20 Books That Inspired Me

The books that changed my life, helped me build successful teams and succeed in business.

1. The Goal

Eliyahu Goldratt

The Goal is probably the best business novel ever written. I love business novels, they are the best of both worlds. They are both fiction and non-fiction. I know there are really good fictional books that we can all learn from but I still feel like reading fiction is a waste of time. At least for me, since I am a pretty slow reader. I read books to learn and think. That’s why I generally prefer reading non-fiction.

I read The Goal multiple times. It is written in socratic method. The author does not simply tell things. He continuously makes the characters ask questions and discuss those questions. It is an amazing way to tell business concepts.

This book has two important concepts:

1. Theory of Constrains: People assume that there are many reasons for a system to not function well. That’s pretty much always a wrong assumption. Every system has a single big hairy bottleneck. When you find that bottleneck and attack it with a single minded focus, you will greatly improve the performance of the system. Once you solve a constrain, you move to the next one.
2. Process of Continuous Improvements: Do not improve a system and rest in your laurels. Keep asking those questions, and keep improving the system all the time. That’s exactly what we do at JotForm. We continuously deploy new versions of our product 50 times every day.

Because I am such a big fan of this book I have read Eliyahu M. Goldratt’s other business novels as well, and they are all good.

• Critical Chain: Theory of Constrains in Project Management
• It’s Not Luck: Theory of Constrains in Sales, Marketing and Distribution
• Critical Chain: Theory of Constrains in Product Development
• Isn’t It Obvious?: Theory of Constrains in Retail
• Necessary but Not Sufficient: Theory of Constrains in Software Business

2. Ready, Fire, Aim

Michael Masterson

In business, most importing things are fuzzy. There are too many secrets. You don’t know how big your competition is or how much they are growing or how they are getting their customers. You don’t know what you customers are really thinking about you. You don’t know where the next opportunities are. In fact, if you knew exactly where the next opportunities are, you’b be too late to the party. They stopped being good opportunities when many people know about them. Tomorrow’s good opportunities look terrible today.

That’s why you can never wait for 100% confirmation before charging ahead. You kind of always have to work with a blurry vision. You just have to have a hunch about opportunities and go after them.

That’s why you fire first. You don’t take 6 months to create a perfect plan. Your perfect plan will be useless by the time you are done with it. So, fire first, look at the results, and then fire again.

When you listen to any entreprenuer you hear similar stories. You don’t hear stories about an entreprenuer who took 1 year to prepare a perfect, and then executed those plans exactly and reached success. PayPal started as a way to send money from one palm pilot to another, but nobody used the product. Instead they found that people were using this minor addon feature that let them send money to other people by email. Twitter came out of a hackathon because Odeo wasn’t getting good traction and Apple was out to kill them by adding podcasts to iTunes, so they decided to search for new ideas.

Ready, Fire, Aim is written by someone who has done it all. He created multiple $100M businesses. He has deep knowledge on different stages of building a company.

Speed is the most important element. Move fast. Try out different things. Build momentum by building systems that enables you to move fast.

Selling should be your main focus. You sustain and grow a business with sales. Do not waste your time, energy and attention on things that don’t matter such as business cards. Instead, focus on your customers and selling your product.

3. Flow

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Flow is not an easy book to read. It is written in a research language. It is hard to read but it is also a very satisfying read.

Flow is a condition we experience time to time. Lucky ones among us probably experience it more often. You get so taken away by a task that you became unaware of the world. You are in a happy “flow” state.

The most common ways for me to get into a flow state is skiing and programming. Both tasks give me pure joy and I lose time doing them. I am good at them but I am also constantly being challenged all the time while performing them.

For us to go into a flow state, a task has to be hard to require our constant attention but it should not be too hard that we have to stop and re-engage on the task constantly.

People assume that if they had nothing to do, or if they plan a vacation with nothing to do, they will be happy. It turns out people get bored when they have nothing to do.

The happiest moments of our lives can also be the most challenging and most difficult times for us. Flow is pure happiness. You are more likely to encounter it if you are challenged.

