Book picks similar to
The Daily Edge: Simple Strategies to Increase Efficiency and Make an Impact Every Day by David Horsager
non-fiction
business
first-reads
self-help
You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life
Jen Sincero - 2013
If you're ready to make some serious changes around here, You Are a Badass will help you: Identify and change the self-sabotaging beliefs and behaviors that stop you from getting what you want, blast past your fears so you can take big exciting risks, figure out how to make some damn money already, learn to love yourself and others, set big goals and reach them - it will basically show you how to create a life you totally love, and how to create it now.By the end of You Are a Badass, you'll understand why you are how you are, how to love what you can't change, how to change what you don't love, and how to use The Force to kick some serious ass.
Becoming The 1%: How To Master Productivity And Rise To The Top In 7 Days
Dennis Crosby - 2012
It tells me that:You are drivenYou want to exceed in your professionYou want more moneyYou want more recognition Most importantly, you don't feel like you have reached your potential yetHow do I know this? I know because I went through a period in my life where I felt the same way. I went through every day asking myselfAm I going to achieve my goals?Does what I do today matter?Are these projects to much for me? Is there enough time for me to get my work done and leave time for family. Which do I choose?If you are asking yourself similar questions, then I understand. I want you to know that I have been there and that you can rest assure that there is a way to realize your dreams, obtain success and join the 1% of the most productive people in the world. And you are going to do it in just 7 days...I was in desperate pursuit of my goals for a long time and knew that there was a high correlation between time management and how fast I obtained my goals. Over and over I tried and failed to find the right formula for unlocking my potential. I researched, interviewed and analyzed until I made my first breakthrough. I found the core principles that every productivity and time management technique is based off of. This book contains that system. It is a step by step guide, that if followed correctly, will transform you. At the end of this journey, you will possess the skills to:Excel in your workplaceGain more time with your familyGet more work done in less timeBecome the envy of your peersTake down large projects so quickly that people will think you are superhumanWhat took me over a year to learn, you will gain in just 7 days. After that you will become part of an elite group of the most productive people in the world. What will you learn in this book?The seven techniques that everyone who wants to be successful in time management must know.How to distinguish your real work from your pseudo work. A skill that will have you exceeding your peers in no time.The 3 core principles of time management that will reframe you mind so that you never look at your to-do list the same way again.How to get more work done in 2 hours, then most can get done in a whole dayWhat you and Olympic athletes have in common (or should)Before I wrote this book, I gave three of my friends a layout of the system to try. They were skeptical and doubted that it would actually work. After some convincing and more begging than I am willing to admit, they gave it a try. I had them track their performance over the next month and log it in a journal for review. I assumed that my results were special because of the work I put in beforehand and that they would only improve around half as much. To my surprise, they saw almost the same amount of increase in productivity as I did. They reported feeling like they had more time than they knew what to do with. Finishing large projects in half the time as before. Making more meaningful steps towards their goals and feeling an overall increase in their quality of life.That is the power of mastering productivity and time management. What took me almost a year to achieve, by using my system, it only took them days.Because I desperately want you to have this book in your life, I am offering a 200% refund on your purchase.That means if you don't find any value in this book, then I will give you double what you paid for it! (Details inside of the book)This is the power of learning to master you time. This is what every person who wants to be successful most know.This will help you achieve your goals faster This is what this book provides.These are the results you can have.I look forward to taking our journey together-Dennis
Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen
Dan Heath - 2020
We put out fires. We deal with emergencies. We stay downstream, handling one problem after another, but we never make our way upstream to fix the systems that caused the problems ... [This book] probes the psychological forces that push us downstream--including 'problem blindness,' which can leave us oblivious to serious problems in our midst. And Heath introduces us to the thinkers who have overcome these obstacles and scored ... victories by switching to an upstream mindset.
The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World With Kindness
Linda Kaplan Thaler - 2006
Where so many companies encourage a dog eat dog mentality, the Kaplan Thaler Group has succeeded through chocolate and flowers. In The Power of Nice, through their own experiences and the stories of other people and businesses, they demonstrate why, contrary to conventional wisdom, nice people finish first.Turning the well-known adage of “Nice Guys Finish Last” on its ear, The Power of Nice shows that “nice” companies have lower employee turnover, lower recruitment costs, and higher productivity. Nice people live longer, are healthier, and make more money. In today’s interconnected world, companies and people with a reputation for cooperation and fair play forge the kind of relationships that lead to bigger and better opportunities, both in business and in life. Kaplan Thaler and Koval illustrate the surprising power of nice with an array of real-life examples from the business arena as well as from their personal lives. Most important, they present a plan of action covering everything from creating a positive impression to sweetening the pot to turning enemies into allies. Filled with inspiration and suggestions on how to supercharge your career and expand your reach in the workplace, The Power of Nice will transform how you live and work.
