2024 Reading List

Books read

• 1. Entrepreneur Revolution by Daniel Priestley

“You will probably just spend a whole lifetime making sacrifices, and then get resentful that you’re too old to do the things that really matter to you. If you continue to sacrifice, you will probably realise after it’s too late that a great life is made up of great days. New idea: there is no payday, there is just life.”

• 2.$100M Offers by Alex Hormozi

“As Dr Burgelman, a famous Stanford business school professor said, it is far better to understand why you failed than to be ignorant of why you succeeded.”

• 3. Six Sales Skills Everyone Should Know by Stefanie Boyer

“You can ask leading questions, like ‘What happened in your day today that was surprising?’ or other open-ended questions to understand what happened in a situation. Too often, we get vague answers because our questions aren’t as thoughtful or as probing as they could be.”

• 4. The Art of War by Sun Tzu

””

• 5. The Ride of a Lifetime by Robert Iger

“I can’t do anything about the past. We can talk about lessons learnt, and we can make sure we apply those lessons going forward, but we don’t get any do-overs. You want to know where I am taking this company, not where it’s been. Here’s my plan.”

• 6. Start with Why by Simon Sinek

“When you compete against everyone else, no one wants to help you. But when you compete against yourself, everyone wants to help you.”

• 7. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

“We have the capacity to build almost anything we can imagine. The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built? As Peter Drucker said, ‘There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.’”

• 8. Conversationally Speaking by Alan Garner

“Shaking hands. Your posture. Facial expressions. Your appearance. Voice tone. Hair style. Your clothes. The expression in your eyes. Your smile. How close you stand to others. How you listen. Your confidence. Your breathing. The way you move. The way you stand. How you touch other people. These aspects of you affect your relationship with other people, often without you and them realising it. The body talks. Its message is how you really are, not how you think you are.”

• 9. Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss

“As you try to insert the tools of tactical empathy into your daily life, I encourage you to think of them as extensions of natural human interactions, and not artificial conversational tricks. In any interaction it pleases us to feel that the other side is listening and acknowledging our situation, whether you are negotiating a business deal or simply chatting to the person at the supermarket butcher counter, creating an empathetic relationship and encouraging your counterpart to expand on that situation is the basis of healthy human interaction. These tools, then, are nothing less than emotional best practices that help you cure the pervasive ineptitude that marks our most critical conversations in life. They will help you connect and create more meaningful and warm relationships. That they might help you extract what you want is a bonus. Human connection is the first goal.”

• 10. Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson

“You help other people understand you by creating a secure arena for communication—on their terms. Then the listener can use his energy to understand rather than to consciously or unconsciously react to your manner of communicating. All of us need to develop our flexibility and so be able to vary our style of communication, adapting it when we speak to people who are different from us. By adjusting yourself to how other people want to be treated, you become more effective in your communication.”

• 11. The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek

“We are the finite players in the infinite game of life. No matter how much money we make, no matter how much power we accumulate, no matter how many promotions we are given, none of us will ever be declared the winner of life. In the game of life, the only choice we get is if we want to play with a finite mindset or an infinite mindset. If we choose to live our lives with a finite mindset, it means we make our primary purpose to get richer, or promoted faster than others. To live our lives with an infinite mindset means that we are driven to advance a cause bigger than ourselves.”
“True trusting relationships require both parties to take a risk, like dating or making friends. Though one person has to take a first risk to trust, the other person has to reciprocate at some point if the relationship has any chance of succeeding. “

• 12. Dear Dolly by Dolly Alderton

“The last time I was getting over someone, a very wise friend said to me gently: ‘You know, no one should have the power to ruin your life by breaking up with you.’ He was right, of course. If you’re in a relationship where you think your entire purpose or self-esteem is dependent on the fact of the other person loving you for ever, something has gone wrong. My life was never their property to ruin, just as you should never feel like his is yours. Now is the time to be brave and honest. He will find love again, just like you will, and both of you will be grateful that you made the decision to end a relationship that wasn’t right. You are allowing him to find someone to be with who really wants to be with him. One day he’ll know that was the real act of kindness.”