4. Man’s Search for Meaning

Viktor E. Frank

If you have to read only one philosophy or psychology book, this is the book you should read: Man’s Search for Meaning

Long term happiness does not come from money, sex, power or any other outside factors. Happiness only come from inside. To be happy you have to find a “reason” to live. You need to have a mission to live for.

One story I remember from the book is about a man in the holocaust camp the author was in. The man believed the war would end soon at a date and they would all be saved. Once that date arrived and there was no end to the war, they found him dead in his bed on the next morning. He lost his reason to live and literally stopped living.

People who have a reason to live will endure the worst possible conditions and still be happy. People who have everything but no meaning in their lives will be lost.

5. How to Win Friends & Influence People

Dale Carnegie

This is an amazing book. It is hard to follow everything in this book to the letter since we all have different personalities and temperaments. So, I can’t honestly say I am able to follow all of the techniques in this book. But, it is still good know what is the proper way to behave even if your personality does not allow you to take full advantage of it.

There are 3 fundemental techniques in handling people: (1) Don’t criticize, condemn or complain. (2) Give honest and sincere appreciation. (3) Arouse in the other person an eager want.

There are 6 ways to make people like you: (1) Become genuinely interested in other people. (2) Smile. (3)Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language. (4) Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. (5) Talk in terms of the other person’s interests. (6) Make the other person feel important — and do it sincerely.

There are 12 ways to win people to your way of thinking: (1) The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it. (2) Show respect for the other person’s opinions. Never say, “You’re wrong.” (3) If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically. (4) Begin in a friendly way. (5) Get the other person saying “yes” immediately. (6) Let the other person do a great deal of the talking. (7) Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers. (8) Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view. (9) Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires. (10) Appeal to the nobler motives. (11) Dramatize your ideas. (12) Throw down a challenge.

And finally, there are 9 techniques to be a good leader: (1) Begin with praise and honest appreciation. (2) Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly. (3) Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person. (4) Ask questions instead of giving direct orders. (5) Let the other person save face. (6) Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be “hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.” (7) Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to. (8) Make the fault seem easy to correct. Use encouragement. (9) Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.

6. Getting Things Done

David Allen

Here are things I learned in from Getting Things Done that I still apply every single day:

1. Add everything to inboxes (except tasks that take under a minute — do those tasks immediately)
2. Keep the number of inboxes to minimum
3. Keep your inboxes empty (review and clean them periodically)

Once you do these 3 things, things don’t fall apart. I keep my email inboxes always empty, except one where I keep longer term todos and I review them weekly.

The only problem with getting really good at cleaning your inboxes is that it might turn out to be a too satisfying job. You might lose your sight at long term stuff. Sometimes, I come at work, reply emails all day long and then go home. It feels like I have accomplished nothing. The solution is to say “No” to many things, delegate as much as possible and spare blocks of time to your long term goals.

7. The War of Art

Steven Pressfield

The War of Art is the best motivational book you will ever read.

I have one copy of this book on my kindle and one audiobook version on my ipad. When I feel like not working, I will randomly start listening a chapter of it and in less than 5 minutes and I am fired up and I am back to work. I even used this technique while trying to finish this painfully long post you are reading right now. Even thinking about this book makes me more productive!

Creative endeavors such as writing, drawing, composing, programming requires being in a creative state of mind. It is really hard to get into the creative state. There are so many forces that stop us going into a creative state. These forces are called “Resistance” and they are all around us.

To overcome Resistance we must constantly fight it. We must give it a personality, think it as a sneaky enemy and be aware of it when it strikes us.

Do The Work is a follow up by the author. It is short but pretty good.

8. Mastery

Mastery is a collection of biographies of successful people. It has stories about DaVinci, Darwin, Mozart, Proust, Goethe, Wright Brothers, Einstein and many more.

Mastery is not only about stories, but also about strategies. What strategies should you follow to reach mastery? How can you become #1 in your field?

