The Energy Bus | Jon Gordon

The Energy Bus by Jon Gordon is a short book that you can easily read and get some inspiration and question the way you live your life.

Positive people and positive teams produce positive results, and the essential ingredient is positive energy.

Everything happens for a reason. Don’t forget that. Every person we meet. Every event in our life. Every flat tire happens for a reason. You can choose to ignore it or ask what that reason is and try to learn from it. Every problem has a gift for you in its hands as my man Richard Bach says. You can choose to see the curse or the gift. And this one choice will determine if your life is a success story or one big soap opera.

We don’t talk this game, we play it.

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less | Greg McKeown

If I ask a key question to myself as: “What was the best book of 2024 so far?” Probably I would choose Greg McKeown’s “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less” which was easy to understand, applicable and eye-opening for me. I found it while I was searching Amazon’s best seller list and it is a real must-read if you deal with so many to-do’s within your ordinary day. I hope my quotes from the book will help you.

THE WISDOM OF LIFE CONSISTS IN THE ELIMINATION OF NON-ESSENTIALS.

 —Lin Yutang

Sam Elliot is a capable executive in Silicon Valley who found himself stretched too thin after his company was acquired by a larger, bureaucratic business. He was in earnest about being a good citizen in his new role so he said yes to many requests without really thinking about it. But as a result he would spend the whole day rushing from one meeting and conference call to another trying to please everyone and get it all done. His stress went up as the quality of his work went down. It was like he was majoring in minor activities and as a result, his work became unsatisfying for him and frustrating for the people he was trying so hard to please.

In the midst of his frustration the company came to him and offered him an early retirement package. But he was in his early 50s and had no interest in completely retiring.

He went to speak with a mentor who gave him surprising advice: “Stay, but do what you would as a consultant and nothing else. And don’t tell anyone.” In other words, his mentor was advising him to do only those things that he deemed essential—and ignore everything else that was asked of him.

The executive followed the advice! He made a daily commitment towards cutting out the red tape. He began saying no.

Now when a request would come in he would pause and evaluate the request against a tougher criteria: “Is this the very most important thing I should be doing with my time and resources right now?”

He stopped attending meetings on his calendar if he didn’t have a direct contribution to make. He explained to me, “Just because I was invited didn’t seem a good enough reason to attend.”

He could concentrate his efforts on one project at a time. He could plan thoroughly. He could anticipate roadblocks and start to remove obstacles. Instead of spinning his wheels trying to get everything done, he could get the right things done. His newfound commitment to doing only the things that were truly important—and eliminating everything else—restored the quality of his work. Instead of making just a millimeter of progress in a million directions he began to generate tremendous momentum towards accomplishing the things that were truly vital.

To his great surprise, there were no negative repercussions to his experiment. His manager didn’t chastise him. His colleagues didn’t resent him. Quite the opposite; because he was left only with projects that were meaningful to him and actually valuable to the company, they began to respect and value his work more than ever. His work became fulfilling again. His performance ratings went up. He ended up with one of the largest bonuses of his career!

In this example is the basic value proposition of Essentialism: only once you give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all, to stop saying yes to everyone, can you make your highest contribution towards the things that really matter.

Hidden Potential | Adam Grant

Everyone has hidden potential. This book is about how we unlock it. There’s a widely held belief that greatness is mostly born—not made. That leads us to celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But you don’t have to be a wunderkind to accomplish great things. My goal is to illuminate how we can all rise to achieve greater things.

Same As Ever | Morgan Housel

In the realm of financial wisdom and life’s philosophies, few voices resonate as profoundly as that of Morgan Housel. His book, “Same as Ever” is a treasure trove of insights, anecdotes, and timeless wisdom that challenges our perspectives and urges us to think deeper. This blog post aims to share some of the most impactful quotes from the book, each serving as a reminder of the enduring truths that govern our lives and the world around us. From Warren Buffett’s wisdom on the constancy of change to Jeff Bezos’ focus on the unchanging, these quotes invite us to reflect on the paradoxes that define our existence. So, let’s embark on this journey of exploration, guided by the enlightening words of Morgan Housel. Same as ever, yet always new.

