There are some books I find myself recommending over and over and over to work friends and coaching clients. Each of them shifted my worldview and gave me tools that I still use daily. They are worth your time.
Side note: I love books. We are so lucky to have them. An expert took the time to distill literal years of learning into a tidy package I can read in a few hours? And all for $20?? What a time to be alive.
To make the list broadly useful, I've left out any on specific areas, like programming, math, and entrepreneurship. What's left are future classics for any manager.
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The Hall of Fame
😌 Set Boundaries, Find Peace. I picked up this book skeptically, read it, then thought about it every day for a year afterward. Profoundly useful at work, home, in the world, everywhere. The world would be an easier place if everyone read this book. And it's a critical read for people-pleasers, rescuers, and overhelpers.
🔎 The Coaching Habit. For managers, not coaches. Structured questions that help you support your team without taking on so much yourself. Really works! Cuts your workload AND helps them grow faster.
🎋 Resilient Management. Lara Hogan's book, website, and workshops have given me excellent tools for surviving management.
🧪 Designing Your Life. Book on useful tools from the design process (prototyping, gathering data, etc) to help you figure out what you want at work, and then how to navigate there—without needing to quit your job first. (Designing Your Work Life is their most recent one, but I haven't read it yet)
🐕 Don't Shoot the Dog. Ostensibly about dog training, but really about the technical details of communication and incentives when working with any mammal (including humans, and including yourself). Has radically changed the way I think about every social aspect of my life, inside and outside of work.
🗺️ The Culture Map. Pragmatic and insightful book about how culture shows up at work, and leads to all kinds of misunderstandings. Mandatory reading for any multicultural teams.
Runners up
🥚 Essentialism. True story: I wanted to hate this book, but he really nailed it. As someone who tends to add add add add add, I came away PUMPED to cut out the cruft.
💀 Oliver Burkeman's work, especially Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals. His newsletter is great too. He starts from the premise that we have to get real about the fact that our time on this earth is finite. So will you do/read/watch/meet/consume/visit/see everything on your list in your lifetime? No! Once you truly accept and internalize this, all sorts of interesting implications shake out.
🗃️ Building a Second Brain. I have many a critique of this book and I don't follow his system exactly, but this book is the thing that finally helped me set up a sustainable system for notes and files after years of trying different approaches. It's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up for notes.
And just for fun...
👯♀️ The Power of Fun. If the idea of a vacation just lying on a beach makes you twitch, and you like systems and analyzing things, you will probably like this book.
🏡 Apartment Therapy. This little black-and-white book with zero photographs is probably not what you're picturing. It's a great primer on how to think about a house not just as a thing to decorate, but a space you have a relationship with that supports the activities you love. It will also give you surprisingly strong opinions about arranging furniture.
🏃♀️🛌 As someone who likes books and ideas (and tends toward thinking of my body as the machine that carries my brain around) Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain and Why We Sleep both helped me understand exactly how exercise and sleep affect my cognition. It's helped me notice and really feel the impact of each workout and hour of sleep, which helps me get more of them.
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What are yours? Leave a comment or email me, I'd love to know.