These are the non-fiction books that have shaped my perspective on the world, all scoring very highly on the controversial ‘page-corner-folding’ rating scale.
(Also in writing the list I became very aware that nearly all are by male authors, so asked for some recommendations on LinkedIn, and got this great list as a result).
Big perspectives on how the world works
Prisoners of Geography – Tim Marshall
Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari
Factfulness – Hans Rosling
The Righteous Mind – Jonathon Haidt
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work – Alain de Botton
Human Behaviour
Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman
Drive – Dan Pink
The Paradox of Choice – Barry Schwartz
Nudge – Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler
Predictably Irrational – Dan Ariely
Scarcity – Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan
Risk Savvy – Gerd Gigerenzer
Watching the English – Dr. Kate Fox
Innovation
Where Good Ideas Come From – Steven Johnson
How We Got to Now – Steven Johnson
Originals – Adam Grant
One Plus One Equals Three – Dave Trott
Ends – Joe McLoed
Good Strategy Bad Strategy – Richard P. Rumelt
It Might Be An Apple – Shinsuke Yoshitake
A Technique For Producing Ideas – James Webb Young
Personal Development
Flow – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The 80/20 Principle – Richard Koch
The 4 Hour Work Week – Tim Ferris
The Chimp Paradox – Steve Peters
The Happiness Hypothesis – Jonathan Haidt
Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell
The SHED method – Sara Milne Rowe
Coaching
The Inner Game of Tennis – Tim Gallwey
Effective Coaching – Myles Downey
The Really Good Fun Cartoon Book of NLP – Philip Miller
Using Your Brain, For a Change – Richard Bandler
Writing
On Writing – Stephen King
Eats, Shoots, and Leaves – Lynne Truss
Thanks for reading this, I really hope you enjoyed it. You can find me:
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Sapiens was an interesting read… ‘on writing’ also excellent. Good list John. I’ll use it….