5 Books to Kickstart the New Year

The New Year means new reading lists. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of great books out there to help us get 2017 off to a great start. These are a few of the books that Krista and I plan on reading as we usher in the New Year.

Our January reading list:

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1. Tools of Titans by Tim Ferris

I just picked up Tim Ferris’s newest book, and it’s been hard to put down. It’s a collection of interviews with some of the most successful people on the planet (with a few topical essays worked in). It’s not a typical read cover-to-cover book; rather, Ferris encourages readers to skip around to the sections that grab their attention. It’s going to take a while to work through this 704 page book, but I don’t mind one bit. One note: While this book has received overwhelmingly positive reviews on Amazon, some Tim Ferris fans who have read every one of his books and listened to all of his podcasts were disappointed in the lack of new content.

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2. EntreLeadership: 20 Years of Practical Business Wisdom from the Trenches by Dave Ramsey

Krista has been a longtime fan of Dave Ramsey. Since reading Total Money Makeover—a book that changed our lives and marriage—she listens to his podcast everyday. EntreLeadership is the next book up on her list.

From Amazon: “Your team will never grow beyond you, so here’s another question to consider. Are you growing? Whether you’re sitting at the CEO’s desk, the middle manager’s cubicle, or a card table in your living-room-based startup, EntreLeadership provides the practical, step-by-step guidance to grow your business where you want it to go.”

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3. The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

This book came recommended by Adrienne Rolon when we did our summer book round-up last August. And the New Year seems like an appropriate time to get around to reading it. 

From Amazon: “In The Power of Habit, Pulitzer Prize–winning business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. Distilling vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives that take us from the boardrooms of Procter & Gamble to sidelines of the NFL to the front lines of the civil rights movement, Duhigg presents a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential. At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, being more productive, and achieving success is understanding how habits work. As Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.”

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4. Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

It seems that many of the books I’ve been reading have referenced Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, and it’s a book that frequently appears on my suggested reading lists. 

From Amazon: “In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation―each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions.”

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5. Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

Ed Catmull is one of the founders of Pixar Animation Studios, and I have been fascinated with Pixar ever since reading Steve Jobs’ biography by Walter Isaacson (a biography that I think should be mandatory reading for students and business owners).

From Amazon: “Creativity, Inc. is a book for managers who want to lead their employees to new heights, a manual for anyone who strives for originality, and the first-ever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation—into the meetings, postmortems, and “Braintrust” sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made. It is, at heart, a book about how to build a creative culture—but it is also, as Pixar co-founder and president Ed Catmull writes, “an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible.””

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What are you planning on reading this year?