Book Reviews for 2020 Part 2 - How to Grow Yourself 365 Days of the Year

Book Reviews for 2020 – the Last 5

Just in case you missed 10 Book Reviews Part 1 from last week – don’t forget to check them out. I have taken time-out to review the books whose golden nuggets have synthesized in my person this year and contributed to who I am becoming. I get to choose how I become my best self, and I find what I read and give focus to in my day to day life has a transformative effect- good or bad.

The Math of Reading

Who says you can’t love math and English studies too! I have some intriguing numbers to tempt you to become a reader or commit to the next level of “good book contemplation” in 2020.

There are between 50,000 and 60,000 words in the average business book.

Below is a chart showing how much time (depending on whether you consider yourself a slow, average, or fast reader) will take you to read.

If you can find 10 minutes every day to read, you would read 90,000 words a month. That is 1.5 books.

Multiply that throughout a year, and this time next year, you would have read between 12 and 18 books!

You will not remember everything you read in those books, but those nuggets you mine within their pages will help you grow exponentially. I promise.

All it will take is 10 minutes a day at an average speed.

Book Reviews 2020 – Part 2

Here are the books – each one I highly recommend every one of these books to you.

1. Rythem (Think/Plan/Do) by Patrick Thean

I love anything to do with creating structure in my life. I am not sure entirely what that says about me, and maybe that’s best left to others to decide, but this book really struck a chord with me. The author introduces the reader to a simple system to empower everyone in organizations to be aligned, focused, and accountable – essentially a three-rhythm process for effective execution. THINK RHYTHM is a rhythm of strategic thinking to keep teams focused and working on the company’s future. PLAN RHYTHM is a rhythm of planning that will allow you to choose the right priorities to get your department aligned with those priorities. Finally, DO RHYTHM is a rhythm for executing the plan and making effective, timely adjustments every week. In many ways, this represents the business version of YOUR BEST YEAR YET, the book that started it all for me, that I referenced in last week’s post.

2. Trust Your Canary by Sharone Barn-Davies

This was such a simple but effective message for me to lap up. The canaries have been credited for saving the lives of millions of miners around the world by detecting invisible but deadly hazards in mines. Toxic and poisonous atmospheres, undetectable to humans often until it is too late. Each of us has a canary inside, alerted when our environment begins to turn poisonous or toxic. We are talking about our day to day workplaces, not an underground mine, of course. Still, the author reminds us that our gut often tells us something before our brain does, and we should trust our gut (aka canary) and do something about the potential risk we could find ourselves in. It is a brilliant book to assist people and organizations in tackling incivility and disrespect in the workplace – also something that we talked a lot about this past year in our work.

3. The Relationship Factor in Safety Leadership by Rosa Antonia Carrillo

I have been involved a great deal over the past 12 months in delivering safety training to some of our clients. In this book, the author highlights the importance of Relationship Centred Leadership (RCL). The principles of RCL have the potential to improve organizational performance exponentially. These principles focus on developing a leader’s ability to engender employee engagement by developing their ability to build relationships. This ability is both a set of skills and beliefs about what works to get the best results.

4. The ONE Thing by Gary Keller

This book is about how to be your most productive self by getting you to focus on that one thing that, if completed, would allow everything else to be a lot easier or perhaps not needed at all. It begins with a terrific Russian proverb: If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one!

So, the take away from the book for me was to write out (and continually look at) the question that runs throughout the book.

“What’s the ONE thing you can do this week such that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?”

5. 4 Seconds by Peter Bregman

This is a book that I have quoted a great deal from this past year. It is filled with simple short chapters where the author reflects on his own life experiences to make sense of the need to stop, pause and then just breathe (4 seconds is the length of time it takes most of us to take a breath) and then think about either what you are now going to say or what you are going to do. 4 Seconds often makes a massive difference – and is the distinction between whether we react or whether we respond to things.