Books That Have Helped Me

In the past, I often mocked ‘Self Improvement’ books.

But now I think that’s because I was reading the wrong ones.

I’ve listed the books I found helpful to me. I’m a little bit cross that they didn’t teach us this useful stuff at school, instead of memorising dates from history and verb conjugations for dead languages. I think many of these books should be on the reading list for the University of Life.

(Spoiler: a great many of these books boil down to “practice meditation or mindfullness to build self-awareness and use that self-awareness to make better choices”)

I’ve sorted this list into best ones first, and worst ones last; I recommend starting at the top and stopping when you get to the ones I scored 2/5 or lower:

The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal: An amazing book that tells you some of the ways your brain works, so you can work out effective ways to achieve the three types of willpower challenges in your life; “I will”, “I won’t” and “I want” without subconsciously sabotaging yourself. (7/5)

The Confidence Gap by Russ Harris: A very practical guide to help you with negative thoughts and procrastination. I wish they had made us read this in school. (6/5)

The Happiness Equation by Neil Pasricha: A short, snappy book about to be happy. This is useful advice. Not just “hey, cheer up!” motivational bollocks. I found it useful for working out where my life was unbalanced. The secret chapter resonated especially hard for me. (6/5)

Yes Please by Amy Poehler: I listened to the audiobook of this. Although very American, and an autobiography, I found it very useful… a lot of the things she discusses are backed by the other self-help books I’ve read, but as anecdotes. “Good for you! (But not for me.)” is a phrase I think to myself a lot since reading this, and has saved me from following terrible advice. (5/5)

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson: A terrifying look at “cognitive dissonance” and the problems it causes. Definitely worth reading to understand how seemingly sane people can end up with absurd belief systems, like anti-vaxxing or being American. (5/5)

Deep Work by Cal Newport: A manifesto for not frittering away your time. Reading this one encouraged me to stop wasting time on just watching whatever was on TV, or surfing Twitter, but to read more books instead. (5/5)

Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek: A primer to how your happy brain chemicals work and how workplaces can harness or waste the positive effects of those chemicals. (5/5)

You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney: A user guide to all the ways our brains are broken — and it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Short, snappy chapters. I’d almost recommend reviewing the contents page on a weekly basis to check if you are unintentionally doing anything stupid. (5/5)

The Five Elements of Effective Thinking by Edward Burger and Michael Starbird: Since reading this book I’ve solved problems differently at work; I’d also recommend as good to read before trying to learn any new skill or subject. (5/5)

Getting To Yes by Bruce Patton, Roger Fisher and William Ury: I think this one develops on The Five Elements of Effective Thinking for a single problem domain — how to get what you want in negotiations. Lots of ideas about how to solve a different problem and find compromises that you wouldn’t normally think of, as well as how to deal with difficult people. (5/5)

The Power of a Positive No by William Ury: An excellent companion to “Getting to Yes”, this one helps you turn your own knee jerk “no” into a constructive situation in any negotiation. (5/5)

The One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson: in less than one hours read, I understood that what I experienced at work every day in my last job was not “bad management”, it’s the absence of management. I’ve since used the techniques in this book when asking colleagues to do things and giving them feedback, and got great results. (5/5)

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande: A pretty simple idea backed up with compelling evidence that it should be used more. (5/5)

Getting Things Done by David Allen: an excellent introduction to managing your life. I haven’t stuck to his system 100%, but I now have an “inbox”, a small notebook I carry with me everywhere, and if something is important, I write it down and then feed that into my cloud-based to-do list several times a week. I think this one is key for anyone feeling overwhelmed, as the system suggests you to write everything down so it’s not nagging at the back of your mind, which frees your brain up to Do The Actual Things. (5/5)

Why We Buy by Paco Underhill: I’ve read a lot of psychology books in the last year, that explain some biases; this book seems be be “applied psychology” and although it assumes that a ‘more consumerism is better’ attitude, you’ll never walk around a shop unaware of what is being done to you again. If you don’t want to take these lessons and then go to the Dark Side, you could maybe apply the same lessons to hospital or library design? (5/5)

Spark Joy by Marie Kondo: ostensibly about how to tidy your house, it has a deeper application to everything in your life; “does this bring me joy?” (4/5)

How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big by Scott Adams: This is written by the same guy that wrote Dilbert. I am aware that the guy has sadly since become a MRA (there are seeds of that occurring in this book), but there is a lot of good advice scattered in this book. (4/5)

Another good book, to hopefully inoculate you against harmful people is Dangerous Personalities by Joe Navarro. This one is geared up for spotting if someone in your life (spouse/boss/priest/accountant) is a dangerous personality, with helpful checklists to “prove” to yourself what you are probably already feeling, and advice on how to protect yourself and get away. Useful for those “boiling a frog” situations where a strange personality in the workplace has crept up on you until they are unbearable. (4/5)

