My key points from the books I read in 2020 in less than 52 words each

Do you remember the last idea that you took from a book?

Back in 2019, I set myself the goal to read a book per week and then read 52 books.

For 2020 I told myself that quality trumps quantity and did not set myself a specific goal. Still, I ended up with quite a number of books and – most importantly – proven lessons that I can benefit from.

Priceless in a year where we were all confined to smaller social circles.

Without the habit of reading, I would have been imprisoned in my immediate world, in respect to time and space. My life would have fallen into a set routine; limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and I would see only what happens in my immediate neighborhood.

But the moment I take up a book, I immediately enter a different world, and if it is a good book, I am immediately put in touch with one of the best talkers in the world. This talker leads me into a different country or a different age or discusses with me some special line or aspect of life that I knew nothing about.

Now to be able to live a few hours in a different world and take my thoughts off the claims of the immediate present is a privilege I am grateful for.

Reading is “learning accelerated”. In a handful of hours, you get to absorb what took someone else years to accumulate, understand, distill, and refine.

But a book is only as good as the idea you choose to take away from it, and knowledge not shared is wasted, so here are a few ideas from books that I read in 2020.

They are mainly Non-fiction books. But then someone might say that all books are fiction because they are all written by humans. Humans are biased and what one believes is fact and the truth might be fiction in the other’s eyes. Everyone has an incomplete view of the world. But we form a complete narrative to fill in the gaps, don’t we?

Now let’s get to those books I finished in 2020 in chronological order. I have “bookmarked” my 3 absolute favourites:

1)     How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen

There is much more to life than your career! But the person you are at work and the amount of time you spend there will impact the person you are outside of work with your family and close friend. Values. Stick to them. 100% of the time is easier than sticking to them 98% of the time.

2)     How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams

Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. We do not rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our systems! Don’t say “I have to …” but say “I get to …”.

3)     Loonshots by Safi Bahcall

When someone challenges a project you invested years in, do you defend with anger or investigate with genuine curiosity? I find when I question the least, I need to worry the most.

“Some days you are the dog, some days you are the fire hydrant.”

4)     Speaking Peace – Non-Violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg

Share what I am feeling. When people see our needs it stimulates people’s enjoyment of giving. We can all identify with needs. We all have similar or even the same needs. When we connect on the needs-level it is amazing how conflicts become solvable.

5)     Rework by Jason Fried

Financial plans are just financial guesses. My strategic plans become strategic guesses. Now I can stop worrying so much about them. They are simply not worth that stress. Figure out the next important thing and do it. I have to make sure that my product stays right for me. I have to be the one who has to believe in it most. That way I can say “I think you’ll love it because I love it.”

6)     How to make people like you in 90 seconds or less by Nicholas Boothman

People are either visual, auditory or kinesthetic and they do express that by the words they use to describe stuff. Knowing which type someone is helps us to make ourselves be like that person if only for the 90 seconds it takes to establish rapport for meaningful connections.

7)     Dream Teams: Working Together Without Falling Apart by Shane Snow

The most important things are made easier – made possible – together. Sometimes those things are as small as changing the world. Sometimes they are as big as changing a life.

8)     The Nomadic Mindset by Kevin Cottam

Never settle … for too long. Nomad means “the movement of the mind”. Mindset is my capital. Nothing disengages people more than fulfilling a role that doesn’t fit with their why and mindset. Think vastly; act narrowly.

9)     The Uninhabitable Earth by Daniel Wallace-Wells

Enough to induce a panic attack ... a brutal portrait of climate change and our future lives on Earth. But we have the tools to avoid it: Carbon tax, technology, change in diet, public investment in carbon capture. We can choose our actions, but we cannot choose our planet, which is the only one any of us will ever call home.

10) The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

Without trust teamwork is all but impossible. Good confrontations are honest, open and goal-directed. Absence of commitment and accountability. Members of a dysfunctional team pursue personal or departmental agendas instead of the team’s goal. Teamwork ultimately comes down to practicing a small set of principles over a long period of time. Ironically, teams succeed because they are exceedingly human.

11) The Formula – The Universal Laws of Success by Albert Laszlo Barabasi

1st Law of Success – Performance drives success. But when performance cannot be measured networks drive success. => It’s time to see the largely invisible networks that shape our success. 2nd Law of Success – Performance is bounded but success is unbounded. 5th Law of Success: With persistence, success can come at any time.

12) Echo Burning by Lee Child (fiction)

Suspense in Texas. Texas is big. Everything is bigger in Texas.

13) If you are so smart why aren't you happy by Raj Raghunathan

Fundamental Happiness Paradox - we want to achieve happiness, but often pursue things that clearly don’t lead to it. We pursue happiness through various means, such as money, status, esteem, or health, and overly fixate on these means rather than the ends. Happiness is knowing what you want yet being okay with not getting it for a while.

14) The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle

Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are. It’s something you do. Individual skills are not what matters but the interactions. Being vulnerable together is the only way a team can become invulnerable. We are all paid to solve problems. Make sure to pick fun people to solve problems with.

