Top 5 books …for the hardest workers in the room

6 min readJan 1, 2022

It was pouring down with rain. The heavy, relentless, kind of rain that leaves you soaked through within a few seconds. Britain’s Got Talent was due to start its 6th series in just a few weeks time and I had a plan. Thankfully for viewers of the show, not one that involved me performing in the competition. I’d been working for the last few weeks with a small tech start-up to create a prototype mobile app that I believed could turbo-charge live television participation experiences. Second screen apps had a rocky start and most failed (including a bunch that I worked on), but as a fledgling Product Manager I saw an opportunity to take the aging telephone voting systems online and incorporate it into our app. All that was standing in my way was getting the three-way contract signed between the broadcaster, the production company and the start-up. It was right down to the wire, if we wanted a chance to be in the show we needed to get the final contract signed that day. Note, this was before online document signing platforms had become truly mainstream. There wasn’t time to arrange a courier and this was too important to get lost at a reception desk. I had two options: give up, or lace up. So at 4:30pm on a Friday afternoon, I laced up the running shoes and stepped out into the downpour with the contract taped into a plastic wallet under my coat. I ran halfway across central London and got thoroughly drenched…

Several weeks later, our first attempt at mobile app voting failed spectacularly in front of a home audience of more than ten million viewers. Traffic was incredibly peaky and when the onscreen personalities of Ant & Dec asked the audience at home to vote, our app user numbers went from fewer than five to more than a million in a ten-second window. We had misconfigured our cloud hosting environment and only let ten thousand users vote that day. Suffice to say the Execs were not happy, although to be fair to them they could see that we were breaking some pretty new ground at the time. We took a year off, learned from our mistakes and convinced them to let us try again. I later recall someone telling me that more people voted on Britain’s Got Talent than for any UK political party in recent elections. I don’t know if that was true or not, but I know that we paved the way for live television programmes across the globe to move their voting mechanics online and several million people interacted with our app. Simon Cowell spoke to me sometime later, thanking me and giving me two pieces of advice, the first “Don’t tweet when drunk” (I think there had been something in the press at the time), the second (I wish I could remember the exact words but) it was something about a combination of hard work and taking risks pays off. Our slightly ramshackle team numbered fewer than five individuals but it was a strong group of very passionate people, and without question, they were all the hardest workers in the room.

There’s an abundance of conflicting advice on how to put your all into work whilst also caring for yourself, like rest when you’re done vs take regular breaks. Put in 110% vs 80% is enough. My advice, get up early, have a routine, get lots of exercise, routinely switch off from the digital world, give it your all and keep learning. So, here are my top 5 books for the hardest workers in the room:

1) Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind — Shunryu Suzuki
I started meditating and practising Zen more than thirty years ago. I don’t talk about it much, but it’s important to me. Would I have achieved what I have today without being able to ground and empty myself? Probably not. Practising mindfulness has become increasingly popular and while there isn’t one flavour that works for everyone I find the quiet practice of zazen works for me. This is the best, most accessible book on the subject I’ve found, the writing in and of itself has a calming influence. It hasn’t resonated with everyone that I’ve shared it with though, and if it doesn’t work for you, the guided meditation app Headspace might be your next port of call.
Amazon

2) 5am Club — Robin Sharma
I advocate a lot of the practices that Robin outlines in this book. As with all blueprints though you need to be flexible. The ever-wise words from one of our generation’s greatest philosophers, Bruce Lee, jumps out at me here, “Research your own experience. Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is essentially your own.”. Getting up early and maximising the quiet but most creative part of the day has always been central in my approach to work. I need those mornings to reflect and reset. I can’t give 100% if I’m still reeling from the day before. I was getting up at 5am well before I read this book, my hope is that others might read it and discover how small changes to their daily routine can make a huge difference. Sadly, I’m not actually a morning person, so I use a technique outlined in book four below to help me get up at 5am every day; spoiler: I just don’t see it as a choice in the first place.
Authors site | Amazon

3) So Good They Can’t Ignore You — Cal Newport
Initially So Good They Can’t Ignore You felt a bit obvious, then it felt a bit negative, then it started asking some interesting questions that made me pause to reflect. I’m exactly where I want to be, doing exactly what I want to do. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be working and no other role I’d rather have than the one I have right now. I’m learning, a lot. I like the idea that you keep your interests as hobbies and you get enjoyment from work by working hard and getting really good at it. It’s nice to read a book that advocates and respects those that work their arses off (rather than finding some negative lens, such as the compromises you have to make to get there). I was given this book as a gift by another CPTO and from time-to-time I pass it onto someone else that’s working their arse off in pursuit of better.
Authors site | Amazon

4) The Art of Resilience — Ross Edgley
I find things difficult almost all the time, be that working on something outside of my comfort zone or the agonising sciatica in my right leg when I try to get out of bed in the morning. Just because something is hard or hasn’t been done before doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Hard things are hard though (in fact there’s a good book on this too: The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz) but being difficult often just adds to the reward of achieving something. So we want challenges. Ross beautifully documents his challenge of swimming around the coastline of the UK without returning to land for one-hundred-and-fifty-seven days. I mean what was he thinking? But then again maybe that’s the key, because the art of resilience for me is about removing the choice, don’t allow yourself the option, just do it. Nike, Yoda — they both had the right idea.
Authors site | Amazon

5) Deep Work — Cal Newport
Busy work, multi-tasking, doing the easy things first are all inhibitors to doing good work. Chances are you got to where you are by going deep on something and doing it well. Focus and force yourself to carve out meaningful blocks of time. Deep work talks through a few different approaches to this for different people and different lifestyles. Now, stop reading this and start reading some of the above, ideally in well-defined blocks of reading time where you can go deep and focus.
Authors site | Amazon

Top 5 books …for the hardest workers in the room

Written by Rico Surridge