· Best Reads · 4 min read
The Best Books I Read in 2019
My five favorite reads of 2019, from Factfulness to The ONE Thing — the books that changed how I think about focus, marketing, and the world.
The five books that stuck with me most in 2019 were Factfulness, Tribes, Purple Cow, The ONE Thing, and The Five Temptations of a CEO. Three of those five are by Seth Godin, which is really the story of my reading year — I picked up one of his books in January and just kept going. I’m calling 2019 my Seth Godin year, and I regret nothing.
Here’s what made the cut and why.
Factfulness by Hans Rosling
Factfulness is Hans Rosling’s argument that the world is in far better shape than the news makes it feel. Poverty is down, literacy is up, child mortality keeps falling — and most of us, including people who should know better, get the basic facts of global progress wrong when quizzed on them.
What stuck with me wasn’t the optimism, exactly, it was the method. Rosling doesn’t ask you to feel better about the world, he asks you to look at the data before you decide how to feel. That’s a small shift with a big effect: it turns “things are getting worse” from a mood into a testable claim.
If you’re someone who doom-scrolls the news and comes away convinced everything is falling apart, read this one. It won’t make you naive. It’ll make you more precise about what’s actually true.
Tribes by Seth Godin
Tribes is Godin’s case that leadership isn’t about authority, it’s about gathering people around an idea worth spreading. Anyone can start a tribe now — a blog, a niche newsletter, a small group of people who care about the same weird thing you care about — and that’s the whole book in one sentence.
I gave this one five stars, and looking back a year later, I think it’s because it reframed leadership as something you can just start doing, today, without a title or a budget. You don’t need permission to lead a tribe. You need a point of view and the nerve to share it.
Read this if you keep waiting for someone to put you in charge before you start leading.
Purple Cow by Seth Godin
Purple Cow is Godin’s pitch for the idea that “safe” is now the riskiest thing a product or a marketer can be. In a world full of brown cows, the only one people stop to notice is purple.
I’ll be honest about my experience with this one: I spent most of the book waiting for it to get concrete, and it mostly didn’t, until the last chapter, where the real-world examples finally showed up. I wrote in my own notes at the time that I had to wait till the last chapter to hear real examples of the purple cow — but it was worth it. The payoff justified the patience.
If you’ve ever built something perfectly competent that nobody talked about, this book explains why, and what to do instead.
The ONE Thing by Gary Keller
The ONE Thing is built around a single focusing question: what’s the one thing I can do such that, by doing it, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary? Keller’s argument is that most of our to-do lists are just noise dressed up as productivity, and the real leverage is in finding the one domino that knocks down all the others.
I gave this five stars because that question has genuinely changed how I plan my weeks. Instead of asking what’s urgent, I now ask what actually moves things forward — and I’m embarrassed by how often those two answers aren’t the same thing.
Read this if your to-do list is long, your progress is slow, and you suspect the two facts are related.
The Five Temptations of a CEO by Patrick Lencioni
This one’s a leadership fable, short enough to read in a single sitting, about a CEO who fails and figures out why on his way out the door. Lencioni frames five traps leaders fall into — chasing status over results, wanting to be liked over holding people accountable, and so on — and tells it as a story instead of a lecture.
What I liked was the format as much as the content. It’s easy to nod along to a listicle of leadership mistakes and forget all five by lunch. It’s much harder to forget a CEO you just watched fail in real time.
If you manage people and want the lessons to actually stick, read the fable version before you read the frameworks.
That’s my 2019 list. If you read something this year that changed how you think, I’d love to hear what it was.