Hi, I’m Jeff O’Neal, filling in for Katie this week. Earlier this month, Book Riot celebrated its sixth anniversary, and it got me thinking about all the learning I’ve had to do to be part of running it. I went quickly from being an academic to trying to be a business person–with no experience at all in managing people, money, strategy, product development, and on and on.
Audiobooks! is sponsored this week by Overdrive for Libby.
Meet Libby, a new app built with love for readers to discover and enjoy eBooks and audiobooks from your library. Created by OverDrive and inspired by library users, Libby was designed to get people reading as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Libby is a one-tap reading app for your library who is a good friend always ready to go to the library with you. One-tap to borrow, one-tap to read, and one-tap to return to your library or bookshelf to begin your next great book.
But I am a bookish sort, so I turned to books to learn. And as I was trying to cram more book-time into my life, my ad hoc business education came via audiobook. By my count, over the last six years I’ve listened to about 150 books picked with the hope that they would help me be a better planner, manager, employee, thinker, leader, colleague, entrepreneur, and executive. And I wanted to try to do it humanely. Of the many, many books I’ve listened to, here are the five that stand above the rest. In no particular order:
Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury
There were many things that scared me about entering the world of business, but the knowledge that negotiation would become a near daily exercise was perhaps the most terrifying. Getting to Yes lays out a strategy for thinking about negotiations not as an irredeemably adversarial process, but one that can proceed rationally and collaboratively, given the right frame of mind. I’ve recommended this book to darn near anyone who will listen because, as Fisher and Ury point out, we negotiate in our daily lives all the time and the same thinking they suggest can offer improvements in almost all areas of your life.
Radical Candor by Kim Scott
Working with people is difficult. They are, after all, other people. And even if you generally like the people you work with, conflict arises. Or even worse, it doesn’t. Things don’t get said that need saying. People aren’t told what they are doing wrong (and right). Our fear of confrontation or hurting someone’s feelings prevents us from having the hard, scary, and necessary conversations we should be having. Radical Candor, as the name implies, is a framework for being honest with co-workers, bosses, and employees that is uncommon in our lives. We’ve incorporated a lot of Radical Candor here at Book Riot, and while it has had its difficult moments, I think we are a markedly better place to work because of it.
The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
We all have a lot of crap to do. A lot. We have spreadsheets and to-do lists and outlines and sticky notes and bullet journals and you know what? We still make mistakes. Gawande suggests that so many of our mistakes could be avoided by the good-old checklist. Using examples from surgery to aerospace, Gawande shows how common, and preventable, serious mistakes are among even the most expert professionals. It will be especially beneficial if part of your work includes repeated tasks, as it is in the moments when we are the least on the lookout for error that our most egregious screw-ups can happen.
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Where The Checklist Manifesto is about avoiding things you know to be errors, Thinking Fast and Slow is about the mistakes you didn’t even know you were making. In fact, it’s about mistakes all of humanity didn’t know humans were prone to making. It is a titanic work of far-reaching influence and applicability. And it is not super-fun to read. But, if you are interested in making better decisions, avoiding costly cognitive biases, and in general knowing why the heck you make the decisions that you do, there is nothing like Thinking Fast and Slow.
Grit by Angela Duckworth
and Peak by Anders Ericcson.
I am cheating and am combining two picks for my last selection. Sue me. But, I do have a good reason to do so. Grit and Peak go really well together. Not only do they both have four letters, but they also are both about how to excel at…well just about anything. Peak is about how mastery is achieved through consistent effort and increasing levels of instruction and error-correction. Basically, if you want to get good at something, you have to put in the hours and figure out a way to identify areas that need improvement and how to improve them. The short version: practice a lot with a great coach.
Grit is about how important the motivation behind wanting to get good is. It’s easy to say “play the violin for 20,000 hours with a professional coach and you will get good.” What is hard is actually having the grit to put in the hours. How do we keep going? Can it be taught? Learned? What can we do to instill it in ourselves, our company, or even our children?
So those are my five (six) picks. I’ve read them all more than once. I plan on reading them all again, multiple times. I think, if you’ll let them, they can make your work, and life, better too.