15) Work is Love Made Visible by Frances Hesselbein

How important is being happy at work for you? Can you keep working at your job despite not being happy? If so, what are the costs? The benefits? To be truly happy at work, we need to feel that what we do at work helps us to get somewhere – and not just to the next rung on a career ladder.

16) Humble Inquiry by Edgar H. Schein

“Humble Inquiry” is an attitude. By “telling”, we suggest that the other person did not know what we are trying to tell them. Instead, by “asking”, we can communicate the same message while empowering the other person by making it seem as if they assisted in reaching the proposed verdict or conclusion.

17) Stop Reading the News by Rolf Dobelli

Consuming the news reduces our quality of life. We will be more stressed, more on edge, more susceptible to disease, and we’ll die earlier. News is to the mind what sugar is to the body: appetising, easily digestible and extremely damaging. We don’t need to know the news. Less is the new more for a happier, calmer and wiser life.

18) Range by David Epstein

Generalists triumph in a specialized world. A domain-based solution is often inferior. Big innovation most often happens when an outsider reframes the problem in a way that unlocks the solution. It takes time and often foregoing a head-start to develop personal and professional range. And it is worth it.

19) You are not listening by Kate Murphy

The ability to multitask is an illusion. The often-used phrase 'pay attention' is apt. You dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities and if you try to go beyond your budget you will fail. Not listening to each other diminishes what we can achieve. And the left ear is usually the more emotional ear.

20) 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

For thousands of years homo sapiens behaved like an ecological serial killer. Now it is morphing into an ecological mass murderer. Climate change is a present reality (vs nuclear war being a future potential). We need to enter rehab from our carbon addiction today! And questions you can’t answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.

21) Great at Work by Morten T. Hansen

Don’t just see yourself as an employee. See yourself as an innovator of work. Hunt and cure pain points. Zoom in on how you can redesign and create value for others. To redesign my work strive to work on the right things and to do them right. Open-mindedness is sexy and it starts with questions. What don't I know? What do I want to learn more about?

22) Food: A Love Story by Jim Gaffigan (fiction)

Hilarious audiobook. Even more so when read by the author himself. An in-depth, thoroughly uninformed look at everything from health food to things that people in the US actually enjoy eating.

23) Intentionally Becoming Different by Alexander Trost ??

"Life can be so easy once we stop trying so hard to complicate it." While we are by nature human beings, it takes effort to naturally be human. The quality of our life is a result of the quality of our thoughts. And we all can start to live a life we don't need leave from.

24) Storybrand - Building a Strong Brand by Donald Miller

The brand’s role is to guide the customer successfully through the challenges. My marketing has to invite the customers into a story – with the customer being the hero! Customers trust a guide who has a plan to help them avoid failure. What will the clients lose if they don’t buy?

25) Emotional Intelligence by Ian Tuhovsky

Emotional intelligence is a skill and can be learned through constant practice and training, just like riding a bike or swimming! The relationship with another human being always starts from me. The responsibility is mine to take as NO ONE can affect my emotions without my concession. And emotional intelligence is mainly about awareness.

26) Calypso by David Sedaris (fiction)

My first encounter with David Sedaris' brilliant writing style.

27) The Art of Possibility by Benjamin and Rosamund Zander

Complexity, tension and dissonance can give life to an organization once connected to a strong vision. The life force for humankind is perhaps the passionate energy to connect, express and communicate. Enrollment is that life force at work. Lighting sparks from person to person. How will I be a contribution today?

28) Corporate Rebels: Make work more fun

Happy Hour is 9-to-5. When people are happier, they don’t just act smarter, they are smarter. We made people happy first and performance followed. The employees are the custodians of corporate culture. “The business of business is people.” – Herb Kelleher (Founder of Southwest Airlines).

29) Safe Strategies for Financial Freedom by van Tharp

The average person does not ask in terms of systems. People ask what is the stock market going to do? What should I buy? Instead ask: “How can I develop a simple system that would control risk and make me money?” The most important trait a winning investor can have is personal accountability. It is the foundation of everything else!

30) Social - Why our Brains are wired to connect by Matthew D. Lieberman

Our social network is our default network. Our brain directs its free time on it. It directs us towards other people’s minds and thoughts. It primes us to be social. That’s why social media works so well. Our brains would have put in more than 10,000 hours on learning the realm of “social living” by the age of 10.

31) How to Own the World by Andrew Craig (Personal Finance)

Throughout history, it has always been the case that those who make an effort to understand what is going on around them have come out on the other side better off – and certainly far better off than those who don’t make such an effort. You need to own the world in order to make superior returns on your money.

32) Ichigo Ichie by Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles ??

What we are experiencing right now will never happen again. Dwell in the present. The present moment is a permanent opportunity to experience ichigo ichie. Ichigo Ichie is the friendly face of carpe diem, since instead of emphasizing the fact that one day we will die, it reminds us that today we can live.

