All right, so these are some of the best books that I've read this year across four different categories, productivity and performance, business and entrepreneurship, health and well-being and fantasy fiction. Let's start with productivity. All right, book number one is Getting Things Done, The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen.
This is an absolute classic in the world of productivity. This is a book that I've read about three or four different times and I reread it again this year because life has been pretty hectic this year with like getting married and moving country and trying to grow my business and growing my team and everything and I realized that there were a bunch of fundamentals from this book. that I'd picked up over the years, but it really helped having that refresher. And the book basically gives you a comprehensive system for capturing and organizing and actually executing on all of the different tasks and projects you need to do to move your life forward.
I'll be honest, it's kind of a boring read. It's not that riveting, but there's a few really game changing principles in here that if you read it or you can listen to an audible or whatever, if you actually apply them to your life with your own productivity system, then I think you'll get a lot of value out of this book. And it's one of those things that the principles you learn from this book, you'll genuinely use for the rest of your life. Book number two is Good Work by Paul Millard. Paul is the author of The Pathless Path, which is is also one of my favorite books.
Now Paul's story is that he quit a prestigious career in management consulting where he was being paid loads of money to kind of pursue his own ambition and what he wanted to do and become a writer where he's making a lot less money. If you're like me and maybe you have a job or you had a job at one point and you were a bit like questioning about whether it was the right thing for you and you didn't have many examples of other people who have kind of gone off the beaten path. Anytime I read these books they just give me more of a sense of permission.
It's like we shouldn't need permission to explore our own ambition and live our own lives but often the social models we have around us are not the same. around us like friends and family and colleagues either consciously or subconsciously encourages down a particular path and if you're feeling that sense of like oh maybe this work that I'm doing isn't really lighting me up in the way that I'd like it to then I'd really recommend reading The Pathless Path and also this book because it's a way of kind of it doesn't give you the answers but it gives you questions and interesting prompts and interesting anecdotes from Paul's life and other people's lives. around how to answer this question for yourself of how do we find good work?
How do we find work that's enjoyable and meaningful and sustainable? Oh, by the way, quick thing. If you're watching this before the 4th of January, 2025, then you might like to check out the completely free two-day productivity workshop that I'm hosting on the 4th and 5th of January, 2025. It is called Productivity Spark, and it's essentially a two-day series of workshops that are hosted by me and also my wife and also a couple of guests that I aim to help you reflect on 2024, figure out where your work and life are heading, and set active goals and quarterly quests forward to you. 2025. It is completely free.
You can check it out with a link down below and I hope to see you there potentially. All right, book number three is Rest by Alex Soo Jung Kim Pang. Why you get more work done when you work less. And the whole thesis of the book really unsurprisingly is that Alex is encouraging us to rest more.
So if we just go through the table of contents, we've got the problem of rest and the science of rest. That sort of talks about why resting feels so hard in this capitalistic and hustly kind of society that we live in, where there's this constant drive for more and more and more. And he also goes into a little bit of the science behind things like the default mode network and how resting actually stimulates our creativity.
Then there are two parts to the book. There is stimulating creativity and sustaining creativity. Within stimulating creativity, we've got four hours. He talks about the optimal amount of time to be able to focus for, the power of morning routines, why walking and napping and stopping for the day is actually a very good thing to do.
And it sounds kind of obvious, and maybe you're watching this thinking, I don't need a book to teach me how to rest. But... If you care about productivity and personal development, it is very easy for people like us to get fixated on the work thing and to really under appreciate the rest thing.
Alrighty, book number four is Slow Productivity by Cal Newport, which is sort of like a productivity book combined with the sort of rest idea. And the subtitle here is The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. I've actually done a whole video about slow productivity that will be linked up there somewhere. And in the book, he talks about the three rules of slow productivity. So do fewer things at once.
work at a natural pace and obsess over quality. And I really like it because there's a bunch of really inspiring stories and anecdotes from people like Galileo and Isaac Newton and Jane Austen and sort of the knowledge workers from back in the day about how they managed to structure their lives around producing really meaningful output that, you know, has... Stood the test of time hundreds of years later, but how they did it in a way that wasn't particularly hurried or rushed or busy or all of these sorts of things.
