Just do it.
In October 2016, I challenged myself to read through a long list of books that friends and colleagues had recommended to me over the years. Now 52 books and 52 weeks later, I have discovered a passion for reading that I hope to keep for years to come. Below I have shared the list of books in no particular order and a handful of quotes from each.
“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.” — MARK TWAIN
“You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.”
— HENRY FORD
Sociology/Psychology:
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
“The “naturalness bias” is a hidden prejudice against those who’ve achieved what they have because they worked for it, and a hidden preference for those whom we think arrived at their place in life because they’re naturally talented. We may not admit to others this bias for naturals; we may not even admit it to ourselves. But the bias is evident in the choices we make.”
When Breath Becomes Air
“Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete. And Truth comes somewhere above all of them.”
Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets
“It struck me that most housing projects, even though they are built in cities, run counter to the very notion of urban living.”
The Last Lecture: Randy Pausch
“How many men are on the football field at a time?” he asked us. Eleven on a team, we answered. So that makes twenty-two. “And how many people are touching the football at any given time?” One of them. “Right!” he said. “So we’re going to work on what those other twenty-one guys are doing.”
Make your Bed
“None of us are immune from life’s tragic moments. Like the small rubber boat we had in basic SEAL training, it takes a team of good people to get you to your destination in life. You cannot paddle the boat alone. Find someone to share your life with. Make as many friends as possible, and never forget that your success depends on others.”
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
“Habits never really disappear. They’re encoded into the structures of our brain, and that’s a huge advantage for us, because it would be awful if we had to relearn how to drive after every vacation. The problem is that your brain can’t tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it’s always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.”
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why
“Fear is like fire. It can cook for you. It can heat your house. Or it can burn you down.”
“If you pour in more tea, it simply spills over and is wasted. The same is true of the mind. A closed attitude, an attitude that says, “I already know,” may cause you to miss important information. Zen teaches openness. Survival instructors refer to that quality of openness as “humility.”
Man’s Search for Meaning
“Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.”
The Culture Code
“Everything we experience in life lies somewhere on an axis between two extremes. One cannot truly know pleasure without knowing pain. One cannot legitimately feel joy without having felt sorrow. The degree to which we feel an experience depends on where that experience lies on the axis (a little painful, overwhelmingly joyful, and so on).”
Barking up the Wrong Tree
“When your head is in a refrigerator and your feet on a burner, the average temperature is okay. I am always cautious about averages.”
“There’s an old Swedish expression that says most kids are dandelions but a few are orchids. Dandelions are resilient. They’re not the most beautiful flowers, but even without good care they thrive. Nobody goes around deliberately planting dandelions. You don’t need to. They do just fine under almost any conditions. Orchids are different. If you don’t care for them properly they wilt and die. But if given proper care, they bloom into the most gorgeous flowers imaginable.”
Leadership:
Leaders Eat Last
“Marine leaders are expected to eat last because the true price of leadership is the willingness to place the needs of others above your own. Great leaders truly care about those they are privileged to lead and understand that the true cost of the leadership privilege comes at the expense of self-interest.”
Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders
“You may be able to “buy” a person’s back with a paycheck, position, power, or fear, but a human being’s genius, passion, loyalty, and tenacious creativity are volunteered only.”
“ People who are treated as followers have the expectations of followers and act like followers. As followers, they have limited decision-making authority and little incentive to give the utmost of their intellect, energy, and passion. Those who take orders usually run at half speed, under utilizing their imagination and initiative.”
Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
“Radical Candor” is what happens when you put “Care Personally” and “Challenge Directly” together. Radical Candor builds trust and opens the door for the kind of communication that helps you achieve the results you’re aiming for.”
“At Apple, as at Google, a boss’s ability to achieve results had a lot more to do with listening and seeking to understand than it did with telling people what to do; more to do with debating than directing; more to do with pushing people to decide than with being the decider; more to do with persuading than with giving orders; more to do with learning than with knowing.”
“Garbage can decision-making” occurs when the people who happen to be around the table are the deciders rather than the people with the best information.”
Never Split the Difference
“Going too fast is one of the mistakes all negotiators are prone to making. If we’re too much in a hurry, people can feel as if they’re not being heard and we risk undermining the rapport and trust we’ve built.”