• 13. Stolen Focus by Johann Hari

“We told ourselves that we could have a massive expansion in the amount of information we are exposed to, and the speed with which it hits us, with no cost. This is a delusion. It becomes exhausting. More importantly, what we are sacrificing is depth in all sorts of dimensions. Depth takes time, and depth takes reflection. If you have to keep up with everything, and send emails all the time, there’s no time to reach depth. Depth connected to work in your relationships also takes time, it takes energy, it takes long timespans, and it takes commitment. It takes attention. All of these things that require depth are suffering. It’s pulling us more and more up onto the surface.”

• 14. Bigger Than Us by Fearne Cotton

“Whatever we think, and then believe, is what we create in our life. Often we lose connection to that something bigger by no more than our self-limiting beliefs, and our self-limiting beliefs can only enter the room when love is absent. The law of attraction brings us back to a place where anything is possible, because we believe we are connected to something other than our own minds.”

• 15. Find Your Why by Simon Sinek

“For those who work for an organisation that does not leave you feeling inspired at the beginning and end of every day, you must become the leader you wish you had.”

• 16. The Diary of a CEO by Steven Bartlett

“Being off target by one degree will lead to a plane missing its end destination by one mile for every 60 miles flown. Week after week, my inbox is flooded with messages from individuals who’ve found themselves lost in their careers, their businesses, their relationships, and their friendships. In nearly every instance, it eventually becomes evident that their present circumstances are a consequence of neglecting small things for an extended period of time. They fail to check in with themselves and others, to speak up, to engage in difficult conversations, or to address the seemingly trivial issues in their lives.”

• 17. The Fearless Organization by Amy C. Edmondson

“Stop to consider which mindset is in charge when you’re at work. How often do you find yourself truly playing to win? It can be challenging to make this shift, because when you play not to lose, you’re likely to succeed (in not losing). But you miss opportunities to grow, to innovate, and to experience a deeper sense of fulfillment.”

• 18. The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks

“The pattern was simple: I’d enjoy a period of feeling really good, then do something to mess it up. Here is the problem: I have a limited tolerance for feeling good. When I hit my upper limit, I manufacture thoughts that make me feel bad. I realised that we were only recently evolving the ability to let ourselves feel good and have things go well for any significant period of time.”

• 19. Good vibes, good life by Vex King

“The Universe responds to your vibration. It will return whatever energy you put out.”

• 20. Burnout by Emily Nagoski

“When you are kind and compassionate towards yourself, you increase the kindness and compassion in the world. Being compassionate towards yourself is both the least you can do and the single most important thing you can do to make the world a better place. The cure for burnout is not self-care, it is all of us caring for one another. You don’t have to wait until all your stressors are dealt with before you deal with your stress. You don’t have to wait for the world to be better before you make your life better. And by making your life better, you make the world better.”
“Pay attention to how different it feels to interact with people who treat you with care and generosity, versus people who treat you as if they are entitled to whatever they want from you.”

• 21. Think again by Adam Grant

“Exhausting someone in an argument is not the same as convincing them - Tim Kreider”

• 22. Be useful: Seven tools for life by Arnold Schwarzenegger

“This, I believe, is one of the reasons so many people feel stuck in their lives: they live in a world that they don’t understand. The world is what it is, and they are who they are, and is just something that they have to accept and deal with. Maybe they were born into a life in which others were rich and they were poor, or others were tall, or smart, or physically gifted, and they were just opposite of those things. And no one explained to them that while there are some circumstances you can’t change, there are others that you can change by being curious and by being a sponge, and then using that knowledge you gain to craft the vision for yourself. No one has shown these poor souls that they can make their own fate, that they can change their circumstances so dramatically that it will make the unchangable things irrelevant. Anyone can make their own fate.”

• 23. This is Marketing by Seth Godin

“Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem.”

• 24. Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

“In my experience, creative people discover and realise their visions over time and through dedicated, protracted struggle. In that way, creativity is more like a marathon than a sprint. You have to pace yourself. Just as our directors lack a clear picture of what their embryonic movies will grow up to be, I can’t envision how our technical future will unfold because it doesn’t exist yet. But how do we go about creating the unmade future? I believe that all we can do is foster the optimal conditions in which it can emerge and flourish. This is where real confidence comes in. Not the confidence that we know exactly what to do at all times but the confidence that, together, we will figure it out.”

