21 Life-Changing Books Summarized in 18 Minutes

Most people read 4 books a year, if that. And with millions and millions of published books to choose from, picking the wrong one is easy. So to help narrow your selection, I'm going to share 21 books that have changed my mind. Before I read the book, I thought one way. After I read the book, I thought a different way. For example, number 1, Grit by Angela Duckworth. I always thought that talent was what mattered most. And it's true, talent matters, no doubt about that. But it's not the only thing, and it's often not even the main thing. That's the big lesson of this book, which taught me that passion and perseverance for what you do matters even more. That's grit. It might be the most important driver of success. Grit has 4 elements, Angela says. Deep interest— you have to love what you do. Deliberate practice— work your butt off in difficult ways so you can improve. And meaningful purpose— do something in the service of others. And finally, resilient hope— remain optimistic and in the face of setbacks. Best of all, grit is something we can develop in others and nurture in ourselves. That's the first book that changed my way of thinking. Now let's go to number 2, a book that some people might not know. It's Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke. Annie is a champion poker player who also has a PhD in cognitive psychology. So she's a great guide to making better, smarter decisions. The key takeaway from this book for me is that when you evaluate your decisions, You shouldn't evaluate them based on the outcomes of those decisions. You should evaluate them based on the process by which you made that decision. She says too many people practice resulting. They think a good outcome means you made a good decision, but that's not always true, and it can lead to making some dumb mistakes in the future. So treat your beliefs as bets. How confident are you? Estimate probabilities instead of assuming certainties. Know what you can control and separate luck from skill. Number 3, Flow by the late Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The best books give you a way to describe something that you know in your gut but don't have the words to describe. That's what this book does. We've all had moments when we are so absorbed in a task that we lose a sense of time. We lose a sense of self. What we're doing is so exquisitely matched to our capabilities that it becomes almost a transcendent experience. It's called flow, and it's a concept that Csikszentmihalyi introduced more than 30 years ago. Because of this book, I always notice when I'm in flow. I also notice when I'm not in flow, and I look for ways to bring flow into my life. Number 4, The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Whenever you sit down to create, the entire universe will conspire against you. Pressfield identifies something he calls The resistance, a hidden force that keeps us from sitting down and doing our work. Amateurs succumb to the resistance. They procrastinate and self-sabotage. Professionals look the resistance in the eye and they challenge it every single day. This book had such an effect on my life that ever since reading it, I've had a sign on my desk that says, beat the resistance. Number 5. The Stoic Challenge by William Irvine. There's been a lot written in recent years about the ancient philosophy of Stoicism, including some great work by Ryan Holiday. This book is by a professor of classics at Wright State University in Ohio. He encapsulates Stoic philosophy elegantly in just under 200 pages. Reading this helped me do a better job of reframing adversity, frustration, and setbacks in my life, seeing them less as a burden I needed to bear and more as an opportunity I can use to grow. The real game changer for me is the Stoic test. When something bad happens, a deal craters, a project meets an unexpected delay, whatever, you have 5 minutes to reframe it as a test. Instead of howling about the unfairness, imagine that the Stoic gods are testing you. They're testing your ingenuity. They're testing your creativity. They're testing your resilience. And if you can meet that test, you can do better than before. 5 down, 16 to go. Number 6. The Sports Gene by David Epstein. Some of the books I mentioned on this list describe ways to improve our performance that are under our control, but certain things are not under our control. And when it comes to athletic ability, some of us are inherently better than others of us, unfortunately. There's some really remarkable data in this book. For instance, we can't control our height, obviously, but in basketball, height, even a few extra inches, is a huge advantage. So of all the American men above 7 feet tall, 1 in 7 is currently in the NBA. Or take women's gymnastics. David says it's now rare to find an elite female gymnast over 5 feet tall. I love books about sports. I love books about science. This book does a glorious job of changing how I think about both topics, and it's why it's one of my all-time favorites. Number 7. Bias by Jennifer Eberhardt. This is a really smart book on the science of implicit bias. Before reading it, I believed that prejudice and stereotypes were mostly infrequent and intentional. After reading it, I now believe that bias is more frequent than we realize, and most of it is unintentional. It doesn't set out to be mean-spirited because we don't even see it. Here's one example. Decades of research have shown we more easily recognize and differentiate faces of people in our own race than faces of people in another race. We're not trying to be biased. It's the way our brains work. This has huge implications for every corner of our life— housing, employment, education, policing. And what I like about this book is that it's optimistic in a hardheaded way. It shows bias is less a trait than a state. We can fix it. We can do things to reduce bias in ourselves and overcome it in our world. Number 8, Give and Take by Adam Grant. This book lays out a taxonomy of how we deal with others. Some of us are givers. We help more than