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Peter Thiel - 2014
In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things. Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we’re too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice. Information technology has improved rapidly, but there is no reason why progress should be limited to computers or Silicon Valley. Progress can be achieved in any industry or area of business. It comes from the most important skill that every leader must master: learning to think for yourself.Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. Tomorrow’s champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today’s marketplace. They will escape competition altogether, because their businesses will be unique. Zero to One presents at once an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way of thinking about innovation: it starts by learning to ask the questions that lead you to find value in unexpected places.
Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less
Robert I. Sutton - 2014
Sutton and Rao have devoted much of the last decade to uncovering what it takes to build and uncover pockets of exemplary performance, to help spread them, and to keep recharging organizations with ever better work practices. Drawing on inside accounts and case studies and academic research from a wealth of industries – including start-ups, pharmaceuticals, airlines, retail, financial services, high-tech, education, non-profits, government, and healthcare -- Sutton and Rao identify the key scaling challenges that confront every organization. They tackle the difficult trade-offs that organizations must make between “Buddhism” versus “Catholicism” -- whether to encourage individualized approaches tailored to local needs or to replicate the same practices and customs as an organization or program expands. They reveal how the best leaders and teams develop, spread, and instill the right mindsets in their people -- rather than ruining or watering down the very things that have fueled successful growth in the past. They unpack the principles that help to cascade excellence throughout an organization, as well as show how to eliminate destructive beliefs and behaviors that will hold them back. Scaling Up Excellence is the first major business book devoted to this universal and vexing challenge. It is destined to become the standard bearer in the field.
The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
Eric Ries - 2011
But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on "validated learning," rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs - in companies of all sizes - a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it's too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.
The Power of When: Discover Your Chronotype--and the Best Time to Eat Lunch, Ask for a Raise, Have Sex, Write a Novel, Take Your Meds, and More
Michael Breus - 2016
Most advice centers on what to do, or how to do it, and ignores the when of success. But exciting new research proves there is a right time to do just about everything, based on our biology and hormones. As Dr. Michael Breus proves in THE POWER OF WHEN, working with your body's inner clock for maximum health, happiness, and productivity is easy, exciting, and fun. THE POWER OF WHEN presents a groundbreaking new program for getting back in sync with your natural rhythm by making minor changes to your daily routine. After you've taken Dr. Breus's comprehensive Bio-Time Quiz to figure out your chronotype (are you a Bear, Lion, Dolphin or Wolf?), you'll find out the best time to do over 50 different activities. Featuring a foreword by Mehmet C. Oz, MD, and packed with fascinating facts, fun personality quizzes, and easy-to-follow guidelines, THE POWER OF WHEN is the ultimate "lifehack" to help you achieve your goals.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
Ben Horowitz - 2014
His blog has garnered a devoted following of millions of readers who have come to rely on him to help them run their businesses. A lifelong rap fan, Horowitz amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs and tells it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, from cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in.His advice is grounded in anecdotes from his own hard-earned rise—from cofounding the early cloud service provider Loudcloud to building the phenomenally successful Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm, both with fellow tech superstar Marc Andreessen (inventor of Mosaic, the Internet's first popular Web browser). This is no polished victory lap; he analyzes issues with no easy answers through his trials, includingdemoting (or firing) a loyal friend;whether you should incorporate titles and promotions, and how to handle them;if it's OK to hire people from your friend's company;how to manage your own psychology, while the whole company is relying on you;what to do when smart people are bad employees;why Andreessen Horowitz prefers founder CEOs, and how to become one;whether you should sell your company, and how to do it.Filled with Horowitz's trademark humor and straight talk, and drawing from his personal and often humbling experiences, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures.
Stop Guessing: The 9 Behaviors of Great Problem Solvers
Nat Greene - 2017
In this book Nat Greene--who's been solving hard problems professionally for over twenty years--shares nine behaviors anyone can adopt to find solutions to even the most seemingly intractable problems. The problem with most problem solving, Greene says, is that it's not problem solving at all: it's guessing. We have an idea of what might work and we try it out. If that doesn't work, we try something else. And so on. It's inefficient at best, and with really hard problems there are simply too many variables for guessing to work. Greene shows you how to adopt the behaviors great problem solvers use to arrive at solutions efficiently--without guessing. He illustrates them with examples ranging from everyday issues like fixing a malfunctioning garage door to stopping frequent breakdowns at a chemical plant (saving millions of dollars) to addressing the scourge of poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. So stop guessing and start solving today!
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Oliver Burkeman - 2021
Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks.Nobody needs telling there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless battle against distraction; and we’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and “life hacks” to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks.Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern fixation on “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society—and that we could do things differently.
