Books

When I cut my ties to a steady income, I hired two coaches to help me get started. They had a lot of great ideas, but I needed space to develop my own. The questions Michael asks in this prompted journal have honed what I want to do from “help people” to “Help founders take control of their time by getting them to focus on what will lead to their success.

Adulting is hard. We spend all this time thinking we know what we want and what will make us happy. In this book, Sonja breaks the myths we’ve all come to believe about happiness and explains how we can live a more fulfilling, joyful life.

The title of this book tells you everything you need to know. I read many different sales books when I got my first sales job, and this one was the most useful for cold calling. It breaks down examples and gives you everything you need to get started. Best as an audiobook because voice matters.

While we are on the topic of breaking myths, Humankind illustrates what actually happens when you leave people to their own devices. This book helped me understand that when we respect each other, everybody wins.

As mentioned, I read a lot of sales books. If you are only ever going to read one, read this one. Jordan is crude, so if you are sensitive, sorry, but his way of selling is precise and embodies SnipeSpeak: using your words with precision to be understood.

Having a community to support you through the challenges you will undoubtedly face when starting a business is crucial. In The Art of Community, Charles outlines what to look for in a community, and its importance in avoiding the painful grips of loneliness. If you don’t yet have a place where you feel a deep sense of belonging, this book will help you build it.

Seth Godin is hit-or-miss for me. Some of his books are brilliant; others confuse me. This is one where I think he is at his best. It’s simple, tangible and gives you what you need to get started with marketing. (This book is excluded from the affiliation program, but worth sharing so the Link is unaffiliated.)

While community is crucial for your business to succeed, you get to decide where you draw the line between what you do and what you delegate. Paul’s Company of One breaks down how we can scale our income without stressing ourselves by scaling our team.

Alex does so much marketing that I probably don’t even need to have his book here for you to have heard about it. It’s worth it. Go read it and apply the methods he describes for building your offers.

Storytelling as a military strategy. Angus uses military examples to show that there is nothing soft about telling stories. Humanity was born out of stories. Stories of creation of the past, and stories of the future. A Plan is the story we tell of the future we want to create. The more plans we make, the more flexible they can be, the more comfortable we become with the unknown. This book will help you understand how plans and stories are connected.

Please Sorry Thanks comes from one of those rabit wholes I jumped down during my deep learning phase. It took me a while to finally get around to it and I am happy I did. While it does have religious undertones, the guy is a pastor after all, I loved how Mark broke how we communicate with each other, and everything down to three words: Please, Sorry, and Thanks.

Some of us have a hard time peopling. In Plays Well with Others, Eric Barker describes how he has struggle to people and what we can do to make peopling easier. As someone who has had a hard time connecting with others and thus spent a lot of time learning about the subject, I found this book to be a good guide for how to build friendships.

Candor, it can hurt when people speak to you without mincing their words. The line between giving direct, actionable feedback and just being a dick is a fine line. Kim Scott describes how you can skate along this line by showing how to speak your mind caringly. (unaffiliated link)

Speaking is only half the conversation, and admittedly, the less important half from your perspective, how you listen matters more than how you speak. Kate Murphy breaks down how to be a better listener in You’re Not Listening so you can connect with collaborators and clients.

I didn’t realize there was an art to reading until reading this book. It turns out that not every book should be treated the same; some are to be flipped through, some are to be savoured slowly. I’m a slow reader on a good day, so I have never gotten into speed reading, but with the help of this book, I can better decide which books are worth understanding and which are best left unfinished.