The 10 Best Books I Read In 2019
My wife and I celebrated our honeymoon in the winter of 2019 on the beaches of Thailand. That gave me lots of extra reading time. In 2019, I read some great books on business, history, religion, and lots of books on leadership. I even found a couple of fiction books that I loved. Below is a list of the top 10 books I read in 2019. See past lists here.
1/ Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman. An excellent book with practical advice that tells it like it is. Startups are beginning to get a reputation as glamourous. They aren't. They are really, really hard. Hoffman — an early employee at PayPal and the founder of LinkedIn — describes it this way:
"Starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down; being resource-efficient lets you "glide" to minimize the rate of descent, giving you the time to learn things about your market, technology, and team before you hit the ground."
Blitzscaling is a great book, especially for those joining a startup for the first time.
2/ The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Muller. I'm a big fan of metrics. I generally like to use them as the foundation of the work that I do. "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it," the old saying goes. This book is a quick read and gives several real-life examples of the danger of relying on metrics when the people that are reporting them are under lots of pressure. As an example, some cities will tout reduction in certain types of crimes due to pressure from the public. But when you dig deeper, you find that they're merely reclassifying crimes to lesser charges. This book is an entertaining reminder to be very careful about reacting too quickly to metrics.
3/ Debt - The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. Debt is a dense and long book that chronicles the history of debt going back 5,000 years before currencies, or even barter were established. It's incredibly instructive on how global markets came to be and what we can learn from the mistakes our ancestors made — highly recommended.
4/ What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture by Ben Horowitz. Horowitz's first book — The Hard Thing About Hard Things — will become a management classic. And this one might as well. Horowitz uses some great analogies to talk about modern-day management — including the Japanese samurais, the leader of a prison gang, and the slave revolt in Haiti during the 18th century. The bottom line is that you can put your company values on your website, and you can talk about them all the time, but if you don't practice what you preach, it doesn't matter. Culture is the output of a company's actions. Culture is about what you are, not what you want to be.
5/ Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds by David Goggins. This is an autobiography by David Goggins, who is the epitome of someone going from a horrible childhood with unspeakable physical and mental abuse and transforming his life into immense success. Goggins is a former Navy SEAL turned motivational speaker. The thing I like most about this book and that he transformed his life simply by changing his attitude, owning his inner voice, and taking full ownership and accountability for his actions and choices. An extremely intense and inspiring book.
6/ Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up by Jerry Colonna. I've been following Jerry's Reboot podcast for years. He's an executive coach and expert on getting the most out of leaders. This one gets pretty deep but it's one of the best books on leadership I've read in years. It forces you to look deeply at yourself and understanding how you became who you are. This is the starting point to the journey of becoming a better leader. I expect to come back to this one every now and then.
7/ VC: An American History by Tom Nicholas. VC is a great book on the history of the venture capital industry. From the whaling ships of the 1800s to modern-day Silicon Valley, this book covers everything. A great, comprehensive overview of this increasingly important asset class.
8/ Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath. I think this is a must-read for managers. This book dives deep into the fundamental errors that humans apply to decision making. Confirmation bias, short-term emotion, overconfidence, reliance on our frame of reference can lead to disastrously bad decisions. Heath goes deep on all of these flaws to help at least make leaders aware of the potential mistakes we make.
9/ Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 by AnnLee Saxenian. This book discusses the battle between the tech ecosystems of Silicon Valley and Eastern Massachusetts during the 70s, 80s, and 90s. I'm biased because I grew up in the middle of this battle and found it fascinating. But the broader lessons from this book will be interesting to any follower of technology and culture. I wrote a blog post earlier this year expanding on some of my thoughts on this topic.
10/ The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance by Tom Brady. I was stunned by how much I liked this book. It's really well written, and Brady's approach to health, longevity, and habits is enormously inspiring. The book doesn't tell us all that much that we don't already know (sleep and hydration are immensely important), but seeing the details of the lifestyle of an incredibly committed and disciplined athlete is something we can all take something from.
Finally, a couple of fiction recommendations. The first is from my cousin Tom. I love all of his books, and his most recent one, The Perfect Liar, was as good as it gets. The second one that I absolutely loved was Goodnight Stranger by Miciah Bay Gault.
I hope you enjoy some or all of these.