• 25. Originals by Adam Grant

“Instead of taking the status quo for granted, ask why it exists in the first place.”

• 26. I Found My Tribe by Ruth Fitzmaurice

“We have love in the nucleus of our family, but where do you put roots down with that love? An affordable bigger house in the countryside, or a commutable distant town? Or stay where you know people, in a smaller house bursting at the seams? My friend’s calm cousin cuts through the bullshit: ‘Find your tribe’, she says. Finding your people is more important than what kind of house you live in. Decide whether you’ve found your tribe and go from there. I believe her.”

• 27. Never Finished by David Goggins

“It’s all well and good to have success reach a certain level, but I really don’t give a f*ck what you did yesterday. Maybe you finished Ultraman, or graduated from Harvard. I do not care. Respect is earned every day, by waking up early, challenging yourself with new dreams or digging up old nightmares, and embracing the suck like you have nothing and have never done a damn thing in your life.”

• 28. The Creative Act by Rick Rubin

“It’s not uncommon to long for outward success, hopeful it will fill a void inside ourselves. Some imagine achievement as a remedy to fix or heal a sense of not being enough. Artists who work diligently to accomplish this are rarely prepared for the reality of it. Most aspects of popularity are not as advertised. And artist is just as empty as they were before, probably more so. If you’re living in the belief that success will cure your pain, when the treatment comes and doesn’t work, it can lead to hopelessness. A depression can accompany the realisation that what you’ve spent most of your life chasing hasn’t fixed your insecurities and vulnerabilities. More likely, with stakes and consequences higher now, it has only amplified the pressure. And we are never taught how to handle this epic disappointment.”

• 29. Win Every Argument by Mehdi Hasan

“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are only entitled to what you can argue for.”

• 30. How to Be a Power Connector by Judy Robinett

“If you are not succeeding, you are in the wrong room.”

• 31. Principles by Ray Dalio

“Radical open-mindedness is motivated by the genuine worry that you might not be seeing your choices optimally.”

• 32. The 7 Second CV by James Reed

“Although it would be handy if they did, employers don’t advertise job vacancies so they can pay people salaries, give them careers, and provide them with something interesting and useful to do all day. They do it because they have a collection of tasks and responsibilities that need taking care of. In other words, from an employer’s perspective, a job is a problem to be solved.”

• 33. Why You? by James Reed

“At first glance this appears to be a book about job interviews, but it’s actually about happiness and self-fulfilment. Happiness at work isn’t for someone else - someone more skilled, more polished, or more experienced than you. Everyone can find a fulfilling job.”

• 34. 101 Smart Questions to ask on your interview by Ron Fry

“These questions, by their very nature, proclaim that you are interested. Likewise, the complete lack of questions will undoubtedly convince most interviewers that you are not. Oh, you were interested? You just didn’t have any questions? Sorry, interviewers don’t consider that an option. No questions? No job offer.”

• 35. Life’s Work by James Reed

“Enjoying your work is key to your happiness in life. If you don’t love what you do, you must move on.”

• 36. First Man In by Ant Middleton

“Humans don’t like to be in the dark about things. We hate not knowing what’s behind the door. We like to be able to see the future, to put one foot in front of the other and walk through life steadily, carefully, and predictably. Learning to cope with deep states of doubt has been the journey of my life in the military.”

• 37. The Chimp Paradox by Prof Steve Peters

“It’s not bad, it’s not good, it’s a chimp. It brings every emotion to your world. It can be your best friend and your worst enemy. It is the chimp paradox.”

• 38. Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

“Connectedness is something we must let happen to us. Connecting with others can make us healthier, happier, and more content. Conversations can change our brains, our bodies, and how we experience the world.”

