"How To Be A Person In The World" and Other Books in Our Startup Library

Hello Everyone,

I surreptitiously started a (physical) library last year, in the early stage cybersecurity startup I was working for. Armed with a wiki page, and two bags of books, at the start, no one even knew it was there, at the back of the office, in a little white bookshelf. (Except the wiki page. He knew.) When our co-founders knew about my guerilla operation, they too, quite happily donated their books. As they had shared a residence together, many of the leadership books in my library were located in the ‘house’ category on the wiki page. The little library expanded to three different physical locations, eventually.

When people departed our startup for other opportunities as they often do, they also donated their friends to our space. (Books are friends, am I right?) Well, here is a [list] of the books we have on our shelves, mostly accompanied by glowing reviews. We do not really have clear guidelines for categories, and our book borrowing system, as I meant it to be, was an ‘honor-system’, meaning that if you wanted to be a book thief, you wouldn’t be a criminal, at least not in my book ;)

Hopefully, more giving, and less taking/thieving would occur. We named our library ‘The Grove’.

As many of our team happen to be actual hackers (the good type), we also have an unusual and large list of cybersecurity books covering covert operations and cybersecurity research. (Which, I’ll write about later this week.)

I wanted to know if books were still important to the younger millennials. I grew up with books, surrounded by colourful encyclopaedias. I hoped that I could find someone here who wanted to start a startup library too. I was the kid who stayed up all night under the blanket, reading books. And I still secretly harbor the hope of writing a bestseller one sweet day.

Here are the books [personal interest / self-help ‘category]

1.How To Be A Person In The World |By Heather Havrilesky

Review : Havrilesky’s funny, grumpy and helpful collected advice offers hearteningly realistic encouragement to the 21st-century worrier.

2. The Motorcycle Diaries | By Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara

Review: Che was more than just a face on a hippy’s T-shirt. He was more than just a revolutionary. This book is the recollection of a young man who was searching for adventure only to come upon horrible inequality which helped shaped his view as the man he would become in the future.

3. The Four Agreements : A Practical Guide To Personal Freedom | Don Miguel Ruiz

Review: A guide to conduct spiritual freedom and a life with fewer limitations, by a Mexican healer.

4. Man’s Search For Meaning | By Victor Frankl

Review: Frankl said that the distinguishing factor was one’s ability to find meaning, and teaches everyone that our ability to find and pursue meaning will strengthen us in any trial, big or small.

5. Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love | By John Gottman Ph.D. , Julie Schwartz Gottman Ph.D. , Doug Abrams

Review: An easy read with almost countless probing questions, many practical steps, and digestible statistics, this book is also full of real hope and optimism. My only criticism is that it can, at times, be too optimistic and almost naive about the real conflicts and challenges that couples can face -- and the times at which, I believe, there is a right and wrong, and we cannot always just be curious and infinitely accepting of our partners.

Here are the books [on leadership]

1. Rebels at Work: A Handbook for Leading Change from Within |By Lois Kelli & Carmen Medina

Review: I love this book!!! In full disclosure, I feel like I’m reading all about myself so maybe that’s why I like it but I sure wish I’d had it when I had to grow up and leave the “land of rebels” (aka Bell Labs) and work in the “Land of Status Quo” (aka AT&T). 

2. The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change | By Camille Fournier 

Review: This book does a good job of walking you through the typical career path of a software engineer, from individual contributor all the way up to senior executive. It's a great read for all programmers and not just managers. In fact, if you're still early in your career, you'll find this book especially valuable, as it's a great outline of what to expect later in your career, and some of the things you can do to accelerate your growth. 

3. Principles: Life and Work | By Ray Dalio 

Review: Amazing book, must read for anyone who has to make decisions in life - that means everyone - but I think the more impact your decisions have the more useful his frameworks are. I'm giving it 5 stars for the big ideas and uniqueness of them - though I will warn you that the book is very long and highly repetitive - there is probably a way to read only parts of it and still get all the big ideas.

4. Leading the Unleadable: How to Manage Mavericks, Cynics, Divas, and Other Difficult People | By Alan Willett

Review: As a software professional new to leadership, I found Alan Willett's book to be a valuable resource in forming my leadership skills. Willett guides readers through the mindset and decision process of exceptional leaders with concrete examples of situations he witnessed and reflection questions at the end of every chapter.

5. Start with Why | Simon Sinek 

Review: Despite the repetition, repetition, repetition and the author fanboying over Steve Jobs and Apple about a million times, this was pretty cool, well-written and motivating. It's a good idea to ask ourselves WHY in all situations, even why we stay alive.

6. Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs | By John Doerr

Review: I've worked on the Google campus for 11 years, and have seen first-hand the impact OKRs have had on the company. John Doerr is single-handedly responsible for bringing OKRs to Google. He saw before anyone else the transformative power Andy Grove's system from Intel could have at Google, and this book is a great window into those early days. John does a great job showing how that early presentation at Google set the stage for so much of the growth and success that came later.

7. Summary of High Output Management  | By Andrew S. Grove

Review: Intel co-founder Andy Grove was a brilliant CEO and a mediocre writer. His breakout business book of 1983 is no breezy beach read. A good deal of the material covered in High Output Management feels dated and his prose is dry as sand and crackers. But there are enough gems in here that it's well worth the read if you work in a managing role in a large organization (or a small organization that is growing).

8. Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box | By The Arbinger Institute 

Review: People should read the book. It gives a new way of looking at our behaviors. It gives you an option to look at your acting. By knowing them, you can gradually live a better life, run organizations better. The book does not give you answers for your problems. It gives you the truth.

“Our ‘honor-system’ library was intended to be far-reaching, non-judgmental, and easily accessible.” - J, a dear boy (also our legal advisor)

Here are the books [on startup growth]

1. The Hard thing about Hard things |By Ben Horowitz

Review: Executive Summary: This is a book about Ben Horowitz's war stories. Ben Horowitz has good war stories, if you care about the narrow space of Venture Backed fast growth technology startups. I'm not so sure that they generalize to the point of making a good management guide. You might be better off reading some Drucker.

2. Chaos Monkeys |By Antonio Garcia Martinez

Review: The greatest danger of “Chaos Monkeys” is that it could suffer the same fate as many equally prescient cautionary tales: It is appreciated less as trenchant social criticism and more as a how-to manual. 

3. Skin in the game | Nassim Taleb

Review: I’m improperly awed and professionally depressed by this guy. While I’ve been in love with the concept of asymmetry since, like, forever, he puts on it such an excruciating spin that… a lot of professions suddenly attain the unmistakable bullshit (or maybe swanshit!) flavor.

Anyway, this book lost a bit of its charm due to aggressive and seemingly random things aggregated together. I'm sure it's another case of 'it's not you, it's me', still, I felt the previous volumes were better grounded and more founded in reality. Anyway, the eruditic approach to even the most disjointed things: Assassins, politics, Knights Templar.... etc, you name it, made this an irresistible read.

Here are the other random books [covering topics like Design Thinking, Economics, Business Intelligence Psychology, Organizational Psychology]

1. Six Thinking Hats | By Edward de Bono

Review: Edward De Bono offers an interesting manual on the process of thinking. He suggests and persuasively argues that keeping our thoughts ordered and divided between the "Six Thinking Hats" allows us to be more effective with our decision making.

2. Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics | By Richard Thaler

Review: Misbehaving is a quickie intellectual history of behavioral economics, told by one of its founders, Richard Thaler. He’s a gleeful contrarian: loves economics, but loathes classical economic models and their assumptions of rationality. His career has been devoted to producing both lab-based and empirical studies documenting the irrationality of what he calls Humans (as opposed to Econs). 

3. Work Rules! | By Laszlo Bock

Review: This should be the new gospel for HR.

4. The Critical Thinker: The Path to Better Problem Solving, Accurate Decision Making, and Self Disciplined Thinking | By Steven Schuster

Review: I recommend this book for anyone who is interested in critical thinking. It is concise, and straight forward.

5. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion | By Robert B Cialdini 

Review: A couple of months ago, I read somewhere that when it comes to the psychology of persuasion and influence, Cialdini is the “daddy” of this subject. I chuckled and moved on. But then, a few days ago I found myself in a bookstore holding this book and heading to the counter. I came back home, and devoured it chapter by chapter, awestruck and flabbergasted by the sheer brilliance of the psychology of persuasion. Cialdini is no novice, apart from being an academic scholar and researcher who conducted innumerable experiments over the course of his career; He spent three years, in field, researching for this book. He entered into programs offered by different business enterprises and marketing agencies to train sales staff and dealers in ‘the art of persuasion’. Cialdini explains the science at work behind the curtains of this ‘art show’ in this book. 

6. Hyperfocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction | By Chris Bailey

Review: My life will forever be split into "before Hyperfocus" and "after Hyperfocus". And I'm optimistic that the "after Hyperfocus" part will be infinitely more focused and creative than the “before” part was, thanks to this book. I felt like on every page, the author was speaking directly to me. 

7. Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results | James Clear

Review: I've read a lot of books on changing behavior and building habits and James Clear's Atomic Habits is my new favorite. This book is different from others in the way it covers an enormous amount of ground in the larger area of self-improvement while seamlessly tying all these ideas back into the central theme of habits.

8. The Courage to Be Disliked: The Japanese Phenomenon That Shows You How to Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness | Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga

Review: Inspiring, thought-provoking and deeper than a Taylor Swift song.

9. Sprint | By Jake Knapp

Review : Being a bit of a process geek, I was excited to read Jake Knapp's new book, Sprint, which covers the refined innovation approach that is used at Google Ventures. I feel that this book is a must read for executives, digital product owners, as well as designers/developers (and I would rarely categorize one book as good for all of those demographics).

Although the word “grove” is defined by the Oxford dictionaries as simply “a small wood or other group of trees“, its concept is far more nuanced than that. Groves have been considered sacred throughout history, and have been associated with learning, self-improvement, enlightenment. Religious figures and philosophers have given famous lectures and sermons on them, performed miracles in them, and have even attained nirvana and immortality meditating in them. Interestingly, the world of academia and scholarly pursuit is also nicknamed “the grove of Academe”.

One of my longtime friends and previous colleague passed me the book How To Be A Person In The World, at a time where it felt that nothing was going right for me. It was apt for the situation I was in, as it is now for the current times. And it will impact the next person who picks up this book from our library. I was also responsible for ‘learning and development’ in the company, although to be honest we never really had the budget to do anything meaningful on a large scale. Maybe this is my way of impacting someone else’s life without getting to know the results of my initiative. If I could start a library, anyone else could, too.

Kind Regards,

Rei