RECOMMENDED READING 2020
2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021
As the year begins, I double down on knowledge.
This year I wish myself and everyone I know 100x growth all round.
To get there requires the right relationships and knowledge.
What You Do is Who You Are by Ben Horowitz
To Horowitz, culture is how a company makes decisions. It is the set of assumptions employees use to resolve everyday problems: should I stay at the Red Roof Inn, or the Four Seasons? Should we discuss the color of this product for five minutes or thirty hours? If culture is not purposeful, it will be an accident or a mistake.
What You Do Is Who You Are explains how to make your culture purposeful by spotlighting four models of leadership and culture-building―the leader of the only successful slave revolt, Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture; the Samurai, who ruled Japan for seven hundred years and shaped modern Japanese culture; Genghis Khan, who built the world’s largest empire; and Shaka Senghor, a man convicted of murder who ran the most formidable prison gang in the yard and ultimately transformed prison culture.
God is a Matchmaker: Seven Biblical Principles for Finding Your Mate by Derek and Ruth Prince
Derek and his wife, Ruth, reveal God’s true plan for you and your future spouse. In addition to sharing their own real-life love story, Derek lays out seven biblical steps to finding your mate. He will also help you answer tough questions, such as
· How can I know if it is God’s will for me to marry?
· How can I prepare myself for marriage?
· How can I find the mate God has appointed for me?
· What is God’s plan for remarriage?
Hard Thing About The Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz
While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. Ben Horowitz analyzes the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights he’s gained developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies. A lifelong rap fanatic, he amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favourite songs, telling it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in.
Filled with his trademark humour and straight talk, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz’s personal and often humbling experiences.
How to Win Friends and Influence People
My most favourite book on human relations.
A consistent annual read for me.
I even want to make it a quarterly read.
The Act of Marriage | Tim & Beverly LaHaye
Tim LaHaye is popular for his book, “Why We Act The Way We Do”.
He is joined in writing this by his wife, Beverly.
And they did a fantastic job.
This particular book is about marriage and delves into some detail around the place of sex in the marriage.
They answer a lot of questions Christian might have about bedroom activities :)
I listened to this on Audible, unfortunately, I don’t have a copy of the ebook to share.
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World — David Epstein
TL;DR
Don’t always overspecialize.
Rather focus on skills that are transferrable from one career to another.
Provocative, rigorous, and engrossing, Range makes a compelling case for actively cultivating inefficiency. Failing a test is the best way to learn. Frequent quitters end up with the most fulfilling careers. The most impactful inventors cross domains rather than deepening their knowledge in a single area. As experts silo themselves further while computers master more of the skills once reserved for highly focused humans, people who think broadly and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives will increasingly thrive.
The Compound Effect — Darren Hardy
No gimmicks. No Hyperbole. No Magic Bullet. The Compound Effect is a distillation of the fundamental principles that have guided the most phenomenal achievements in business, relationships, and beyond. This easy-to-use, step-by-step operating system allows you to multiply your success, chart your progress, and achieve any desire.
If you’re serious about living an extraordinary life, use the power of The Compound Effect to create the success you want. You will find strategies including:
Things I Wish I’d Known Before We Got Married Paperback — Gary Chapman
“Most people spend far more time in preparation for their vocation than they do in preparation for marriage,” No wonder the divorce rate hovers around fifty per cent.
Bestselling author and marriage counsellor, Gary Chapman, hopes to change that with his newest book. Gary, with more than 35 years of counselling couples, believes that divorce is the lack of preparation for marriage and the failure to learn the skills of working together as intimate teammates.
There just isn’t enough time for everything on our ‘To Do’ list — and there never will be. Successful people don’t try to do everything. They learn to focus on the most important tasks and make sure they get done.
There’s an old saying that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that it’s probably the worst thing you’ll do all day. Using ‘eat that frog’ as a metaphor for tackling the most challenging task of your day — the one you are most likely to procrastinate on, but also probably the one that can have the greatest positive impact on your life — Eat That Frog! shows you how to zero in on these critical tasks and organize your day. You’ll not only get more done faster, but get the right things done.
