The Best Books I Read in 2019

I picked up a Seth Godin book in January and then kept going. Two of them ended up on this list, and I am calling 2019 my Seth Godin year with no regrets at all.

But reading one author several times works differently. You stop hearing the argument. You start hearing the move.

And Godin’s move, once you can see it, is the same every time. He walks you over to the gate you have been standing at for years, and then he shows you it was never locked.

So that is the frame for this year. Five books, one repeated move, and two books that broke the pattern hard enough to earn their place next to it.

So why does that matter for a reading list? Because the move is the thing you keep, long after the individual arguments have blurred together.

Here’s the list.

Factfulness by Hans Rosling

Rosling opens with a quiz. Thirteen multiple-choice questions about the world, three options each, on child mortality and literacy and girls in school.

And people fail it. Not slightly. Rosling ran that quiz on students, on journalists, on Nobel laureates, on executives at Davos, and across almost every question they scored worse than random chance would. A chimpanzee picking bananas at random beats a room full of experts. That is the joke he opens with, and then he spends the book refusing to let you laugh it off.

So why do informed people score below chance? Because chance has no opinions. Getting it wrong at that rate takes a systematic bias, pointing the same direction every time, and that bias is what the book is actually about.

And the four levels are the piece I still use. Rosling throws out developed and developing and replaces them with income levels one through four, measured in dollars a day, and most of the world now lives in the middle two. So where did the two-box picture come from? From a world that stopped existing around 1970, and from the fact that nobody sends you a notice when a category quietly dissolves.

So what is his fix? It is unglamorous. Look at the number before you decide how to feel about it. That turns “things are getting worse” from a mood into a claim somebody can check.

He finished the book while dying, and it came out in 2018, a year after he did. That matters to how it reads. There is no time in it for the comfortable version of anything.

That’s the first one. Data will make you specific long before it makes you optimistic.

Tribes by Seth Godin

Godin published Tribes in 2008, which was the exact moment the tools got cheap. And his claim is that leadership is the work of gathering people around an idea worth spreading. The gathering part no longer requires a budget or a title.

You can start one this afternoon. A blog, a small newsletter, a group chat of eleven people who care about the same narrow thing you care about. That is a tribe, and the book is essentially one long argument that you already have permission.

He also has a word for the alternative, which is sheepwalking. Doing a job somebody else designed. At a pace somebody else set. Well enough to stay off the radar. And the uncomfortable part is that sheepwalking gets rewarded, right up to the week the org needs somebody to have an opinion.

But here’s the part that landed, a year later, when I went back to my notes. He separates leadership from management cleanly, and management is the part I had been quietly practising while telling myself it was the same job. Management moves resources toward a known outcome. Leadership moves people toward one nobody has seen yet.

So what stops most people? The waiting. We wait to be handed a mandate. We wait for a headcount. We wait for a slot on somebody’s org chart. And the whole time, the thing we were waiting for was sitting there, free.

That’s the second one. A title tells people you are in charge, but a tribe tells you whether anyone is following.

Purple Cow by Seth Godin

The argument is that safe has quietly become the riskiest position available. You drive past a field of brown cows and see nothing. A purple one stops the car.

And Godin practised what he sold, because the original 2003 edition shipped inside a milk carton. That is the whole thesis executed as a package.

And his mechanism for spread is otaku, a Japanese word he borrows for obsessive enthusiasm. The target is the small group that gets compulsive about a thing, because telling other people is part of what they get out of it. They carry it for you. They do it for free. And they are harder to buy than an ad slot, which is the part the budget holders keep missing.

Now, I will be honest about my experience with the book. I spent most of it waiting for it to get concrete. 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, and I stand by the complaint. But the examples arrive late. So why does it take him that long? Because remarkable is easy to recognise and hard to specify, and I suspect Godin knew it while he was writing.

But the payoff justified the patience, which is a strange thing to say about a book on being remarkable. And it is the most useful thing the book taught me by accident. Being remarkable is expensive to set up and cheap to run. Most of the cost lands before anybody notices you.

That’s the third one. Being safe feels like protecting the downside, right up until the downside is that nobody mentions you.

The ONE Thing by Gary Keller

Keller built the whole book around a single question. What is the one thing I can do such that, by doing it, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?

And the image he uses is dominoes. A domino can topple another one about half again its own size. So a chain that starts with a two-inch tile reaches a domino taller than a person in about eighteen steps. Sequence is doing the work there. Force is not.

And Keller’s other line is that success is sequential, not simultaneous. You earn one domino at a time. The chain does the multiplying. I have watched good engineers, myself included, try to run six dominoes in parallel and then wonder why the year produced six half-things.

So I ran the focusing question against my own week, and the answer was uncomfortable. What is urgent and what actually moves things forward turned out to be two different lists, and I had been working the first one with real discipline for years.

The honest caveat is that this book is longer than its idea. The question is the whole product, and you have it now, and Keller would probably tell you to skip ahead and start using it.

That’s the fourth one. A long list will keep you busy, but one domino will keep you moving.

The Five Temptations of a CEO by Patrick Lencioni

Lencioni published this in 1998, and it is a fable. A CEO who has just been fired meets a stranger on a train platform and gets walked back through the five ways he did it to himself.

The five are status over results, popularity over accountability, certainty over clarity, harmony over conflict, and invulnerability over trust. Five traps. He does not add a sixth.

And the one that stung was certainty over clarity. Lencioni’s claim is that leaders stall because they would rather be right later than clear now, so the team sits waiting on a decision being polished somewhere above them. Clarity is cheap to hand out and expensive to hold back.

So why tell it as a fable at all? Because a framework gets filed and a story gets retold. You can read the whole thing in one sitting, which is exactly the point. I have nodded along to listicles of leadership mistakes and forgotten all five by lunch. Watching a man lose his company in real time is harder to put down and much harder to file away.

So here’s the pattern I noticed only after reading it next to the Godin books. Every one of the five temptations is a gate the CEO locked himself, then stood in front of, then blamed the board for.

That’s the fifth one. A fable will beat a framework whenever you need the lesson to survive lunch.

And here’s where I should flag the obvious. Two Godin books in a year is a small sample to build a theory of an author on, and the repeated-move idea is mine, not his, assembled after the fact from a reading year I did not plan.

That’s my 2019 list. One author, several times, and the discovery that the gate was open.

Reading many authors will show you many ideas. Reading one author repeatedly will show you how an idea gets built.