ISSUE #1 - JANUARY 4, 2022
My year in books
Read through my reviews of the books that I read during the past year. Some of them are "must-reads", some of them I trash. The topics vary across entrepreneurship, product management, sales, self-improvement, psychology, history, maths, physics.
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One of the core items of my last year’s resolution was that I wanted to read more. As a result, I set a goal that I should read a minimum of ten books within the year. In order to give myself a better chance of achieving this, I created a reading list with the books that I would like to read, making sure that I wouldn’t add any fiction books. Why no fiction? I observed in the past years that whenever I try to go through a fiction book, I usually end up abandoning it in the middle.
The result? I smashed that goal, reading a total of 20 books within the year, enjoying every moment of it. Below you can find my review of those books. I’ve split them in 3 categories:
- Must reads
- Below expectations
- Stay away
You can either read through the whole list, or just skip to the review that you’re interested in reading.
Must-reads
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1. Principles: Life and Work, by Ray Dalio
That easily made the top of “Must-reads” list. If you are into building your own business or just want to optimize the results of the organization you are working for, or even find a framework in which you could make decisions in your life, Dalio offers invaluable advice on how to do this via his own experiences which are a result of his successes and failures.
The book is split in two parts. The first one is like an auto-biography in which Dalio shares his life story, whereas in the second one he points out the “principles” (or maybe better put the rules) that helped him thrive. According to his recommendation in the book, you can either read both or just skip to the second part.
Personally, I don’t particularly enjoy stand-alone “do’s and don’ts” lists, so I would highly recommend reading both sections. After all, by reading the first one, you can actually understand how the man came up with the second one, and why it makes sense.
2. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness, by Eric Jorgenson
Another book that is sharing the experiences and life principle of another successful person, Naval Ravikant, among other things co-founder of Angellist. The book is not written by him, but by Eric Jorgenson who curated material from a series of his writings, interviews or even simple tweets.
Despite this book looks a lot like the first of the list, it is very different in the sense that it’s not an autobiography, neither a list of rules that you have to follow. The writer mostly points out the principles and life values that proved most useful to Naval’s personal or professional success. It is much easier to follow and includes some really useful advice, not the “heavy-sounding” kind of advice of the “how to live your life” style.
3. Thinking, Fast & Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
In this book Kahneman presents much of his life’s work on how the human brain works. From the title, someone could assume that it is a guide on how to think fast and slow, however it is a highly scientific work, based on years of academic research. Kahneman explains all those mechanisms that are working in the various parts of our brains, help us ingest and process data and lead us to making impulsive or more well-thought decisions.
The book by no means shares ways on how we can control the more impulsive or the more “conservative” parts of our brain, after all as the writer explains, that is not possible since we are programmed to work in a certain way. However, as far as I am concerned, understanding how our decision making mechanisms work, our strengths and our flaws on that part of our body, is a great tool to making better decisions in the future, or trying to fix the wrong ones that we have already made.
4. The Courage to Be Disliked: How to Free Yourself, Change your Life and Achieve Real Happiness, by Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga
The title of this book might be misleading, as most people would think that it is a self-help or self-improvement book. This is not the case. Not that it won’t help to that direction, however I would classify it in the psychology genre. Kishimi and Koga base this book on the principles of Alfred Adler (Adlerian psychology), one of the three giants of phsychology alongside Freud and Jung.
For me, anyone that would be interested in psychological theory and in particular Adlerian psychology, should start from this book as an introduction to it. It is written in a dialogue format, which makes it much easier (and enjoyable) to follow and allows its main takeaways to sync in. Personally, it opened up a whole new world for me, as I found Adlerian theory particularly interesting and I have already ordered a couple of more books that will help me dig deeper into that.
5. The intelligent investor, by Benjamin Graham, Jason Zweig (Contributor), Warren Buffett (Contributor)
For anyone thinking about breaking into investing, this should be the starting point, if you don’t want to just send money down the drain. Don’t get me wrong, this is not some kind of investment handbooks that will help you “make $50K in 90 days with a starting capital of $1”. The title of this book could easily be “Investing 101”.
Graham with the help of Zweig and Buffett, introduces all the basic principles of fundamental analysis and all the basic aspects of what anyone should be looking into in order to evaluate the market, a company, bonds, anything that you’re thinking about investing in. It is primarily focusing on people that want to get into long term investing. What this book will not give you (for a good reason if you’re new to investing) is anything around technical analysis and how to read candles on a graph in order to evaluate the future of a company, which is great for me.
It is not like I believe that technical analysis is worthless, but if you are serious about not loosing your money, fundamental analysis is the cornerstone that you should build on.
6. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, by Peter Frankopan
This is by far the most interesting book I’ve ever read on world history. Frankopan begins from the BC years of humanity and reaches almost up to the 21st century in a very detailed and comprehensive manner, with one small twist. His primary focus is on the eastern side of the world, in the areas of East Asia and Middle East and how the events that happened there have practically affected the evolution of the world that we live in today.
Being a history junky myself, there were many things that I learned, so that by itself would be enough, however the book is very well-written and easy to follow, to the degree that in some cases I felt like watching a movie in my head.
7. Calculus Made Easy, by Silvanus Phillips Thompson, Martin Gardner
That could be a weird choice for many people being in a reading list. After all, reading math outside of a school or university context is not that common. However, I wanted to refreshen my calculus, so I gave the book a chance. It was a great choice.
Calculus is usually a head-ache for most students, however I strongly believe that it wouldn’t be, if instead of the very technical and usually crappy books that we were given at school of university, people used this book. It takes a complex concept like calculus and makes it very simple to understand from the very beginning. So when things get more complicated as the book progresses with differentials or integrals, or essential concepts in business today like compound interest or the laws of organic growth, you can actually follow easily.
On the bonus side, it has plenty of exercises to help you practice, which made this book my favourite weekend companion for a couple of months (when I was a student, I never believed that I would say these words in my life).
8. The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, by Ben Horowitz
There is no denying that this is one of the best business reads out there. In this book, the legend Ben Horowitzh, shares his story about creating a business and the challenges that he faced. Other books do the same thing in a really good manner, however in this one you really feel the pain, as Horowitz explains even low level details, even in situations of extreme stress where the lives of many people were hanging from the success or failure of your own decisions.
My favourite thing about this book is that by sharing a real story, it really puts things when it comes to business problems into perspective and shows you that if this guy managed to keep his cool and succeed, given the macro and micro circumstances that he faced, then there is a solution for every business problem, no matter how big or small, provided that you keep your cool, you are open minded and willing to take risks (big ones some times) and make sacrificies (costly in most of the times).
9. Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love, by Marty Cagan
I read this book for the second time in 2021, after 7 years of practicing product management. The first time was when I was starting to get into the role. What I loved about it, is that with some years of experience, this book gives you a totally different perspective on things around product.
This time, I paid more attention (or maybe I was just in a position to better understand) to things around product leadership, whereas the first time that I was reading this I mostly focused on the technical details of the job. All in all, in my opinion this is one of the first book that anyone that is trying to break into product management should read, but it serves you well even if you have a few years of experience.
10. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, by Patrick Lencioni
This is literally a page-turner. Once I got my hands on this book I could not stop reading. This is primarily because of the fact that it is written in a parabolic way. The story is that a company is going under a major leadership change, so we witness the hardships of the new CEO that is trying to get the company back into the right path of growth, which is not straight-forward in some cases, as she is dealing with the pre-existing senior management team, which is kind of resistant to change, especially when change is coming from the new kid in the block.
It is really like watching a movie. The new CEO has a certain framework called “the 5 dysfunctions” that she is applying in her first few weeks in the company, so that she can help the senior management work better together. So by following the story, you are getting introduced to the framework, which is particularly interesting and the writer definitely makes some good points on how a team should function.
11. A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, by William B. Irvine
I always had a curiosity around the basic principles of stoic philosophy and this book gives a great introduction to that. Irvine shares the main insights as well as practical techniques used by the stoics in their effort to achieve tranquility. When reading about stoicism, we usually have the idea that we have to abandon anything that offers material pleasure in order to follow the stoic principles. However, this is not true or at least not true in principle.
There is no handbook in stoicism that tells you that you have to abandon any kind of material or immaterial pleasure in order to achieve tranquility. The book showcases how you need to think, in order to be in a position to achieve this. I would definitely recommend the book in anyone that is interested to learn more about philosophy and stoicism in particular, either because they want to adopt a life philosophy or either out of curiosity and interest in philosophical theories.
12. Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, by Neil Shubin
This is one of the books that I did not expect enjoying that much, mostly because of its genre (palaeontology), which let’s say is not my cup of tea. How wrong I was. Shubin in this book sheds light through his life research on all those processes that needed to take place, so that we could evolve from fishes. As a result, there are millions of similarities in our bones structures and DNAs with other species that also took part into the process, which is quite interesting and fascinating for me.
Another aspect of the book that I found particularly interesting is that Shubin also shares some of the basic principles of fossil search and how palaeontologists plan them, especially given the usually limited resources that they have at their disposal.
Below-Expectations
13. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters
Despite not being a bad book, on the contrary, this book didn’t make the cut in my personal “Must-Reads”. The main take away here is that in order to take the world from zero to one, you must not just optimize something that already exists, but bring a radical improvement on something that actually brings value to people.