The Purpose and Power of Love & Marriage: Dr Miles Munroe
Probably no other dimension of human experience has been pondered, discussed, debated, analyzed, and dreamed about more than the nature of true love. Yet, for all our thinking and talking, where can we turn for genuine insight in matters of true love?
Dr. Myles Munroe provides answers to the questions surrounding the true nature of love as he exposes the false images created in our culture. He shares practical and realistic truths that will enable you to discover and experience love for God, for yourself, for your mate, and for those around you.
Bill Gates named Shoe Dog one of his five favorite books of 2016 and called it “an amazing tale, a refreshingly honest reminder of what the path to business success really looks like. It’s a messy, perilous, and chaotic journey, riddled with mistakes, endless struggles, and sacrifice. Phil Knight opens up in ways few CEOs are willing to do.”
Fresh out of business school, Phil Knight borrowed fifty dollars from his father and launched a company with one simple mission: import high-quality, low-cost running shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the trunk of his car in 1963, Knight grossed eight thousand dollars that first year. Today, Nike’s annual sales top $30 billion. In this age of start-ups, Knight’s Nike is the gold standard, and its swoosh is one of the few icons instantly recognized in every corner of the world.
The Everything Store: Brad Stone
Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn’t content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that’s never been cracked. Until now. Brad Stone enjoyed unprecedented access to current and former Amazon employees and Bezos family members, giving readers the first in-depth, fly-on-the-wall account of life at Amazon. Compared to tech’s other elite innovators — Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg — Bezos is a private man. But he stands out for his restless pursuit of new markets, leading Amazon into risky new ventures like the Kindle and cloud computing, and transforming retail in the same way Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing.
The Everything Store is the revealing, definitive biography of the company that placed one of the first and largest bets on the Internet and forever changed the way we shop and read.
Love & Respect: Emerson Eggerichs
Why does communication between couples remain the number one marriage issue? “Because,” says Dr. Emerson Eggerichs, “most spouses don’t know that they speak two different languages. They are sending each other messages in ‘code,’ but they won’t crack that code until they see that she listens to hear the language of love and he listens to hear the language of respect.”
Dr. Eggerichs’ best-selling book, Love & Respect, launched a revolution in how couples relate to each other. In The Language of Love & Respect, he presents a practical, step-by-step approach for how husbands and wives can learn to speak each other’s distinctly different language — respect for him, love for her. The result is mutual understanding and a successful, happy marriage.
The Book of Five Rings is one of the most insightful texts on the subtle arts of confrontation and victory to emerge from Asian culture. Written not only for martial artists but for anyone who wants to apply the timeless principles of this text to their life, the book analyzes the process of struggle and mastery over conflict that underlies every level of human interaction.
The Book of Five Rings was composed in 1643 by the famed duelist and undefeated samurai Miyamoto Musashi. Thomas Cleary’s translation is immediately accessible, with an introduction that presents the spiritual background of the warrior tradition. Along with Musashi’s text, Cleary translates here another important Japanese classic on leadership and strategy, The Book of Family Traditions on the Art of War by Yagyu Munenori, which highlights the ethical and spiritual insights of Taoism and Zen as they apply to the way of the warrior.
Behind the Clouds: Marc Benioff
How did salesforce.com grow from a start up in a rented apartment into the world’s fastest growing software company in less than a decade? For the first time, Marc Benioff, the visionary founder, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, tells how he and his team created and used new business, technology, and philanthropic models tailored to this time of extraordinary change. Showing how salesforce.com not only survived the dotcom implosion of 2001, but went on to define itself as the leader of the cloud computing revolution and spark a $46-billion dollar industry, Benioff’s story will help business leaders and entrepreneurs stand out, innovate better, and grow faster in any economic climate.