The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker: Although it’s a book about avoiding being the victim of violent crime, I found some of the information was applicable to being lied to in other situations — being aware of things like “Forced Teaming”, “Too Many Details”, “The Unsolicited Promise” and “Discounting The Word ‘No’”. Compared to the Dangerous Personalities book listed above it focuses on one particular personality type: The Predator. Based on reading the two books together, I feel that predators are the most dangerous personality type as they will blindside you quickly, compared to the other three slow-boiling personality types described in the Joe Navarro book, who you will have more time to avoid. As they are more dangerous, you need this one to prime you when they are coming at you. (4/5)

Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini: This gives you a basic primer in the techniques that other people will use to persuade you, and how to frame your descriptions of things to be more persuasive. (4/5)

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert: A sense of humour, while it explains to you that everything you know about being happy is wrong. It will help you put big decisions into perspective. (4/5)

The Upside of Irrationality and Payoff by Dan Ariely: These books overlap substantially. They give you a good insight into your flawed thinking and biases. Out of the two, I’d recommend Payoff for a short read, and Upside of Irrationality for a longer read with more detail. (4/5)

Messy by Tim Harford: A book about how trying to keep things tidy (from forest plantations to kids’ playgrounds to political campaigns) has negative effects. I often think of myself as a perfectionist but this book gave me permission to give myself permission to embrace messiness and vagueness. (4/5)

Algorithms To Live By by Christian/Griffiths: A companion read to Messy; this book deals with messy situations that you will find, reassures you that there are perfect solutions, but they are impossible to calculate and then shows you pretty good algorithms for improving your odds of picking a good solution. (4/5)

Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: I can’t decide if this extended essay is playful or pretentious, but gives lots of good examples of how we are blind to “Unknown unknowns” and tries to give us advice on how to avoid the mistaken belief we know what is going on, and be aware of people who confidently predict on a daily basis and always get it wrong. (4/5)

Start Right Where You Are by Sam Bennett. My favourite stupid thing in this book is the One Minute Art projects, that I use to work out how I feel, so I can then try to work out why and find a productive way to move on. (3/5)

Wait by Frank Partnoy: A book explaining a bunch of ways in which slowing down is better for us. There are situations where we should react fast, but the modern world is bombarding us with supposedly urgent decisions which we don’t really need to make urgently. (3/5)

Hello Stay Interviews, Goodbye Talent Loss by Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans: I can’t directly apply this to my job, but another good book for prompting you to think “if I can’t have X, what else do I want instead?” (3/5)

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell: An interesting book about how people become experts in a field, which acknowledges that factors which are essentially luck, such as date of birth, and how wealthy your parents are, will affect your life. (3/5)

Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky: Informative extended essay on how: 1. We used to be busy; 2: Automation freed up our time; 3: We filled that spare time with TV; 4: Amazing things can happen if we use that time for something other than consuming social media or TV. (3/5)

The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova: Interesting stories about con artists and how they exploit our psychology (3/5). I read this at the same time as The 48 Laws Of Power by Robert Greene: The 48 Laws of Power has a bad reputation — I chose to read it not to learn how to become manipulative, but to understand how people try to manipulate us. It tells some of the same anecdotes as The Confidence Game from a different perspective (3/5).

Tools Of Titans by Tim Ferriss: A strange mixed collection of notes from interviews with successful people. Some patterns emerge and some great metaphors for understanding life pop out of this book. (3/5)

Paddle Your Own Canoe by Nick Offerman: I’m rating these books as “self-help” books, not autobiographies. I didn’t get much out of this as a self-help book (it duplicated a lot of themes that are better covered in other books), but enjoyed reading it, so going to give it a (2.5/5)

Stop Walking On Eggshells by Mason and Kreger is about dealing with people with Borderline Personality Disorder. Luckily, I don’t know any people with Borderline Personality Disorder, but I’m reading these kind of books to try to figure out what the hell happened with one of my customer’s projects in the last 18 months. And these types of books do have advice on setting clear boundaries to protect yourself from generally bad personality types. (2.5/5)

Disrupted by Daniel Lyons: May not translate well for others. Experiences of a 50-something who spent years writing about the technology industry suddenly working inside it. On one hand, I couldn’t believe how VC/startup industry works, but on the other hand, I felt Daniel was a naif, as some of the stuff he experienced also occurs in the old tech industry that he used to cover, and yet he thought it was new to that one workplace… still enjoyable, in a “I’m glad my job’s not that bad” kind of way. (2/5)

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield: I’m uncomfortable with this book for two reasons; firstly, it flippantly suggests not taking modern medicine, and secondly, it flippantly discusses how cancer cures itself when you realise what is useful in life. However, although those made me uncomfortable, I did like the metaphors of “Resistance” and “Muses” for explaining why it’s hard to do good work, and then why it’s easy. I also liked the “explanation” of fundamentalism. (2/5) An excellent companion read for The War of Art was How To Avoid Making Art by Julia Cameron which I happened to read in the same week. This one is a bunch of short statements and cartoons showing all the different ways that “Resistance” will try to thwart you. (4/5)

Books That Haven’t Helped

Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy: A quick summary of productivity techniques that are better explained in other books. I didn’t like it that much. Maybe useful for some people as a “refresher” but not for me. (1/5)

Fish by Stephen C. Lundin: I hated this book. It basically tells you to cheer up at work without offering any constructive ways to do it. (-1/5)