2021 Reading Recap

Last year's COVID reading recap got a lot of love, so I'm excited to share my reading list from this year and one lesson learned from each of these 20 books. I admittedly found some of these books to be subpar, but I appreciate these takeaways and how they've stuck with me!

What was your favorite read this year and what's next on your list?

Here we go:

1. Understanding your major and extreme customers can point you down new paths of innovation (The Power of Little Ideas)
2. "Everything sucks, some of the time"... measuring yourself and your devotion to something between the obvious high points is critical to understanding your passion (The Passion Paradox)
3. Creative living means embracing paradoxes (Big Magic)
4. Great leaders set up their organizations to succeed beyond their own lifetimes (The Infinite Game)
5. Become your own chief editor - someone who uses deliberate subtraction to not only eliminate, but add life to the things around you (Essentialism)
6. Strive to have a sense of humor, even under the most difficult circumstances (The King's Good Servant But God's First)
7. One way to plan for the future is to bucket your portfolio by core initiatives, adjacent initiatives, and new growth initiatives (Lead from the Future)
8. In every encounter, there are three "realities": your intent, the common observed behaviors, and the impact you have. Stick to your reality (Connect: Building Exceptional Relationships with Family, Friends and Colleagues)
9. There is almost nothing compared to the bonds of brotherhood (The Gimmicks)
10. In meetings and conversations: expect to need others, expect to be needed, and expect to change (The Power of Giving Away Power)
11. Today’s world demands that we be "protagonists of history" - leave a mark?(A Future of Faith)
12. In this day and age, organized stability can still breed instability... and sandpile theory is a unique prism to view current events (The Age of the Unthinkable)
13. To find new value in your organization, ask yourself: "If your company were to disappear tomorrow, who would miss it?" (Better, Simpler Strategy)
14. Reducing uncertainty through things like test trials and free samples can increase a person's willingness to change (The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone's Mind)
15. When we talk about someone we respect, it's usually because we admire that person's commitment to something or someone - and yet we struggle to emulate this dedication in our own lives (Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing)
16. Conscious experiences are informative (different from any other experience) and integrated (appearing as a unified scene) (Being You: A New Science of Consciousness)
17. Namibia has a rich history and the country experienced a tragic genocide (Embassy Wife)
18. We can see echoes of the stories of Irish immigrants to the United States in the lives of newer Americans ('Tis)
19. There's always a battle between access and control: innovations usually start utopian and democratic, and end up centralized and hegemonic (Stealing Fire)
20. Foreign rules and imposed modernity are no match for ancestral customs, tradition, and values (The Wandering Falcon)