5-Star Books of 2021
One of the only silver linings to a global pandemic is more quiet time for reading, and I got in a bit more reading this year than last. Last year, 5 star books were 5 of 26 (19.2%). This year, I’m at 7 of 32 (21.8%).
Last year was my first time doing this and I got out a lot of the process — going through my notes and recalling concepts that impacted me helps me to retain and use the best parts of these books. If you are reading this, I hope you get something out of it too — if you’ve read something you think I might enjoy — please drop me a line, I’d love to hear from you.
Non-Fiction:
Have you ever been annoyed with someone who is changing their mind? “Do it this way, no, do it that way” — it can be easily frustrating, but this book provided an excellent view into how that sort of decision making process can also be incredibly value to getting to the right answer. One of the norms at Benco I like so much is the idea that we aspire to “It’s about getting it right, not being right” — this books reads like a how-to for that value. Especially in a environment around us so divided, this book was so thought provoking to me on how to debate ideas and reevaluate positions that are entrenched both in my own minds, and others. 60 highlights for me in this one, here are my top three:
1) In a heated argument, you can always stop and ask, “What evidence would change your mind?” If the answer is “nothing,” then there’s no point in continuing the debate.
2) The purpose of learning isn’t to affirm our beliefs; it’s to evolve our beliefs.
3) When we find out we might be wrong, a standard defense is “I’m entitled to my opinion.” I’d like to modify that: yes, we’re entitled to hold opinions inside our own heads. If we choose to express them out loud, though, I think it’s our responsibility to ground them in logic and facts, share our reasoning with others, and change our minds when better evidence emerges.
I took more notes in this book this year than in any other. I’m fascinated by the success of the Amazon machine — in business and technology, for better or worse, it has few peers in how it’s changed the world. This book is a behind the scenes telling of how Amazon runs their business by authors who have since left, but where involved from the ground floor. Lots of good lessons on the value of autonomous and dedicated teams, and best practices on hiring for a high performance team, and tools many of us have already adopted from Amazon like virtual press releases and the case method for decision making.
1) The answer lies in an Amazon innovation called “single-threaded leadership,” in which a single person, unencumbered by competing responsibilities, owns a single major initiative and heads up a separable, largely autonomous team to deliver its goals.
2) “most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.”
3) Output metrics — things like orders, revenue, and profit — are important, but they generally can’t be directly manipulated in a sustainable manner over the long term. Input metrics measure things that, done right, bring about the desired results in your output metrics.
For those who have worked with me, you know I’m a huge proponent of the “cardboard MVP” concept from The Lean Startup. The Right IT is like a deep-dive workshop into how to build cardboard MVPs which this author calls a “Pretotype”, the thing before a prototype — and it’s something that we should be able to make in minutes, hours or days. This book is all about figuring out what the risks are for a new product and how to build tests to generate meaningful data about how our idea meets customer needs and fits into the market. One of the general concepts that has stuck with me is the hierarchy of skin in the game — someone saying they like your idea is meaningless (ala The Mom Test) until they have skin in the game measured by their time, treasure or talent.
1) So when it comes to validating ideas for new products, we cannot depend on what people think, say, or promise. Instead, we must escape the treacherous trolls of Thoughtland by recognizing and acting upon our fourth hard fact: Data beats opinions.
2) The Skin-in-the-Game Caliper allows you to assign the proper value to the data you collect according to how much skin in the game accompanies it. A $250 preorder counts more than, say, a $50 deposit to be put on the waiting list, which counts more than a submitted email address. Opinions, of course, are worth zero points; as are thumbs-ups, likes, and comments.
3) If you are not enjoying the pretotyping process, at some point you have to ask yourself some tough questions: Even if this idea that I hatched in Thoughtland turns out to be The Right It, is it likely to be my thing? Am I cut out for this kind of job, this kind of product (or service or business)? Do I really want to be in this market for the next few years?
A colleague pitched this book to me as exploring the concept of “how much is enough”. It more than exceeded my expectations in that regard and ended up being a book that my wife Alicia and I both read and had insightful conversations about. I felt like a lot of the concepts in here go back to being focused on true happiness and the ability to be content and grateful for what you have. A good companion book to The Happiness Advantage if you want to explore paths to a fulfilling and happy life (and isn’t that the point of everything we do?).
1) The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, “I can do whatever I want today.” … Having a strong sense of controlling one’s life is a more dependable predictor of positive feelings of wellbeing than any of the objective conditions of life we have considered. … Use money to gain control over your time, because not having control of your time is such a powerful and universal drag on happiness. The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want to, pays the highest dividend that exists in finance.
2) In his book 30 Lessons for Living, gerontologist Karl Pillemer interviewed a thousand elderly Americans looking for the most important lessons they learned from decades of life experience. He wrote: “No one — not a single person out of a thousand — said that to be happy you should try to work as hard as you can to make money to buy the things you want. No one — not a single person — said it’s important to be at least as wealthy as the people around you, and if you have more than they do it’s real success. No one — not a single person — said you should choose your work based on your desired future earning power. What they did value were things like quality friendships, being part of something bigger than themselves, and spending quality, unstructured time with their children.”