Awaken Your Genius | Ozan Varol

Ozan Varol is one of the best "out-of-the-box thinkers" I have known and after reading his best seller "Think Like a Rocket Scientist", I started to follow his blog and weekly posts. I get new perspective from what he shares and this makes him one of my best authors. And here is the best book I read in 2024: Awaken Your Genius. No need for fancy introduction, you will understand why I love him so much after having a look at the quotes from his book below. So let's start...

Here’s the thing: No one can compete with you at being you. You’re the first and the last time that you’ll ever happen. If your thinking is an extension of you—if what you’re building is a product of your own genius—you’ll be in a league of your own. But if you suppress yourself, if you don’t claim the wisdom within, no one else can. That wisdom will be lost, both to you and to the world.

Your Next Five Moves | Patrick Bet-David

If I would need to share the best book I read in 2023, it is "Your Next Five Moves" by Patrick Bet-David. I found this book from the best sellers in Amazon business books list and I read it during a time where I need to answer some key questions in my career and set a new strategy for the upcoming performance review cycles. 

Let's leave the personal things and focus on this great book and its author.  According to Patrick Bet-David, "The only thing separating us from greatness is a vision and a plan for achieving greatness. When you’re fighting for a cause, a dream, something greater than yourself, you will find the enthusiasm, passion, and joy that make life a great adventure. The key is identifying your cause and knowing who you want to be." Who am I? A short question but the answer needs a long thinking. 

From my point of view, Patrick Bet-David's "Your Next Five Moves" has 2 main take-aways. First, get into the habit of thinking five moves ahead in everything you do in business.  Just working to try and do that will lift your game and lead to greater success. Second, in every industry, 80 percent of the players will be actors, and only 20 percent will be doers. The key to positioning yourself firmly in the doers camp is to be continually investing in learning and growth. Invest in yourself. Think five moves ahead.

I Will Teach You to Be Rich | Ramit Sethi

I am a fan of personal finance books and I do like to read this kind of books that I found in the best seller list of Amazon. This time, the list brought me the book: "I Will Teach You to Be Rich, Second Edition: No Guilt. No Excuses. No B.S." This New York Times and Wall Street Journal Bestseller is written by Ramit Sethi.

There were some generic recommendations which do not fit to the realities of today, at least for my country Turkiye. Anyway, it is a good piece of work who want to have a mindset about where to start for personal finance. Let's continue with my highlights from the book:

People love to argue minor points, partially because they feel it absolves them from actually having to do anything. You know what? Let the fools debate the details. I decided to learn about money by taking small steps to manage my own spending. Just as you don’t have to be a certified nutritionist to lose weight or an automotive engineer to drive a car, you don’t have to know everything about personal finance to be rich. I’ll repeat myself: You don’t have to be an expert to get rich. You do have to know how to cut through all the information and get started—which, incidentally, also helps reduce the guilt.

Investing early is the best thing you can do.

The best time to start investing was ten years ago. The second best time is today.

Bring the Noise: The Jürgen Klopp Story | Raphael Honigstein

I recently completed reading the book by Raphale Honigstein about Jürgen Klopp: Bring the Noise: The Jürgen Klopp Story. It is not a great biography but it still has great quotes to keep in mind. Here we go: 

It ain’t where you from, it’s where you at. - Eric B. and Rakim

If you need someone in a suit and in a tie, don’t get Jürgen Klopp. But if you want a top coach, you’ll have to get him. It wasn’t a case of making an immediate decision but I know that Dortmund were looking at him a bit more closely from that day on. But they still weren’t entirely convinced. Watzke kept on calling me, I don’t know how many times. I always said: “Go for it, go for it. You will never regret the day you sign Jürgen Klopp.”’

‘Once, Mainz drew 1-1 with us, in Dortmund, and I congratulated him on winning a point. To draw at Dortmund was a success for Mainz, wasn’t it? But he just looked at me and said: “Congratulations to you too.” That was classic Klopp.

‘It’s always about making the crowd happy, it’s about producing games with a recognisable style,’ he vowed. ‘When matches are boring, they lose their rationale. My teams have never played chess on the pitch. I hope we will witness the odd full-throttle occasion here. The sun won’t shine every day in Dortmund, but we have a chance to make it shine more often.’

No Filter | Sarah Frier

Instagram is one of the two social media apps that I use regularly and when I see a book about it, I couldn't think so much about if it should be in my reading list or not, I definitely should read and learn more about it, so I just started.

