review

A great thing about reading books is finding smart people. I first realized this reading Malcolm Gladwell a decade ago and thinking “Wow, this guy is really smart,” and the same thing when I finished Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good For You. The conclusion of this book is that your vice, while not nice, may not be so bad. A secondary takeaway is to think about reframed, redefined, and updated views and when we do this we can see where things are going rather than where they’ve been.

I used to consider myself reasonably adept when it came to using OmniFocus, a feature-rich to do list and action management application for OS X and iOS, however that opinion was blown out of the water within a few hours of reading this book.

Until now I had never read the Heath brothers, which is a shame. Their books are good. Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard is a mix of business experience, academic research, and productivity tools that anyone can apply.

Beyond being my favorite book of the year (and one of the best I’ve ever read), The Fish That Ate The Whale has everything a nonfiction story needs.

“It’s about pausing to constantly to ask, ‘Am I investing in the right activities?’” In Essentialism, Greg McKeown wants you to line up all the the work you do in business and life, the things that are painful and pleasurable, and the stuff that makes you feel great and feel sick. Line it up like

Are you a giver or a taker? In his book Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success, professor Adam Grant examines the most successful individuals in a variety of fields and finds one thing they all have in common, they are givers. Right from the start Grant takes a moment to address that being

  There are some foods that are quite healthy for you but taste equally as bad; those foods are analogous to failure. Failure has a bitter, uncomfortable taste to it and in The Up Side to Failure, Megan McArdle attempts to break down what, how, and why we fail – and why it’s good for

I downloaded the Audible version of The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking by Dr. Edward Burger and Dr. Michael Starbird for a weekend road trip and was, at first, disappointed to see that there was only about three hours of content. That equates to 168 pages if you’re reading rather than listening – hardly the

Being productive doesn’t seem like it has much to do with philosophy, and sometimes philosophy seems like the opposite of productivity. Sitting around and debating arcane positions instead of getting up and getting work done are opposed in almost every regard. But with The Obstacle is The Way, author Ryan Holiday has written a book