Team of Teams: The Power of Small Groups in a Fragmented World
“In 2005, terrorism in Iraq would claim 8,300 lives, the equivalent of almost three 9/11s in a country with one tenth the population of the United States.”
“We’re not lazier or less intelligent than our parents or grandparents, but what worked for them simply won’t do the trick for us now. Understanding and adapting to these factors isn’t optional; it will be what differentiates success from failure in the years ahead.”
“…in a resilience paradigm, managers accept the reality that they will inevitably confront unpredicted threats; rather than erecting strong, specialized defenses, they create systems that aim to roll with the punches, or even benefit from them.”
What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School: Notes from a Street-smart Executive
“I once heard someone say that if Thomas Edison had gone to business school we would all be reading by larger candles.”
“Ego is why some things that should happen don’t, why other things that shouldn’t happen do, and why both take a lot longer than necessary.”
Business:
Business Adventures: John Brooks
“The road to Hell is paved with good intentions!”
“American income taxes originated and developed not as a result of the efforts of monarchs to fill their coffers at the expense of their subjects but as a result of the efforts of an elected government to serve the general interest.”
Sam Walton: Made in America
“One of the real reasons I’m writing this book is so my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will read it years from now and know this: If you start any of that foolishness, I’ll come back and haunt you. So don’t even think about it.”
“At Wal-Mart, we’ve always paid our executives less than industry standards, sometimes maybe too much less. But we’ve always rewarded them with stock bonuses and other incentives related directly to the performance of the company. It’s no coincidence that the company has done really well, and so have they.”
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE
“Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.”
“A soldier in shoes is only a soldier. But in boots he becomes a warrior.”
“When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is — you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama.”
American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company
“Our industry is an interdependent one. We have 80 percent overlap in supplier networks. Nearly 25 percent of Ford’s top dealers also own GM and Chrysler franchises. That is why the collapse of one or both of our domestic competitors would also threaten Ford.”
“The teacher will appear when the student is ready.”
Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time
“Success is empty if you arrive at the finish line alone. The best reward is to get there surrounded by winners.”
The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
“When Amazon had its first five-thousand-dollar-order day and Lovejoy wanted to throw a party, Bezos rejected the idea. “There are a lot of milestones coming and that’s not the way I want to run things,” he said.”
Dethroning the King: The Hostile Takeover of Anheuser-Busch
“Anheuser’s hubris and naïveté had led to its fall from grace, and it provided an apt comparison to the broader state of America at the time. After years spent downplaying or ignoring developments in other parts of the world, assuming that its supremacy was a constant, America’s political and financial dominance were also at risk.”
“To many American drinkers and even more to drinkers in Europe, Bud and Bud Light are keg beers meant to be enjoyed five or six at a time in front of the television. “People don’t really care how you make the stuff,” said Kopcha, echoing in blunt terms what Anheuser insiders try to skirt around more delicately. “They assume it’s sanitary, and that’s all they really care about.” “I wish I had a dollar for every time we tried to talk ingredients in a focus group, and somebody would say, ‘Look, I don’t care if it’s made out of panther piss. If I like it, I like it and if I don’t, I don’t.”
Steve Jobs
“The Apple Marketing Philosophy” that stressed three points. The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: “We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.” The second was focus: “In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.” The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. “People DO judge a book by its cover,” he wrote. “We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.”
The Endangered Customer
“All of these frustrations share one vital common thread. Each one represents a customer touch points in which the business has broken its “human connection” with the customer. These slights and irritations, which can seem rather minor when described in isolation, create negative feelings that are hard for customers to shake. And in the Switching Economy, where “nonstop consumers” have no shortage of alternative choices, the quickest and most natural balm for hurt feelings is to make a switch to a competitor.”
The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
“A 25-ton container of coffeemakers can leave a factory in Malaysia, be loaded aboard a ship, and cover the 9,000 miles to Los Angeles in 23 days. A day later, the container is on a unit train to Chicago, where it is transferred immediately to a truck headed for Cincinnati. The 11,000-mile trip from the factory gate to the Ohio warehouse can take as little as 28 days, a rate of 400 miles per day, at a cost lower than that of a single business-class airline ticket. More than likely, no one has touched the contents, or even opened the container, along the way.”
