭐ Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari. Humans have become the most powerful species on earth mainly because their ability to create fictions. Unlike other animals, we are, not only able to communicate things that exist, but also able to communicate things that physically do not exist — like money, empires, or religions. These shared myths have helped us to cooperate in large numbers, and progressed throughout the time to create things that even our ancestors have never could have imagined.
⭐ Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond. Why did the Europeans (at the time of the writing of the book) become so dominant in global economy and politics compared to other races? Diamond presents that the Europeans were actually not racially more superior than others. It is only because of geographical luck the Europeans could manage to be very powerful by having access to the most powerful guns, the nastiest germs, and the most technologically-advanced steel.
The Airbnb Story: How to Disrupt an Industry, Make Billions of Dollars … and Plenty of Enemies, by Leigh Gallagher. Airbnb grew from a dying experimental project to a multi-billion dollar company in a relatively short time, and this book attempted to capture that. I just felt that it’s too early for anyone to write any book about this young company.
So, in total, I read 12 books in 2018; 3 biography books, 4 business books, 1 jokes/philosophy book, 2 history books, and 2 biography/business books.
I learned that I mostly enjoyed biography and history books the most. Business books are, although interesting, often hard to finish. I preferred to learn business practices from examples (which explains why I love biography of business people).
What’s next in 2019? I feel like I need to read more fictions. I used to love this genre a lot. In fact, it used to be the only genre that I used to read.
2018 has been becoming an exciting year to read and I’m ready to welcome another year of enriching reads. Cheers to 2019.
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