🤓 Year in Books 2021

I completed my annual reading goal today. My plan was to read one book for satisfying my curiosity, one that directly helps me in business, and one that provides an escape every month. Here are the books I picked along with a short review:

1. The Power of Habit (5/5): I now have a solid understanding of the science behind modifying habits. I’d recommend this more than Atomic Habits.
2. The Airbnb Story (5/5): By all accounts, Airbnb should not have become this big! The very idea of letting strangers into your home raises eyebrows, but the way they executed it with belongingness at the core is amazing.

3. And Then There Were None (5/5): The thought process that went into writing this is simply incredible! I might not pick up the Mystery genre again for a while as this has set the bar quite high.

4. The Psychology of Money (5/5): This book combined my favorite topic psychology with finance, which I’ve been subconsciously avoiding for a long time. I got a good definition of freedom - being able to wake up one morning and change what I’m doing on my own terms. In other words, do the work you like with people you like at the times you want for as long as you want.

5. Steve Jobs (5/5): I see a lot of parallels in Jobs and Musk, combining great technology and aesthetic design with a team of A-players.

6. The Little Prince (5/5): It’s the most beautiful book I’ve ever read! This will now be my choice of gift for all ages. The Little Prince is one of the top translated books of all time, and I now understand why. If you’re reading this and have some recommendations for me, please let me know.

7. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (4/5): The content is really good and crisp - it’s just that I had read most of it in bits and pieces already.

8. The Everything Store (4/5): Jeff is an embodiment of long-term thinking. He emphasizes doing what’s best for the customer, even if it translates to huge losses in the short term. However, I feel that this is not the definitive story of Amazon. It has cherry-picked bits and pieces, unlike Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs.

9. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (2/5): I hated the font! There wasn’t any coherent story either. It felt more like random motivational posts stitched together.

10. The Courage to be Disliked (5/5): It’s the most powerful book I’ve ever read. The book provides a nice introduction to Adlerian psychology with a unique conversational format between the philosopher and youth, which grew on me. I had a lot of aha moments and will be picking this again soon.

11. Good Strategy Bad Strategy (2/5): It helps you understand what a good strategy looks like, in an unnecessary long text.

12. Recursion (3/5): I liked the concept of traveling through memories; the story wasn’t a page-turner though.

13. The Courage to be Happy (5/5): One of those rare sequels that make you want to read more. I found a lot of parallels with religious texts. Everyone should read this.

14. Playing to Win (2/5): My key takeaway was that all successful strategies fall into two buckets: you can provide a commodity at the lowest price or you can differentiate your offering to charge a premium. Not worth reading the whole book.

15. The Midnight Library (3/5): The ending was predictable. Pick this up if you want to read self-help books but get bored quickly.

16. The Selfish Gene (5/5): When we die, there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes. I enjoyed the rich examples. You should definitely pick this up if you liked Sapiens.

17. Blue Ocean Strategy (4/5): This book provides good frameworks to pursue differentiation at low-cost with lots of case studies.

18. Project Hail Mary (5/5): Andy tickles my nerdy bones. If you liked “Dark Matter” or “The Martian”, you’ll love this as well.

19. Meditations (1/5): This is the first book I have left halfway. Life’s too short to spend time on things I know I’m not enjoying.

20. The E-Myth Revisited (5/5): Loved this business novel. It hit me that the sole aim of a small business owner should be to create playbooks that anyone can execute.

21. The Phantom Tollbooth (5/5): I enjoyed the wordplay. I’d love to write a witty book like this down the line.

22. Siddhartha (5/5): You need to experience a lot to achieve inner peace. Knowledge can be transferred via words, but wisdom must be earned on your own.

23. The Making of a Manager (4/5): Your report should never be left wondering: What does my manager think of me? If you think she is the epitome of awesome, tell her. If you don’t think she is operating at the level you’d like to see, she should know that too, and precisely why you feel that way. This hit me hard because I felt restless wondering about the same question frequently a few years back. I’m now consciously bringing this up in my weekly 1:1s. Other learnings were around delegation and caring for your team. Your job as a manager isn’t to dole out advice or “save the day”—it’s to empower your report to find the answer herself.

24. Jonathan Livingston Seagull (4/5): This is for people who think there’s more to life and are in the pursuit of perfection.

25. Freakonomics (2/5): It felt like individual blog posts, which can be compressed to a tenth of their size.

26. High Output Management (4/5): Training is the manager’s job. Along with motivation. Your management style should change with the task-relevant maturity, going from hands-on to high-level supervision.

27. Animal Farm (5/5): I’m falling in love with the fable genre. Kudos to Orwell’s effort for putting this down in such a simple language.

28. The Science of Storytelling (5/5): If you want to write a story, read this book. It is one of the densest books I’ve read so far, with a lot of great examples. This is going into my rereading list. I picked this up at the right time as I have recently started penning down another story. I got solid frameworks to develop the main character and the overall plot. This book has single-handedly improved my mental models around storytelling by an order of magnitude. There was so much I didn’t know.

29. The $100 Startup (5/5): Some key takeaways for me were to give people the fish (not many people want to learn how to fish), that you usually don’t get paid for your hobby itself but to help other people pursue the hobby or for something indirectly related to it, and have a deadline on your offerings. It reinforced my belief to improve the quality of life I lead, not the amount of money I earn. And to not sweat about the small things. The case studies also conveyed that there’s no rehab program for being addicted to freedom. Once you’ve seen what it’s like on the other side, good luck trying to follow someone else’s rules ever again.

30. Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (3/5): I liked the variety of explanations but I have forgotten a lot of them already.

31. Bird by Bird (4/5): Anne talks candidly about the insecurities you feel while writing, especially when your early drafts are bound to be shitty.

32. Founders at Work (5/5): It’s okay to make mistakes while starting out; you can figure things out on the way. Props to Jessica for probing at all the right places.

33. Big Mushy Happy Lump (2/5): I LOL’d at some of the comic strips in the first half; the second half was a drag for me.

34. On Writing (4/5): You need to read a lot and write a lot. There’s no other way to become a great writer.

35. Tribe of Mentors (5/5): I picked this up to get book recommendations for next year. One thing that stood out to me was the emphasis on meditation throughout, every other interviewee had mentioned it!
36. Solutions and Other Problems (3/5): I liked the second half more, especially the ending which talks about being friends with yourself.

Until We Meet Again…
🖖 swap