“Your kids don’t want your money (or what your money buys) anywhere near as much as they want you. Specifically, they want you with them,” Pillemer writes.
Take it from those who have lived through everything: Controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays.
3) Things that have never happened before happen all the time … Experiencing specific events does not necessarily qualify you to know what will happen next. In fact it rarely does, because experience leads to overconfidence more than forecasting ability.
If you are in a job leading and managing others, this is a book I’d recommend. A lot of this book isn’t about teaching new behaviors, it’s about helping to understand “antipatterns” that we as good leaders need to stop. As I read this book I reflected that I’m guilty of some of these antipatterns — one of the biggest takeaways for me is the second excerpt below — before I say something, I’ve begun to consciously think — “is it worth it?”. In general I felt that almost all of the topic areas in this book were relevant to what I do regularly, work-life-balance, effective leadership communication, motivating teams. I’m a better leader for having read this book.
“1) One of the greatest mistakes of successful people is the assumption, “I behave this way, and I achieve results. Therefore, I must be achieving results because I behave this way.”
2) Destructive comments are an easy habit to fall into, especially among people who habitually rely on candor as an effective management tool. Trouble is, candor can easily become a weapon. People permit themselves to issue destructive comments under the excuse that they are true. The fact that a destructive comment is true is irrelevant. The question is not, “Is it true?” but rather, “Is it worth it?” … You can apply a similar test to help you avoid destructive comments. Before speaking, ask yourself: 1. Will this comment help our customers? 2. Will this comment help our company? 3. Will this comment help the person I’m talking to? 4. Will this comment help the person I’m talking about?
3) This I-know-what-they-want delusion extends far beyond money. As a general rule, people in their 20s want to learn on the job. In their 30s they want to advance. And in their 40s they want to rule. No matter what their age, though, understanding their desires is like trying to pin down mercury. You have to find out what they want at every step—by literally asking them—and you can’t assume that one size fits all.
Business Strategy is something I have a passion for. I generally advise that the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) method is one of the best frameworks out there for structuring strategy. Measure What Matters is an excellent book for understanding the OKR framework — but OKR frameworks are tactical in terms of managing strategy, they don’t advise on what the right objectives are for a given organization. So often, organizational strategy is optimistic and aspirational — and this book makes the case, that whether you are large business, a startup, or a non-profit, you need to start with a hard look at what is not working. Once you have a diagnosis, then we can have a strategy to attack it.
1) To detect a bad strategy, look for one or more of its four major hallmarks: Fluff. Fluff is a form of gibberish masquerading as strategic concepts or arguments. It uses “Sunday” words (words that are inflated and unnecessarily abstruse) and apparently esoteric concepts to create the illusion of high-level thinking. Failure to face the challenge. Bad strategy fails to recognize or define the challenge. When you cannot define the challenge, you cannot evaluate a strategy or improve it. Mistaking goals for strategy. Many bad strategies are just statements of desire rather than plans for overcoming obstacles. Bad strategic objectives. A strategic objective is set by a leader as a means to an end. Strategic objectives are “bad” when they fail to address critical issues or when they are impracticable.
2) When a leader characterizes the challenge as underperformance, it sets the stage for bad strategy. Underperformance is a result. The true challenges are the reasons for the underperformance. Unless leadership offers a theory of why things haven’t worked in the past, or why the challenge is difficult, it is hard to generate good strategy.
3) The kernel of a strategy contains three elements:
* A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming complexity of reality by identifying certain aspects of the situation as critical.
* A guiding policy for dealing with the challenge. This is an overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis.
* A set of coherent actions that are designed to carry out the guiding policy. These are steps that are coordinated with one another to work together in accomplishing the guiding policy.
Sometimes small phrases stick with you, one that has always stuck with me is the Latin phrase “Memento Mori” — it means, “remember you must die”. Not in the morbid sense, but in the sense that our time on this planet is finite so it’s important to make the most use of the time we have. That’s the topic this book explores in more depth — Four Thousand Weeks is the life expectancy of the average human — this books is all about recognizing that we can’t do everything, so how do we focus on the things that matter most?
1) Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default — or deceiving yourself that, with enough hard work and the right time management tricks, you might not have to make them at all.
2) What we forget, or can’t bear to confront, is that, in the words of the American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, “a plan is just a thought.” We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is — all it could ever possibly be — is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.
3) Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been.
Fiction
Bonus book, I’m including one fiction title this year — Hail Mary by Andy Weir. This is the third book from Weir, the first was “The Martian” (also a movie). I think this is Weir’s best work yet — Weir writes like you are watching someone work through a life-or-death problem solving adventure. If you are interested in physical science, language, and space and the problems described will fascinate you and they put together in a detailed but understandable way that makes it easy to imagine the setting. The characters are small in number, but memorable. The story captured me (and my 12 year old son Ethan!) completely and entirely.