His point is that most of us are probably not in the situation that Jane Austen was, where you could just sort of chill in a cottage for 10 years and just do your writing. But the point is that there are things that we can learn from these figures from the yonder days and how we can apply them to our own fairly busy lives. And for me, I found that this has been one of the most impactful books that has changed how I personally approach goal setting and task and project management and actually getting things done.
While we're here, a cheeky plug for my own book, Feel Good Productivity, which if you haven't read yet, then you might like to. It's available everywhere books are sold. I think it's a pretty good companion to slow productivity.
My thesis in Feel Good Productivity is that if you want to be more productive, more creative, less stressed, and do work that feels enjoyable and meaningful and sustainable, then we've got to focus on the positive emotions that the work generates. And however boring a task or project might be, there are always ways that we can find the fun in it and find a way to enjoy it just a little bit more. So...
You might like to check that out if you haven't yet. All right, let's now move on to the business and entrepreneurship favorite books of this year that I would recommend for you. And the first one is Ready, Fire, Aim. by Michael Masterson.
And the subtitle here is zero to $100 million in no time flat. Obviously, that's a little bit of an exaggeration. But actually, I think the book does a reasonable job of delivering on that particular promise. And basically, what he does is that he splits up business entrepreneurship into distinct phases, the zero to $1 million phase, the one to $10 million a year phase, then 10 to 50. And then I think like 50 to 100. For me, having been through the zero to $1 million a year stage, there were a lot of lessons that I learned from reading this that I learned myself through experience and a few that I hadn't quite considered. But now in our case, our business is between the one and $10 million a year mark.
Like we do about four or five, $6 million a year in annual revenue, depending on the year, it fluctuates a little bit. And this book gave me some genuinely novel and very useful ideas on how to break that $10 million a year sort of business. growth threshold.
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Book number two is a book that I have read many, many times on Kindle and that is Traction by Gino Wickman. Traction is one of the books I've most recommended to other entrepreneurs running businesses. If you have a business that's got at least three people in it, then Traction, I would say, is pretty much essential reading.
If you have a business that's less than three people in it, and maybe you're at an earlier stage or you haven't yet gotten started, I probably wouldn't recommend Traction because it's not quite for that particular stage of growth. But if you do have a business with more than three team members, then Traction is really, really good. It is like the ultimate operating system for running a business. Now in my business, we've been kind of going back and forth on like the Traction methodology versus not the Traction methodology for the last few years.
And this year I kind of reread the book and I realized that a lot of the mistakes that we've made in business over the last two years were made by the people that I know. we could have avoided had we just stuck to the method. Like, you know, they've built this method on how to like operate a particular business. They've built it over. decades with like hundreds and hundreds of businesses that are between like three and 100 plus people in size.
And it's just like really, it's just really, really good. All right, book number three is a really old school one called The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. This is the 30th anniversary edition.
This book has been out for a long time and has sold over 10 million copies. That is a lot of copies. And basically it is about the principles of business operations and management, which sounds really, really boring and probably is boring unless you work in business operations or you own a business, in which case it is absolutely riveting because you can immediately see all of the different ways in which you're screwing up your own business. And what I like about this book is that it's not a textbook or a how-to guide. It's actually told in the form of a fable or a story.
And that's nice because it really helps drive home this idea of theory of constraints, which is ridiculously important when you are running a business, but it tells it through a story that makes it far more engaging and accessible. All right, book number four is a book I listened to on Audible, and that is Death by Meeting by Patrick Lencioni. I love the business books by Pat Lencioni.
They sound like super boring on the surface, like Death by Meeting and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive and The Advantage and things like that. But they're really, really good. They're very accessible, very easy to read or listen to. And they are also told in the format of a story. So you learn important business concepts.
but you don't have to just sort of read or listen to the important business concepts. You listen or you read them in the format of a story of a fable of a business owner and kind of the struggles they're having in their like manufacturing plant or marketing business or whatever the thing is. And through the story, he introduces the concepts, which I think is a super, super nice way to learn. And this book, Death by Meeting, I think is super, super interesting and required reading for anyone who either leads or attends meetings as part of your job.
Book number five is Million Dollar Weekend by Noah Kagan, the surprisingly simple way to launch a seven-figure business in 48 hours. Now, obviously you're not gonna make a seven-figure business in 48 hours, but you can absolutely launch a seven-figure business in just 48 hours. I speak to loads of people who wanna start businesses and basically none of them actually take action on it.