we get in return. Some of us are takers. We take more than we give to others. And most of us are matchers. We reciprocate. You help me, I help you. What this book reveals is that the least successful people are givers. That's the bad news. The good news is that the most successful people are also givers. This book will teach you how to be a giver without being a doormat. And that is one secret to success. Number 9, The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker. Have you ever gone to a meeting, a party, or a dinner that was kind of blah? This book will help. The reasons most gatherings are uninspiring and forgettable is that when we organize them, we're typically on autopilot. But this book offers a way to bring your gatherings to life by being intentional, deliberate, and the opposite of a chill host. The keys? Define a purpose for your meeting or dinner or conference, not the logistics. Its very reason for being. Include the right people, which means not including some people. Establish a set of unique rules for the world you're creating. When you do things Priya's way, you can transform ordinary gatherings into extraordinary experiences that connect people in deep and meaningful ways. Number 10, Unfair by Adam Ben-Ferrato. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I went to law school. And after reading this book, I realized that a lot of what I learned was garbage. Ben-Ferrato, who's a law professor himself, shows that much of our legal system is built on assumptions about human behavior and the human brain that just aren't true. For instance, we believe we can tell when someone is lying, but we actually have no idea. A lot of the cues we rely on— not looking you in the eye or acting jittery— have no relevance. So a nervous person may well be telling the truth, and a calm, composed person may be lying through her teeth. And yet juries put people in jail based on this mistake. Or eyewitness testimony. It's generally worthless. The human brain is not a perfect video recorder. And yet we use eyewitness testimony over and over again to determine guilt or innocence. Like a lot of books on this list, this one made me question some of the premises underneath what I believe. Number 11, Influence by Robert Cialdini. This is a true classic. It might be the book I've recommended more than any other. Cialdini is a professor, now an emeritus professor at Arizona State University, and he's considered the father of Persuasion Science. In this book, he lays out the 6 principles of persuasion, 6 things that can help us persuade others ethically and effectively. Reciprocity. We return favors done to us. Scarcity. When there's less of something, we value it more. Authority. We tend to follow the lead of people with power or expertise. Consistency. We do what we say we're going to do and what we've done in the past. Liking. There's a good chance we'll do something If the person who asks us is someone who's like us or whom we like. Social proof. When others don't know what to do, they look around for cues from other people about how to behave. In later editions, Cialdini added a 7th principle, but you'll have to read the book to find out that one. Number 12, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers. This book helped me understand countries, organizations, and families in an entirely new way. Some cultures are tight. They have a prescribed set of rules that are pretty rigid. People stick to those rules. It's why public clocks in Germany are always accurate, why some families insist that their kids call adults Mr. This or Mrs. That. Other cultures, they're loose. They have weaker social norms. They're more permissive, more tolerant. It's why public clocks in Brazil are often inaccurate and sometimes way off, why some families are totally cool on kids calling adults by their first name. Tight isn't better than loose. Loose isn't better than tight. They're just 2 different ways to organize the world, 2 different cultures. After I read this book, I see loose cultures and tight cultures everywhere. It's reshaped how I interpret the world and given me a new way to talk about it. Number 13, The Genetic Lottery by Kathryn Paige Harden. This book, I have to say, made me a little uncomfortable. What it shows is that genes actually matter. Genes have a big effect on the outcome of our life and that our birth is in some ways a lottery. Now, that doesn't mean we throw up our hands and say we can do nothing, but it also doesn't mean that we should be ignoring the effect of genes on our life. So this is a very powerful and provocative book showing that if we actually care about building a better world, We have to reckon with the fact that genes have a role in our life and that there is a genetic lottery that some of us do better in and some of us do worse in. Number 14, The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. I used to believe that human beings make decisions, particularly about moral issues, by carefully weighing both sides of an argument and then settling on the position with the greater weight of the evidence. This book taught me that's nonsense. Instead, people have visceral emotional reactions to things like abortion or the death penalty, and they enlist reason to support whatever they're feeling. Our rational mind isn't a neutral judge. It's an advocate, a press secretary for what our emotional mind instinctively believes. This book also shows that there isn't a single morality among humans, but a set of several moral foundations. Some of them most of us agree with. For instance, don't harm other people. Others, there's less consensus. For instance, always deferring to elders or maintaining purity. John Haidt is now better known for his book, The Anxious Generation. But here's a prediction. This book will last with you and with the world even longer. Number 15, Uncivil Agreement by Lilliana Mason. This book will help you understand the mess of American politics. It's a great companion to The Righteous Mind. We think that politics is mostly about interests. People support a policy because it makes them