The Best Books I Read in 2020

March took away most of the excuses I had been using about why I could not read more. And what ended up on the shelf by December was stranger than I expected. Six books, and every one of them is about a loop.

A loop is a thing that keeps running whether or not you are watching it. Clear’s runs on a cue and a reward. Sinek’s runs until the players walk away. Stanley’s runs on a timescale you cannot feel from inside a single year. Eyal’s runs on you. Gottman’s runs between a parent and a child in about four seconds. Burg’s runs so slowly that most people quit before the second pass.

So that’s the frame for a year nobody planned. Six loops, three I was trying to build, and three that were already running.

Here’s the list.

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Clear published this in 2018, and the arithmetic in chapter one is the part everybody repeats. One percent better every day compounds to roughly thirty-seven times better across a year. One percent worse, run the same way, takes you to almost nothing.

And the number is a rhetorical device more than a measurement, which Clear more or less concedes. The shape it describes is the useful part. Small. Repeated. Invisible on any given Tuesday.

And his four laws are the operating manual. Make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying, then invert all four for anything you want gone.

So why does the same resolution fail three Januaries running? Because a resolution names an outcome and leaves the loop untouched. Clear’s argument is that your systems, rather than your goals, set the level you land on. And a goal with no system under it is a sentence you said out loud in December.

So what makes one stick past February? Clear’s answer is identity. Every rep is a vote for the kind of person you are claiming to be, so the goal stops being to run a marathon and starts being to become somebody who runs. The outcome arrives later, and in that order.

That’s the first loop. A goal will point you in a direction, but a system will carry you there.

The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek

Sinek published this in 2019, building openly on James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games from 1986. And the distinction is clean enough to use in a meeting. A finite game has fixed players, fixed rules, and an agreed ending. An infinite game has changing players, changing rules, and one object, which is to keep the game going.

Business is the second kind. So what happens when a company plays it as the first? It optimises hard for a finish line that was never there, wins the quarter, and spends the slack it was going to need for the next surprise.

So he names five practices for the long version: a just cause, trusting teams, a worthy rival, existential flexibility, and the courage to lead. Five. And the one I keep coming back to is the worthy rival. It turns your competitor into a source of information about your own weak spots rather than a target to be beaten.

And reading this in 2020 was its own experience. The whole year functioned as an unplanned audit of which organizations had been building slack and which had been booking wins.

That’s the second loop. You can play a game that has no ending, and you can be the reason it keeps going.

The Millionaire Mind by Thomas J. Stanley

Stanley published this in 2000, four years after The Millionaire Next Door, and it is a survey rather than an argument. He went and asked them. Hundreds of them, over years, which is a slower way to write a book and a much harder one to argue with.

And the findings are boring in the way useful things usually are. They live in houses they bought a long time ago. They drive cars somebody else broke in. They spend well under what they could, and they have been doing it for decades.

But the detail that surprised me was the academic one. What most of Stanley’s respondents had was a very long time horizon and a willingness to look unimpressive in public for most of it. Their school records were ordinary, and several of them had been told outright that they were not the gifted ones.

So where is the loop in that? In the decades. Frugality on any single Saturday is invisible and mildly annoying. Run it for thirty years and it becomes the entire mechanism, which is why the book has no secret to sell you.

And the follow-on question is the one that stings. If the mechanism is that simple, why does almost anybody fail to run it? Because thirty years of restraint has no applause built into it. Every year you do it right looks exactly like a year you did nothing at all.

That’s the third loop. Wealth looks like a decision, and it behaves like a habit.

Hooked by Nir Eyal

Eyal published this in 2014 as a manual for product builders, and his loop has four parts. Trigger, action, variable reward, investment.

And the word carrying the whole thing is variable. A reward that arrives every single time stops being interesting within a week. A reward that arrives sometimes is what keeps a hand moving toward a phone at eleven at night, and Skinner established that with pigeons decades before anyone shipped an app.

And the investment step is the clever one. You put something in, a photo, a follower, a saved playlist, and now leaving has a price attached. That price is the switching cost, and you are the one who paid it in.

So reading it as a user is a different experience from reading it as a builder. Naming the loop puts your hand on the light switch. Nobody promised it turns the light off. And by the way, Eyal went on to write a whole second book about resisting the thing this one teaches you to build. That tells you plenty about how the first one aged.

So do I still use the apps? Every day. Knowing the loop bought me maybe four minutes of resistance a night, and I will take the four minutes.

That’s the fourth loop. You can learn the mechanism in an afternoon and still be inside it that night.

Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child by John Gottman

Gottman published this in 1997, and I picked it up as the parent of a young kid, which is the only qualification it asks for.

And it reads less like a parenting manual than a book about emotion coaching, and the sequence has five steps. Notice the feeling. Treat it as an opening rather than an interruption. Listen, and say it back. Help name it. Then, and only then, set the limit.

And the whole thing turns on the order. I had been running that sequence backwards for years, leading with the limit and then wondering why the feeling came back louder the next time.

So the change was one sentence long. Instead of “stop crying,” I learned to say “you sound really frustrated,” and then wait. The behaviour settles on its own a surprising share of the time, once the feeling has been said out loud by somebody bigger.

So does it work every time? Of course not. Some nights the feeling gets named properly and the crying carries on to its own schedule.

That’s the fifth loop. Name the feeling first, and the behaviour has less work left to do.

Go-Givers Sell More by Bob Burg

Burg and Mann published this in 2010, following on from The Go-Giver, and it reverses the usual sales posture. Give the value first. Let the selling happen afterward, if it happens.

And there are five laws in it, covering value, compensation, influence, authenticity and receptivity. But receptivity is the one that stuck, because it names something I had never had a word for. Plenty of people are excellent at giving and quietly terrible at receiving, and a loop that only turns one way stops being a loop.

Now, this is the slowest book on the list by a distance. Nothing in it pays back inside a quarter. Or two.

So why does it work at all? Because the hard close optimises one transaction and this optimises the twentieth. Over a single deal, the closer wins. Over ten years, the person who helped when there was nothing in it for them holds a position you cannot buy.

That’s the sixth loop. A close will get you this deal, but a reputation will get you the next nine.

And here’s the caveat on the whole frame. I read these six in the strangest year most of us have had, stuck in one house with the same four walls, and a person in that position will find loops everywhere, because a year without events is mostly loops.

That’s my 2020 list. Six loops, three I was building and three that were running on me.

A normal year teaches you what to want. A strange one teaches you what keeps running after you stop paying attention.