Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice by Matthew Syed Matthew Syed is a half Welsh, half Pakistani, British journalist, author and broadcaster. He was a table tennis international champion, 3x men’s singles champion at the Commonwealth Table Tennis Championships (in 1997, 2000 and 2001), and also competed for Great Britain in two Olympic Games, at Barcelona in 1992 and at Sydney in 2000.
Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger From the author of THE PERFECT STORM and WAR comes a book about why men miss war, why Londoners missed the Blitz, and what we can all learn from American Indian captives who refused to go home. Tribe is a look at post-traumatic stress disorder and the challenges veterans face returning to society. Using his background in anthropology, Sebastian Junger argues that the problem lies not with vets or with the trauma they’ve suffered, but with the society to which they are trying to return.
Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio Ray Dalio is the founder and co-chairman of Bridgewater Associates, which, over the last forty years, has become the largest and best performing hedge fund in the world. Dalio has appeared on the Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world as well as the Bloomberg Markets list of the 50 most influential people. He lives with his family in Connecticut.
This classic, written in the dark ages when your granddaddy was a young man, before TV, let alone the internet (yes, a time did exist), still rings true today. A lot of the information has become cliche because it is so well known and well read, but I often say, ‘Something becomes cliche because its true’. It was on my reading list for a while then I was chatting to my cousin about some stuff I was going through at work, and she basically implied that I needed to get some people skills then pulled this book off her shelf, loaned it to me, and told me that she regularly goes back to it when she is having trouble getting what she wants. If family can’t hit the BS button on you then point you in the right the direction then who can?
Horowitz is the co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that has invested in Airbnb, GitHub, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Previously, he was cofounder and CEO of Opsware, formerly Loudcloud, which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. Horowitz writes about his experiences and insights from his career as a computer science student, software engineer, cofounder, CEO, and investor.
Maybe it was a grandparent or a teacher or a colleague. Someone older, patient and wise, who understood you when you were young and searching and gave you sound advice to help you make your way through it. For Mitch Albom, that person was Morrie Schwartz, his college professor from nearly 20 years ago. Mitch lost track of this mentor. Mitch Albom rediscovered Morrie in the last months of the older man’s life. Knowing he was dying of ALS, or motor neurone disease, Morrie visited Mitch in his study every Tuesday, just as they used to back in college. Their rekindled relationship turned into one final “class”: lessons in how to live.
This is a large open letter to his son. Not the usual book you’d expect a white Aussie, living in London, would read but it was an education on race relations in the USA, and I could relate to it as a man who grew up in the ’90s, had to find his way in this world, and now is of an age where he reflects and thinks about what he wants to pass on to the next generations.
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell Gladwell is not the first person to come up with the 10,000 hour rule, that was Anders Ericsson (below), but this book popularised the concept, and it’s about time I caught up with it. Gladwell is great at explaining deep concepts.
