Books Recommended by Adam Johnston

Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek came to me a couple years into starting Last Call Trivia, and about that time my business partner and I were separately moving all over the country every few months trying to set up branches of our new company. This book taught me to create a business that works on its own as much as possible and gave me the confidence that traveling and building a business remotely was not as far from the norm as it sounded at the time.

The last two pages of Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art gave me a swift kick in the ass. Do it or don’t do it. But if you don’t do it, you not only hurt yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet. Pressfield wrote a beautiful book that you should read, but if nothing else, just read the last two pages of the book. I have them hanging on my wall in my office.

The research in Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker has me completely riveted. Unfortunately, it took a Naturopath and many years of burning the candle at both ends for me to realize how important sleep was, not only for my longevity, but for my mood, sharpness, and accessibility to FLOW. Walker states early on in the book that he gives himself a non-negotiable 8-hour block of time for sleep each night. And if a neuroscientist can prove how important something is for my health that I already desire, I’m going to make consistent, sufficient sleep time a higher priority. Spoiler alert: it works.

Stealing Fire discusses the many alternate states of consciousness and how to leverage them to achieve creativity, vision, and FLOW. While this isn’t 100% a business book, it has had the biggest impact on me professionally by helping me find and stay in flow. The book’s greatest lesson, however, is in realizing why FLOW is so important - it leads to the best quality of work. Maximum output for minimal input.