Ryan Holiday’s 2018 Reading List

This was definitely the best business/leadership book I read this year. It proves that we have really missed what makes great teams and organizations work. It’s not star players, it’s not even how much they can spend–it’s whether they have great captains. Walker’s chapter on “carrying the water” had some great insights re: Ego is the Enemy and I think this incredibly well-written book should be studied by anyone trying to build a great organization (or trying to find a role for themselves inside one).

It’s basically a collection of Tolstoy’s favorite passages from the ancient and classic texts, with excellent supplements from his own considerable wisdom. Each day draws on Chinese, Jewish, Stoic, Christian, Indian and Arabic sources (he quotes everyone from Emerson to Marcus Aurelius to Lao-Tzu) and manages to give good, actionable advice from all of these differing schools. It’s no wonder the Communists banned and suppressed this book, because it challenges everything they were trying to deny about human nature and the human experience. This book should be much, much, more popular and I promise your mornings will be improved if you start them with it.

Robert has been writing this book since Mastery came out in 2013 and it shows - it's a spectacular masterwork that builds atop all his other books. Robert's book have always been an unvarnished look at how the world really works, for better and for worse. What I like about this book is that it pushes us to question our own biases, our own assumptions, irrationalities and tendencies. It's almost as if we believe other people have a 'human nature' but we don't - we're logical, fair, motivated by higher purposes always. Of course this is silly. Lots of good stuff here for anyone in a position of leadership, who works with an audience or studies human behavior.

This book is out on Tuesday and it's also very good. An atomic habit is a tiny habit or change that can have an enormous impact on your life. Getting up a little earlier, deleting social media from your phone, automating your savings, developing a system, these are atomic habits. Me personally, I don't feel like I am particularly talented or even that disciplined, but I have a number of atomic habits that I started early on that have had a massive compounding benefit. My blurb of this one: "A special book that will change how you approach your day and live your life."