Without intending to do so I’ve created a reading time machine to 6, 8, and 10 years ago. I loved thinking about and making this list and it turned out to be the best way to represent the decade without recency bias or too much bunching together. I commend each of these books to you as important, interesting, and original!
Read MoreThe book is a five-year journey focusing on character, specific types of talent, problem solving, timing, and hard work. It’s a behind-the-scenes scrapbook of the breaking of a 108 year “curse.” If you don’t care about baseball, you probably won’t care too much about this book—but it’s remarkably light on baseball strategy and heavy on purposeful team-building.
Read MoreThe answer to “What do you want?” is most often not what we think we want. Here’s the gist of the book: “To recognize the limits of knowledge is not to embrace ignorance. We don’t need less than knowledge; we need more. We need to recognize the power of habit” (6).
Read MoreThe idea of this book, as far as I can tell, is to help the reader begin to see themselves as one who values originality. We ought not stifle it, run from it, belittle it, or talk trash about it, or else we’ll be relegated to the bin of history where the Polaroid camera, the Segway, and the video rental store reside.
Read MoreTwo of the top 10 greatest speeches ever given by U.S. presidents were given within three days of each other. Eisenhower and Kennedy were politically, generationally, ideologically, and culturally opposed and yet they understood the magnitude of the day, the seriousness of the foe in communism, and the need to preserve one of America’s greatest strengths: the peaceful transition of power.
Read MoreJack Welch, former CEO of GE, focuses on helping anyone who works for any company succeed wherever they are. From getting promoted to dealing with terrible bosses to managing people to merging two companies together—Welch covers the gamut. He speaks and leads with specificity, which is refreshing in a land filled with used up generalities.
Read MoreIt was the early 2000’s—before the Beijing Olympics, but after the great migration from the country to the cities had begun. Gifford’s journey, more than any other modern road trip book I’ve read, encapsulates a very specific window of a country’s history. China was rising, but how fast? Could it sustain itself? Did it want to?
Read MoreAfter reading the first few paragraphs, I immediately understood this book’s appeal. Here’s a normal guy who, against all reasonable odds and the norms of his community, went to college and then graduated from Yale Law School—effectively jumping at least two rungs on the social capital ladder before he was 30.
Read MoreStanley McChrystal was in the U.S. Army for thirty-four years. He was the commander of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Iraq, trying to defeat Al Qaeda. No small task. His goal was to defeat an agile, de-centralized enemy with all the hulking resources of a bureaucratic, top-down military machine.
Read MoreIn the 1940s, a division inside Lockheed eventually came to be known as the “Skunk Works.” It was in this hulky warehouse just off the main runway at the Burbank Airport where the coolest 21st Century Airplanes were dreamed up, prototyped, and made—midway through the 20th Century.
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