?? My 12 Favorite Reads of 2023 ??

Of the dozens of books I read over the past year, each of these had an especially profound impact on the way I think, live, and see the world. I highly and humbly recommend any of them as primo "minion fodder " for fellow curious humans!

Awaken Your Genius by Ozan Varol

I loved Ozan Varol 's debut, Think Like a Rocket Scientist , and he managed to avoid the sophomore slump with his second book, Awaken Your Genius . It's packed with mental models and practical tips for living a more intentional, wholehearted, and fulfilling life like:

?? Worrying is a giant waste of your imagination

?? Play is an odyssey into the unknown

?? Make thought a deliberate practice

How to Know a Person by David Brooks

How to Know a Person was probably my favorite read of the year and I can't recommend it highly enough. It's helped me become a better person in so many ways, and has radically changed how I see and talk to other people with incredible nuggets of wisdom like:

?? A personality is a way of being in the world

?? People just want to be seen, heard, and understood

?? Be a loud listener

Right Kind of Wrong by Amy Edmondson

Right Kind of Wrong will teach you the fine art of intelligent failure from the pioneer of psychological safety herself. Amy Edmondson drops more knowledge than an elevator full of Nobel laureates, like:

?? Don’t bring an execution mindset to a learning task

?? Choose learning over knowing

?? Anger and blame don’t help us learn from failure

Both/And Thinking by Wendy K. Smith & Marianne Lewis

Behold the power of paradoxical thinking in Both/And Thinking ! Wendy K. Smith & Marianne Lewis have crammed a metric ton of mental models into this brilliant takedown of either/or, black-and-white, myopically binary thinking like:

?? Language is the first step to changing any underlying assumptions

?? Cultivate the potential for generative doubt

?? Organizational success depends on purpose, more than organizational strategy or structure

Magic Words by Jonah Berger

Magic Words is yet another gem from the Contagious-ly engaging Berger that thoroughly indulged my passion for words. There are a ton of great nuggets and new ways to think about the magic of the right word(s) at the right time, like:

?? Saying “I don’t“ can be far more powerful than “I can’t“

?? Foster a “could mindset”

?? The more we know, the more we assume others know

The Nature of Technology by Brian Arthur

I look forward to rereading The Nature of Technology for the rest of my life. It has deeply and profoundly changed the way I think about science and technology, with mind-blowing nuggets like:

?? Technology is a programming of nature

?? Science is a form of technology

?? Innovation is re-domaining to explore new possibilities

Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth

2023 is the year I learned how to truly love economics, and Doughnut Economics was a key contributing factor to my newfound love and appreciation. There are a ton of great nuggets to help you "think like a 21st century economist," like:

?? Human thriving depends on planetary thriving

?? Money is a social relationship

?? Regenerative design is biomimicry at its finest

The Creative Act by Rick Rubin

I've likened The Creative Act to both a mind-blowing collection of fortune cookies written by the legendary music producer and his version of The Almanack of Naval Ravikant . Regardless what you compare it to, the book is filled with Rick Rubin koans like:

?? We're not playing to win, we're playing to play

?? Failure is the information you need to get where you're going

?? The magic lives in the wonder of what we do not know

Awe by Dacher Keltner

As someone who aspires to live awe-fully, I'd been eagerly anticipating Dacher Keltner 's treatise on Awe and it was as awesome as I'd hoped. Keltner helped transform my understanding of "the new science of everyday wonder" with nuggets like:

?? Mysteries awaken us to systems

?? The more we practice awe, the richer it gets

?? Fun and awe are self-transcendent states

A Future So Bright by Kate O'Neill

Reading Kate O'Neill 's A Future So Bright inspired me to start self-identifying as a strategic optimist and if enough folks follow suit, I believe her book just might help save the world. Here are just a few of the "thought grenades" that changed the way I think:

?? Purpose is the shape that meaning takes in business

?? The economy is people

?? Innovation is about what's going to matter

The Long Game by Dorie Clark

I reread The Long Game for the first time this year, and it won't be the last. Dorie Clark packs more life-changing advice and mental models into this book than I can begin to capture, so here's three that I hope inspire you to dig in for yourself:

?? Treat everything as an experiment

?? Optimize for meaning and interesting

?? You can't ever be happy in life with the thing that used to be

Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith

My curiosity led me to learn more how our brains work by reading about non-human intelligences this year, including cetaceans (whales and dolphins have culture!!!) and cephalopods (octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish), the focus of Other Minds . While this could be naively dismissed as a nerdier, nonfiction version of Remarkably Bright Creatures , I implore you to expand your concepts of consciousness with nuggets like:

?? When more is known, decisions become more complicated

?? Cephalopods are said to be color blind (NOTE: seriously, this blows my mind every time I think about it)

?? Language provides a medium for the arrangement and manipulation of ideas