In Behind the Cloud, Benioff shares the strategies that have inspired employees, turned customers into evangelists, leveraged an ecosystem of partners, and allowed innovation to flourish.
“The most enrapturing book about Silicon Valley drama since Hatching Twitter” (Fortune), No Filter “pairs phenomenal in-depth reporting with explosive storytelling that gets to the heart of how Instagram has shaped our lives, whether you use the app or not” (The New York Times).
In 2010, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger released a photo-sharing app called Instagram, with one simple but irresistible feature: it would make anything you captured look more beautiful. The cofounders cultivated a community of photographers and artisans around the app, and it quickly went mainstream. In less than two years, it caught Facebook’s attention: Mark Zuckerberg bought the company for a historic $1 billion when Instagram had only thirteen employees.
From Impossible to Inevitable: Aaron Ross & Jason Lemkin
“This book makes very clear how to get to hyper-growth and the work needed to actually get there”
Why are you struggling to grow your business when everyone else seems to be crushing their goals? If you needed to triple revenue within the next three years, would you know exactly how to do it? Doubling the size of your business, tripling it, even growing ten times larger isn’t about magic. It’s not about privileges, luck, or working harder. There’s a template that the world’s fastest-growing companies follow to achieve and sustain much, much faster growth.
From Impossible to Inevitable details the hypergrowth playbook of companies like Hubspot, Salesforce.com (the fastest growing multibillion-dollar software company), and EchoSign―aka Adobe Document Services (which catapulted from $0 to $144 million in seven years). Whether you have a $1 billion or a $100,000 business, you can use the same insights as these notable companies to learn what it really takes to break your own revenue records.
No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving — every day. James Clear, one of the world’s leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results.
If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don’t want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Here, you’ll get a proven system that can take you to new heights.
In AI Superpowers, Kai-fu Lee argues powerfully that because of these unprecedented developments in AI, dramatic changes will be happening much sooner than many of us expected. Indeed, as the US-Sino AI competition begins to heat up, Lee urges the US and China to both accept and to embrace the great responsibilities that come with significant technological power. Most experts already say that AI will have a devastating impact on blue-collar jobs. But Lee predicts that Chinese and American AI will have a strong impact on white-collar jobs as well. Is universal basic income the solution? In Lee’s opinion, probably not. But he provides a clear description of which jobs will be affected and how soon, which jobs can be enhanced with AI, and most importantly, how we can provide solutions to some of the most profound changes in human history that are coming soon.
Fourth Dimension: Dr David Yonggi Cho
We live in a three–dimensional world, but in God¿s kingdom there is a fourth dimension. It is entered only by faith. Once entered, there is found vast and sweeping provisions and spiritual equipment for God¿s work and personal development and growth. The fourth dimension is a new world of answered prayer that is discovered by only those hungry to experience the power and might of God in their lives and ministries. This best–selling book reveals the underlying principles for answered prayer, church renewal, and personal growth. These principles were developed and proven time and again by the pastor of the world¿s largest church in Seoul, Korea.
Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years — as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues — Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.
At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.
“We spend more time working than doing anything else in life. It’s not right that the experience of work should be so demotivating and dehumanizing.” So says Laszlo Bock, former head of People Operations at the company that transformed how the world interacts with knowledge.
This insight is the heart of Work Rules!, a compelling and surprisingly playful manifesto that offers lessons including:
- Take away managers’ power over employees
- Learn from your best employees-and your worst
- Hire only people who are smarter than you are, no matter how long it takes to find them
- Pay unfairly (it’s more fair!)
- Don’t trust your gut: Use data to predict and shape the future
- Default to open-be transparent and welcome feedback
- If you’re comfortable with the amount of freedom you’ve given your employees, you haven’t gone far enough.
