Book Summaries 2024

You're probably getting less sleep than you should be. Many people are more chronically sleep-deprived than they realize, and the punishments for this are severe – reduced productivity and happiness, and increased risk of a panel of diseases. Why We Sleep discusses how sleep happens, its major benefits, and the best ways to get better sleep. Don't fall for the trap of thinking that sleeping less m...

We’re constantly trying to do too much and to be all things to all people. Yet when someone makes a request, we say yes without thinking in order to avoid conflict or hurt feelings. We feel we have to do it all. Because we’re stretched thin and going in too many directions, we make little progress. We feel overworked but underutilized because most of what we’re spending our time on isn’t really im...

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable explores how teams fail to work cohesively together through a dynamic, five-part model of dysfunction. The five dysfunctions are: absence of trust fear of conflict lack of commitment avoidance of accountability inattention to results. Through identifying these root causes of poor teamwork, teams can develop specific strategies for overcoming each...

The Art of War by Sun Tzu is a renowned guide for how to engage in conflict and be successful in battle. Written more than two thousand years ago, Sun Tzu, a Chinese warrior and philosopher, details the nature of competition and psychology of leadership and provides strategies for how to approach both. Although his teachings are geared toward actual military conflict, the principles can be useful...

The One-Minute Manager is a guide for managers looking to empower their employees and teach them to succeed in their jobs, with minimal direct guidance. As the title suggests, most of what we consider "management" takes one minute or less. One -minute managers build their employees up by defining success through short one-minute goals and performance standards; providing immediate and direct posit...

This book is for those who prefer to be players rather than pawns. To turn you from an amateur into a master player, Greene has codified 48 laws of power based on historical examples of people who’ve excelled or failed at wielding power, with glorious or bloody results (or both). Some key principles you’ll learn: Use your enemies, keep others dependent on you, say as little as possible, take credi...

What is the key to being a great leader? Is it about having the right personality type, training, or team? Former U.S. Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, authors of Extreme Ownership , argue that the best leaders take responsibility for every aspect of their team and every task they’re working to accomplish. Extreme Ownership requires a leader to own her team’s mistakes and failures — withou...

In Coach the Person, Not the Problem , Marcia Reynolds seeks to expand people’s understanding of coaching. She argues that coaching is a partnership in which coaches help clients examine and challenge deep-seated beliefs that limit them, rather than a surface level, problem-solving exercise in which an expert doles out advice. Reynolds is a leadership and executive coach who has advanced degrees i...

In Built to Sell , entrepreneur and small business expert John Warrillow teaches you how to build a business you can sell. As someone with first-hand experience creating and selling a small business, Warrillow claims that a sellable business is one that can function without the owner. To create such a company, he provides a step-by-step process any business owner can follow. In this guide, we’ll e...

According to progressive media and politicians, climate change constitutes an existential threat to humanity, requiring drastic cuts in carbon dioxide emissions to avoid catastrophe. However, Bjørn Lomborg argues that, while climate change poses a significant threat, it’s not cataclysmic . In his 2020 book, False Alarm , Lomborg concedes that climate change will have a notable impact if left unche...

In the age of science, we’ve turned our backs on the myths our ancestors believed in. However, could it be that in giving up those stories, we’ve lost a crucial part of the human experience? In Maps of Meaning , Jordan Peterson argues that mythology provides a psychological tool that helps us create meaning in a chaotic world. Beneath their fanciful trappings, creation stories and heroic quests gi...

Right now, you’re not only reading these words. You’re also engaging in self-talk: your thoughts taking the form of words, all within your mind. Self-talk is the encouraging voice that tells you, "Nailed it!" after you rock an interview, as well as the inner cynic that grumbles, "You’re a failure" after you bomb a first date. In Chatter , neuroscientist and psychologist Ethan Kross highlights this...