Maybe if you wanted to start a business, you might've been thinking about it for a few months, maybe even a few years, maybe even a few decades, and you're probably waiting for the right idea, right? Because- you've got to find the right idea. Otherwise, what's the point? And like the market is saturated and how will you know when you found the right idea? There's all of this procrastination that holds people back from actually launching their first thing.
And what I love about this book is that it's really a step-by-step roadmap on how to do it. how to actually just get started with the thing. He really encourages you to take action here.
If you're one of those people who thrives on just learning lots of stuff and never taking action on it, then you probably won't like this book because it will call you out and encourage you to take action. But if you actually want to start a business rather than just reading about starting a business forever, then this book will actually help you take action and make it happen. So 100% recommend. All right, number six is the audio book for The Biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.
This book came out many years ago, but I hadn't read or listened to it until this year. And when I did, I thought it was really good. It was very compelling, very interesting read, very engaging, and obviously it's not a how-to guide on how to start a business or anything like that.
But just hearing the stories of like the early days of Apple and how Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak operated, and you know, obviously a flawed character in many ways, but there's a lot I think we can learn from Steve Jobs about how to do business and also how not to do business. So if you're interested in entrepreneurship or you have a business already or you just really like Apple products, then I think you would really enjoy this book. All right, let's now move on to our health and wellbeing and including spirituality category.
And the first book on this list is Outlive by Peter Atiyah, The Science and Art of Longevity. This is an absolutely enormous book and it is also really, really, really good. I thought like, I saw it, it arrived in the post and I was like, who's got time to read this shit?
And I didn't make the time to read it. I actually made the time to listen to it on Audible and all the way through, I was just like, damn. A, the information is really good, and B, just the way that he writes it is also just really good and really engaging.
I'm gonna read this thing at the start. In his mid-30s, prominent longevity expert, Dr. Peter Atiyah was a marathon swimmer. crossing ocean passages like the Catalina Channel. But as he discovered, he was also surprisingly unhealthy and on the path to early death from heart disease.
This knowledge launched him on a quest to understand longevity, how and why we die, and how we can delay or even prevent the chronic diseases that kill most people, including heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and type 2 diabetes. This is not biohacking, it's a strategic and science-based approach to extending lifespan while also improving our physical, cognitive, and emotional health. Dr. Otear's aim is less to tell you what to do, and more to help you learn how to think about long-term health in order to create the best plan for you as an individual.
I turned 30 this year and got married, and my wife is currently pregnant with our first child. And so really for the first time in my life, I'm starting to think about how to help ensure or maximize my chances of living a long and crucially healthy life. Because, you know, especially, you know, being a former doctor, as some of you might know, you know, I spent some time working in the geriatric medicine ward, the care of the elderly ward, and also knowing various older family members, like...
There are people who age healthily and then there are people who age unhealthily. And the people who age unhealthily generally have a way less good quality of life than the people who age healthily. There's not much we can do about aging itself, at least for now, but there is a lot that we can do to set ourselves up to be able to walk around and not get out of breath climbing up the stairs and be able to carry the shopping baskets and be able to potentially even go on a long hike without like feeling like we're gonna collapse. All of that kind of stuff is the stuff that he touches on in the book. And if you're interested in not just how to live longer, but also how to live healthier as well, not just in physical health, but also in terms of cognitive and emotional health, I think you will get a lot of value from this wonderful book.
Book number two, we have The Power of Now, A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle. This is good stuff. There's some good shit in here.
It's really, really hard to describe this. If you are into spirituality, then you will get a lot from this. If you are not yet into spirituality, then you probably won't.
But it might be a good gateway drug into it. Back in the day when I wasn't into spirituality, I tried reading this because I heard loads of people recommending it, and I just did not get it. And then, you know, I started meditating, I did an ayahuasca retreat, I got more into the spirituality stuff.
I actually preferred, as a gateway drug, books like The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer and A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. But then earlier this year, I reread The Power of Now. And it's sort of like the classic in this, the classic pop spirituality book.
And all the way through, I was like, okay, nice. I now get it. If you don't get the world of spirituality, try reading The Surrender Experiment.