Team of Teams General Stanley McChrystal
When General Stanley McChrystal took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in 2004, he quickly realized that conventional military tactics were failing. Al Qaeda in Iraq was a decentralized network that could move quickly, strike ruthlessly, then seemingly vanish into the local population. The allied forces had a huge advantage in numbers, equipment, and training — but none of that seemed to matter. To defeat Al Qaeda, they would have to combine the power of the world’s mightiest military with the agility of the world’s most fearsome terrorist network. They would have to become a “team of teams” — faster, flatter, and more flexible than ever.
In Team of Teams, McChrystal and his colleagues show how the challenges they faced in Iraq can be relevant to countless businesses, nonprofits, and organizations today. In periods of unprecedented crisis, leaders need practical management practices that can scale to thousands of people — and fast. By giving small groups the freedom to experiment and share what they learn across the entire organization, teams can respond more quickly, communicate more freely, and make better and faster decisions.
Packed with more than 20 case studies, Lean B2B consolidates the best thinking around Business-to-Business (B2B) Customer Development to help entrepreneurs focus on the right actions each step of the way, leaving as little as possible to luck.
The book helps:
- Assess the market potential of opportunities to find the right opportunity for your team
- Find early adopters, quickly establish credibility and convince business stakeholders to work with you
- Find and prioritize business problems in corporations and identify the stakeholders with the power to influence a purchase decision
- Create a minimum viable product and a compelling offer, validate a solution and evaluate whether your team has found product-market fit
- Identify and avoid common challenges faced by entrepreneurs and learn ninja techniques to speed up product-market validation
Most people think success comes from good luck or enormous talent, but many successful people achieve their accomplishments in a simpler way: through self-discipline. No Excuses! shows you how you can achieve success in all three major areas of your life, including your personal goals, business and money goals, and overall happiness.
Each of the 21 chapters in this book shows you how to be more disciplined in one aspect of your life, with end-of-chapter exercises to help you apply the “no excuses” approach to your own life. With these guidelines, you can learn how to be more successful in everything you do — instead of wistfully envying others you think are just “luckier” than you. A little self-discipline goes a long way — so stop making excuses and read this book!
Silicon Valley has been birthing renegade technology companies for the better part of a century, a storied lineage that traces from Stanford’s Fred Terman to the Varian brothers’ Klystron amplifier, from the hallowed garage of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard to the bold “traitorous eight” who fled Shockley Labs to form Fairchild Semiconductor. These companies, to be sure, broke new science and engineering ground — yet their most lasting legacy may well be their pioneering approach to the business itself. They blazed a path that led to Intel, Apple, Oracle, Genentech, Gilead, Sun, Adobe, Cisco, Yahoo, eBay, Google, Salesforce, Facebook, Twitter, and many, many others.
What causes a fledgeling company to break through and prosper? At the highest level, the blueprint is always the same: An upstart team with outsized ambition somehow possesses an uncanny ability to surpass customer expectations, upend whole industries, and topple incumbents. But how do they do it? If only we could observe the behaviours of such a company from the inside. If only we were granted a first-person perspective at a present-day Silicon Valley startup-cum-blockbuster. What might we learn? This document — the story of Data Domain’s rise from zero to one billion dollars in revenue — is your invitation to find out.
7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Stephen Covey
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has captivated readers for 25 years. It has transformed the lives of Presidents and CEOs, educators, parents, and students — in short, millions of people of all ages and occupations have benefited from Dr. Covey’s 7 Habits book. And, it can transform you.
Infographics Edition: Stephen Covey’s cherished classic commemorates the timeless wisdom and power of the 7 Habits book and does it in a highly readable and understandable, infographics format.
The Innovators Solution: Clayton Christensen
In The Innovator’s Solution, Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor expand on the idea of disruption, explaining how companies can and should become disruptors themselves. This classic work shows just how timely and relevant these ideas continue to be in today’s hyper-accelerated business environment.
Christensen and Raynor give advice on the business decisions crucial to achieving truly disruptive growth and propose guidelines for developing your own disruptive growth engine. The authors identify the forces that cause managers to make bad decisions as they package and shape new ideas — and offer new frameworks to help create the right conditions, at the right time, for a disruption to succeed. This is a must-read for all senior managers and business leaders responsible for innovation and growth, as well as members of their teams.
