The Best Books I Read in 2017

I owned a lot of books in 2016. I had read almost none of them.

That is the confession, and it is not a flattering one. The shelf looked like a reader’s shelf. Right names, right titles, a couple of spines I could point at if a conversation went that way. But most of them were uncracked, and the honest finished count for the year was none.

So 2017 became the year I stopped buying and started finishing.

Six made it through. Carnegie, Vance on Musk, the Heath brothers, Peck, Mandino, and Trout. And I only caught the pattern in December, reading back over the list to write this up: every one of the six is a book about subtraction. Six authors, spread across sixty years, all making the same argument from different rooms. The thing in your way is something you are still carrying.

So that’s the frame I’d hand you for the list. Six books, six subtractions.

Here’s what each one asked me to put down.

How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Carnegie published this in 1936, and it started as a night class he taught at a New York YMCA, not as a book. And you can still hear the room in it. It reads like a man standing in front of forty people who paid to be there.

The core idea is embarrassingly small. Take real interest in the other person first, before you try anything else on them. And everything you would call influence comes downstream of that.

So what surprised me, reading it eighty years late? How little of it is technique. Listen properly. Remember the name. Let the other person talk about themselves and let the conversation stay there. Carnegie’s entire method is one subtraction: take yourself out of the exchange.

And I had that backwards for years. I thought influence was an allocation, some charisma budget handed out at birth that I had missed. But attention is a thing you spend. On one person, in a specific ten minutes, while you would rather be rehearsing your own next sentence.

That’s the first subtraction. Charisma buys you a room’s interest, but attention buys you its trust.

Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance

Vance published the biography in 2015. He got access to Musk directly, and to a long list of people who had worked for him, including the ones who left angry. So this is not a hagiography.

And the number that stayed with me is three. Three Falcon 1 launches failed, in 2006, 2007, and August 2008. SpaceX had money for roughly one more attempt, and the fourth one flew that September. That is the whole pattern in miniature: a timeline nobody could have hit, missed repeatedly, and a company still standing on the other side of it.

So what is the transferable part? First principles, which is a phrase worn smooth by overuse, so here is the concrete version. Everyone else priced a rocket by asking what rockets cost. But Musk priced it by asking what the aluminium, titanium, copper and carbon fibre cost, and the raw materials came to about two percent of the sticker price. Same question. Different starting point.

And by the way, Vance is honest about the bill for reasoning like that. It gets paid by whoever is standing nearest to him, and Vance refuses to soften that chapter, which is the main reason I trust the pages where he is being generous.

That’s the second subtraction. Take away what the industry normally does, and price the thing from the raw materials up.

Made to Stick by Chip & Dan Heath

The Heath brothers went after one question. Why do bad ideas travel while good ones die in the room where they were explained?

And their answer is six traits, wrapped in an acronym so it would survive contact with a Tuesday. SUCCESs. Simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and told as a story. And they announce the count in the introduction, which is one of the six already working on you.

But the part I still carry is a study they cite. Elizabeth Newton, Stanford, 1990. She sat people down and had them tap out a well known song with a finger, then predict how often a listener would name it. The tappers guessed one in two. The listeners got it right three times out of a hundred and twenty.

Why the gap? Because the tapper hears the whole song, orchestra and lyrics and all, and cannot un-hear it. The listener hears knocking.

And that is every explanation I have ever given badly. I hear the song. The room hears knocking. So I add a slide, because adding a slide is what you do when the knocking is not working. Then I add a diagram to explain the slide.

So I started running my own explanations against the six traits, and most of them failed on concrete. Usually because I opened with the abstraction I had spent weeks earning, instead of the one picture that would have bought me the room in ten seconds.

That’s the third subtraction. Put down the abstraction you are proud of and lead with the picture.

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Peck opens with three words. “Life is difficult.” And then he spends the rest of the book on what changes once you stop arguing with that sentence.

And his case is that discipline is the equipment for problems that never dissolve on their own. He names four pieces of it: delaying gratification, accepting responsibility, dedication to the truth, and balancing. Four tools. He does not sneak in a fifth.

So this is the heaviest book on the list, and it earns the weight. And it sat on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a decade. Why does a book that opens by telling you life is hard sell for that long? Because everyone reading it already knew, and nobody had said it out loud.

Here’s the part I did not see coming. Accepting that difficulty is the baseline, rather than an exception being run on you personally, turned out to be calming, because once difficulty is the weather you stop spending energy on the appeal and start spending it on the coat.

That’s the fourth subtraction. Put down the argument with reality and you get the energy back.

The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino

This is the odd one. Mandino published it in 1968, and it is a parable built around ten ancient scrolls. And the book tells you exactly how to read them: each scroll three times a day for thirty days, then move to the next.

So do the arithmetic. Ten scrolls, thirty days each, is three hundred days to finish a book you could skim on a flight.

Did I follow that to the letter? Of course not. Almost nobody does. But I did slow it down, one scroll at a time rather than one sitting, and the words landed differently for it. Persistence is the subject of the book. The reading protocol is the book making you practice the subject before it will let you reach the end.

And I have not seen another book pull that trick. It is more fable than framework, which is why I almost skipped it, and it is exactly why it stayed.

That’s the fifth subtraction. Take the speed out, and the book gets to do its job.

The Power of Simplicity by Jack Trout

Trout spent a career on positioning, and this book, from 1998, is the blunt version of the argument. A message fails when five people each get one idea into it and all five cancel out on the page.

His prescription is subtraction. Strip the message to the one thing, then refuse to add anything back, and that second half is the hard one. Adding is a decision anyone in the room can defend. Removing is a decision exactly one person has to own out loud, in front of the four people whose idea got cut, which is why the forty slide deck keeps happening in rooms where everyone privately agrees on twelve.

So what is your instinct when something is not landing? Mine was to add. Add a slide. Add a caveat. Add a diagram. Add a second diagram to explain the first one.

But Trout’s answer is to take away. He was aiming squarely at marketing when he wrote it, right? But I have carried it into architecture reviews, into design docs, and into more than one deck that had grown a section per reviewer.

That’s the sixth subtraction. And it is the one the other five were all quietly making.

And I should say where this frame gives out. Six books in a year is a thin sample. And I found the subtraction pattern after the fact, which is the kind of tidy story people tell about a year that was messier at the time. Read it as a shelf, not a syllabus.

That’s the 2017 list. Six books, six subtractions, and the year the habit finally took.

And of course the list itself matters less than the finishing did. I had spent years collecting books the way people collect gym memberships, and 2017 was the year the collecting stopped standing in for the thing.

A shelf you have read is always smaller than a shelf you have bought. But it is the only one that ever did anything for you.