2023 Reading List

Books read

• 1. Open by Andre Agassi

”- So I need to tell you, I just need to say before we go any further, that I think you are beautiful. I respect you, I admire you, and I would absolutely love to get to know you better. That’s my goal. That’s my only agenda. That’s where I am. Tell me this is possible. Tell me we can go to dinner.
- No”

• 2. Dopamine Nation by Dr Anna Lembke

“The relentless pursuit of pleasure (and the avoidance of pain) leads to pain”

• 3. Atomic Habits by James Clear

• 4. Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

“The assumption that time is something we can possess or control is the unspoken premise of almost all our thinking about the future, our planning and goal-setting and worrying. So it’s a constant source of anxiety and agitation, because our expectations are forever running up against the stubborn reality that time isn’t in our possession and can’t be brought under our control. Whatever you value most about your life can always be traced back to some jumble of chance occurrences you couldn’t possibly have planned for.”

• 5. Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff by Richard Carlson

“Maybe so… maybe not!”

• 6. Change your life in 7 days by Paul McKenna

“You are constantly letting other people know how to treat you by the way you treat yourself.”

• 7. Five Steps to Happiness by Enda Murphy

“The skill of a happy life is in learning how to cope with the instability, uncertainty, insecurity and disorder of life without getting anxious. We need to accept being discontent in lesser things in oder to be content in greater things.”

• 8. 12 Rules for Life by Dr Jordan B Peterson

“It is not virtuous to be victimised by a bully, even if that bully is oneself. To treat yourself as if you were someone you are responsible for helping is, instead, to consider what would be truly good for you. This is not ‘what you want’. It is also not ‘what would make you happy’. ‘Happy’ is by no means synonymous with ‘good’.”

• 9. Self-Acceptance by Dr Harry Barry

“One of the short cuts to developing unconditional self-acceptance, especially if you are a low self-rater, is to challenge your internal critic. It is difficult to challenge it in your emotional mind. But on writing down its comments on paper, your logical mind can now challenge the contents.”

• 10. How to Fail by Elisabeth Day

“For the first time in my life, I had to learn that rejection was not necessarily a personal indictment of who I was, but a result of the infinite nuances of what the other person was going through, which in turn was the consequence of an intricate chain of events, shaped by their own experiences and their own family dynamics and past relationships, that had literally nothing to do with me.”

• 11. The subltle art of not giving a f*ck by Mark Manson

“They say that a butterfly flapping its wings in Africa can cause a hurricane in Florida; well, what hurricanes will you leave in your wake?”

• 12. The Rules of Management by Richard Templar

• 13. Change your Posture, Change your Life by Richard Brennan

“You can see happiness in people’s posture, and you can also see depression and sadness and unhappiness in their posture too. Change the posture by changing the way you use yourself, and you change the state of mind; change the way you think, and you change your life.”

• 14. A Survival Guide for Life by Bear Grylls

“But when I reached the end checkpoint I was told I had been failed - I had been too slow. I was sent off to make camp in the woods and rest for the night. That night in those woods, warm and dry under my shelter, blisters attended to, dry socks on, and out of the wind and rain, I learnt an enduring lesson: warm and dry doesn’t mean fulfilled and happy. Never has anyone wanted to be cold, wet and tired as much as I did right then. And never have the comforts of shelter and food meant so little to me. Being dry and warm in life, but with no purpose, is no consolation for being in the heat of the arena in pursuit of your goals.”

• 15. Gravitas by Garoline Goyder

• 16. How to Say It: Words that Make a difference by Allison Friederichs Atkinson

• 17. The Introvert’s Edge to Networking by Matthew Pollard

“If you hate what you do, no amount of networking strategy and insights are going to make up for the fact that you fundamentally don’t want to be doing what you’re doing, working toward a goal you don’t really want, meeting people you don’t really care to know. Networking success starts with finding what sparks excitement in you, then connecting it with what you currently do or want to be doing. If you have that—if you’re networking from a place of passion—you’re already miles ahead of your competition.”

