10 of my most favorite books in 2016

In the last couple of years I’ve actively tried to improve my daily reading routine, cutting out on consuming click-bait articles and replacing them with books. Since many friends have asked, here is the top 10 books that gave me company over the last 12 months.

1. Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy F. Baumister.

This was my first book in 2016, while I was still holidaying in Cambodia in January.

This book is authored by one of the world's most influential psychologists, Roy F. Baumeister who tried to reveal the secrets of self-control and how to master it through research-backed data.

The book draws from years of cutting-edge research and the wisdom of real-life experts that shared practical insights on how to focus our strength, resist temptation, and redirect our lives. It goes on to explain how to be realistic when setting goals, monitor its progress, and how to keep faith when they falter. By blending practical wisdom with the best of recent research science, Willpower teaches why we won’t reach our goals without first learning to harness self-control.

Key takeaways from the book:

1. “Self-control is ultimately about much more than self-help. It’s essential for savoring your time on Earth and sharing joy with the people you love.”
2. You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.
3. You use the same stock of willpower for all manner of tasks. “You use the same supply of willpower to deal with frustrating traffic, tempting food, annoying colleagues, demanding bosses, pouting children. Resisting dessert at lunch leaves you with less willpower to praise your boss’s awful haircut. ”
4. A child’s level of self-control predicts his or her future behavior.
5. When you deplete your willpower, you feel other emotions more strongly. This creates a “double whammy.” For example, you might overeat when you are upset or become upset when you overeat.
6. Willpower, like a muscle, becomes stronger with exercise. All willpower – regardless of the temptation – flows from the same reservoir of inner strength.
7. Setting goals and monitoring your progress are the first steps in developing self-control.
8. Organize a to-do list to gain calmness and clarity.
9. Make a plan for short- and long-term activities to hush your inner nag.
10. New technologies, such as smartphone apps, make tracking and sharing your progress a lot easier.
11. Make small changes, monitor behavior and set realistic targets to achieve your goals.
12. Self-control will be most effective if you take good basic care of your body, starting with diet and sleep.
13. Use your self-control to form a daily habit, and you’ll produce more with less effort in the long run.
14. No glucose, no willpower: The pattern showed up time and again as researchers tested more people in more situations.
15. A personal goal can seem more real once you speak it out loud, particularly if you know the audience will be monitoring you.
16. You can’t control or even predict the stresses that come into your life, but you can use the calm periods, or at least the peaceful moments, to plan an offense.
17. When people have to make a big change in their lives, their efforts are undermined if they are trying to make other changes as well.
18. Self-control turned out to be most effective when people used it to establish good habits and break bad ones.

2. Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success by Adam Grant

Give and Take became a hugely successful book last year and picked it up after being recommended at may levels. The author Adam Grant is an award-winning researcher and Wharton's highest-rated professor.

For generations, we have focused on the individual drivers of success: passion, hard work, talent, and luck. However, this book explains that success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others. In the book, Adam Grant examines the surprising forces that shape why some people rise to the top of the success ladder while others sink to the bottom. I found the subject very radical and transformational to its core.

Key Takeaways from the Book:

• When you interact with others, you choose how to treat them.
• You can be a “taker,” a “giver” or a “matcher,” who matches others’ giving or taking.
• Takers and matchers end up in the middle of the income ladder, while givers hold the top and bottom ranks.
• When networking, takers seek advantage, matchers seek fair exchanges and givers freely help others.
• Givers foster creativity and excellence in those around them.
• If you think only of others, you will burn out. Pursue your own interests and parse out your time and energy judiciously.
• Takers fall prey to “responsibility bias”: a common fallacy in which people overestimate their contributions to a collective endeavor.
• Givers use “powerless communication” to earn influence without dominance. Its techniques include “hedging,” being tentative and asking questions.
• To make members of a community more inclined to give, establish the proper norms.
• You will benefit by adding more giving to your life, your workplace and your community.

3. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth

In this instant New York Times bestseller, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows anyone striving to succeed—be it parents, students, educators, athletes, or business people—that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a special blend of passion and persistence she calls “grit.”