Work Clean: The life-changing power of mise-en-place to organize your life, work, and mind
Dan Charnas - 2016
In Work Clean, Dan Charnas reveals how to apply mise-en-place outside the kitchen, in any kind of work.Culled from dozens of interviews with culinary professionals and executives, including world-renowned chefs like Thomas Keller and Alfred Portale, this essential guide offers a simple system to focus your actions and accomplish your work. Charnas spells out the 10 major principles of mise-en-place for chefs and non chefs alike: (1) planning is prime; (2) arranging spaces and perfecting movements; (3) cleaning as you go; (4) making first moves; (5) finishing actions; (6) slowing down to speed up; (7) call and callback; (8) open ears and eyes; (9) inspect and correct; (10) total utilization.This journey into the world of chefs and cooks shows you how each principle works in the kitchen, office, home, and virtually any other setting.
Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick
Wendy Wood - 2019
That means that almost half of our actions aren't conscious choices but the result of our non-conscious mind nudging our body to act along learned behaviors. How we respond to the people around us; the way we conduct ourselves in a meeting; what we buy; when and how we exercise, eat, and drink--a truly remarkable number of things we do every day, regardless of their complexity, operate outside of our awareness. We do them automatically. We do them by habit. And yet, whenever we want to change something about ourselves, we rely on willpower. We keep turning to our conscious selves, hoping that our determination and intention will be enough to effect positive change. And that is why almost all of us fail. But what if you could harness the extraordinary power of your unconscious mind, which already determines so much of what you do, to truly reach your goals?Wendy Wood draws on three decades of original research to explain the fascinating science of how we form habits, and offers the key to unlocking our habitual mind in order to make the changes we seek. A potent mix of neuroscience, case studies, and experiments conducted in her lab, Good Habits, Bad Habits is a comprehensive, accessible, and above all deeply practical book that will change the way you think about almost every aspect of your life. By explaining how our brains are wired to respond to rewards, receive cues from our surroundings, and shut down when faced with too much friction, Wood skillfully dissects habit formation, demonstrating how we can take advantage of this knowledge to form better habits. Her clear and incisive work shows why willpower alone is woefully inadequate when we're working toward building the life we truly want, and offers real hope for those who want to make positive change.
Grace, Not Perfection: Embracing Simplicity, Celebrating Joy
Emily Ley - 2016
As a busy wife, new mother, business owner, and designer, Emily Ley came to a point when she suddenly realized she couldn’t do it all. She needed to simplify her life, organize her days, and prioritize the priorities. She decided to hold herself to a standard of grace rather than perfection. This mantra led to the creation of her bestselling Simplified Planner®, a favorite among busy women everywhere—from mamas to executives and everywhere in between.Grace, Not Perfection takes this message from a daily planner to an inspirational book that encourages women to simplify and prioritize. Designed with Emily Ley’s signature aesthetic, this book gives women tangible ways to simplify their lives to give space to what matters most. With a focus on faith, Emily reminds readers that God abundantly pours out grace on us—and that surely we can extend grace to ourselves.Have you been told you can have it all, only to end up exhausted and occasionally out of sorts with the people you love? Are you ready for a new way of seeing your time? Learn to live a little more simply. Hold yourself and those you love to a more life-giving standard in Grace Not Perfection,and allow that grace to seep into your days, your family, and your heart.Ideas include:List Making 101—tips to create effective to-do lists and get through them one step at a timeSimplify your life by simplifying the three major areas: your space, your time, and your mindStrategies to center your day around an intentionally slower rhythm of life
Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long
David Rock - 2009
Their lives, like all of ours, are filled with a bewildering blizzard of emails, phone calls, yet more emails, meetings, projects, proposals, and plans. Just staying ahead of the storm has become a seemingly insurmountable task.In this book, we travel inside Emily and Paul's brains as they attempt to sort the vast quantities of information they're presented with, figure out how to prioritize it, organize it and act on it. Fortunately for Emily and Paul, they're in good hands: David Rock knows how the brain works-and more specifically, how it works in a work setting. Rock shows how it's possible for Emily and Paul, and thus the reader, not only to survive in today's overwhelming work environment but succeed in it-and still feel energized and accomplished at the end of the day.YOUR BRAIN AT WORK explores issues such as:- why our brains feel so taxed, and how to maximize our mental resources- why it's so hard to focus, and how to better manage distractions- how to maximize your chance of finding insights that can solve seemingly insurmountable problems- how to keep your cool in any situation, so that you can make the best decisions possible- how to collaborate more effectively with others- why providing feedback is so difficult, and how to make it easier- how to be more effective at changing other people's behavior