better off. Higher incomes, larger benefits, more opportunities, whatever. But drawing on her own research and the research of many others, Mason shows that what's really driving politics today is identity. We want our tribe to win, and we're willing to tolerate or even support policies that might hurt our interests if they're advocated by people whose identity is similar to our own. So in this country, the fiercest disagreements can be less about warring political policies than about 2 distinctly different political tribes, one that is mostly white, mostly religious, and usually not in cosmopolitan areas, And one that is less white, less religious, and almost always in cosmopolitan urban areas. This is a tough problem to solve, but there's a solution. Politicians who appeal to our higher identity, our shared identity as Americans, to what we all have in common. Here's hoping. Number 16, Mindset by Carol Dweck. This one's been around for a while. You might know about it, but it's still monumentally important. Dweck says we can approach what we do with 2 distinct mindsets. A fixed mindset says our abilities— math, writing, social skills, whatever— are finite. And when you fail at something, it's a sign you're not very good at it. A growth mindset is the opposite. It says that our abilities are malleable. They're not set in stone. With the right effort and dedication, you can expand them. And that means that failures are actually opportunities to learn and grow. This book was transformative for me. Because I was raised very much with a fixed mindset. But when I read this book in my 30s, I realized that for my own kids and for the rest of my own life, I want to cultivate a growth mindset. Number 17, Scarcity by Sendhil Mullainathan and Elder Shafir. When we don't have enough of something— time, money, resources of any kind— that's challenging in its own right, but it also dramatically affects how we make decisions. Put simply, When you have less, when you confront scarcity, you make worse decisions. For instance, if you're deeply concerned about paying this month's bills, you can develop tunnel vision. You don't think long-term about health or education or other parts of your life. There's even evidence that people who are dieting and therefore hungry tend to be worse decision makers than people who aren't, because scarcity imposes a tax on our mental bandwidth. The key point here? When we see people who are struggling economically make impulsive or wrongheaded decisions about their lives, we mistakenly attribute the behavior to character flaws when in fact that's how most of us would behave in that situation. This book made me much more empathetic to the lives others lead. I wish every policymaker would read it. Number 18, Bird by Bird by Annie Lamott. This book helped me become a writer, plain and simple. The story comes from a story of Annie's brother. Back when he was in 5th grade, he had to write a report about birds. He hemmed, he hawed, he delayed, he dilly-dallied. And the night before the report was due, he had nothing. So his father offered him some advice about how to write the report. Just take it bird by bird, buddy. Bird by bird. It's an essential lesson for writing and for life. E.L. Doctorow once said that writing is like driving a car at night. You can never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole journey that way. That's why I take it bird by bird. Number 19, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright. The books that can truly change your mind are those that help you see what's going on, not on the surface of our lives, but one or two layers beneath. This is one of those books. There are two kinds of interactions we can have. In zero-sum interactions, The only way for me to win is for you to lose. In positive-sum interactions, that's not the case. The best way for me to win is to help you win. Wright argues that most, not all, but most interactions are positive-sum. That's become even more true as economies have grown larger and humans have become more interconnected, which means the key to progress is to continue moving away from the zero-sum approach and toward one where there's mutual benefit. This book came out in 2001, but it's even more relevant today when some dark forces in our world are trying to push us toward a zero-sum, dog-eat-dog, pessimistic future. Number 20, Moneyball by Michael Lewis. Let me confess, this is the only book I've ever read that I wish I'd written myself. It's pretty well known now thanks to the Brad Pitt movie of the same name. It tells the story of Billy Beane, who was in charge of the Oakland A's the least wealthy team in Major League Baseball. Beane turned his team of misfits and castoffs into a contender by challenging the sport's conventional wisdom, embracing analytics, and ultimately revolutionizing the game. You don't have to be a baseball fan to enjoy it because Moneyball will leave you with a set of indelible lessons. Think differently. Challenge the norms of your industry or your world and ask yourself, What if everyone else is wrong? Number 21, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. You think you're too busy or stressed to find meaning in your life? Tell that to Viktor Frankl, who survived 3 years in 4 different Nazi concentration camps. He nearly lost his freedom, his family, everything, but he didn't lose his hope. While he was imprisoned, he wrote on scraps of Paper, a new approach to psychotherapy that doubles as a philosophy of life. Franco says that human beings' primary drive isn't pleasure, but meaning. And even in brutal, dehumanizing conditions, we can find purpose and significance. In fact, we can use our craving for meaning to build resilience. If you're struggling, read this book. If you're not struggling, read this book. It's that powerful. These aren't the only books that will reshape your thinking, but they're a start. So power on your e-reader, crack the spine of a paperback, or hit your local library. When we read books like these, we change our minds. And when we change our minds, we change the world. Cool.