Bookshelf Tour - Why I Organize my Books by Color

Hi everyone, my name is Matt, and today I'm going to share with you one of the most requested videos on this channel in the comments, through email, on Instagram. You want to know or see the bookshelf tour, even though it's right here and we're kind of already touring it. But it's a bookshelf. People love to ask me, why are your books color-coded? And it's a very simple reason: because I like the way they look. The first person that I saw color-code their bookshelf was John Acuff. Now, John Acuff is a writer that lives down in Franklin, and he did it in a little bit of a sneaky way because he's a writer, and so he had literally hundreds, it seemed, of his own books. And so they were all the same color, and they were all the same size, and I guess you could say they were all the same topic because they were the exact same book. But I just loved the way that it looked, and so I started to organize my books by as close to the same color or color family as I could. Hey, um, one, one quick thing before we get into all, to all the books. This setup is not supposed to make sense to you, all right? It's my setup. I know where books are. I know what color they are, what size they are. I know that everything that I'm about to tell you is not going to make perfect sense because sometimes books are not the exact right color and sometimes It's kind of a little bit also based on size instead of particular hue of color. And so when I'm explaining this to you, I'm giving you a tour and I'm giving you a little window into the mind of how I like to do this. But it's not supposed to make sense to you. It's not supposed to be something that you copy. It's my little thing. I do think that we should all have little things that make sense to us for no other reason than they just make sense to us and we like them. Because it's too easy to follow someone else's formula or system. And I say that knowing that I have given you a lot of formulas and systems the last few years. What's important is to do something that makes sense to you and works for you. If I can find a book that I want, that's a good system for me, even if it doesn't make sense to you. All right, so life lesson, productivity lesson, from an organized yet not very organized book collection. Let's get back to it. A common question people ask is how do you find a book based on a topic or even an author that you want to find? And that to me is also very easy because even though I have a lot of books, I know literally every book that I have and it's still a very manageable number. So if I know, like let's say I want to find a book by Seth Godin, say I want to find Seth Guden's book The Practice. One, I know it's blue, so I can go and look. Oh look, it's right here, Seth Godin's book The Practice. Or maybe I'm thinking to myself, hey, I want to read my favorite novel from 2021, Black Buck. Well, I know that Black Buck is a black book. I never really thought about that before. And so I just go to the black books, and Black Buck, the black book is right here. You should totally read Black Book— if no, Black Buck, The Black Book, right here. It's so good, so good. So for me, it's as simple as that. I want to give you a little bit more of the tour and talk about some of the books that I have on this shelf, but there are more books that I'm going to specifically recommend to you in a future video. I'm going to have one, a video called 22 Books to Read in 2022. You're gonna like that. But for now, I just want to cut to more of the books themselves, and I'll give you a tour of like just what kind of books I got on the shelf. I'm going to give you a look at each of the color-coded sections of the bookshelf and a few of my favorite books that are on here. Um, Splendid in the Vile is an incredible book about the German Blitz in London during World War II. Couldn't quite get those words out. And, uh, I already mentioned Black Buck, incredible book. Discipline Equals Freedom, obviously awesome, is a great book about positioning. So if you do any kind of work in like sales or product development, this one is incredible. How to Be Antiracist is so good as well, really kind of changed how I think about how I live. So that's always a good, a good thing for a book. And then Screw Tape Letters is another one that I want to call out. Really one of the first books that really changed how I think about my relationship with God and spiritual world and just, yeah, how, how crazy all of that can be. So, and of course, shout out to The Bullet Journal Method. Over here we have the orange to red section, and one of the things that I want to point out that I kind of referenced is that sometimes the hue of these books will not line up exactly the same. Because I do want to organize them not just based on relative color but also based on height. So start high on the outside and then come down. We're basing this more on like height of book once we get into the particular colors. A few others to, to call out here that have been really good reads. I really liked Radical Candor by Kim Scott. It's great. And then Influence: Science and Practice. It is— I got this used, check it out. One of the best $3 purchases I've made. There are a couple of books up here that will really help you think about how people think. And Influence is a good one. And then Loser Think. I don't agree with a lot of what Scott Adams like talks about on Twitter.. But this is a really good way to, yeah, think about how people think. And it's especially helpful on Twitter and social media to kind of cut through, cut through some of the noise. So all of these, I do want to call out also, you know, you can see I have some black books over here and some blue books. But this is more like on the edge, I'm willing to fill in the space, rather than sticking just to the colors. Because the other thing that I'm trying to do here is I have these signs in the middle, and I do want to keep them pretty much in the middle. So these black books that were originally over here, I moved over so that these signs can stay more in the middle. Now we're in the white section of the books, and if you want like a kids' book recommendation, something that's kind of like a kids' book, really like this one. What Do You Do with an Idea? It is really great, I found, for creative people. Not just for kids, but it's a cool way to kind of think about creativity with your kids as well. Conspiracy, one of my favorite all-time books. Again, another shout out to Ryan Holiday. Atomic Habits, you've heard me reference before. Psychology of Money really helped me think about how I think about money, and I'm still like consistently rethinking that. But this one by Morgan Housel is great. Marketing Made Simple. Try not to talk too much about business books, but this one is really good by Donald Miller. And then I've also been enjoying reading Mary Oliver's devotions lately. So she's a poet and essayist. Am I saying that correctly? Poet and essayist. And just really good pieces of writing to read on a daily basis. A couple