All in all, I have great respect for Peter Thiel and his achievements, although if this book wasn’t written by him, I am not sure if it would have the success that it currently enjoys.
14. Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (100th Anniversary Edition), by Albert Einstein
I am adding the particular edition that I read here, as it contains commentary which is useful to the reader. Obviously, adding this book on my “Below-Expectations” list is not a criticism to its content, after all I do not have neither the knowledge, nor the substance to criticise the theory on which modern physics are built. It gets into that category, as in my opinion, a reader who is not a specialist in physics (like myself), cannot get really deep into the concepts around the special and the general theory.
Nevertheless, there are some interesting parts and concepts that you won’t easily read elsewhere. For me, that was the part where Einstein shows why in classic mechanics you cannot really claim that two events are “simultaneous”, which is really cool. As well as the analysis of Lorentz equations, or the four dimensional space of Minkowski, where time is another co-ordinate, just as space in classic mechanics.
15. High Output Management, by Andrew S. Grove
While this book is a pretty good read on classic management principles, I did not find it particularly fascinating. Despite still being relevant on the fundamentals of management, which is an unbelievable achievement considering that this book was written almost 30 years ago, I think that a more modern perspective would be more preferable, given the vast change in business environments over the past years.
Nevertheless, Andrew Grove is obviously another legend of the business world and reading this book is definitely not a bad use of your time.
16. What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School: Notes from a Street-Smart Executive, by Mark H. McCormack
When I first saw this book, the title reminded me of those books on airport book stores. The catchy title that leads you to buy it and you almost always end up realizing that you should never be anywhere near this book before you even reach to the 10th page. This is definitely not the case with this one.
McCormack is indeed street smart and offers great insights on how to build a business, but I am adding this book in my “Below Expectations” segment for two reasons: Firstly, I think it is too focused on sales, which is not bad, but it is also not what I expected. Secondly, it is too focused on the world of sports and it got tiring (at least for my taste) from one point onwards. In spite of that, the techniques and manoeuvres described are definitely applicable in other industries as well, so if you want to read it, go ahead, but adjust your expectations.
17. Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams, by Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson, Nate Walkingshaw
I had high hopes for this book when I bought it, especially given that it interviews quite a few accomplished product managers, so I thought it would include some first hand insights. Unfortunately, my expectations weren’t met, mostly because of the fact that it stayed on high level and vague items around product management, not jumping into the particulars or enough real life examples. It is not a “no-go” for me, but I am pretty sure that there are plenty of other reads around product management out there, with far deeper insights.
Stay Away
18. Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, by Simon Sinek
Let me be clear. This is by far the worst book - let me repeat - the worst book that I ever got my hands on. From the first page to the 50th (that’s only how far I managed to go) the writer goes on and on about how you always have to sell the “why” you are doing what you are doing or selling what you are selling and not with the “what”.
Thank you very much, I can find that in the first 10 pages of any self-respecting marketing book that I am going to open. What’s even worse, is the constant use of Apple as the example of it. Literally, the writer goes on and on for pages about how great Apple is doing what they do. What is the problem?
You do not need 256 pages that are all repeating the same thing to explain that. Just a blog post or a short video would suffice.
By the way, I asked a couple of friends who had the courage to finish this, if anything changed in the rest of the pages that I didn’t have the bravery to read. You know, just to make sure that I am giving a fair opportunity to the book. Guess what. Nothing changes. Just stay away!
19. How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie
This is one of the books that was coming up quite frequently in discussions, but I never had the opportunity to read it. So, I decided to give it a go. How mistaken I was. In my honest opinion, I think that this book could be valuable only if you are an introvert teenager or in general lacking some fundamental social skills. And then again, I am not sure that I agree with the advice that it offers.
I am only going to give it some slack, only because it was written around 90 years ago and the world was a very different place back then.
20. The Decision Book: Fifty Models for Strategic Thinking, by Mikael Krogerus, Roman Tschäppeler
The first time I came across this book was at an airport book store. The title seemed interesting to me, so I considered buying it, although I had a few pages left in the book that I was already reading, so I hesitated. I should have kept it this way.
It is the definition of the airport-bookstore book. Luckily, it is very short and each page has a certain decision framework. A couple of them are kind of useful, but other than that, in case you never read this book, you can continue with your life knowing you are not missing anything.
That was it for 2021. Onwards to a great reading 2022.
P.S.: Despite my opinion and maybe bold criticism for the books that I “trashed”, I still respect the hours of work and effort put by their authors and their teams.
The Product Notebook by Manos Kyr.
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