Players: The Story of Sports and Money, and the Visionaries Who Fought to Create a Revolution
“Despite the inevitable pitfalls and crassness money has wrought, money has also made athletes and the sports they play immeasurably better. An upside-down business needed to be turned right-side up, for better or for worse.”
Entrepreneurship:
My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla
“I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am, if thought is the equivalent of labor, for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours. But if work is interpreted to be a definite performance in a specified time according to a rigid rule, then I may be the worst of idlers.”
“When a man springs from a people who have a hundred words for knife and only one for bread, it is a little unreasonable to urge him to be careful even of his own life.”
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
“There was a tendency at Bell Labs to confine important developments to middle management for a purgatorial period, lest word of a breakthrough reach upper management too soon. The concern was that research that appeared to be important could turn out, upon closer inspection, to be nothing of the sort. Thus the practice was for a supervisor to move any big news up a step — a week or two at a time, in Brattain’s recollection — only after he was convinced of its importance.”
“The purity of the materials produced at Bell Labs, beginning in the early 1950s, was akin to a pinch of salt sprinkled amid a thirty-eight-car freight train carrying in its boxcars nothing else but sugar.”
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
“There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.”
“Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship.”
“No matter who you are, you need two kinds of friends in your life. The first kind is one you can call when something good happens, and you need someone who will be excited for you. Not a fake excitement veiling envy, but a real excitement. You need someone who will actually be more excited for you than he would be if it had happened to him. The second kind of friend is somebody you can call when things go horribly wrong — when your life is on the line and you only have one phone call. Who is it going to be?”
The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
“As our personal technology is becoming more complex, more codependent upon peripherals, more like a living ecosystem, delaying upgrading is even more disruptive. If you neglect ongoing minor upgrades, the change backs up so much that the eventual big upgrade reaches traumatic proportions.”
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“Horizontal or extensive progress means copying things that work — going from 1 to n. Horizontal progress is easy to imagine because we already know what it looks like. Vertical or intensive progress means doing new things — going from 0 to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done. If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.”
The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
“Validated learning is not after-the-fact rationalization or a good story designed to hide failure. It is a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty in which startups grow.”
“ Metcalfe’s law: the value of a network as a whole is proportional to the square of the number of participants. In other words, the more people in the network, the more valuable the network. This makes intuitive sense: the value to each participant is driven primarily by how many other people he or she can communicate with.”
Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days
“When a risky idea succeeds in a sprint, the payoff is fantastic. But it’s the failures that, while painful, provide the greatest return on investment.”
Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
“ Dunning-Kruger effect, named after two researchers from Cornell University whose studies found that incompetent people fail to recognize their own lack of skill, grossly overestimate their abilities, and are unable to recognize talent in other people who actually are competent.”
Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
“ It’s not the rats who first abandon a sinking ship. It’s the crew members who know how to swim.”
“If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”
“There’s a Jewish folktale about a biblical king who dispatches one of his wise men to craft him a mantra that would both humble the proud and console the unfortunate. After searching in the market, where our wise man consults a local jeweler, he returns to the king with an engraved ring. The king holds the ring close and reads: THIS TOO SHALL PASS. So remember that, when lamenting your troubles, contemplating the perceived triumphs of peers and competitors, or rejoicing in that rare entrepreneurial triumph. It will all soon pass, and much faster than you think.”
History/Politics:
All the President’s Men
“In the course of his five-and-a-half-year presidency, beginning in 1969, Nixon launched and managed five successive and overlapping wars — against the anti–Vietnam War movement, the news media, the Democrats, the justice system, and, finally, against history itself. All reflected a mind-set and a pattern of behavior that were uniquely and pervasively Nixon’s: a willingness to disregard the law for political advantage, and a quest for dirt and secrets about his opponents as an organizing principle of his presidency.”
The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics
“Rowing is like a beautiful duck. On the surface it is all grace, but underneath the bastard’s paddling like mad!”
“Good crews are good blends of personalities: someone to lead the charge, someone to hold something in reserve; someone to pick a fight, someone to make peace; someone to think things through, someone to charge ahead without thinking.”
An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back
“The United States spends nearly one-fifth of its gross domestic product on healthcare, more than $3 trillion a year, about equivalent to the entire economy of France. For that, the U.S. health system generally delivers worse health outcomes than any other developed country, all of which spend on average about half what we do per person.”
