The Best Books I Read in 2017

My six best reads of 2017 were How to Win Friends & Influence People, Elon Musk, Made to Stick, The Road Less Traveled, The Greatest Salesman in the World, and The Power of Simplicity. This is where my Goodreads shelf actually begins — 2017 is the year I got serious about reading, and these six are the ones that made the habit stick.

Here’s what made the list, and why.

How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Carnegie wrote this in 1936, and it still works because people haven’t changed nearly as much as we like to think. The core idea is almost embarrassingly simple: take genuine interest in other people before you try any technique on them, and most of what you’d call “influence” follows naturally.

What struck me, reading it decades later, was how little of it is actually about persuasion tricks. It’s mostly about listening properly, remembering names, and letting people talk about themselves — none of which is clever, all of which is rare.

Read it if you think influence requires charisma you don’t have. It mostly requires attention you can choose to give.

Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance

Vance’s biography is not hero worship — it’s a close, sometimes uncomfortable look at audacity and first-principles thinking, warts included. Musk sets timelines that sound impossible, misses plenty of them, and somehow the company survives anyway, again and again.

The lesson I took from it wasn’t “be like Musk.” It was that a lot of what looks like impossible ambition is really just ambition that hasn’t been priced correctly by everyone else yet. Reasoning from first principles, instead of from what’s normally done, is what makes that repricing possible.

Read it if you want a clear-eyed account of what obsessive ambition actually costs the people around it, not just what it produces.

Made to Stick by Chip & Dan Heath

The Heath brothers set out to answer why some ideas spread and others, often better ones, don’t. Their answer comes down to six traits: sticky ideas are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and told as stories.

I found myself testing every explanation I gave at work against that checklist afterward, and most of them failed at least two of the six. It’s a rare business book that changes how you talk the same week you read it.

Read it if you’ve ever explained something well in your head and watched it land flat out loud.

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Peck opens with three words — “Life is difficult” — and the rest of the book is what happens once you actually accept that instead of resisting it. His case is that discipline and delayed gratification aren’t punishments, they’re the only route through problems that don’t go away on their own.

It’s a heavier, more searching book than the others on this list, and it earns that weight. Accepting that difficulty is the baseline, rather than the exception, turned out to be strangely calming rather than discouraging.

Read it when you’re ready for a book that asks more of you than it gives back easily.

The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino

This one is an old-fashioned parable, built around ten ancient scrolls meant to be read one at a time, slowly, until each lesson on persistence and habit actually sinks in rather than just being skimmed.

It’s unlike anything else on this list — more fable than framework — and I liked it precisely for that reason. Reading it the way it asks to be read, one scroll a day instead of one sitting, made the ideas land differently than a typical business book would.

Read it if you want a book about persistence that makes you practice persistence just to finish it.

The Power of Simplicity by Jack Trout

Trout’s argument is that most messages fail not because they lack ideas, but because they carry too many of them — the job of good communication is stripping a message down to its essential core and refusing to add anything back.

This is a theme I keep returning to, in one form or another, in almost everything I read and write. Trout’s version of it, aimed squarely at marketing and communication, was the clearest early statement of an idea I’ve carried with me ever since.

Read it if your instinct, when something isn’t landing, is to add more to it rather than take more away.

That’s my 2017 list — the year the reading habit began. What book started yours?