One of my 2016 resolutions is to read one book per week. I haven’t been pushing toward the goal explicitly but I read pretty much every day. We’re approaching the end of June so it’s a good time to go ahead and count my progress. I’ll be able to see if I should be more aggressive about this.
I reviewed my Kindle history and I think I got all the books so far here. On an episode of the Tim Ferriss podcast, Derek Sivers talks about his reading and his book notes. He talks about how books are filled with stories but if you trust someone enough and they’ve read the book you can probably get by with what they learned. So he has directives.
So here’s my list of books1 with a “Just tell me what to do” summary.
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Happy Money: Spend money on experiences.
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Miracle Morning for Writers: Write in the morning before you’re distracted.
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Persistence in Writing: Don’t ignore physical and mental health.
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Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh_t: Tell a story, no matter what genre you’re writing in.
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Smarter Better Faster: Set stretch goals and use S.M.A.R.T. goals to reach them2.
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Sleep Smarter: Work out in the morning and disconnect two hours before you want to sleep.
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Simple and Sinister: Every day, do 10 sets of 10 swings, 10 total Turkish get-ups.
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Anything You Want: Focus on helping people.
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The Coaching Mindset: Ask good questions instead of giving ‘good’ advice.
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The Serious Guide to Joke Writing: Consider other perspectives.
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Effortless Reading: Cycle different types of books and you don’t need to finish them all.
Okay I’m going to do a separate post with the rest of the directives because it’s taking much longer than I expected. I keep going into my highlights to think of a good directive. Here’s the rest of the list, without directives.
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Lifelong Writing Habit
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Disrupt Yourself
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Work the System
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Nicely Said
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Deep Work
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On Writing Well
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The Miracle of Morning Pages
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The Coaching Habit
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The Wild Diet
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Apprenticeship Patterns
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User Story Mapping
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Triggers
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The Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth
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Non Obvious
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59 Seconds
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Console Wars
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Fiction
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A Knight of Seven Kingdoms: All I learned is that I should tell everyone you know that watches Game of Thrones to read this book.
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Star Wars — Heir to the Empire: Read more Star Wars books
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Re-read3
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The One Thing (re-read):
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Smartcuts (re-read):
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Masters of Doom (re-read):
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War of Art (re-read):
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Unfinished
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Wireframing Essentials
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About Face
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Do More Great Work
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Audiobook
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The Magic of Thinking Big
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Content Inc
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Soft Skills
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I read about 28 books. I’m on pace to finish 52 by the end of the year. I recently switched to fiction for nighttime reading so the list so that should be reflected in the list I write4 at the end of the year.
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I’d love to keep this list updated and add links to book notes that I write for any of them. I think I can write notes for 15 or so at least. Nearly all of them are heavily highlighted already. ↩
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His examples in the appendix of how he used stretch and S.M.A.R.T. goals to write the book itself were so meta and so metal. So the appendix was my favorite part of the book. ↩
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You can forget entire books given enough time (and that amount of time isn’t that long). There are books I remember enjoying but can’t recall specific passages. I’m going to try to re-read more books. For the rest of the year, I’ll try to re-read 4 books. To be determined. I’ll write a post once I decide the books I’m going to re-read. Obstacle is the Way is on that list. ↩
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If this 100 day project doesn’t drive me to some point where I’m fed up with writing and shun it forever or for months. ↩