Reading List
Last updated June 16, 2024
This is a list of books on career development, content creation, and education that have shaped my personal philosophy and practices. I often share or recommend these books to others. The list of books I recommend changes often as I discover new books and shift my perspective.
Building and Growing Your Career
Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know
The world is changing and you are exposed to new things daily. Clinging to old beliefs based on outdated information will stunt your growth and opportunities will pass you by.
From the Publisher:
With bold ideas and rigorous evidence, Adam Grant investigates how we can embrace the joy of being wrong, harness the advantages of impostor syndrome, bring nuance into charged conversations, and build schools, workplaces, and communities of lifelong learners. Think Again reveals that we don’t have to believe all our thoughts or internalize all our emotions. It’s an invitation to let go of views that are no longer serving us well and prize mental flexibility, humility, and curiosity over consistency.
Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
Sometimes you have to get creative and make things up as you go. This book helps you become essential at work by teaching you to think creatively, solve problems, and stay strong under pressure.
From the Publisher:
There used to be two teams in every workplace: management and labor. Now there’s a third team, the linchpins. These people figure out what to do when there’s no rule book. They delight and challenge their customers and peers. They love their work, pour their best selves into it, and turn each day into a kind of art.
Corporate Confidential
If you’re going to work for a company, you need to understand how companies manage their people. This book will help you avoid the traps many people fall into at work.
From the Publisher:
Cynthia Shapiro is a former Human Resources executive who’s pulling back the curtain on the way that companies really work. In Corporate Confidential, she unmasks startling truths and what you can do about them, including:
- There’s no right to free speech in the workplace. *Age discrimination exists.
- Why being too smart is not too smart.
- Human Resources is not there to help you, but to protect the company from you.
- And forty-five more!
Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High
Communicating clearly and effectively in high pressure situations is vital to your success. This book gives you techniques that will help you stay calm, listen more carefully, and speak clearly to improve relationships and get better results.
From the Publisher:
When stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong, you have three choices: Avoid a crucial conversation and suffer the consequences; handle the conversation poorly and suffer the consequences; or apply the lessons and strategies of Crucial Conversations and improve relationships and results.
The Pragmatic Programmer: Your Journey To Mastery, 20th Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition)
If you work in tech, this book has so many nuggets of advice and practical suggestions. Whether you’re a new programmer or a seasoned developer, there’s something in here for you to learn.
From the Publisher:
This new edition re-examines what it means to be a modern programmer. Topics range from personal responsibility and career development to architectural techniques for keeping your code flexible and easy to adapt and reuse.
Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success
This book shows how being generous and helping others can lead to greater success in your career and personal life. It explores givers, takers, and matchers, and uses many stories and studies to show how the givers ultimately find the most success.
From the Publisher:
For generations, we have focused on the individual drivers of success: passion, hard work, talent, and luck. But in today’s dramatically reconfigured world, success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others. In Give and Take, Adam Grant, an award-winning researcher and Wharton’s highest-rated professor, examines the surprising forces that shape why some people rise to the top of the success ladder while others sink to the bottom. Praised by social scientists, business theorists, and corporate leaders, Give and Take opens up an approach to work, interactions, and productivity that is nothing short of revolutionary.
Content Creation
Keys to Great Writing Revised and Expanded: Mastering the Elements of Composition and Revision
This book gives you practical tips and techniques to improve your writing skills through clear explanations and useful exercises. When working with a new author, I often recommend this book first.
From the Publisher:
If you’re ready to empower your writing but are unsure of where to start, let Keys to Great Writing Revised and Expanded show you the way. Award-winning author and veteran writing coach Stephen Wilbers provides invaluable instruction on every aspect of the craft, from word choice and sentence structure to organization and revision.
On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
This book helps you write clear, engaging content that’s enjoyable to read. The first chapter uses a draft of the first chapter to explain some of the initial concepts, which I’ve found helpful when teaching others to write.
From the Publisher:
Whether you want to write about people or places, science and technology, business, sports, the arts or about yourself in the increasingly popular memoir genre, On Writing Well offers you fundamental priciples as well as the insights of a distinguished writer and teacher. With more than a million copies sold, this volume has stood the test of time and remains a valuable resource for writers and would-be writers.
The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself
I recommend working with an editor, but if you can’t find one, you’ll have to edit your own work. And that’s a difficult process. This book offers good advice and techniques to help you get comfortable with the editorial approach.
From the Publisher:
The Artful Edit explores the many-faceted and often misunderstood―or simply overlooked―art of editing. The book brims with examples, quotes, and case studies, including an illuminating discussion of Max Perkins’s editorial collaboration with F. Scott Fitzgerald on The Great Gatsby. Susan Bell, a veteran book editor, also offers strategic tips and exercises for self-editing and a series of remarkable interviews…
The Practice: Shipping creative work
From the Publisher:
Creative work doesn’t come with a guarantee. But there is a pattern to who succeeds and who doesn’t. And engaging in the consistent practice of its pursuit is the best way forward.
Developmental Editing, Second Edition: A Handbook for Freelancers, Authors, and Publishers
Editing is more than just finding grammar and spelling problems. Developmental editing is the process of working with authors to build a better book. This book has everything you need to become a great developmental editor, even if you’re only doing it as a freelancer.
From the publisher:
Developmental editing—transforming a manuscript into a book that edifies, inspires, and sells—is a special skill, and Scott Norton is one of the best at it. With more than three decades of experience in the field, Norton offers his expert advice on how to approach the task of diagnosing and fixing structural problems with book manuscripts in consultation with authors and publishers. He illustrates these principles through a series of detailed case studies featuring before-and-after tables of contents, samples of edited text, and other materials to make an otherwise invisible process tangible.
Education and Learning
Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware
This is one of the best books on understanding how to learn new skils quickly.
From the Publisher:
Software development happens in your head. Not in an editor, IDE, or designtool. You’re well educated on how to work with software and hardware, but what about wetware–our own brains? Learning new skills and new technology is critical to your career, and it’s all in your head. In this book by Andy Hunt, you’ll learn how our brains are wired, and how to take advantage of your brain’s architecture. You’ll learn new tricks and tipsto learn more, faster, and retain more of what you learn. You need a pragmatic approach to thinking and learning.
The Accelerated Learning Handbook: A Creative Guide to Designing and Delivering Faster, More Effective Training Programs
From the Publisher:
Accelerated learning is the use of music, color, emotion, play, and creativity to involve the whole student and enliven the learning experience. The Accelerated Learning Handbook is the first definitive book to explain state-of-the-art accelerated learning techniques to trainers and teachers, and features 40 techniques designed to save money while producing far better results.
Management
The 27 Challenges Managers Face: Step-by-Step Solutions to (Nearly) All of Your Management Problems
From the Publisher:
The 27 Challenges Managers Face shows exactly how to break the vicious cycle and gain control of management relationships. No matter what the issue, Tulgan shows that the fundamentals are all you need. The very best managers hold ongoing one-on-one conversations that make expectations clear, track performance, offer feedback, and hold people accountable.
Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
From the Publisher:
The idea is simple: You don’t have to choose between being a pushover and a jerk. Using Radical Candor—avoiding the perils of Obnoxious Aggression, Manipulative Insincerity, and Ruinous Empathy—you can be kind and clear at the same time.