That's usually my first sort of gateway drug for people who are sort of like me, are sort of a bit like high achieving E type people. The Surrender Experiment is a really good gateway drug. To make the journey into the power of now, we will need to leave our analytical mind and its false created self, the ego behind. From the very first page of this extraordinary book, we move rapidly into a significantly higher altitude where we breathe a lighter air. We become connected to the indestructible essence of our being, the eternal ever-present one life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death.
I met a guy last year who, when he was like, he was telling the story of when he was 19, he was... He'd been clinically depressed for like five years to the point of having had multiple suicide attempts and felt like he was on the verge of ending his life. And then a friend of his recommended this book, The Power of Now. And he said that reading this book literally cured his depression and made him realize that life was in fact worth living and he hasn't had a suicidal thought ever since.
Obviously, that is just an anecdotal example. And obviously, I'm not saying that if you are depressed right now, this book is magically going to cure. cure your depression or whatever. But I think it's an interesting story. It's an interesting anecdote.
And weirdly, there's quite a few reviews of this book where people have those sorts of life-changing experiences. I did not personally have a life-changing experience from reading the book, but I know at least a handful of people who have in various ways, including this guy whose depression was allegedly magically cured by just reading the book. So if any of that sounds interesting, it might be worth checking out.
All right, book number three is The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. I absolutely. love this book.
explained a lot of stuff around experiences that I've had and experiences that my friends have had. I was born in 1994, so that technically makes me a millennial, but I am friends with a lot of people in Gen Z, who I think is 1997 plus, and I work with a lot of people who are in Gen Z, 1997 plus. And there really does seem to be this sort of epidemic of mental illness in particular among Gen Z, and that's not just conjecture. Jonathan Haidt cites a bunch, he's like a sociologist, I think, and he cites a bunch of studies across loads of different countries that show that there was... was this sort of massive spikes in reported levels of depression and anxiety and various mental illnesses amongst the people who were born after 1997 he argues compellingly that this is not just a case of mental illness being destigmatized that is often a thing people say that oh the reason that these kids are anxious is either a well the world is falling apart so of course they're going to be anxious or secondly that hey you know we've destigmatized mental illness and therefore you know people had mental illness all along they just weren't open about it but now gen z are more open about it for various reasons.
But on both of those points, Jonathan Haidt kind of refutes that, I think, in a pretty convincing way. And he basically argues that this epidemic of mental illness can basically be traced down to a handful of major things. The primary culprit being social media and the various negative impacts that things like Instagram have had on teenage boys and girls.
You know, I'm just gonna read out the summary of the introduction because I think this is good stuff. In sum, between 2010 and 2015, the social lives of American teens moved largely onto smartphones with continuous access to social media, online video games and other internet based activities. This great rewiring of childhood, I argue, is the single largest reason for the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness that began in the early 2010s. The first generation of Americans who went through puberty with smartphones and the entire internet in their hands became more anxious, depressed, self-harming, and suicidal. We now call that generation Gen Z, in contrast to the millennial generation, which had largely finished puberty when the great rewiring began in 2010. The tidal wave of anxiety, depression, and self-harm hit girls harder than boys, and it hit...
pre-teen girls hardest of all. This increase in suffering was not limited to the United States. The same pattern is seen at roughly the same time amongst teens in the UK, Canada, and other major Anglosphere countries, and also in the five Nordic nations.
Feelings of alienation in school rose after 2012 across the Western world. Data is less abundant in non-Western nations, admittedly, and the patterns there are less clear. No other theory has been able to explain why rates of anxiety and depression surged among adolescents in so many countries at the same time and in the same way. Other factors of course contribute to poor mental health. But the unprecedented rise between 2010 and 2015 cannot be explained by the global financial crisis, nor by any set of events that happened in the US or in any other particular country.
And there's a bunch of super interesting stuff there that if you are interested in this topic, if you know people who are suffering from mental health issues, or you have kids, or you interact with social media in any way, shape, or form, I think there's some really, really, really interesting stuff in this book that you might like to check out. All right, book number four is a spirituality book by Jed McKenna, who is a pseudonym actually, called Spiritual Enlightenment, The Damnedest Thing. I have read various books about spirituality and spiritual enlightenment and stuff over the years, have not yet achieved the state of spiritual enlightenment unfortunately, but I thought this was quite a nice... at least I really liked Jed McKenna's sort of teaching style in this book. It's very irreverent, it's very sort of straight talking.