Drawing on her own powerful story as the daughter of a scientist who frequently noted her lack of “genius,” Duckworth, describes her early eye-opening stints in teaching, business consulting, and neuroscience, which led to the hypothesis that what really drives success is not “genius” but a unique combination of passion and long-term perseverance.

She shares what she’s learned from interviewing dozens of high achievers—from JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon to New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff to Seattle Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll.

Key Takeaways from the Book:

• “Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina.”
• “Grit,” or diligence in pursuing far-off goals, is the best predictor of success in school and other endeavors.
• “The highly accomplished were paragons of perseverance. Their passion is enduring.
• “It is this combination of passion and perseverance that made high achievers special. In a word, they had grit.”
• Talent doesn’t make people gritty. In fact, some of the most gifted individuals lack commitment and drive.
• “Eighty percent of success in life is showing up.”
• “high but not the highest intelligence, combined with the greatest degree of persistence, will achieve greater eminence than the highest degree of intelligence with somewhat less persistence.”
• “The real way to become a great swimmer is to join a great team.In the long run, culture has the power to shape our identity. ”
• The magic of the Hard Thing Rule. Duckworth writes that her whole family abides by what she and her husband call the "Hard Thing Rule." Hard Thing Rule has 3 parts:

1) Everyone in the family has to do something that's hard

2)You have to finish what you start

3) No one gets to pick the hard rule for anyone else

• A concept called the “growth mind-set” may provide clues to building grit. This idea states that learning ability is fluid, not fixed, and can improve with effort.
• “The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is: I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill. I will not be outworked, period. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier than me. You might be all of those things. You got it on me in nine categories. But if we get on the treadmill together, there’s two things: You’re getting off first, or I’m going to die. It’s really that simple. I’ve never really viewed myself as particularly talented. Where I excel is ridiculous, sickening work ethic.” : Will Smith
• You can grow your grit from Inside Out:

* You can cultivate your interests

* You can develop a habit of daily challenge-exceeding skill practice

* You can connect your work to a purpose beyond yourself

* You can learn to hope when all seem lost. 

• You can grow your grit from Outside In:

*parents, coaches, teachers, bosses, mentors, friends

4. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson

This book was recommended to me by Teresa Torres, product discovery coach. She spoke fervently about the book on our podcast interview and I purchased it the next instant.

In the book, Ericsson and Robert Pool lay out decades of Ericsson’s research at an almost leisurely pace, allowing you to slowly grasp the full depth of his deliberate practice. 

The author Anders Ericsson was cited in the best-selling book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, who used Ericsson’s research on expert violinists as the basis for his “10,000-hour rule.” According to this rule, if you practice for 10,000 hours, you will become an expert.

Key Takeaways from the Book:

• No one is born with vastly superior talent. 

Ericsson make it very clear in the book that no one is born with vastly superior talent. Just to be clear, Ericsson launches his book with the poster child for innate superior talent: Mozart. As everyone knows, Mozart was a musical genius — both as a performer and a composer — at an age when most children were focused on playing with their tiny (lead, at that time) toy soldiers.

Ericsson and Robert argue in the book that Mozart would not have been Mozart had he been born the son of a cobbler. Thankfully, for the world, Mozart was born the son of a musician, whose apartment was filled with all kinds of musical instruments — all of which Mozart learned to play beginning at the age of four. Mozart, it turns out, practiced for thousands of hours just like the other experts 

• The Power of Purposeful Practice

Of course, not all practicing is equal. Ericsson identifies three different types of practicing. The most basic type of practicing is naïve practice, the generic rather mediocre practicing that children muddle through as they go from piano lesson to piano lesson. They will not become star performers, nor do they intend to.

A much more effective type of practice is what Ericsson calls purposeful practice. Purposeful practice is not simply repetition. Instead, it is characterized by well-defined, specific goals. Instead of just playing a piece over and over, purposeful practice would require the piano student to play the entire piece three times in a row with no mistakes. The guiding principle of purposeful practice is to take baby steps –– a bunch of them that, little by little, helps you reach the goal.