Find your calling. If you do not have a natural talent for what you are doing, it is impossible become a master. You can be good at it, but being a master requires a powerful passion about your field. That’s how you go through years of hardship. There is cycle of success and motivation. They feed each other.

Become an apprentice. Figuring things out by yourself is the longest road to mastery. The shortcut is to find someone who is already a master and be an apprentice.

Stop yourself when you feel superior. When you feel like you are very good, your development and learning will stop. Never be satisfied with your work. Never be proud. Be humble. Find things in your work and yourself that are inferior. That’s probably why so many successful people has Impostor Syndrome. They are successful because they have an imposter syndrome, not inspite of it.

Once you pay your dues, be bold. First you must pay your dues. If you are a painter you must copy other painters. If you are a scientiest, assist experienced scientists for many years. But, once you reach a ripeness, you must be brave to take next steps and be creative. You will start seeing ideas and opportunities other people don’t. You will find association in ideas others don’t see. Go after them. This is your time.

These are only a few of the many strategies in this book. Each strategy is explained well with real examples from real masters.

9. Fire in the Valley

Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine

You’ve probably never heard of this book but seen its movie: “Pirates of the Silicon Valley”.

Fire in the Valley tells the story of how the personal computing got started.

Learning about the first days of the personal computing is so exciting. Pretty much everything we do today has their roots on those days. For example, if Steve Jobs didn’t saw a mouse prototype on a random visit to Xerox Labs, we would probably be interfacing our computers with a different kind of device.

The most exciting part about this history is that the most important inventions were not made by big companies. They were made by small groups of people who worked in garages. People like us.

10. Peopleware

Tom Demarco & Timothy Lister

Peopleware is a book about managing people and projects in software development. Give people good, clear goals and get out of their way so that they can get done what needs to be done. The manager’s first priority should be to remove the roadblocks, not to give out orders.

Most successful software companies are alike. They give their people responsibilities, get out of their way and let them do their magic.

This book taught me most of the fundementals I know about building successful teams that can create good software. Just like wine, everything I learned from this book gets better with time.

Here are some fundementals I learned in this book: Meetings should be done sparingly; The work environment should be silent; Let developers control their work space; Give developers freedom; Teams should be co-located together in the same space; Do not forget play; Don’t work too many hours; Take your weekends; No deathmarches; No scheduled deadlines; Don’t accept bad quality; There is no silver bullet; Jelled teams work well together; Be open, share good and bad news; Keep the 10x developers.

11. The Mythical Man-Month

Frederick Brooks

Your project is in trouble. You need to speed things up. What do you do? Let’s add more people to the project to speed things up, right?

The answer to this question was given on this book by Frederick Brooks. For obious reasons it is known as Brooks’ Law. It is more popular in software engineering but it applies to pretty much all project management.

The answer is no. The worst thing you can do to a troubled project is to add more people. More people means more communication pathways. The team gets less effctive as the size increases. Adding manpower to a late project makes it even later.

Pretty much all inventions are made by small groups of people. You can see small teams everywhere. Military uses it. Small or large, all successful Intenet companies work in small, efficent and cross-functional teams. That’s also what we do at JotForm.

The best team size is 5–7 people. This is also called the “two pizza” rule: Never have a team where two pizzas couldn’t feed the entire group. When you have more people, split them into separate teams.

12. The Principles of Product Development Flow

Donald G Reinertsen

The Principals of Product Development Flow is one of the secret books that only the best product managers know.

The cover might have a waterfall but the content inside is the anti-thesis of waterfall development. The software industry has lost too many projects, products and customers thanks to the waterfall model. So, what is the anti-thesis of the waterfall model? It is the lean development model, and this is a recipe book on how to do lean iterative development.

Twelve cardinal sins of product development: (1) Failure to correctly quantify economics. (2) Blindness to queues. (3) Worship of efficiency. (4) Hostility to variability. (5) Worship of conformance. (6) Institutionalization of large batch sizes. (7) Underutilization of cadence. (8) Managing timelines instead of queues. (9) Absence of WIP constraints. (10) Inflexibility. (11) Noneconomic flow control. (12) Centralized control.