This is probably not the book for you if you have never dabbled with spirituality, but if you have potentially read other spiritual literature, if you've maybe got a yoga meditation practice or you've gone somewhere into this world of spirituality... I think you would really enjoy this book. At least I did and would recommend giving it a go.
In fact, here's a nice quote from the hero. In nearly all cases, the enlightenment being bought and sold is not truth realization at all, but a state of consciousness so crazy ass wonderful that you'd have to be an idiot to not want it. So insidiously wonderful, in fact, that its radiance has blinded. untold millions of secrets to the fact that it doesn't exist.
If that sentence means anything to you, if you're interested in this sort of stuff, you should read the book. You might like it. For the record, my wife absolutely hates it. She does not like the way that he writes or talks in the book.
I absolutely love it because I vibe with the sort of like very kind of aggressive aggressive and like contrarian tone of it, but try it out and see if you like it. All right, book number five in this category is The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter. This is a book that I'm still reading, but I really like it so far and I've taken lots of notes.
And so it's on my list of favorite things that I've read this year. I intend to finish it by the end of the year. And perhaps unsurprisingly, the whole thesis of the book is that we should embrace discomfort, seek out discomfort much more than we currently do.
The lives that we have, including mine, like I felt like really called out in this because, you know, my life is just riddled with comfort. Um, everything, you know, I live in an air conditioned apartment, live in Nice place, like I try to avoid discomfort wherever possible and this book is helping me realize that actually this is not necessarily a good way to live and it's really entertaining, it's really engaging. I think he's a journalist? yeah, he's a journalist, so he writes really well. So good book, would recommend.
All right, finally, let's move on to the fiction category. So this year I got a recommendation from a friend of mine called Ollie for the Detective Galileo series of Japanese murder mystery novels. And I read the first two books in that series, and I'm currently reading the third, and they're really, really, really good. The first one is called The Devotion of Suspect X. I read it on Kindle. This is a series of murder mystery books by Japanese author Keigo Higashino.
I think this is a translation. Is it a translation? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. I can't remember.
Either way, it's really good. The first book that I read in the series is The Devotion of Suspect X, which is, think of it like a murder mystery meets like physics and maths, like a physics teacher and a maths teacher who are both like geniuses are involved in this like murder mystery type situation, which is, which is good shit. Like.
I don't want to say any more because like I don't want to give the plot away but I've recommended this to so many people and people like a couple of people I recommended it to have come back to me being like holy that was a really really really good book. And secondly of course this year I read a bunch of books by Brandon Sanderson who's my favorite fiction author of all time. I read Tress of the Emerald Sea, Yumi and the Nightmare Painter and the Sunlit Man and I'm currently reading Wind and Truth which is book five of the Stormlight Archive. I have literally been recommending Brandon Sanderson to everyone that I ever meet, everyone who talks to me. to any, for any amount of time about any kind of book, I'm like, oh my god, have you read Brandon Sanderson?
If you have not yet read any of Brandon Sanderson's stuff, I would really recommend starting with The Final Empire, which is book one of the Mistborn trilogy. I made a video about this back in like 2017. The Mistborn series is a good introduction to the Cosmere, the world of Brandon Sanderson, and it's, it's cool because it's sort of like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or at least back in the day, like pre... Avengers Endgame, where like there's all these different characters in all these different books and they're like all part of the same universe and some of them like interact with each other and stuff in like really cool ways. I've been absolutely obsessed with Brandon Sanderson for the last like eight years now and I don't see that changing in the near future. So this year I was delighted to read four of his books and they are just absolutely incredible and every time I'm absorbed in a book.
My wife knows when I'm absorbed in a book because I will just sort of like tune out of everything else and just be sort of reading and just be like obsessed with this book, trying to get it, trying to finish it, but also trying to savor it at the same time. Cannot speak more highly of books by Brandon Sanderson, but I'd recommend starting with The Final Empire. All right, so those are some of my favorites this year, but I've actually put a playlist together of some of my favorite books from previous years that you can find over there if you are looking for more book recommendations.
Thank you so much for watching. Have a lovely day and I will see you in the next video. Bye-bye.