other to call out: How to Take Smart Notes. Weird little thing. For some reason, the title is almost like printed upside upside down because, you know, look at all these other books. You pull it off to the side and look, it's front of the book, it's the front of the book, it's the front of the book, and it's the back of the book upside down. But if I do, you know, so here's the front of the book, but if I put it in this way, just looks weird. So I put it in right side up for a title, and technically I guess upside down. War of Art and Tribes, I just want to call these two out as well. War of Art by Steven Pressfield and Tribes by Seth Godin. These are two books that really changed how I think about work and creativity and effort and being a professional. And it just— these two books really kind of changed the course of my life and how I do things. So definitely recommend both of those. They're both very short reads as well. Alright, now this is where we get into the mostly blue but also some green books. And A few here that I want to mention. Got some, got some variety here. But The Education of Little Tree is a book that I read when I was in college and really makes you kind of change how you think about the way that people used to live, the difference between like savage and civilized. I've— it's, it's an incredible book. Another one, Awareness, Anthony de Mello. Jeff Goins— shout out to Jeff, love you, buddy— uh, recommended this book to me a couple of years ago, and it has also certainly changed how I think about life and how I think and process things and the labels that I put on my experiences and even my relationships. Callings, really good. I read this last year, and it was instrumental in me deciding to go, like, do my own business. And then a few others that I really like as well. Shout out to my friend Sean McCabe for his book Overlap. It's great. GorillaPod was kind of poking in here, so sorry about that. But those are all of the main sections, the main color-coded sections of my bookshelf. So this is this is what you see. This is what I zoom in on and what you experience when you're probably asking about like, hey, give me a tour of the bookshelf. There's also a couple of sections, and I'll show you one over here in just a moment, of the occasional times where I have a collection of books that I do want to keep together. So there are a series of books right here: Adam's Return, The Hero Within, Iron John, The Power of Myth, Loving What Is, He and She Revisited or Revised. But these are all books that I have helped me with the male development work that I have done and continue to do in some ways, like men's development, becoming a better man. And also books like Loving What Is that just helped me be a better person and cultivate a higher emotional and relational intelligence. The other example of this and what you see up top is a more condensed version of that and a color code. But again, books that didn't really fit onto these main sections or just didn't, yeah, didn't really work down there. But you can see these books right here from Real Artists Don't Starve over to Show Your Work These are more writing-specific books mainly. So Bird by Bird, Draft Number Four, Writing That Works, Writing Down the Bones, Running Down a Dream. These are all like creative lives and writing. Show Your Work with Austin Kleon. So these are all books that like have a very specific like writer/artist category, categorization to them, even if they're not all exactly the same color. And then the last part that I want to show you are these old journals that I have. And so I've gone through some of these before, but this is a journal from 2009, 2012, 2016, '15. And so whenever I'm doing my annual reviews and just kind of going back and looking through, it's incredible to have this collection of journals together that I can sort through and remember literally what life was like and what I was doing. The only other thing that I want to show you about that is just down here. This is where I have a bunch of smaller notebooks. This in particular is a notebook from 2011. Now, much smaller. This is like that pocket-sized one. And I used to name my notebooks about like mountain ranges or parks that I had been to. So I have a bunch more of those.. And this box right here, and then I just want to show you over here, this isn't quite as clean, but over in this part these are all like field notes size notebooks that I finished over the years. Okay, I forgot the only other thing that I wanted, the only other thing that I wanted to show you was this Chronicles of Narnia box set. This is set that I bought in 1993. So I bought it for my 10th birthday, and I got this at a thrift store sale. Thrift store sale, a quarter each for these books in Wauchula, Florida. Shout out to Florida Cracker Country. It's not— and it's literally called that. And so this was $1.75. The first books that I ever bought with my own money that like I have a memory of. Probably read each of them, I don't know, a dozen, a dozen times at least, if not more. I still go through and read them like every few years. It also makes a great bookstop as well. And for all of you that have been asking about the maker's mark, and so as you can see, it has my name on it. And so this was a custom label by my cousin as a groomsman, as you can see, at his wedding. And so he put the name on there, but the other cool thing that he did was a print of their like wedding venue. And so I thought that was really cool. He like did such a good job with it that I've just, you know, left it. I've just left it up there. I think it looks cool. Maybe I'll open it up, you know, next year is their 10-year anniversary. So I'll pop that open. It's not aging in the same way. I know that. Does need to be drank at some point. So next time I see you at the James, we'll, we'll open up a bottle of Maker's together. All right, everyone, thank you for watching this bookshelf tour video. If you saw a book on there that you are interested in knowing a little bit more about, I know I went through all of them like visually, but I didn't— I only talked about a small percentage.. So if you saw a book that you would like for me to explain a little bit more or talk about or just learn more about, please drop a comment below. Or if— this is another thing you could do if you want to comment, I would love for you to comment— is what book have you seen on here that you have also read that you love? I would love personally to know where our overlapping books are that we love and care about and have spoken to us. All right, thank you so much again for watching. I'm going to go ahead and end this video because I'm almost out of space on this SD card. Other YouTubers will know what that feeling is like. You're like, okay, I've got like maybe a minute left to actually wrap this thing. So thanks again for watching. Let me know what books you either want to know more about or books that you saw up here that you have also read and loved. I'll see you in the next video and have a great day and days until then. Bye!