Just as I did 2017, 2018, and 2019, I made it one of my goals in 2020 to read one book a month. I exceeded my goal to reach 20 (the extra time during this COVID year and my digital detox both helped). Here’s a list of my top 5 books from 2020:
Favourite Memoir
I couldn’t put this book down and read it in 24 hours. It’s a captivating memoir by Disney’s CEO of how he started at the bottom, worked hard, learned from mentors, and eventually became CEO. Bob tells the story of how he convinced Steve Jobs to sell Pixar to Disney, which was extremely difficult because Steve had a toxic relationship with Disney’s past CEO. He also tells the stories of putting together deals to purchase Marvel, Star Wars, and 20th Century Fox.
Through the book he writes with humility and shares insightful leadership lessons. My favourites was, “Strong leadership embodies the fair and decent treatment of people.”
Favourite Fiction
As a lifelong Star Wars fan, I’ve found Timothy Zahn’s character Thrawn to be one of the most compelling. He’s written two trilogies about Thrawn, one about his relationship with Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader, and one about him taking control over the Empire and fighting the Rebels after Palpatine and Darth Vader die.
This is the first book in his third trilogy and is the prequel to the other two trilogies, outlining the origins of Thrawn and his ascent to power in his homeland of the Chiss Ascendancy in the Outer Rims. Thrawn is a brilliant military strategist who studies the philosophy, art, and culture of his enemies to understand how to defeat them. On a side note, while watching the last season of the Mandalorian, I was excited to hear Thrawn’s name mentioned by Ahsoka Tano, which hopefully means that Thrawn will appear in future Star Wars episodes.
Favourite Productivity Book
Olive and I read this book together as we were both grappling with the increasing pull of social media and smartphones on our lives. Cal gives a strong case for the negative impact of digital consumption. While this is nothing new, Cal’s solution of going on 30-day digital detox (he calls it a digital declutter) is just radical enough to work.
Reading the book gave us inspiration to both try the 30-day digital detox in August. While I continued using my phone and laptop for work, I did limit my phone usage to family conversations on Whatsapp only and set a 30-minute limit of non-work digital use each evening. I also turned off all my notifications and broke my bad habit of checking my phone first thing in the morning. During the 30 day digital detox I used my extra time to finish 3 books (compared to my average of 1.5/month) and clean half of our house.
Favourite Business Book
This book is about achieving business growth through marketing and sales. It’s a great overview of 19 channels businesses can use to get more customers. The authors give a simple explanation of how each channel works and share a few examples of companies that have successfully used each channel and how they did it. They also talk about the Bullseye method of experimenting with the 3 most promising channels first, before focusing on the one that will give you the most growth in the season your business is in.
The 19 channels are: targeting blog, publicity, unconventional PR, search engine marketing, social and display ads, offline ads, search engine optimization, content marketing, email marketing, engineering as marketing, viral marketing, business development, sales, affiliate programs, and existing platforms. They don’t go very deep into any channel, but it does give the reader a good understand of the breadth of modern sales & marketing options available.
Favourite Psychology Book
This fascinating book is about the groundbreaking work of two Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, and their unique friendship and partnership that propelled their work. Their original studies showed ways in which the human mind systematically made mistakes.
Kahneman and Tversky were responsible for well-known psychological principles that I learned in Psychology 101, like anchoring, the Gambler’s fallacy, the availability heuristic, loss aversion, and prospect theory. For example, they gave people these two choices:
- Having a 100% chance of winning $500
- Having a 50% chance of winning $1000
Then they gave people these two choices:
- Having a 100% change of losing $500
- Having a 50% chance of losing $1000
Which options would you choose? The majority of people chose the 100% chance of winning $500, but chose the 50% chance of losing $1000. This is an example of loss aversion. The author did a marvellous job of story-telling in this book.
Honourable Mentions:
These are six other books I read that I would highly recommend:
- The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World by Melinda Gates – Melinda shares stories of 20 years of working to empower women around the world.
- Reinvention: Changing Your Life, Your Career, Your Future by Arlene Dickinson – Long-time investor on Dragon’s Den shares her story of growing her marketing business, the business failing, and the reinvention of both herself and her business.
- Educated by Tara Westover – This was a wild memoir. Tara’s upbringing is unbelievably chaotic and her determination to succeed despite her past is inspiring. It was a roller coaster ride to read this.
- Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans – Inspiring and practical. Olive wrote a blog post about how this book changed her year (and maybe her life).
- Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen by Dan Heath – Like his other books, Dan tells compelling and insightful stories like how Expedia eliminated 20 million phone calls to their call centres.
- Wonder by R. J. Palacio – Our family listened to the audio book on our summer road trip and thoroughly enjoyed it. An amazing story told creatively and emotionally through the perspectives of the main characters.
The other books I read this year were Mo’s Bows, When Life Gives You Pears, The Book of Longings, eMyth Enterprise, Undermine, Consulting Made Easy, Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, The New Business of Consulting, and The Money Tree.
PS – Here’s our other Top 5 Lists:
This post was originally published at the Coracle Marketing blog