When Breath Becomes Air is the beautiful and heart-wrenching memoir of Dr. Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgical resident diagnosed with lung cancer in the last year of his training. When the life Paul and his wife Lucy imagined for their futures ceases in the face of his diagnosis, he works to understand what his new life will look like and how long it will be. Through various treatments, his struggle...

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien tells the stories of a small company of American soldiers serving in the Vietnam War. Through the narrative, the book blurs the line between autobiography and fiction, leaving the reader unsure as to what is fact and what is myth. In reading these stories, we explore the harrowing physical and psychological toll of warfare and the dehumanizing and brutalizing...

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, is a distillation of his life lessons and experiences. Written with reporter Jeffrey Zaslow, the best-selling book is an expanded version of a "Last Lecture" Pausch gave in 2007, after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The "Last Lecture" series was a tradition in which professors presented their phi...

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis examines the spiritual and social decline of the Appalachian white working class through the life story of its author, JD Vance. Growing up in a post-industrial Ohio town, Vance encountered the symptoms of community and familial dysfunction—drug and alcohol abuse, unstable marriages, lack of education, and evasion of hard work—that unders...

Educated: A Memoir is writer Tara Westover’s autobiography. In it, she shows us her transformation from being the daughter of survivalist, fundamentalist, anti-science, anti-medicine, and anti-education parents, to becoming a Cambridge-educated historian. Westover gains the strength to break free from the ideological chains of her youth and discovers the agency to make her own choices about how sh...

In The Bezos Blueprint , business communication expert Carmine Gallo explains how to improve your communication by internalizing the principles that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos uses in his writing and speaking. Gallo says that if you follow Bezos’s communication "blueprint," you’ll set yourself apart from your competition, pitch your ideas more effectively, and inspire others to follow your lead. Ga...

Daniel Goleman argues that attention is a complex and underappreciated cognitive resource in our modern society overrun with distractions. In Focus , he explores how you can understand, strengthen, and effectively use your attention to lead a more fulfilling and productive life, as well as to connect better with others and have a positive impact on the world. A renowned psychologist and New York T...

In The Fearless Organization , Amy C. Edmondson argues that for organizations to thrive in the complex knowledge economy, leaders must cultivate psychologically safe cultures where workers can ask questions, raise concerns, and make mistakes without fear of reprisal. But many companies rely on a fear-driven management approach that silences workers’ voices. They do so at their peril, stifling inno...

We’ve all experienced situations that produce intense feelings of fear, blame, and disconnection and cause us to lash out at ourselves or others. Author and researcher Brené Brown explains that this intense feeling is called shame , and it’s a natural part of being human. However, allowing shame to control our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors wreaks major havoc on our health, happiness, and relat...

Candace Owens is rallying the troops—she sees the Democratic Party as modern-day slavery and is calling on all Black Americans to walk out in a mass exodus. In Blackout, Owens gives the history of Black politics, reveals hidden oppressions, and demonstrates how the Democratic Party has been keeping Blacks poor and needy for their own political gain. Specifically, Owens claims that Democratic polic...

In Spare, Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, explains why he made the extraordinary decision to leave the United Kingdom and the Royal Family, instead choosing to live in California with his wife, Meghan Markle. He provides a brutally honest look into the life of an English prince, particularly the struggles that come from being a younger son—not the heir-apparent, but merely a "spare." Harry talks fra...

https://amzn.to/4brWaIF Across the world, from Papua New Guinea to Tokyo and Manhattan, humans compete for status. Through games of dominance, virtue and success, it’s an obsession that has driven the best and worst of us: the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution as well as spree killers and tyrants at the gates of Europe. But what makes status an all-consuming prize? And how can we wield our...

https://amzn.to/4bQ2SI0 When Carol Roth first heard that one of the World Economic Forum’s predictions for 2030 was “You will own nothing, and be happy,” she thought it was an outlandish fantasy. Then, she researched it. What she found was that a number of businesses, governments, and global elites share a vision of a future that sounds utopian: Everyone will have everything they need, and no one...