At the start of this year I set myself a number of goals. One of them was to read at least 1 book a month. I tried to accomplish a number of things with that.
Why
The first was to get the amount of screen time down. This also means reading books on paper, which I actually prefer over reading on a screen. I may try an E-reader at some point, when I run out of physical books to read. The second was to finally read all of these books I bought, but never touched and all the books that were recommended to me and I never did anything with. Finally I wanted to increase my concentration span again, as I feel that with all distraction we are facing, this is going down a lot. I experienced this as well, that I’m easily distracted when reading articles online.
Now 7 months after I started, I feel really good about lowering the screen time hours, slightly increasing my concentration span and learning a lot! Besides that, I also achieved my goal already as I just finished the twelfth book.
The list
The books I read are a mix of productivity/professional and pleasure/fiction. I try to mix reading one work or professional life related book and one book I read for pleasure.
These are the books I read so far in 2019 in order that I read them:
- GRIP – Rick Pastoor
- Built to Sell – John Warrillow
- The Automatic Customer – John Warrillow
- Enders Game – Orson Scott Card
- The new emperor – Ties Dams
- 4 hour workweek – Timothy Ferriss
- The Mastermind – Evan Ratliff
- The Phoenix Project – Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford
- 100 years KLM Flying Dutchman – Ron Wunderink
- Moneyland – Oliver Bullough
- Artemis – Andy Weir
- 7 habits of highly effective people – Stephen Covey
My favourite so far is GRIP (unfortunately only available in Dutch right now), which has changed my way of structuring my work tremendously. Second is The Mastermind, which is an unbelievable true story, you can also listen to Reply All Episode 136 to get a first sense of how insane this story is.
More!
I really appreciate reading again and I’m definitely going forward with this and hope to read and learn a lot for the remainder of the year. Do you have any good recommendations? I’m interested in both professional and fun/fiction books to read!
Nice, I might check out 100 years KLM if I make progress on my backlog.
I recommend (I’m in the middle of) – “The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers” – Ben Horowitz. Its not for everyone but I am really enjoying it!
The hard thing about hard things is nice, but some books I would recommend are:
High Output Management – Andrew Grove
Creativity Inc – Ed Catmull
From third to First World – Lee Khan Yew (highly recommended)
Network Mergers and Migrations (junos specific, but I found it quite good)
The Emperor of all Maladies (history of cancer)
Could add many more, if you like some more books just let me know
Thanks for sharing your list. A few of my recommendations are:
– Bad Blood (Secret and lies in a Silicon Valley startup) – John Carreyrou
– Exponential Organisations – Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest (ook NL versie beschikbaar)
– When Breath Becomes Air – Paul Kalanithi
– Streampunks: YouTube and the rebels making media – Robert Kyncl
– Start with Why – Simon Sinek
– American Kingpin (about the master mind behind the Silk Road market place) – Nick Bilton
– Homo Deus: a brief history of tomorrow
The last four books I digest via Audible (audible.com). Great way to consume books while travel or commute.
Ik ga Grip op m’n short list zetten 🙂
Excellent recommendations! Really appreciated!