Not Giving a F*ck. 8 books to get ready for 2017
My annual two week digital detox is done. My brain is clear from social media, likes, shares, follows, innovation reading, work and emails…
My annual two week digital detox is done. My brain is clear from social media, likes, shares, follows, innovation reading, work and emails and I feel recharged and ready to do it all over again!
Taking this break is a great time for getting perspective on life and work and what’s actually important vs what seems important in the moment.
I love what I do but can sometimes get carried away with the momentum. I’m really clear on what opportunities 2017 can bring and which streams of my life need to get amplified vs shut down completely.
An upside of the digital detox is I get to rest and read. A lot.
Here’s the books that educated me over the past two weeks.
The One Thing: The surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results.
“What is the One Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary”
There will always be just a few things that matter more than the rest, and out of those, one will matter most
Think of it this way. If we really lose almost a third of our workday to distractions, what is the cumulative loss over a career? What is the loss to other careers? To businesses?
A Buddhist would call this monkey mind.” We think we’re mastering multitasking, but we’re just driving ourselves bananas.
Actionable approach that I’m going to use to get really clear focus and execute on a grander scale.
Rating: 5/5
Shoe Dog: A memoir by the Creator of NIKE
The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us.
Brilliant example of the One Metric That Matters “the daily pair count.”
Giving up doesn’t mean stopping. Don’t ever stop.
The tenacity and focus by Phil and his team over decades speaks volumes to what is needed to build a great and lasting business.
Rating: 4/5
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
Ever notice that sometimes when you care less about something, you do better at it?
And like the road not taken, it was the fucks not given that made all the difference.
The secret sauce is in the solving of the problems, not in not having problems in the first place.
I love the direct language and message here.
Rating: 5/5
Gateless
thinking (“cognition”) and your body’s biochemistry are not actually separate things
I abandoned this book 1/3 of the way in. Poorly written and repetitive. I’m sure there are some nuggets in there but digging is exhausting
Rating: 1/5
The Elements of Style, Annotated and Updated.
The definitive writing companion. I’ll use this a lot. I need it ;-)
Originals: How Non-Conformists Change the World
When achievement motivation goes sky-high, it can crowd out originality: The more you value achievement, the more you come to dread failure.15 Instead of aiming for unique accomplishments, the intense desire to succeed leads us to strive for guaranteed success.
On matters of style, swim with the current,” Thomas Jefferson allegedly advised, but “on matters of principle, stand like a rock.
We find surface ways of appearing original — donning a bow tie, wearing bright red shoes — without taking the risk of actually being original.
successful originals take extreme risks in one arena and offset them with extreme caution in another.
Practical examples, research and strategies of getting original thinking adopted.
Rating: 4/5
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.
Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it. Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about.
An imagined reality is not a lie.
No one was lying when, in 2011, the UN demanded that the Libyan government respect the human rights of its citizens, even though the UN, Libya and human rights are all figments of our fertile imaginations.
Since large-scale human cooperation is based on myths, the way people cooperate can be altered by changing the myths.
Both schools of thought are castles in the air, connected to the ground by the thin strings of meagre archaeological remains.
I am amazed how little I knew about where we come from and how we function as human beings.
Rating: 5/5
Born A Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah
People don’t want to be rich. They want to be able to choose.
But with what raw materials are the poor to make something of themselves?
They’re free, they’ve been taught how to fish, but no one will give them a fishing rod.
Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading.
As a South African this book hit home hard. We grew up in a crazy place at a crazy time. Trevor captures the harsh realities of growing up in racially divided madness. #PROUD
Rating: 5/5
And I finally finished “A Man without a Face: The Unlikely rise of Vladimir Putin”
Nothing to quote here. Incredibly sad story of a hijacked nation.
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