Reading Recap: May 2024
💸The Go-Giver: A Little Story About A Powerful Business Idea by Bob Burg and John David Mann
The more you give of yourself to help others, the more that comes back to reward you. A short, fun read that inspires and educates.
🪕Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
An overnight success; decades in the making. A wonderful and entertaining read. It should serve as a cautionary tale that the creativity that breeds in obscurity and that results in success will ultimately be suffocated by that same success.
👩💼Executive Presence 2.0 by Sylvia Ann Hewett
How you present yourself influences how your work is perceived. This book helps you understand the rules and important opportunities that may be too sensitive for other to give you feedback about. It also shows that some of these rules change with time. Leaders on the vanguard of the new rules often had to break some of the olds ones. You don’t have to follow all the rules, but you should understand them and understand why you choose to break them if you do.
👑The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
A good read, but people get a little too excited about this book. It is treated like the Necronomicon, the powerful “Book of the Dead”. If your plan is to put the power laws from this book directly into action, you may end up like Bruce Campbell in The Army of Darkness movie. All that said, power dynamics are real, and it is important to understand how they play out. I read this book, because I want to read books that people who read books like this read.
🌞Uptime by Laura Mae Martin
I really don’t need another productivity book at this point, but I couldn’t resist when I heard Laura’s story on the Best of Both Worlds podcast. She was such an effective planner that planning became her job at Google. The book has a unique perspective on pairing times of the day when you have more or less energy with appropriate tasks. Her analogy of a very inefficient laundry folding methodology to our default way of working is very illustrative of the challenges. I appreciated her inclusion of Connection as a valid reason for meetings.
