Did you catch last week’s part one post where I shared half of my favorite reads from 2023? If not, you can catch up here.
I wrote about books related to Learning and Development and DEI.
This week I continue with my favorite books from last year on personal development, health and wellness, business development and my absolute top reads from 2023.
Here we go, errr, read.
1. Personal development
Better than Before, Mastering the Habits of our Everyday Lives by Gretchen Rubin
- Chockablock full of tips and well-researched examples, it’s a great read.
- I think about Gretchen’s writings often in my lifelong quest for healthy habits
- Her four tendencies (how you welcome or resist inner and outer expectations) were a game-changer for me when I realized I’m a questioner. I welcome inner expectations and question outer expectations.
- Gems like loophole spotting (when you’re letting yourself off the hook), we’re more likely to eat leftovers if they’re in a clear container, figuring out if you need to abstain (no chocolate bars around you at all) or if you can imbibe a little are easy concepts to understand and implement.
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande
- I’m an uber fan of lists overall including checklists so I was curious about this book.
- “Checklists are as straightforward as they sound: a rundown of steps to be finished when completing a task or procedure. Shockingly, it is the stuff that everybody ought to know, the most obvious steps – that are frequently the most crucial that get overlooked or skipped.”
- “The checklist provides us with a safety net.”
- For example when checklists were implemented, death from surgeries in the eight facilities decreased by 47 percent!
- Yeah for checklists.
2. Health and Wellness
Soul Shift, the Weary Humans Guide to Getting Unstuck and Reclaiming your Oath to Joy by Rachel Macy Stafford
- While I can’t remember how I first discovered this book, I do recall that one’s “Oath to joy” sounded great.
- I enjoyed the focus on taking “small, brave steps” and six practices including:
- Presence
- True self-worth
- Letting go of perfection
- Being kind to yourself
- Authentic self
- Self-forgiveness
The Kindness Method: Change Your Habits for Good USing Self-Compassion and Understanding by Sharoo Izadi
- This was another book that I heard about on a podcast.
- When reviewing my book notes, I can see a page full of words with the sentence in the middle in bold “Ways I’m Happy is to be….”
- The world is down enough on people in general, and especially women, POC, the elderly, disabled, LGBTQI people, etc., that with a focus on kindness, we simply can’t go wrong.
3. Business development
Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers by Chip Heath and Karla Starr
- I’m a big fan of Chip and Dan Heath’s work so this book was a natural for me. Plus I got to see Karla Starr speak at the World Domination Conference a couple of years back (an event for change-makers and entrepreneurs).
- It’s fabulous! Based on a course that Chip teaches at Stanford, each chapter has a different principle of how to, well, make numbers count.
- Our brains aren’t wired to understand large numbers. And this can lead to some serious, yet fixable problems.
- My favorite parts were the authors putting the principles into practice and showing the before and after. Explaining a principle, they’d then compare the before and after by using the principle.
- Here’s one of many, many examples, this one based on the principle of using the Goldilocks – making your numbers juuuust right.
- Before: According to researchers at Northwestern University, Black families with kids have a single penny in wealth for every dollar held by White families with kids.
- After: Consider two thought experiments to make clear the implications of the penny/dollar discrepancy. Imagine a child breaking a leg, racking up $1,500 in doctors’ bills. If a typical White family has $2,000 in a checking account, a Black family has only $20. Imagine reaching retirement age: a White family has $500,000. A Black family would have $5,000 – and probably find it impossible to retire.
Buy Back Your Time, Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire by Dan Martell
- I love this book! Rather than focus on time management, Dan urges us to focus on energy management by doing a time and energy audit.
- He creates a simple, elegant quadrant that compares tasks that make you money and light you up, which creates four categories;
- replacement (makes money but doesn’t light you up)
- delegate (doesn’t make you money and doesn’t light you up)
- production (makes money and lights you up)
- investment (doesn’t make money (yet) and lights you up)
- I also loved his DOD (definition of done) concept. Delegating can be tough. I know it can be for me. So his DOD is a truly helpful concept. I’ll be adding it to my SOP document, with key tasks having a short checklist that defines when the task is considered done.
Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results, An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones by James Clear
- So good! I’d been meaning to read this New York Times Bestseller for a while and finally got to it.
- James packs tons of helpful tips that you can customize to the habits you’re trying to build or avoid.
- One summary of a portion of the book (which has lots of interesting practical examples) is to build good habits by focusing on making it obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying.
- Conversely, if you’re trying to break a habit, do the opposite -not obvious, unattractive, difficult, and dissatisfying.
Hook Point; How to Stand Out in a Three-second World by Brendan Kane
- Brendan tells us we have more information on our smartphones than the US president had access to in the 1990s.
- This access to info has led us to be bombarded with more than 600,000 messages being sent daily.
- One of his key messages is that in today’s world, we need to learn how to stand out in a mere three seconds
- His tips include fighting through the noise, storytelling, and truly understanding who you’re trying to reach.
4. My overall top 2023 reads
Of all the books I read this year, from parts one and two of my blog posts, these are my absolute favourites.
- Mindset, the New Psychology of Success; How we can learn to fulfill our potential by Carol Dweck. This is one of my all-time favorite books ever. Seriously, go get it if you haven’t read it yet.
- Mistakes were made (but not by me); Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson
- The Seeker- a Novella by Ali Enow
- My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem
- Buy Back Your Time, Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire by Dan Martell
- Do the Work! An Antiracist Activity Book by W. Kamau Bell and Kate Schatz.
- Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results, An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones by James Clear
Another year, another list of my favourite books. I hope these books have inspired you to seek out more learning. Enjoy!
Now go on and learn, laugh, and lead
Learn
- Check out the books that call to you and settle in for a good read.
Learn some more
- Roll out the red carpet for learning and celebrate.
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