Books

Receiving and giving feedback does not come naturally to me. Where I grew up and got my early exposure to the world, asking questions on how to do something better often meant questioning authority. Giving feedback was the anonymous complaint box and though later most companies I worked at adopted some form of performance management with 360 feedback, it didn't quite feel right. Even during these years, I got exposed to good managers and started to see the gap between feedback for feedback's sake and feedback that prompts you to be better. ...

Tim Ferriss's "4-Hour Workweek" was the first self-development book I read. In this book, the author shared his story that many could identify with (working a lot but not being happy), outlined an alternative (outsourcing tasks I don't like and spending free time meaningfully), and detailed how to achieve freedom. While Tim Ferriss primarily approached freedom from a business perspective, through the "time = money" equation, today's book author wants to help break down limitations in other areas of life. Harry Browe wants to help, but doesn't tell you what to do, which is a refreshing opening for a self-development book. ...

I am a semi-professional people pleaser, so my default way of "problem-solving" is to avoid hot topics and suffer the consequences later. Bringing problems to the surface and solving them are crucial for our personal and professional lives. To resolve this conflict in my life I picked up Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High. I was hoping to get some useful advice with a bunch of stories (just like in usual non-fiction books), but I was surprised: the amount of practical knowledge packed in this book is hard to comprehend. ...

I always considered chess the game of decision-making. You need to be strategic, count on your opponent's reaction, and plan ahead. But as Annie Duke, professional poker player and psychologist points out, chess is far from real-life decisions. In chess, there is a clear good decision in every step. In life there are many. If you are lucky in chess it doesn't really matter on the course of the game. In life it does. ...

I hate self-help books in which the author picks a popular problem, shares his way of solving it, and creates a framework around his thinking. These types of advice are often not applicable to my life, so reading them turns out to be a waste of time. This is not the case for The Art of Possibility. The conductor Benjamin Zander and his therapist wife Rosamund Stone Zander did something remarkable with their book. Instead of picking problems they are telling stories from their life and career while sharing exercises on how you can shift your perspectives to enable a life of possibility. ...

Reading stories about day-to-day challenges is boring. Reading a detective story is slightly more interesting. Reading a detective story of an everyday dude where the plot is made mystical with a touch of magic is the best. But Murakami Haruki always put some real-life parallels, and hard-to-decode metaphors into his books, so we can enjoy the story while thinking hard about what this all meant. It’s magical realism or what. ...

I am an overthinker and a pessimist by nature. Reading extensively is part of my overthinking process. But for some mysterious reason, every book and every fact points to the direction that it makes much more sense to be an optimist. Save like a pessimist, and invest like an optimist when it comes to personal finance.Publish optimistic inflation and job market predictions to cool down the economy (if you are the government agency).Project a ridiculously high return on investment for your next campaign to get your marketing budget accepted.An even better reason to be an optimist, is that being grumpy all the time sucks. ...

Brad Stulberg is a coach obsessed with excellence. In his previous books, he has written about the characteristics of world-class performers (Peak Performance), and about how to develop a passion to enable you to be the best (The Passion Paradox). But the author discovered through his coaching practice and personal observations that successful people are often not happy. Some of them are missing elements from their life which makes their circumstances miserable despite their loud successes. ...

At university, I had a semester-long class about intercultural communication. We learned all the model's researchers come up with in the last 100 years, and we did exercises to practice avoiding miscommunication. It was a well-thought-through class. And I hated every minute of it. I felt that we are trying to squeeze people and situations into predefined "cultural" buckets created by Hofstede and Edward T. Hall. I had a completely different experience with Erin Meyer's book, The Culture Code. ...

I watch book recommendation videos to get ideas about what to read next. I found several on this list through other content creators' recommendations. I bring some ideas from the books as well to give you a sneak peek of what you can expect. I hope you find one or two recommendations that you will enjoy reading. Let’s get started. Paul Millerd: The Pathless PathThe first book is an unconventional one: Paul Millerd’s Pathless Path. ...