• 18. Finding your Purpose by Christine Whelan

“Because I value V1, V2, and V3, I will use my gifts/skills for S1, S2, and S3, to make a positive impact on G1, G2, and G3. I accept my fears and anxieties about F1, F2, and F3, and still today make conscious purpose-based commitments to C1, C2, and C3”

• 19. 8 Rules of Love by Jay Shetty

• 20. The End of the World is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan

• 21. Why has nobody told me this before by Dr Julie Smith

“Thoughts are not facts. They are guesses, stories, memories, ideas, and theories. They are a construct offered to you by your brain as one potential explanation for the sensations you are experiencing right now. They are so heavily influenced by your physical state, by each of your senses, and by your memories of past experience. Emotions are real and valid, but they are not facts.”

• 22. Outlive by Dr Peter Attia

“Longevity was basically an engineering problem, or so I thought. What I eventually realised is that longevity is meaningless if your life sucks, or if your relationships suck. Your resume doesn’t really matter either when it comes time for your eulogy. I wanted to live longer only because deep down I knew I needed more runway to try to make things right.”

• 23. Breath by James Nestor

“That 30lb of air that passes through our lungs every day, and that 1.7lb of oxygen ourselves consume is as important as what we eat or how much we exercise. Breathing is a missing pillar of health.”

• 24. Essentials of Social Psychology by Dr Wind Goodfriend

“If you are proud of your group, you display your group membership publicly for all to see. If your group didn’t do well, you now need to protect your self-esteem by distancing yourself from the group. It seems to be almost an automatic tendency to embrace or distance ourselves from things that boost or hurt our self-esteem respectively.”

• 25. The Science of Love by Dr Wind Goodfriend

“People with growth beliefs when it comes to love believe that successful relationships evolve from the resolution of risks, challenges, and difficulties, rather than their absence.”

• 26. The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

“People tend to want wealth to signal to others that they should be liked and admired. But in reality those other people often bypass admiring you, not because they don’t think wealth is admirable, but because they use your wealth as a benchmark for their own desire to be liked and admired. If respect and admiration are your goal, be careful how you seek it. Humility, kindness, and empathy will bring you more respect than horsepower ever will.”

• 27. The Power of Regret by Daniel H Pink

“The consequences of actions are specific, concrete, and limited. The consequences of inaction are general, abstract, and unbounded. Inactions incubate endless speculations.”

• 28. Lost Connections by Johann Hari

“Depression isn’t a disease. Depression is a normal response to abnormal life experiences.”

• 29. We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland by Fintan O’Toole

“The fear that stalked so many Irish artists and intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s – that Ireland would disappear as a distinctive cultural space – was misplaced. In 1958, and for many decades afterwards, there was this sense that, if it did not pretend to know itself thoroughly and absolutely, Ireland would not exist at all. Perhaps we are learning to live without being so defined. Maybe Ireland has reached the point of accepting that half-knowledge is better than the swinging between the pretence of knowing everything and the denial of what you really do know. Now, it is a more positive idea: there need not be a single, knowable future.”

• 30. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it - Alan Key”
“If he knew for sure a course of action was right, he was unstoppable. But if he had doubts, he sometimes withdrew, preferring not to think about things that did not perfectly suit him”
“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do”
“People who know what they’re talking about don’t need Power Point”
“Our goal is not just to make money, but to make great products”
“The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind”
“If you don’t love something, you are not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much”
“Nobody is eager for a lecture, but everybody loves a story”
“The innovator’s dilemma - people who invent something are usually the last ones to see past it”
“If you want to allow your products to be open to other hardware or software, you have to give up some of your vision”
“The company does a great job, innovates, and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they are the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the sales people end up running the company”
“If you are not busy being born, you are busy dying - Bob Dylan”

• 31. The 6 Habits of Growth by Brendon Burchard

“Your present circumstances aren’t a cage. The only cage is in your mind.” ; “One of the most powerful things you will do in your entire lifetime is to determine your own worth by yourself.”
“Self-doubt is not a signal to stop, it is a signal to learn.”

