Book Summaries 2024

This book is for those who prefer to be players rather than pawns. To turn you from an amateur into a master player, Greene has codified 48 laws of power based on historical examples of people who’ve excelled or failed at wielding power, with glorious or bloody results (or both). Some key principles you’ll learn: Use your enemies, keep others dependent on you, say as little as possible, take credit for others’ work, control all the options, don’t take sides, create a cult following, and don’t get your hands dirty.You can choose to apply or dismiss these rules - but you can’t escape them.

What is the key to being a great leader? Is it about having the right personality type, training, or team? Former U.S. Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, authors of Extreme Ownership, argue that the best leaders take responsibility for every aspect of their team and every task they’re working to accomplish. Extreme Ownership requires a leader to own her team’s mistakes and failures — without blame or excuses — and objectively assess what works and what doesn’t in order to constantly improve. As Willink and Babin warn, the concept is simple but not easy.Willink and Babin honed the leadership principles of Extreme Ownership while serving in Ramadi, Iraq, the deadly and hostile center of enemy insurgency, during Operation Iraqi Freedom. After their military careers, they helped companies apply the same tenets in a corporate context through their business consulting firm, Echelon Front.Each chapter of the book examines a different aspect of Extreme Ownership and is divided into three sections — one explaining the core principle, another illustrating how it proved pivotal on the battlefield in Ramadi, and the last showing how it applies in a business setting.

In Coach the Person, Not the Problem, Marcia Reynolds seeks to expand people’s understanding of coaching. She argues that coaching is a partnership in which coaches help clients examine and challenge deep-seated beliefs that limit them, rather than a surface level, problem-solving exercise in which an expert doles out advice.

Reynolds is a leadership and executive coach who has advanced degrees in education, communications, and organizational psychology. Through working with a range of clients—including corporations like AT&T and American Express, universities, and government agencies—she discovered that lasting change comes only when people confront the underlying assumptions and emotions that have led them into the same, problematic situations time and again.

This guide examines Reynolds’s approach to coaching, five practices she uses to empower clients, and techniques to hone your coaching skills. Additionally, we provide expert perspectives that support, counter, and contextualize Reynolds’s work.

In Built to Sell, entrepreneur and small business expert John Warrillow teaches you how to build a business you can sell. As someone with first-hand experience creating and selling a small business, Warrillow claims that a sellable business is one that can function without the owner. To create such a company, he provides a step-by-step process any business owner can follow.

In this guide, we’ll explain why a self-sufficient business is more attractive to potential buyers and why you should strive to build such a business regardless of whether you intend to sell it. We’ll also explore each step of Warrillow’s process, including how to find and market a unique product or service, find the right salespeople, incentivize upper management, and finalize a sale of your business. Throughout the guide, we’ll compare Warrillow’s strategies with those of other business experts.

According to progressive media and politicians, climate change constitutes an existential threat to humanity, requiring drastic cuts in carbon dioxide emissions to avoid catastrophe. However, Bjørn Lomborg argues that, while climate change poses a significant threat, it’s not cataclysmic.

In his 2020 book, False Alarm, Lomborg concedes that climate change will have a notable impact if left unchecked. However, he argues that climate activists’ proposed approaches, like sharply reducing fossil fuel consumption, have unintended economic costs that must be balanced with the effects of climate change alone. Instead, Lomborg outlines several more modest recommendations that, he claims, represent the best approach to climate change.

In this guide, we’ll discuss Lomborg’s arguments about the impact of climate change, along with his assessments of unsuccessful approaches to climate change and his suggestions for alternatives. We’ll also examine counterarguments from climate scientists and discuss some real-world implications of Lomborg’s arguments.

In the age of science, we’ve turned our backs on the myths our ancestors believed in. However, could it be that in giving up those stories, we’ve lost a crucial part of the human experience? In Maps of Meaning, Jordan Peterson argues that mythology provides a psychological tool that helps us create meaning in a chaotic world. Beneath their fanciful trappings, creation stories and heroic quests give us the moral foundations of society and the tools for adapting to life’s challenges. Perhaps even more importantly, myths teach us to recognize our individual capacity for good and evil.

In this guide, we’ll examine Peterson’s arguments on how myth affects the mind, mythology’s fundamental archetypes and stories, and how to apply the lessons of myth to live a more well-rounded life. We’ll also look at alternative interpretations of mythological stories, what science says about the intersection of myth and cognitive development, as well as how the symbols of myth have taken new form in the stories of today.

Right now, you’re not only reading these words. You’re also engaging in self-talk: your thoughts taking the form of words, all within your mind. Self-talk is the encouraging voice that tells you, "Nailed it!" after you rock an interview, as well as the inner cynic that grumbles, "You’re a failure" after you bomb a first date. In Chatter, neuroscientist and psychologist Ethan Kross highlights this last type of voice—negative self-talk, which he believes interferes with your happiness, health, and success. He argues that you can improve your life by quieting your negative self-talk.

In this guide, we’ll present Kross’s insights on self-talk and share his research-based strategies for managing its negative form. For instance, you’ll learn why seeking support from others may make you feel worse and why feelings of amazement quiet your inner critic. Throughout this guide, we’ll compare Kross’s ideas and strategies to those of other experts on self-talk. Furthermore, we’ll provide additional actionable steps for quieting your negative self-talk.

When Breath Becomes Air is the beautiful and heart-wrenching memoir of Dr. Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgical resident diagnosed with lung cancer in the last year of his training. When the life Paul and his wife Lucy imagined for their futures ceases in the face of his diagnosis, he works to understand what his new life will look like and how long it will be. Through various treatments, his struggle to return to work, and the birth of his first and only child, Paul details his personal journey of discovering the meaning of life, death, and the thin line separating them. He explores what it means to save a life---not only his patients’, but his own, as well.

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien tells the stories of a small company of American soldiers serving in the Vietnam War. Through the narrative, the book blurs the line between autobiography and fiction, leaving the reader unsure as to what is fact and what is myth. In reading these stories, we explore the harrowing physical and psychological toll of warfare and the dehumanizing and brutalizing effects of combat on human beings. We see these men engage in shocking acts of cruelty toward Vietnamese soldiers, civilians, each other, and even themselves. We see how the high chance of sudden death makes life a cheap commodity for the soldiers.We also see the transformative power that narrative and storytelling have to help us make sense of our experiences and give meaning and clarity to even the most shocking, chaotic, and traumatizing events. Telling stories enables them to objectify their experiences, to make them seem more distant, third-party, and remote—and thus, more bearable. But creating a narrative around their experiences also brings the war and the people whom they lost to it back to life. Telling their stories makes them immortal.

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, is a distillation of his life lessons and experiences. Written with reporter Jeffrey Zaslow, the best-selling book is an expanded version of a "Last Lecture" Pausch gave in 2007, after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

The "Last Lecture" series was a tradition in which professors presented their philosophy of life, as if it were their last chance to share what was important to them. It truly was a last chance for Pausch, who had only months to live. His book and lecture, which went viral and has been viewed by millions, are about his life lessons and living your dreams.

Besides discussing the importance of pursuing your childhood dreams, Pausch used his Last Lecture to recount other lessons he’d learned or taught throughout his life, including the value of honest feedback, how to push through brick walls, and why you should be a Tigger, not an Eeyore.