It wasn't a book of "wow"s for me, it didn't enlighten me but anyway it was still a good book to learn more about Facebook and Zuckerberg. 

So let me share my highlights from Sarah Frier's "No Filter":

With the rise of Instagram, Beco do Batman has become one of São Paulo’s top tourist destinations. Via the vacation rental site Airbnb, various vendors charge about $40 per person to provide two hours of “personal paparazzi” in the alley, taking high-quality pictures of people to post on Instagram; the service is a type that’s become one of Airbnb’s most popular for its travelers in cities around the world.

For amateur photographers, the only cost is the stress of perfection.

Each month, more than 1 billion of us use Instagram. We take photos and videos of our food, our faces, our favorite scenery, our families, and our interests and share them, hoping that they reflect something about who we are or who we aspire to be.

Skin In The Game | Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In Skin In The Game, Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains how the willingness of accepting one’s own risks is an important quality of heroes, saints and successful people in all walks of life. 

Skin In The Game is about the distortions of symmetry and reciprocity in life. If you have the rewards, you must also get some of the risks and not let others pay the price of your mistakes.

Here are my highlights from the book:

If you have the rewards, you must also get some of the risks, not let others pay the price of your mistakes. If you inflict risk on others, and they are harmed, you need to pay some price for it.

Don’t tell me what you “think,” just tell me what’s in your portfolio.

The Power of One More | Ed Mylett

It is another personal development or self motivation book that I read and honestly speaking, I liked the content and flow. This is the book I met with Ed Mylett and after completing the reading of this book, I started to follow Ed in twitter which is a sign that I liked him. I have 9 pages of highlights from Ed's book. I have read the last part of the book in a Starbucks with a melancholic mood and the book was a great friend for me at that time and place. So let's see what I highlight:

At its core, The Power of One More is about your willingness to do one more rep, make one more phone call, get up one hour earlier, build one more relationship, or do one more thing for whatever your situation calls for.

You can find your best life by doing “one more” than the world expects from you.

The individual thoughts and actions you take don't need to be profound. However, when you compound these small thoughts and actions and stack them up on top of each other, the resulting changes over time are profound.

“Winning is more fun than fun is fun.”

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

 —Andy Warhol

Deep inside, you know what's true about you.

What we perceive about ourselves is what we believe about ourselves.

Nobody is ever always right. As a child, you accepted much of what you were told, right or wrong. Your identity became the good and the bad parts of how other people influenced you. The unfortunate thing is that you were defenseless. Your critical thinking skills did not exist to give you the tools you needed to survive in the world.

As you grew older, you began to confirm your identity. If someone said you weren't a good student or a lousy athlete, that became a part of your identity. You still didn't have the capacity to disavow what you were being told. You grew into adulthood, and you carried with you these beliefs about yourself. Your identity had taken root. Your limitations became a part of you, and because they were so ingrained, you weren't even sure where they came from.

Stress-Free Small Talk | Richard S. Gallagher LMFT

Small talk is a skill, just as learning how to bake a cake from a cookbook is a skill. There are clear phases to every conversation and teachable steps you can take to master each of these phases. If you learn and practice them, you will discover that you really can learn to be confident in any conversation.

The Oxford Dictionary defines small talk as “polite conversation about unimportant or uncontroversial matters, especially as engaged in on social occasions.” Put another way, its entire purpose is to build relationships. This is why conversations about “unimportant” topics can actually be some of the most important kinds of communication we have with people. As nationally known social networking expert Phil Gerbyshak put it, “Make friends first, and do business last.” It would not be an exaggeration to say the most important networking skill you can develop is to simply delight in the company of other people.

There is a popular saying that all business is personal, and it is true from the mailroom to the boardroom. People who like you are much more willing to help you, support you, and even promote or make deals with you. More often than not, these good relationships start with people showing an interest in others by engaging in small talk.

Atomic Habits | James Clear

If you want to start a new habit, it means that you have a new challenge. If you need a supporter for this challenge, your main supporter might be a book. And if this might be a book, this will probably be this book: Atomic Habits, by James Clear.

In this blog post, you will find more than the average highlights that I share because this book is full of great insights. Here are just some of these awesome quotes which will make you take action.

Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results

No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving—every day. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results.

If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Here, you'll get a proven system that can take you to new heights.

Mindset - Updated Edition: Changing The Way You Think To Fulfil Your Potential | Carol S. Dweck

People may start with different temperaments and different aptitudes, but it is clear that experience, training, and personal effort take them the rest of the way.

It’s not always the people who start out the smartest who end up the smartest.

When you enter a mindset, you enter a new world. In one world—the world of fixed traits—success is about proving you’re smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the other—the world of changing qualities—it’s about stretching yourself to learn something new.

Benjamin Barber, an eminent political theorist, once said, “I don’t divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures. . . . I divide the world into the learners and nonlearners.”

People in a growth mindset don’t just seek challenge, they thrive on it. The bigger the challenge, the more they stretch. And nowhere can it be seen more clearly than in the world of sports. You can just watch people stretch and grow.

“Becoming is better than being.”

A World Without Email | Cal Newport

The book by Cal Newport,  "A World Without Email" is his attempt to tackle the crisis of focus and communication overload. To pull together—for the first time—everything we now know about how we ended up in a culture of constant communication, and the effects it’s having on both our productivity and our mental health, as well as to explore our most compelling visions for what alternative forms of work might look like.  

The key is to find ways to minimize context shifts and overload while still getting done what needs to get done.                                                      

How to Talk to Anyone at Work | Leil Lowndes

Perhaps so far you haven’t been that fortunate at work. Most people aren’t. You may be stuck with a boss who constantly criticizes you, is a control freak, micromanager, or just plain jerk.

When you were a kid, nothing prepared you for these workplace characters, because, hopefully, you had parents and relatives who believed in you and complimented you when you did something good.

No matter what you do or where you earn your living, your work can be either a dream job or a nightmare. It’s all up to you.

What’s the Number One Skill You Need? You guessed it: whether it’s online or in person, it’s the rare ability to communicate effectively with everyone in your place of employment. I’m not just talking about regular communication skills, the kind people need to get along in everyday life. I’m talking about specific techniques necessary for success on the job.

It’s the people we work with that make our jobs gratifying or grueling.

Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success | Phil Jackson & Hugh Delehanty

I learn a lot from the biographies and the true stories of professionals. During his storied career as head coach of the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers, Phil Jackson won more championships than any coach in the history of professional sports. And he has a lot to share in his book: Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success. Besides, there are great quotes in this book. Here they are:

When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.

                                     RUMI

Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is ajar.

                                     JIM BUTCHER

Decisive | Chip Heath and Dan Heath

In Decisive, Chip Heath and Dan Heath, the bestselling authors of Made to Stick and Switch, tackle the thorny problem of how to overcome our natural biases and irrational thinking to make better decisions, about our work, lives, companies and careers.

When it comes to decision making, our brains are flawed instruments. But given that we are biologically hard-wired to act foolishly and behave irrationally at times, how can we do better? A number of recent bestsellers have identified how irrational our decision making can be. But being aware of a bias doesn't correct it, just as knowing that you are nearsighted doesn't help you to see better. In Decisive, the Heath brothers, draw on extensive studies and stories...

The Biggest Bluff | Maria Konnikova

It's true that Maria Konnikova had never actually played poker before and didn't even know the rules when she approached Erik Seidel, Poker Hall of Fame inductee and winner of tens of millions of dollars in earnings, and convinced him to be her mentor. But she knew her man: a famously thoughtful and broad-minded player, he was intrigued by her pitch that she wasn't interested in making money so much as learning about life. She had faced a stretch of personal bad luck, and her reflections on the role of chance had led her to a giant of game theory, who pointed her to poker as the ultimate master class in learning to distinguish between what can be controlled and what can't. And she certainly brought...

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World | David Epstein

Plenty of experts argue that anyone who wants to develop a skill, play an instrument, or lead their field should start early, focus intensely, and rack up as many hours of deliberate practice as possible. If you dabble or delay, you'll never catch up to the people who got a head start. But a closer look at research on the world's top performers, from professional athletes to Nobel laureates, shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule.

David Epstein examined the world's most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters and scientists. He discovered that in most fields--especially those that are complex and unpredictable--generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. Generalists often find their path late, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on one. They're also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can't see.