• 32. Science of Friendship by Kyler Shumway

“If you met your soulmate for the first time today, would they want to be with you? What I didn’t know then, that I know, is that the thing that needed to change was not, in fact, my appearance, or my charm. Instead, what needed to change was the anticipation of rejection. I believed that my soulmate would not accept me for who I was, because I did not accept myself.”

• 33. Power Moves: Lessons from Davos by Adam Grant

“Gaining influence and authority frees us up to show our true colours, to act on our real wishes. It releases us from the shackles of social pressure. Power disinhibits us - it’s like an amplifier. Whoever we were before comes out louder. Nothing discloses real character like the use of power. If you wish to know what a man really is, give them power.”

• 34. Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey

“We don’t live longer when we try not to die, we live longer when we’re too busy living.”

• 35. Oversubscribed by Daniel Priestley

“People don’t buy what others want to sell, they buy what others want to buy.”

• 36. Glucose Revolution by Jessie Inchauspe

“If you eat the items of a meal containing starch, fiber, sugar, protein, and fat in a specific order, you reduce your overall glucose spike by 73%, as well as your insulin spike by 48%.”

• 37. Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton

“To choose to love is to take a risk. Always. That’s why it’s called falling. A much underrated and incredibly simple considering factor when it comes to choosing a partner is how much you love their company.”

• 38. Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggings

“The kid I always judged so harshly didn’t lie and cheat to hurt anyone’s feelings. He did it for acceptance. He broke the rules because he didn’t have the tools to compete. He did it because he needed friends. Instead of coming down on that kid for one more second, instead of chastising my younger self, I understood him for the first time. I lived in fear and doubt, terrified of being a nobody and contributing nothing. I judged myself constantly, and I judged everyone else too.”

• 39. Ultra-Processed People by Chris Van Tulleken

“UPF is, in general, soft. This means you eat it fast, which means you eat far more calories per minute, and you don’t feel full until long after you finished. It also potentially reduces facial bone size and bone density, leading to dental problems. Second, UPF typically has a very high calorie density because it is dry, and high in fat and sugar, and low in fiber, so you get more calories per mouthful. Third, it displaces diverse whole foods from the diet, especially among low income groups. An UPF itself is often micronutrient deficient, which may also contribute to excess consumption. Fourth, those mismatches between taste signals from the mouth, and the nutrition content that arrives in the gut alters metabolism and appetite in ways that we are only beginning to understand, but that seem to drive excess consumption. Fifth, UPF is addictive, meaning that for some people, binges are unavoidable. Sixth, the emulsifiers, preservatives, modified starches and other additives damage our microbiomes, allowing inflamatory bacteria to flourish, and causing our guts to leak. Seventh, the convenience, price, and marketing of UPF urges us to eat constantly and without fault, which leads to more snacking, less chewing, faster eating, and increased consumption and tooth decay. Eighth, the additives and physical processing mean that UPF affect our satiety system directly, and other additives may affect brain and endocrine function, and plastics from the packaging might affect fertility. And ninth, the production methods used to make UPF require expensive subsidy, and drive environmental destruction, carbon emissions, and plastic pollution, which harms us all.”

• 40. How to Own the Room by Viv Groskop

“Putting yourself in low pressure situations where you can rehearse improvisation and making it up as you go along is the only thing that will prepare you for real leadership. Don’t wait until you are ready, do it when you are not ready.”

• 41.What They Don’t Teach You About Money by Claer Barrett

“What does financial independence really mean? Ultimately it is about finding a balance between these three things. #1: time spent adding money, and finding meaningful work that engages you, although this may not be the highest paid option. #2: spending your money on things and with people that you love. And #3: being able to put something aside for tomorrow.”

• 42.The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse by Charlie Mackesy

“One of our greatest freedoms is how we react to things. Isn’t it odd. We can only see our outsides, but nearly everything happens on the inside.”