In 2009, Simon Sinek started a movement to help people become more inspired at work, and in turn, inspire their colleagues and customers. Since then, millions have been touched by the power of his ideas, including more than 28 million who’ve watched his TED Talk based on START WITH WHY — the third most popular TED video of all time.
START WITH WHY shows that the leaders who’ve had the greatest influence in the world all think, act, and communicate the same way — and it’s the opposite of what everyone else does. Sinek calls this powerful idea The Golden Circle, and it provides a framework upon which organizations can be built, movements can be led, and people can be inspired. And it all starts with WHY.
Boundaries in Marriage: John Townsend
Learn when to say yes and when to say no — to your spouse and to others — to make the most of your marriage
Only when a husband and wife know and respect each other’s needs, choices, and freedom can they give themselves freely and lovingly to one another. Boundaries are the “property lines” that define and protect husbands and wives as individuals. Once they are in place, a good marriage can become better, and a less-than-satisfying one can even be saved.
Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend, counsellors and authors of the award-winning bestseller Boundaries, show couples how to apply the 10 laws of boundaries that can make a real difference in relationships.
The Righteous Mind: Jonathan Haidt
Drawing on his twenty-five years of groundbreaking research on moral psychology, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt shows how moral judgments arise not from reason but from gut feelings. He shows why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have such different intuitions about right and wrong, and he shows why each side is actually right about many of its central concerns.
In this subtle yet accessible book, Haidt gives you the key to understanding the miracle of human cooperation, as well as the curse of our eternal divisions and conflicts. If you’re ready to trade in anger for understanding, read The Righteous Mind.
“Originals is one of the most important and captivating books I have ever read, full of surprising and powerful ideas. It will not only change the way you see the world; it might just change the way you live your life. And it could very well inspire you to change your world.” — Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook and author of Lean In
With Give and Take, Adam Grant not only introduced a landmark new paradigm for success but also established himself as one of his generation’s most compelling and provocative thought leaders. In Originals, he again addresses the challenge of improving the world, but now from the perspective of becoming original: choosing to champion novel ideas and values that go against the grain, battle conformity, and buck outdated traditions. How can we originate new ideas, policies, and practices without risking it all?
The Rational Optimist: Matt Ridley
“Ridley writes with panache, wit, and humour and displays remarkable ingenuity in finding ways to present complicated materials for the lay reader.” — Los Angeles Times
In a bold and provocative interpretation of economic history, Matt Ridley, the New York Times bestselling author of Genome and The Red Queen, makes the case for the economics of hope, arguing that the benefits of commerce, technology, innovation, and change — what Ridley calls cultural evolution — will inevitably increase human prosperity. Fans of the works of Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel), Niall Ferguson (The Ascent of Money), and Thomas Friedman (The World Is Flat) will find much to ponder and enjoy in The Rational Optimist.
Billion Dollar Loser: Reeves Wiedman
In its earliest days, WeWork promised the impossible: to make the American workplace cool. Adam Neumann, an immigrant determined to make his fortune in the United States, landed on the idea of repurposing surplus New York office space for the burgeoning freelance class. Over the course of ten years, WeWork attracted billions of dollars from some of the most sought-after investors in the world, while spending it to build a global real estate empire that he insisted was much more than that: an organization that aspired to nothing less than “elevating the world’s consciousness.”
Moving between New York real estate, Silicon Valley venture capital, and the very specific force field of spirituality and ambition erected by Adam Neumann himself, Billion Dollar Loser lays bare the internal drama inside WeWork. Based on more than two hundred interviews, this book chronicles the breakneck speed at which WeWork’s CEO built and grew his company along with Neumann’s relationship to a world of investors, including Masayoshi Son of Softbank, who fueled its chaotic expansion into everything from apartment buildings to elementary schools.
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