10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works — A True Story
by Dan Harris
“There’s no point in being unhappy about things you can’t change, and no point being unhappy about things you can.”
I have been interested in meditation for a few years, but have never successfully incorporated it into my daily routine. I just didn’t know how to start (or constantly procrastinated to start). Over the last few years, I’ve read several books on Zen and meditation, but they didn’t help me transform my theoretical knowledge into practice. This book did.
I finished reading this book on July 27th, 2021. Since then, meditation has been part of my morning routine. Thus this book is indeed a life-changer for me.
The book, written by American journalist and former ABC news anchor Dan Harris, chronicles his struggles with career and personal life and how the accidental discovery of meditation helped him.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in meditation and mindfulness, especially those struggling to begin a meditation routine.
“When you have one foot in the future and the other in the past, you piss on the present.”
Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science
by Athul Gawande
“Practice is funny. For days and days, you make out only the fragments of what to do. And then one day you’ve got the thing whole. Conscious learning becomes unconscious knowledge, and you cannot say precisely how.”
In 2018 I read Athul Gawande’s book ‘Check List’, and I liked ideas from the book a lot and the way the book is written. After that, I’ve added other Gawande books to my reading list. ‘Complications’ is the second book of Athul Gawande’s that I’ve read so far.
The book 'Complications' delves into the challenges of learning in complex environments where errors can have severe consequences. It also explores the tough decisions doctors must make every day despite uncertainty, as well as the importance of communication and decision-making. The book raises questions about how to guide patients towards making the 'right' decisions about their health, and what constitutes the 'right' decision in the first place. To support his arguments, Dr. Gawande shares real stories and cases from his experience as a practicing surgeon.
Reading about the complexity, uncertainty, and stress of unfamiliar environments, and the principles and techniques that aid in successful operation, was stimulating and will be beneficial for anyone who wants to improve their decision-making process.
“We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do.”
The Effective Executive
by Peter Drucker
“There are few things less pleasing to the Lord, and less productive, than an engineering department that rapidly turns out beautiful blueprints for the wrong product. Working on the right things is what makes knowledge work effective.”
This classic book was on my reading list for years, but I continuously skipped it because I thought I might not be ready yet to read about the effectiveness of executives (it always seemed far from my title and responsibilities). I was very wrong. This book is full of nuggets of wisdom for leaders of every level.
It was very genuinely stated by someone in one of the book’s reviews: “Stop reading boring blogs and books about productivity and go straight to this book — the source of many of these ideas”
So, don’t be confused by ‘Executive’ in the title of the book. Druker defines executive as:
“…those knowledge workers, managers, or individual professionals who are expected by the virtue of their profession or their knowledge to make decisions in the normal course of their work, that have a significant impact on the performance and results of the whole.”
Read this book, and you’ll be surprised how many principles that are currently popular because of agile and lean movements are emphasized by Drucker in this book written in 1966.
“Effectiveness, while capable of being learned, cannot be taught.”
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
by James Clear
“Professionals stick to the schedule, amateurs let life get in the way.”
The book "Atomic Habits" by James Clear offers a practical guide to developing good habits and eliminating bad ones. Whether you want to change your own habits or influence the habits of others (individuals or groups) — this book provides very concrete recommendations on how to make it happen.
“Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean it’s the most important thing.”
The Magic of Thinking Big
by David J. Schwartz
“Successful people are like successful businesses, live with these questions: “How can I improve the quality of my performance? How can I do better?””
I was skeptical about the book because of its title — “The Magic of Thinking Big”. It sounded to me like yet another comfy self-help book. But I consistently found this book recommended by many people and authors I respect. And after the reading, I understood why. It has become one of my favorite self-help books, and I believe I will need to reread it periodically.
The book was first published in 1959 and has remained popular and relevant, with regular republishing for over 60 years. Although this is a self-help book, it is unlike any other. The book provides practical ideas and recommendations for improvement in various areas of life, including personal growth, leadership, critical thinking, and professional development. As well as change your mindset to strive for continuous improvement in life.
The same advice as with Drucker’s classic mentioned above: Stop reading boring blogs and books about productivity and go straight to this book — the source of many of these ideas.
“A leader is a decision-making human machine. To manufacture anything you’ve got to have raw materials. In reaching creative decisions, the raw materials are ideas and suggestions of others.”