There are other characteristics that separate purposeful practice from naïve practice:

• Purposeful practice is focused. Students must give it their full attention.
• Purposeful practice involves feedback. Immediate, specific feedback on where students are falling short is vital.
• Purposeful practice requires leaving one’s comfort zone. If students aren’t pushing themselves beyond what is comfortable and familiar, they will not advance.

Purposeful practice is more effective than naïve practice. But to truly become an expert requires an even higher level of practice: Deliberate practice. Deliberate practice also pushes people out of their comfort zone and involves feedback and focus. However, deliberate practice is different from purposeful practice because it is based on proven techniques developed by past experts. “Deliberate practice is purposeful practice that knows where it is going and how to get there,” Ericsson writes. For example, the violin has been played for centuries, and the best training techniques to become a world-class violinist are well known. Deliberate practice requires a teacher who will use those techniques to increase the proficiency of the violin student.

5. Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas Friedman

Thomas Friedman is one of my favorite non-fiction authors. My first positive impression of him was formed after reading his book, The World if Flat, which was a seminal book on the subject of globalization.

Thomas has a perceptive mind and is an acute observer to trends and tectonic shifts in the world at large in society, business and technology.

In Thank You for Being Late, Friedman reveals the tectonic movements that are reshaping the world today and explains how to get the most out of them and cushion their worst impacts. 

Key Takeaways from the Book:

• to understand the twenty-first century, you need to understand that the planet’s three largest force are accelerating all at once. 

1) Moore’s law (technology)

2)Market (globalization)

3)Mother Nature (climate change and biodiversity loss)

 These accelerations are transforming five key realms: the workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and community.

• Friedman shows, the exponential increase in computing power defined by Moore’s law has a lot to do with it. 

The year 2007 was a major inflection point: the release of the iPhone, together with advances in silicon chips, software, storage, sensors, and networking, created a new technology platform. Friedman calls this platform “the supernova”―for it is an extraordinary release of energy that is reshaping everything from how we hail a taxi to the fate of nations to our most intimate relationships. It is creating vast new opportunities for individuals and small groups to save the world―or to destroy it.

If you do not have the patience to read the book, make it a point to watch Friedman's hour long talk about the book. He covers most parts of the book in the talk.

6. Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip and Dan Heath

This book was again highly recommended to me by Teresa Torres.

This is the second book I read of Chip and Dan after the very popular Made to Stick written some years ago.

The book reveals a lot from research that our decisions are disrupted by an array of biases and irrationalities: We’re overconfident. We seek out information that supports us and downplay information that doesn’t. We get distracted by short-term emotions. When it comes to making choices, it seems, our brains are flawed instruments. Unfortunately, merely being aware of these shortcomings doesn’t fix the problem, any more than knowing that we are nearsighted helps us to see. The real question is: How can we do better?

Decisive is the Heath brothers’ most powerful book yet, that offersi fresh strategies and practical tools enabling us to make better choices.

Key Takeaways from the Book:

• The four villains of decision making

1) Villain 1: Narrow framing 

2)Villain 2: Confirmation Bias

3) Villain 3: Short-term emotion.

4) Villain 4: Overconfidence.

• WRAP framework of decision making

1) Widen Your Options

2)Reality Test Your Assumptions

3)Attain distance before deciding

4)Prepare to be wrong

The book packs a lot of punch and hence I am in the process of writing an elaborate book summary on this book. Do come back for a detailed summary of the book.

7. Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days

I have write an elaborate book summary and have published a podcast on the topic.

Sprint: A Book Summary

Podcast on Sprint

8. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck

World-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck, in decades of research on achievement and success, has discovered a truly groundbreaking idea—the power of our mindset.

In this book, Dweck shows how success in school, work, sports, the arts, and almost every area of human endeavor can be dramatically influenced by how we approach our goals. People with a fixed mindset—those who believe that abilities are fixed—are far less likely to flourish than those with a growth mindset—those who believe that abilities can be developed through hard work, good strategies, and mentorship. Mindset reveals how great parents, teachers, managers, and athletes can put this idea to use to foster outstanding accomplishment.