• 39. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

“It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.”
“A- Naturally, the heart is afraid that, in pursuing your dream, you might lose everything you won. S- Well then, why should I listen to my heart? A- Because you will never again be able to keep it quiet. Even if you pretend not to have heard what it tells you, it will always be there inside you, repeating to you what you’re thinking about life and about the world.”
“People need not fear of the unknown if they are capable of achieving what they need and want. We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it’s our life or our possesions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.”
“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”

• 40. Hidden Potential by Adam Grant

“Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life, as by the obstacles overcome while trying to succeed - Booker T. Washington.”
“If you are comfortable, you are doing it wrong.”
“Weak leaders silence voice and shoot the messenger. Strong leaders welcome voice and thank the messenger. Great leaders build systems to amplify voice and elevate the messenger.”
“The impostor syndrome is a paradox: others believe in you, you don’t believe in yourself, yet you believe yourself instead of them. If you doubt yourself, should’t you also doubt your low opinion of yourself?”

• 41. Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

“The relationship between our deeply human sociality and modern digital communication tools is fraught and can produce significant issues in your life if not handled carefully. You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types of rich interactions to which we’ve painstakingly adapted over millennia. Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis. To click Like, within the precise definition of the Information Theory, is literally the least informative type of non-trivial communication, providing only a minimal one bit of information about the state of the sender to the receiver. To replace this rich flow with a single bit is the ultimate insult to our social processing machinery. Don’t click Like, ever.”

• 42. How to Talk to Anyone by Leil Lowndes

“Oh wow, it’s you! Don’t answer the phone with an ‘I’m just so happy all the time’ attitude. Answer warmly, crisply, and professionally. Then, after you hear who is calling, let a huge smile of happiness engulf your entire face and spill over into your voice. You make your caller feel as though your giant warm fuzzy smile is reserved for him or her.”

• 43. Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish

“When you are well positioned, there are many paths to victory. When you are poorly positioned, there may be only one. You can think of this a bit like playing tetris: when you play well, you have many options for where to put the next piece. When you play poorly, you need just the right piece. Ordinary moment determine your position, and your position determines your option. Clear thinking is the key to proper positioning, which is what allows you to master your circumstances, rather than be mastered by them.”

• 44. Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl

“For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.”

• 45. Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferriss

“Most of the time, “What should I do with my life?” is a terrible question. Excellence is the next five minutes. Improvement is the next five minutes. Happiness is the next five minutes.”

• 46. Clean Code by Robert C. Martin

“Consider the following three laws of Test-driven development (TDD):

• You may not write production code until you have written a failing unit test.
• You may not write more of a unit test than is sufficient to fail, and not compiling is failing.
• You may not write more production code than is sufficient to pass the currently failing test.
  Test code must be kept as clean as production code. If you don’t keep your tests clean, you will lose them, and without them, you lose the very thing that keeps your production code flexible. It is unit tests that keep our code flexible, maintainable, and reusable. If you have tests, you do not fear making changes to the code. Without tests, every change is a possible bug.”

• 47. The Clean Coder by Robert C. Martin

“Labourers may be hesitant to say No, but professionals are expected to say No. Indeed, good managers crave someone who has the guts to say No. It’s the only way you can really get anything done.”

• 48. AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor

“We should be far more concerned about what people will do with AI than what AI will do on its own.”

• 49. The Nature of Software Development by Ron Jeffries

“It’s usually not a good idea to start over on some huge part of the product. It might be, but I’d bet it isn’t. It’s usually not a good idea to stop doing features entirely, to “clean up” the code. It might be, but I’d bet it isn’t. What seems to work best is to follow the Campground Rule: Leave the campground a little better than you found it. Every time we do a feature, we start by cleaning up the area where we are going to do the work.”

• 50. Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug

“The belief that most Web users are like us is enough to produce gridlock in the average Web design meeting. But behind that belief lies another one, even more insidious: the belief that most Web users are like anything. The only problem is, there is no Average User. In fact, all of the time I’ve spent watching people use the Web has led me to the opposite conclusion: all web users are unique and all web use is basically idiosyncratic.
There are no simple right answers for most Web design questions. What works is good, integrated design that fills a need—carefully thought out, well executed, and tested.”

• 51. Clean Agile by Robert C. Martin

“Your team should establish the pattern of work compatible with their specific context first, and then consider using tools that support their workflow. Workers use and control tools. Tools don’t control and use people. You don’t want to get locked into other people’s process flows. Whatever you are doing, you want to get a handle on your process before you automate.”

