My favorite summer reads from 2019
Summer of 2019 was a summer of great new opportunities, clarity and purpose for me personally. I got out of a messy relationship (thankfully, not in personal life, my wife and I are still enjoying our marital bliss) — just an experiment with my career that went south. Suffices to say there are things one gets into that don’t quite turn out the way you expected them to be. However, every experiment is a successful experiment if you learn something from it. So, after I was done agonizing over a squandered opportunity and started detoxing myself I looked for some productive things to invest my time in. Luckily, I found and read (actually listened to — on Audible — during my daily walks and at other times too) some great books. These were recommended by (my alma-mater) CMU Alumni peers .
Minor Digression, among other things this summer, I also got invited to join the CMU Tech and Engineering Alumni Slack Channel, which was also a lot of fun. Learning from great achievers on how to become a better professional, life can’t offer better perks than that.
Here are the recommended reads from this summer.
Grit
by Angela Lee Duckworth
The Power of Passion and Perseverance
It is my first and foremost favorite for this summer. The central topic of this book is that Passion and Perseverance are what determine your Grit and Grit is what determines your success in life. This book shows through countless examples how ordinary people like you and I can achieve extraordinary feats by identifying our passions and persevering through challenges to pursue them. This books is divided into three sections — first describes with appropriate examples how Grit can be identified and how one can label behaviors as Gritty or not Gritty, distinguish talent from grit and how it is possible to become gritty over time. You are not necessarily born with it, but you can certainly acquire it and master it with practice. Second and third sections show how to cultivate Grit in yourself and others respectively. A must read for those who don’t naturally understand this concept and gravitate towards early dismissal of their personal interests just because they are not naturally talented in it.
Never Split the Difference
by Chris Voss
Negotiating as if your Life depended on it.
When an FBI Hostage Negotiator speaks about his experience there is very little you can do but listen, intently! This gripping narration of the ideas developed by Chris Voss throughout his career as a top-notch negotiator working at Crisis Negotiation Unit of Quantico, is a page-turner or if you are listening to the Audible version, a binge-worthy listen. There are countless lessons and several learnable skills described in this book — the most vital being how to listen to your counterpart and identify “Black Swans” because the author claims every negotiation has at least three black swans hiding somewhere to be identified by a skilled negotiator, even unknown to the party they are negotiating with. It teaches you that your opponent is not necessarily an enemy. Silence is an extremely powerful tool. And there are no deadlines. This book can be a transformative in several ways, helping you identify your own kinks and become a better negotiator in business situations and other life situations.
Trillion Dollar Coach
by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle
The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell
This book reveals some of the powerful dynamics that transpired behind the scenes of some of mega-successful Silicon Valley Startups, that became world’s most valuable companies and are expected to remain that way for the foreseeable future.
Bill Campbell is regarded as coach for the likes of Eric Schmidt and the rest of the Google Execs. He was a close friend and confidant of Steve Jobs, having served on the Apple’s board during Jobs’s first stint at Apple. The success of Intuit and Kodak in the pre-DSLR is also attributed to him.
This book builds a narrative on top of these great names and shares personal anecdotes as examples demonstrating what a great coach can do for an organization. The key message for me in this book was that one must either be lucky to find a brilliant coach as one of their colleagues or go looking for one in one’s network, so that one can receive timely and personalized advise in a non-judgemental environment.
This book emphasizes the role a coach can play in helping you become a better leader and prevent you from causing major screw-ups as you make critical decisions in your professional life. Additionally, this books teaches you how to be a good coach — which may or not appeal to everyone, because you have to love coaching and mentoring others to become a good coach.
Finally, for you to receive any benefits from coaching, you have the responsibility of staying coachable throughout your life. If you can’t be coached, you won’t receive good advice and even investors would not want to bet their money on you because a good investment is the one that is controllable by the investor. If you can’t be controlled by your investors you won’t be invested in — so staying coachable (which means keeping an open mind, listening actively and weighing team benefits over personal benefits) is absolutely essential to become a successful leader.
The reason this book is at number three for me is that the strategies it offers are not quite as straightforward to implement as they are explained in the examples. There are tons of variables that are not covered in this book, however in combination these three books can be used as a gold mine for building one’s leadership profile incrementally over time.
After nearly 6 months of slogging I had found an opportunity to spend time with my daughter and to reconnect with my friends and family — happy to report that I spent quality time with them over countless moments of hookah-infused* political discussions, arguing over controversial parenting topics and everything else under the sun.
Thanks to my wife, I made some new friends too — and discovered a fabulous part of California — Gualala in Mendocino County. It is a picturesque town embedded along the coastline of California, hidden in plain sight — of breathtaking beauty and calm. I also learned about Abalones, what a big-deal they are in the world of delicate cuisines and how Gualala is one of the most sought after places where you can hunt for Abalones. Believe it or not, you are only allowed to hunt them if you are a sea-diver who can dive without any breathing equipment, holding your breath underwater while you capture your prize. And then there is a limit on how many you can hunt in a season. Yeah! This world is full of surprises.
This summer I have also enjoyed the trails in my neighborhood, taking long walks as I listened to my audiobooks on Audible and learned incredible new ideas for my personal growth and emerging techniques that I can incorporate in my professional life to be more effective.
So, like I said this summer has been ripe with opportunities for personal development, a big part of it was also reading/listening to these great books that I have shared above. I hope you will find them as useful as I did and enjoy reading them as much as I did. Don’t forget to share your feedback. Finally, let me know what you did this summer too.
*, ** Warning: I am not promoting smoking, Cigar and even Hukkah smoking is injurious to health and can cause cancer, so please don’t consider this as an advice for quality time or as a suggested hobby. I chose to be honest in this post but I don’t advocate for any form of smoking as a legitimate pastime.
