The Best Books I Read in 2018

Somewhere around nineteen books in 2018. That is the record, and I doubt I will beat it.

So cutting the list to six meant dropping books I actually liked. Rework went. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People went. Drive went. And that tells you more about the shelf than anything I could say. In a thinner year, any one of those three walks onto the list unopposed.

Here’s the thing I only saw in December, lining the survivors up. Every one of the six is about something you have to build before the thing you actually wanted. Thiel wants a company and makes you build a question. Ries wants a product and makes you build an experiment. Catmull wants a movie and makes you build candor. Duhigg wants a habit and makes you build a loop. Sinek wants a pitch and makes you build a reason. Nadella wants a turnaround and makes you build a culture.

Six books, six things you build first.

Zero to One by Peter Thiel

Thiel published this in 2014 with Blake Masters, out of notes from a Stanford course. And the whole book hangs on one interview question. What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

Try answering that out loud. So can you do it? I could not. That was the useful part. Opinions are cheap and I have plenty, but a contrarian belief you would stake a company on is a different object entirely, and most of mine fell apart the moment I tried to say them in a full sentence to another human being.

And the argument underneath it is that competition is what happens to companies that ran out of ideas. Going from zero to one means making something that did not exist. Copying the market leader with better execution goes from one to n, which feels like progress and pays like a wage.

So I turned that question over for weeks after finishing it. That is the mark of a good book. And by the way, it is also the mark of an uncomfortable one.

And he closes with seven questions every company has to answer, covering engineering, timing, monopoly, people, distribution, durability, and the secret nobody else has spotted. His claim is that you want a good answer to all seven, and that five or six can still carry you.

That’s the first build. Build the question before you build the company.

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Ries published this in 2011, out of his own wreckage at IMVU, where the team shipped a product built on assumptions nobody had checked.

So the loop is build, measure, learn. And the whole discipline is running it at the cheapest version that still answers the question. A minimum viable product is the smallest experiment that can tell you whether the thing deserves the next six months.

This is the one I still hand to people, because it turns failure into data. Most of us guess expensively when we could learn cheaply. We build for two quarters, ship, and then discover what a two week prototype would have told us for free.

So what is the actual discipline in there? Deciding, before you build, what result would make you stop. Teams that skip that step keep going forever, because there is always one more feature that explains the flat number.

And the sharpest chapter is the one on vanity metrics. Total registered users only goes up. Cumulative downloads only goes up. Both numbers will climb while the product dies underneath them, which is why Ries pushes cohort analysis instead, where you follow one week’s signups over time and the chart is finally allowed to tell you something bad.

That’s the second build. Build the experiment before you build the product.

Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

Catmull ran Pixar, and this is a book about protecting ugly early ideas long enough for them to become good ones. And he brings receipts, because he tells you about the time Pixar nearly lost Toy Story 2.

Someone ran a delete command on the wrong directory in 1998. Ninety percent of the film went in about twenty seconds. Then the backups turned out to be bad too. So how did the movie survive? A technical director had been working from home after having a baby, and she happened to have a copy on her own machine.

I run production data systems, so that story lives in a different part of my brain than it does for most readers. Every designed safeguard failed. The recovery came from a person who was never in the plan.

But the durable idea in the book is candor, which Catmull treats as a discipline rather than a personality trait. So why would honesty need a discipline? Because hierarchy eats it on its own, without a single person in the chain deciding to lie. Bad news gets softer at every level it climbs, and it keeps getting softer unless someone spends real effort holding the channel open.

That’s the third build. Build the candor before you build the thing that needs reviewing.

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

Duhigg published this in 2012, and the mechanism has three parts. Cue, routine, reward. That is the loop, and once yours has a name it changes shape.

Because here is his actual rule for changing one. Keep the cue. Keep the reward. Swap the routine in the middle and leave everything else alone.

And that sounds small until you look at the alternative, which is what most of us try. You decide to stop. You white-knuckle it for nine days. You relapse on the tenth. You conclude you have a discipline problem.

The problem isn’t your discipline. It isn’t your willpower either.

And his best example is Paul O’Neill taking over Alcoa in 1987. He opened with investors by telling them his one priority was worker safety, and one of them walked out and told his clients to sell. Alcoa’s market value rose roughly fivefold across O’Neill’s tenure. So why does safety move a balance sheet? Because it was the keystone habit, the one that made every other process in the company legible on the way to fixing it.

So I started naming my own cues, which is unglamorous work and mostly consists of admitting out loud what actually sets you off. Once a cue has a name, changing the routine stops feeling like willpower and starts feeling like editing a config file.

That’s the fourth build. Build the loop before you build the resolve.

Start with Why by Simon Sinek

Sinek’s golden circle has three rings. Why in the middle, how around it, what on the outside. And his claim is that people buy the why and backfill the what afterward.

The 2009 TED talk has been watched tens of millions of times. And that is itself evidence for the thesis, because the talk opens with the why and holds the what back for nine minutes.

Now, it is a simple idea. Maybe an obvious one. Once somebody has said it to you cleanly. But cleanly enough to use is the entire distance between an idea you agree with and an idea you apply on Monday morning.

And the test is quick to start and unpleasant to finish. Write down what your team does. Then write down how. Then try the why without using the words value, quality, or customer.

So what happened when I ran it on our own work? It was embarrassing. I could describe what my team did in forensic detail. I could describe how, down to the orchestration layer. And the why came out as a sentence that would have described any data team at any company in the country.

That’s the fifth build. Build the reason before you build the roadmap.

Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella

Nadella published this in 2017, three years into the job. And the phrase that carries it is learn-it-all over know-it-all, which he takes openly from Carol Dweck’s work on mindset rather than dressing it up as his own.

He also writes about his son Zain, born with severe cerebral palsy, and about how long it took him to stop asking why this had happened to him and start asking what it was asking of him. A CEO memoir that spends real pages there is doing something other than positioning.

And I read this one from inside the blast radius. I work in the Microsoft data ecosystem every week. So the culture he describes has consequences for me, right down to whether a support ticket comes back with a real answer.

So does the book flatter its author? Of course it does. They all do. What earns it a place here is how specific it gets about what was broken before he arrived. Most executive memoirs cover that in one graceful paragraph and a pivot.

That’s the sixth build. Build the culture before you build the strategy.

And here’s where the frame gives out. I found the build-it-first pattern in December, looking backwards at a shelf I assembled without a plan. And any six decent books will line up into a pattern if you push on them hard enough.

So was nineteen books a good year or a busy one? Both. And I have stopped treating the count as the interesting number.

That’s the 2018 list. Nineteen read, six kept, and the year I started asking what has to exist before the thing I actually want.

Nineteen books will make you well read. Six of them, applied, will make you different.