33) Personal Branding with LinkedIn by Natalie Wiechowski

You “cannot not have a personal brand.” Add value! What do I do for whom and with what end result? Building a personal brand is like running a marathon. Instead of exhausting yourself for the first five kilometers and then stopping, manage your strength for the entire marathon.

34) The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel ??

Financial success is not a hard science. It’s a soft skill, where how I behave is more important than what I know. Wealth is what you don’t see. Personal savings and frugality—finance’s conservation and efficiency—are parts of the money equation that are more in my control and have a 100% chance of being as effective in the future as they are today. If you can get the goalpost of lifestyle desires to stop moving at a young age, you have won. Everyone has an incomplete view of the world. But we form a complete narrative to fill in the gaps.

35) Ecological Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

Knowing the impacts of what we buy can change everything.

36) Humanocracy by Gary Hamel

Bureaucracy is not a cosmological constant. Nowhere is it written in the stars that organizations must be clumsy, stifling, and heartless. Bureaucracy was invented by human beings. It’s up to us to invent something better. There’s no way to build a human-centric organization without flattening the pyramid. You can hardly expect employees to be engaged in their work if they’re not engaged with each other.

37) Essentialism by Greg McKeown

The idea that we can have it all and do it all is a myth. Essentialism is not about doing one more thing. It’s a different way of doing everything. It is a way of thinking. It’s living by design, not by default. We have the invincible power of choosing to choose. If the answer isn’t a ‘definite yes’ then it should be a ‘no’. This is a succinct summary of a core essentialist principle.

38) Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff

Messages that are composed and sent by my young neocortex are received and processed by the other person’s old crocodile brain. No message is going to get to the logic center of the other person’s brain without passing through the survival filters of the crocodile brain system first. Unless my message is presented in such a way that the crocodile brain views it to be new and exciting - it is going to be ignored.

39) The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

We systematically fail to think clearly by deviating from optimal, rational, reasonable thought and behaviour. We are all biased and emotional decision-makers. To control our emotions through thinking is illusory – as illusory as trying to make my hair grow by willing it to. We are all dumb, but only the smart ones learn from it and sharpen their cognitive-biases-life-hack.

40) 5 Minute Selling by Alex Goldfayn

The System is so much more important than the actions. If you can get comfortable with silence you will be way ahead of the competition. DYK-questions.

41) Conscious Luck by Gay Hendricks & Carol Kline

The 8 Secrets of Changing My Luck. Feeling lucky is more important than being lucky. There is a difference. Feeling lucky is a better measure of luck than whether you or others consider the events in your life to be lucky. Luck is purely subjective! Without gratitude I end up with a luck flat tire.

42) Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey (autobiography)

Wow. I really had a totally wrong picture of who Matthew McConaughey is. Great approach to life. Full of life lessons. “I never wrote things down to remember; I always wrote things down so I could forget.” There are so many more Greenlights in our lives than Redlights.

43) Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss

No such things as fair! Great question: “How am I supposed to do that?” To play the ball back when someone requests something unreasonable. Listening is not a passive activity. It is the most active thing you can do. The sweetest two words are “That’s right.”

44) Great Advice by David Wee & Handi Kurniawan

Chockful of bite-sized practical advice for people leaders of all ages packaged in a beautiful format and arranged along the employee life cycle. Great reference book.

45) Friday Forward by Robert Glazer

We must determine what we want most and align our daily lives to pursuing it. Capacity building is the method through which we seek, acquire, and develop the skills we need to perform at a higher level and unlock our innate potential. It comprises four areas—spiritual, intellectual, physical, and emotional capacity.

46) Transcend - The New Science Of Self-Actualization by Scott Barry Kaufman

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is often misconstrued. It is not a static pyramid. We are always in the state of becoming. We are moving from one hierarchy to the other up AND down. It is an ongoing process and not a sudden phenomenon. The good life is not something you will ever achieve. It is a way of living.

47) The Click Moment by Franz Johansson

Success is random but there are a number of specific actions to capture randomness and focus it in our favour. You need to do something different in order to become successful and rise above the avalanche of competitors. Success in the future defies logic and prediction because it is and must be random. The faster the world is moving and the more interconnected it is, the less predictable it becomes.

What did I really learn from those 47 books?

Well, in ways I cannot list or know, but I am not the person in the end who I were at the start. An idea, a truth, an insight has tinkered with my thinking, it has reshaped how I feel. 

So little else in life is so altering as reading widely.

Which book altered you most in 2020?

Any recommendations for continuing my reading journey in 2021?

"Reading can teach you the best of what others already know. Reflection can teach you the best of what only you can know." – James Clear

Oh, I almost forgot, I only managed to get through those 47 books with lots of help from our National Library and its free audiobook App “Overdrive”. Made my commute and drives so much more enjoyable.

Listening is the new reading. It may feel less studious than reading, but at least some research shows that you can learn and retain just the same. The intonation of the narrator can also help you understand the text.