Key Takeaways from the Book:

• People have either a fixed or a growth mindset.
• People who believe their personal qualities are unchangeable have a "fixed mindset."
• People who believe they can improve or change their personality traits over time have a "growth mindset."
• People with a growth mindset believe that the future presents an opportunity to grow, even during challenging times.
• Mindsets produce definite worldviews, but they can be changed.
• Children who are praised for their intelligence tend to adopt a fixed mindset and reject new challenges.
• Jack Welch, who had a growth mindset, took over GE in 1980 when the company was valued at $14 billion; 20 years later, it had a $490-billion valuation.
• Athletes with a growth mindset build strong characters by challenging themselves.
• Historically company executives who hold fixed mindsets and regard themselves as geniuses or visionaries do not build great teams.
• Coaching and teaching about mindset are the best ways to boost kids' self-esteem.

9. Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice by Clayton Christensen

The title of the book doesn't reveal that the book is on Jobs to be Done.

Clayton Christensen was the man responsible to coin the concept of Jobs to be Done by his hugely popular talk on solving the milkshake problem.

The foremost authority on innovation and growth presents a path-breaking book every company needs to transform innovation from a game of chance to one in which they develop products and services customers not only want to buy, but are willing to pay premium prices for.

How do companies know how to grow? How can they create products that they are sure customers want to buy? Can innovation be more than a game of hit and miss? Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has the answer. A generation ago, Christensen revolutionized business with his groundbreaking theory of disruptive innovation. Now, he goes further, offering powerful new insights. 

After years of research, Christensen and his co-authors have come to one critical conclusion: our long held maxim--that understanding the customer is the crux of innovation--is wrong. Customers don't buy products or services; they "hire" them to do a job. Understanding customers does not drive innovation success, he argues. Understanding customer jobs does. The "Jobs to Be Done" approach can be seen in some of the world's most respected companies and fast-growing startups, including Amazon, Intuit, Uber, Airbnb, and Chobani yogurt, to name just a few. But this book is not about celebrating these successes--it's about predicting new ones. 

10. Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

This book piqued my interest after I found that it had won the 2015 FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.

What are the jobs of the future? How many will there be? And who will have them? As technology continues to accelerate and machines begin taking care of themselves, fewer people will be necessary. Artificial intelligence is already well on its way to making “good jobs” obsolete: many journalists, office workers, and even computer programmers are poised to be replaced by robots and smart software.

As progress continues, blue and white collar jobs alike will evaporate, squeezing working- and middle-class families ever further. The result could well be massive unemployment and inequality as well as the implosion of the consumer economy itself. The past solutions to technological disruption, especially more training and education, aren't going to work. We must decide, now, whether the future will see broad-based prosperity or catastrophic levels of inequality and economic insecurity. Rise of the Robots helps us understand what accelerating technology means for our economic prospects for society as a whole.

Key Takeaways from the Book:

• Automation may soon threaten your job and way of life.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) doubles in capacity every two years or so.
• AI already defeats the world’s best chess and Jeopardy players.
• AI drives cars, runs restaurants, writes articles, creates original art, composes symphonies and builds houses – and that’s just the beginning.
• Automation handles most factory and agricultural work.
• AI will take over most remaining farm and factory jobs, then retail and fast-food employment.
• AI augments or replaces work that analysts, radiologists and scientists do. It will replace most knowledge workers.
• Millions will lose their jobs, income disparity will grow, and the economy and society will break under the pressure.
• Ultimately, everyone will need a “guaranteed minimum income.”
• Few will work, because machines will be a thousand or a million times more intelligent and capable than people.

There were also a few more that I managed to read:

• The Achievement Habit by Bernard Roth
• Gamestorming
• Deep Work by Carl Newport
• Radical Focus by Christina Wodtke
• Strategize by Roman Pichler
• Platform Scale by Sangeet Paul Chaudhary
• A Guide to a Good Life by William Ervine

Do let me know if you want an elaborate book summary or a podcast on any of the above books and I will be glad to publish it.