• 52. The Purple Cow by Seth Godin

“The Cow is so rare because people are afraid. So it seems that we face two choics: to be invisible, anonymous, uncriticised, and safe, or to take a chance at greatness, uniqueness, and the Cow.”

• 53. The Running Book by John Connell

“There was a time in the long ago when things were not like this when I looked to the future. When would my life get better? When would I not feel so bad? When would a lover come back? If it was not the future that occupied my thoughts, it was the past, and I was stuck in a loop of should-have, could-have, if I had done this, if I had done that. It was a mental prison that so many of us live in. It was the time before running.”

• 54. Master of Change by Brad Stulberg

“Most people tend to respond in one of four ways when faced with change, whether to themselves or to the broader structures in their lives: 1. Attempt to Avoid Change or Refuse to Acknowledge It. 2. Actively Resist Change 3. Sacrifice Agency Amidst Chaos 4. Try to Get Back to Where We Were. While the above strategies may feel good in the moment, they almost always create problems in the long run.”

• 55. Slow Productivity by Cal Newport

“Pseudo-productivity – the use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort. It’s safer to chime in on email threads and jump on calls, than to put your head down and create a bold new strategy.”
“How do knowledge workers decide when to say no to the constant bombardment of incoming requests? In the modern office context, they tend to rely on stress as a default heuristic for moderation. You need to feel sufficient personal distress to justify the distress saying no might generate in the other party. The problem with deploying the stress heuristic, of course, is that you don’t start turning away incoming tasks until you find yourself already creeping up to the edge of unsustainable workloads.”

• 56. Linchpin by Seth Godin

“Every successful organization is built around people. Humans who do art. People who interact with other people. Men and women who don’t merely shuffle money, but interact, give gifts, and connect. All these interactions are art. Art isn’t only a painting; it’s anything that changes someone for the better, any nonanonymous interaction that leads to a human (not simply a commercial) conclusion. The only thing keeping you from being one of these artists is the resistance. The loud voice of the lizard brain telling you that you can’t possibly do it, that you don’t deserve it, that people will laugh at you. We don’t have a talent shortage, we have a shipping shortage. Anyone who makes the choice to overcome the resistance and has the insight to make the right map can become a successful linchpin.”

• 57. Daring Greatly by Brene Brown

“Daring greatly is not about winning or losing. It’s about courage. In a world where scarcity and shame dominate and feeling afraid has become second nature, vulnerability is subversive. Uncomfortable. It’s even a little dangerous at times. And, without question, putting ourselves out there means there’s a far greater risk of feeling hurt. But as I look back on my own life and what Daring Greatly has meant to me, I can honestly say that nothing is as uncomfortable, dangerous, and hurtful as believing that I’m standing on the outside of my life looking in and wondering what it would be like if I had the courage to show up and let myself be seen.”

• 58. Dare To Lead by Brene Brown

“You have no idea how much it means to someone when you circle
back and say, “You shared something hard with me, and I wish I had
shown up in a different way. I really care about you and what you shared.
Can I try again?” That’s daring leadership.”

• 59. Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

“I realized that as long as I was still young I had to serve my country by doing something truly meaningful abroad. The alternative, I thought, was just becoming a more successful Frank: sitting at progressively better desks, making progressively more money, until eventually I, too, would be obsolesced and kept around only to handle the future’s equivalent of a janky tape machine.”

From Lindsay’s diaries - “Interrogations over, for now. But a tail still following. I left the house, happy to get back in the air at this local aerial silks studio. Made it to the studio and couldn’t find street parking, but my tail did. He had to leave his spot when I drove out of range, so I doubled back and stole his spot.”

• 60. The Icarus Deception by Seth Godin

“If the job market isn’t there, if your boss doesn’t respect you, if the world doesn’t get you—make good art. If it’s not working, then make better art. If you don’t know how to make better art, learn. If the people around you are sabotaging your art, ignore them. If your boss stops your art, make different art. If he stops it again, take responsibility and make different art. Keep doing it until your art gets better or you get fired, whichever happens first. And then make more art.”

• 61. When by Daniel H Pink

“Given a choice, human beings prefer endings that elevate. We favour sequences of events that rise rather than fall, that improve rather than deteriorate, that lift us up rather than bring us down.”