The Most Interesting Books I Read This Year

Here are a few books that I found particularly compelling this year. I hope it sparks your holiday break reading list!

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, The Price of Privilege by Madeline Levine, and Never Enough by Jennifer Breheny Wallace.

The first books that stood out to me were a trio of parenting books a friend recommended. A common theme ran through all three: Parents, particularly those with financial resources and a drive for achievement, can unintentionally hinder children’s development by over-involving themselves in their lives and striving too hard to ensure their success.?

Instead, we can help them by giving them space. As Dr. Levine writes, “Our children benefit more from our ability to be ‘present’ than they do from being rushed off to one more activity. Try to slow down. It is almost always in quiet, unpressured moments that kids reach inside and expose the most delicate parts of their developing selves.”

Co-Intelligence, by Ethan Mollick

Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is a prominent thought leader on AI. Beyond his tips for using AI tools at work, the book helped me consider the potential impact of AI tools on how work gets done in organizations. For example, “In study after study, the people who get the biggest boost from AI are those with the lowest initial ability—it turns poor performers into good performers. In writing tasks, bad writers become solid. In creativity tests, it boosts the least creative the most. And among law students, the worst legal writers turn into good ones. [...] This suggests the potential for a more radical reconfiguration of work, where AI acts as a great leveler, turning everyone into an excellent worker. The effects of this could be as profound as the automation of manual labor.”

The Friction Project, by Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao

Stanford professors Rao and Sutton argue that although friction is usually bad in organizations, leaders should recognize where it’s helpful. They write, “Savvy trustees hit the pause button and figure out what to make easy, hard, or impossible before they turn to how to do it. They strive to get things done as quickly and cheaply as possible but keep searching for signs that it will take longer to go fast and cost more money to do things cheaply. [...] When and where you want a little friction, or a lot, requires weighing an organization’s goals, values, talents, and constraints, including money, traditions, rules and laws, and power dynamics.”

The Work of Art by Adam Moss and Slow Productivity by Cal Newport

Adam Moss interviews artists about their creative processes in The Work of Art. What struck me most was how often their great works emerge from moments of happenstance. For example, the poet Louise Gluck shared, “For me, the really hard thing about writing is how much patience you need to have. I mean, you can will things, but whenever I’ve tried to do that, the poem just goes to hell.” She concludes, “If you want a discovery that will surprise you, [...] you just have to wait.”

This reminded me of a key point from Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity—that great work often arises during seasons when we’re “unproductive” in the conventional sense. Newport writes that the slow productivity philosophy “rejects busyness, seeing overload as an obstacle to producing results that matter, not a badge of pride. It also posits that professional efforts should unfold at a more varied and humane pace, with hard periods counterbalanced by relaxation at many different timescales, and that a focus on impressive quality, not performative activity, should underpin everything.”

Something Fun

This year has been a big one for my writing. Strategic FUEL for Nonprofits was the centerpiece of that. But I also published a second book last month—Dad Sh*t.

The backstory: A few years ago, when a friend was about to have his first kid, I sent him a Google document with everything I wish the parenting books had told me at that stage. Over time, I gradually added to the document, peppered it with humor, and collected perspectives from other dads.

Turning it into a book languished near the bottom of my to-do list until a few months ago when I was creatively stuck on another project and ran into a soon-to-be father. When he invited me to his baby shower, I thought, “This will be a good gift.”?

This project was always just for fun, but it was also a useful diversion because it helped me learn a new design software and the mechanisms of publishing and advertising on Amazon. The main lesson: You can’t advertise for items with curse words in the title! :)

This is my last Monday Musing of the year. I hope you have a good holiday break!

Thanks for reading!

Charles

Get Monday Musings in Your Inbox

I publish this blog series each Monday. Like this one, it’ll contain something useful and something fun to start your week. If you want to receive Monday Musings in your inbox, subscribe here!