13. Slack

Tom DeMarco

It is easy to lose sight that the goal is to create great products. What happens on most software development teams is that we lose sight of the forest for the trees.

When you aim for total efficiency (everyone is busy all the time) there can be no spare resources to provide the flexibility that you need in order to do anything creative.

Spare time for (1) learning, (2) activities that jell teams, (3) sharpening our tools, (4) resting, (5) celebration, and (6) being creative. (This list is not from the book, mostly my opinions)

Here are some examples from the JotForm Development Team:

(1) Learning: We are open to using new platforms, programming languages and frameworks. We work from home on wednesdays and (when there is no urgent project going on) we are free to work on our own projects or read books.

(2) Activities that Jell Teams: We will take 3 hour lunch breaks and go biking together. We take week long vacations together and go some place cool.

(3) Sharpening Our Tools: We discuss how to improve the way we work, and constantly improve our tools.

(4) Resting: We don’t work on weekends or at nights.

(5) Celebration: We will occasionally go out drinking to celebrate a milestone or launch.

(6) Being Creative: We are open to new ideas. In fact seek new ideas and discuss them openly. We do day-long and week-long hackathons.

14. The Year Without Pants

Scott Berkun

The Year Without Pants has the worst possible book cover that can happen to a book! This book is the living proof for the theory “Don’t judge a book by its cover”.

The biggest question in my mind these days is how to scale the JotForm Team without losing our culture and effectiveness. In software, when the team size increases the communication and management gets harder. Big teams make bad products.

Scott Berkun’s The Year Without Pants is about remote working on the surface, but I had a completely different takeaway from this book. He spends 1 year working for Wordpress.com and tells it all. What I learned from this book was how to scale a team without increasing the team sizes. The principles apply whether your teams are remote or not.

Wordpress.com consists of dozens of cross-functional teams. Each team is small, consisting of around 5 people. The teams are cross functional. So, a team might contain a manager, frontend programmers, backend programmers and a designer. Each team has a single goal. For example, Scott’s team was the Team Social. They dealt with things like comments on blog posts, social media sharing and making it easier to blog. The team decides what to work on and how to work on it. Because of the small size, it is easier to move fast and build momentum.

Unfortunately, I found no other good books on cross functional teams. There are many companies in Silicon Valley such as Facebook that found success in small cross functional teams. Hopefully, more people will write about this new way of working. Otherwise, I will have to write the book from what we learn at JotForm.

15. Crossing the Chasm

Geoffrey Moore

Crossing the Chasm explains a phenomenon shown on the chart below. There is a gap between the early adopters of any technology and the mass market adoption. Many products and technologies simply fall off this gap and never make it to the other end.

While early adoptors are visionary and enthusiastic. They will get bored quickly and move on. So, you either cross the chasm or you die.

This is why it is dangerous to be the first in a market. Since there is no market for your invention you have to spend so much energy on teaching mainstream people about the market that you might simply run out of fuel.

When you exhaust all of your energies on teaching people about the market, even if you become successful at creating the market, a competitor might pop up and eat your meal.

So, how do you move a product across the gap? The best answer is: don’t. Don’t try to create new markets. Instead, find markets that has just crossed the chasm and go after them. There is going to be enourmous need for your product since a new growing market does not have many competitors.

16. The Innovator’s Dilemma

Clayton M. Christensen

Some techology companies find great margins, dominate markets and get large. The problem with getting too large is that you are now a big hungry beast. You need big markets and big margins.

When a new technology arrives and there are new opportunities on the market. These opportunities might become really big in the future but for now, they are small opportunities with small margins. The big company looks at the opportunity and decides to ignore it. The market is too small for the big hungry beast.

The big company is now very efficent and the metrics are all about the old technology. The new opportunities does not make any sense when you look at them with the big company’s glasses.

