If you’re a busy professional, perhaps not even that?
I’ve always found reading to be an essential part of personal development. Not blogs - I mean the normal, in-depth, catch every word - not just the headlines - reading ;).
Over the past couple of years, I’ve noticed how my shelves started getting full of books I had no idea when I’d come around to read. Business books, fiction, language books, you name it …
Looming over me like a very pronounced shadow of outdated aspirations.
But why do I read less?
I suppose partly due to the standard reasons that we all face - apart from the apparent busyness, it’s ever-shifting interests and professional pressures that are making it increasingly hard to sit down and dive into one of the classics that you’ve always felt bad about not having read.
Here are some recommendations from the last couple of months:
Malcolm Gladwell: Blink
About “the power of thinking without thinking”, an excellent read about the decisive first few moments of looking. Available at Audible (audio book).
Fisher, Ury, Patton: Getting To Yes
A really good book on negotiation - getting the other party to agree without being at an unfair disadvantage that could haunt you later. Also available as audio.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Black Swan
Fairly entertaining read about the impact of the highly improbable. Summary: Gaussian distribution sux for most cases. The ideas Taleb describes are interesting and useful, but DO NOT get the audio book as, adding to the writer’s very noticeable self-confidence, the narrator makes the whole thing sound terribly big-headed. I later heard Taleb speak at a conference and I was shocked at how nice the guy actually sounded :).
Inspired by the terrific insightfulness of Blue Ocean Strategy, I have tried to capture the gist
of the book by comparing its own value curve to that of your conventional marketing handbook.
On the x-axis, you see a set of values the books bring to the reader, on the y-axis their strengths.