“ The original purpose of health insurance was to mitigate financial disasters brought about by a serious illness, such as losing your home or your job, but it was never intended to make healthcare cheap or serve as a tool for cost control.”
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
“ Think of driving a car. We may not see the other driver, but we know not to run into his car. We know that the damage will be mutual. We protect the other person without seeing him, dozens of times every day. Likewise, although we may not see the other person in front of his or her computer, we have our share of responsibility for what he or she is reading there. If we can avoid doing violence to the minds of unseen others on the internet, others will learn to do the same. And then perhaps our internet traffic will cease to look like one great, bloody accident.”
Science:
Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World
“ It is the smell of chocolate from within your own mouth that is responsible for its complex taste. When you cook chocolate, many of its flavor molecules evaporate or are destroyed by the cooking. This is a problem not just for hot chocolate but also for coffee and tea.”
“ In the 1840s the invention of vulcanized rubber by Charles Goodyear allowed for the introduction of “cushions” at the sides of the playing surface, which were soft and springy instead of wooden, ensuring that the balls would bounce off them in a predictable manner for the first time. From this point onwards billiard tables resembled those we know today. The move from a billiard game, which uses three or four balls, to the more fashionable game of pool, which uses fifteen balls, happened in 1870s America. Up until this point, though, the balls themselves were made of ivory and so were expensive.”
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
“ Influenza emerged from the Latin influentia because medieval doctors imagined that the cyclical epidemics of flu were influenced by stars and planets revolving toward and away from the earth.”
“ Political revolutions, the writer Amitav Ghosh writes, often occur in the courtyards of palaces, in spaces on the cusp of power, located neither outside nor inside. Scientific revolutions, in contrast, typically occur in basements, in buried-away places removed from mainstream corridors of thought.”
Spaceman: An Astronaut’s Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe
“ People sometimes think having a kid gets in the way of pursuing a dream. I think it’s the opposite. Having her made me want to pursue my dream even harder because I wanted her to be able to do the same. I didn’t want to tell her about how to live life — I wanted to show her.”
Sapiens: A brief History of Humankind
“In Homo sapiens, the brain accounts for about 2–3 per cent of total body weight, but it consumes 25 per cent of the body’s energy when the body is at rest. By comparison, the brains of other apes require only 8 per cent of rest-time energy.”
“ Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all.”
“ Some scholars believe there is a direct link between the advent of cooking, the shortening of the human intestinal tract, and the growth of the human brain. Since long intestines and large brains are both massive energy consumers, it’s hard to have both. By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens.”
Complications: A surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science
“ The word nausea comes from the Greek word for ship.”
“Some 32 percent of the general working-age population develops at least one serious mental disorder — such as major depression, mania, panic disorder, psychosis, or addiction — and there is no evidence that such disorders are any less common among doctors.”
Finance:
Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street
“ A good rule for survival on Wall Street: Never agree to anything proposed on someone else’s boat, or you’ll regret it in the morning.”
“ He disapproved of workdays longer than eight hours because, he said, “you then arrive at the office in the morning with the same thoughts you left with late the night before.”
Rich Dad, Poor Dad
“Seek work for what they will learn, more than what they will earn.”
Angel: How to invest in Technology Startups
“ The odds are wildly against founders making a huge return, while the odds are in favor of a lifelong angel or venture capitalist getting rich.”
“ Startup founders often sell too early, leaving money on the table. VCs often force founders to hold out and swing for the fences, risking blowing up companies and locking in gains.”
Slicing Pie
“In spite of the setbacks, the struggles, the stress, the long hours, the hard work and even the occasional failure, start-ups are fun as long as everyone participating in the start-up is treated fairly. When everyone feels that they are getting what they deserve, everyone can get along and move the business forward as a team. Backstabbing, greed and politicking, on the other hand, suck the fun out of the start-up faster than your company's rogue article gets deleted from Wikipedia.”
“Entrepreneurs give security to other people; they are the generators of social welfare. The country needs entrepreneurs, the world needs entrepreneurs. Without them not much would happen.”
Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist
“ You can’t predict your revenue with any level of precision, but you should be able to manage your expenses exactly to plan.”
“Since your revenue forecast will be wrong, your cash flow forecast will be wrong. However, if you are an effective manager, you’ll know how to budget for this by focusing on lagging your increase in cash spend behind your expected growth in revenue.”
