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

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• 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

• 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 Davig Goggings

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• 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.”