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
by Angela Duckworth
“Supportive parenting and demanding parenting should co-exist. Parents should be loving and tough.”
Angela Duckworth in her book “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance” insists that talent is much less important than passion and perseverance. The combination of passion and perseverance she calls Grit.
She went further and illustrated that with a few formulas:
talent x effort = skill
skill x effort = achievement
talent x effort x effort = achievement
Thus, per Angela Duckworth, in order to achieve anything significant in life person should apply a lot of effort and not necessary talent.
Angela Duckworth, in her book, makes a point about why all of us should strive to become gritty and provides practical recommendations on how in the first place, to grow grit in ourselves and in those whom we can influence and care about.
As a father at home and team leader at work, I found the ideas in this book both appealing and practical.
“Nobody wants to show you hours and hours of becoming, but the highlight of what they’ve become.”
Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
by Kim Scott
“Being a boss is a job, not a value judgment”
Kim Scott compares the corporate and leadership cultures of Apple and Google in her book "Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity", using them as examples to explain common and different leadership principles.
I highly recommend that every manager and team leader read this book. The principles and recommendations described in the book will hopefully be adopted by more and more organizations soon.
“I spend a lot more than eight hours a day at my job, If I don’t enjoy my work and my colleagues, the majority of my brief time on this planet would be unhappy.”
Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
by Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais
“We must shift our thinking from treating teams as a collection of interchangeable individuals that will succeed as long as they follow the set of ‘right’ processes and use the right tools, to treating people and technology as a single human/computer/silicon sociotechnical ecosystem.”
I found Matthew Skelton's book "Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow" very helpful for structuring my thoughts on team topologies. The book offers useful recommendations for selecting proper team organizational structures based on projects and product contexts.
Authors argue that there are four types of development teams, a combination of which is enough to create a product of any size and complexity:
- Stream-aligned team
- Enabling team
- Complicated-subsystem team
- Platform team
And only three interaction models of how these teams might interact with each other:
- Collaboration
- X-as-a-Service
- Facilitating
I highly recommend this book for anyone dealing with the organization of multiple teams and inter-team communications.
“Behavioral studies suggest that humans work best with others when we can predict their behavior. Clear roles and responsibility boundaries help this by defining predictive behavior and avoiding “invisible electric fences””
How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens
by Benedict Carey
“There is no right and wrong way to learn. There are different strategies, each uniquely suited to capturing a particular type of information. A good hunter tailors the trap to the prey.”
The book “How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens” by Benedict Carey is for those readers, who want to understand better how our brain consumes, digests, and stores information about the surrounding world and those who would like to improve one’s learning (or teaching) abilities. The book contains a lot of insightful information and descriptions of scientific (and not such) experiments.
I prefer this book to the more well-known "A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science" by Barbara Oakley.
“Forgetting a huge chunk of what we’ve just learned, especially when it’s a brand new topic, is not necessarily evidence of laziness, attention deficits, or a faulty character. On the contrary, it is a sign that the brain is working as it should.”
Principles: Life and Work
by Ray Dalio
“Everything looks bigger at the close. What’s happening today seems like a much bigger deal than it will appear in retrospect.”
The book “Principles: Life and Work” by Ray Dalio is a long, 550 pages, read overflowing with insights from very different areas — life, learning, people, relationships, philosophy, leadership, and many others. The book's well-organized structure and appealing design make it easy to find information without reading from cover to cover.
Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, has a wealth of knowledge to share. Some of his principles and recommendations might seem controversial and even contradict conventional leadership and management principles.
The book is divided into three parts:
- “Where I’m coming from”. Ray Dalio’s autobiography and history of the Bridgewater Associates.
- “Life Principles”. In this chapter, the author shares his life principles and explains the philosophy that drives them.
- “Work Principles”. Ray Dalio’s working principles explanation with the examples from the Bridgewater Associates culture.
Most of the recommendations in leadership and management practices from “Principles” intersect with the recommendations described in Kim Scott “Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity” book. But in Bridgewater, the recommended principles are much more radical in most cases.
I recommend this book to everyone interested in leadership, people and organization management, decision-making, and building organizational culture.
In most companies, people are doing two jobs: their actual job and the job of managing others’ impressions of how they’re doing their job. And that’s terrible.