This is a great opportunity for the startups. They have an open market and they are not big or hungry like the big hungry beast. They go after the market and as the market grows they grow. At some point, the big hungry beast recognizes its mistake, but it is so large and so slow to change that the game is pretty much over for it.

17. Positioning

Al Ries and Jack Trout

Positioning is one of the most important books of marketing.

What really matters is how your customers perceive your product.

The easiest way of getting into people’s mind is to be the first in a market. People usually remember first movers. Even if the second entrant offers a better product, the first mover has a large advantage that is hard to catch up. If you are a second entrant, it is better to create a new category than to try to convince people that you are better than the existing market leader.
One of the interesting examples in the book was Avis. Instead of saying “we are the best rent a car” they have accepted the status and they have come up with an interesting slogan “Avis in only No. 2 in rent-a-cars, so why go with us? We try harder.”

Trying to change people’s mind is a losing game. If you try to convince them into something they don’t believe in, they will reject you. If you agree with them, they are more likely to trust your words.

Same difficulty applies when you decide to change your own positioning. Do not try to change your positioning. Coca-cola lost market share when they tried to position as a hip new product for young people. It gained market share back when it went back to its roots by positioning itself as “the real thing”.

The book warns against “line extension”. Do not create new products using an existing strong brand name. You will lose your branding and positioning when you extend it with new products. Instead a better way is to create new brands.

18. How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

Scott Adams

Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert comics. In this book he talks about his life story, his beliefs and his success tips.

One common theme in the book is that he prefers “systems” instead of “goals”. Systems are similar to habits. The difference is that habits assume that you must personally build them using your own willpower. A system can include other people or tools.

For example, instead of having a goal of losing 10 pounds, create a system that will make you eat well and exercise. For example, start going to a dietitian, sign up with a diet class or join a amateur sports team.

Goals makes people like losers. Because When you have goals, you are always in a state of failure. What do you do when you reach your goal? You celebrate for a short while and then you set another goal. Goals make you feel like a failure all the time.

When you focus on a goal too much, you might miss opportunities, because you are too much focused on the specific goals. Have a general focus about what you want to do, but do not corner yourself too much.

Scott Adam’s book is full of wisdom. It is also fun to read. You will chuckle in every page.

19. A Guide to the Good Life

Gerald Jay Sussman and Hal Abelson

A Guide to the Good Life is a book about Stoicism. It is written in an unexpectedly clear, every day language from a philosophy book.

The biggest take away from this book is to do “negative visualizations”. Did you ever had a bad dream that was so real that when you wake up you had a hard time believing that is was only a dream. Did you feel great when you recognized that it was only a dream?

When you visualize bad things such as losing someone you love, you recognize how important that person is to you. This helps you be thankful for what you have and work harder to enjoy your time with that person. Negative visualizations also helps you be prepared for bad things. If you visualize being broke when you get old, you might start saving.

Recently, I read a research that found that thinking about death actually makes people more happy. When you think about your own death, you discover how meaningless and small are the problems that worry you every day. It gets you be thankful for what you have got.

Another take away from this book is to only worry about things you can change. There are three types of problems: (1) Things you can’t change, and therefore shouldn’t worry about. (2) Things you can change, and therefore you should. (3) Things you have some control over: Just worry about part of that you can do something about. Here is an example to the third one: When you play tennis, you are probably not be able to become a world champion, but you can still try to play as well as you can.

20. Rocket Surgery Made Easy

Steve Krug

The biggest problem with the software business is that the people who are building things and the people who use those things are not in the same room.

Builders assume the wrong things and build wrong products. Users curse the product or worse feel like it is their fault that they cannot use the damn product.

There is a solution. It is called “usability testing”, and Steve Krug with this amazing book, has given us the recipe on how to do it well.

We have been using this guide for a very long time. In the past, we have been organizing our own usability tests. Inviting people to our office, running user tests with screen recording and all that. Since this is really too time consuming, today, we use services such as Usertesting.com and Open Hallway instead.

Without this short book, JotForm wouldn’t have over a million happy users today.