The Tools: Transform Your Problems into Courage, Confidence, and Creativity


Phil Stutz - 2012
    

Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity


Kim Malone Scott - 2017
    While this advice may work for everyday life, it is, as Kim Scott has seen, a disaster when adopted by managers.Scott earned her stripes as a highly successful manager at Google and then decamped to Apple, where she developed a class on optimal management. She has earned growing fame in recent years with her vital new approach to effective management, the “radical candor” method.Radical candor is the sweet spot between managers who are obnoxiously aggressive on one side and ruinously empathetic on the other. It’s about providing guidance, which involves a mix of praise as well as criticism—delivered to produce better results and help employees achieve.Great bosses have strong relationships with their employees, and Scott has identified three simple principles for building better relationships with your employees: make it personal, get (sh)it done, and understand why it matters.Radical Candor offers a guide to those bewildered or exhausted by management, written for bosses and those who manage bosses. Taken from years of the author’s experience, and distilled clearly giving actionable lessons to the reader; it shows managers how to be successful while retaining their humanity, finding meaning in their job, and creating an environment where people both love their work and their colleagues.

How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be


Katy Milkman - 2021
    In this ground-breaking book, Milkman reveals a proven path that can take you from where you are to where you want to be, with a foreword from psychologist Angela Duckworth, the best-selling author of Grit.Change comes most readily when you understand what's standing between you and success and tailor your solution to that roadblock. If you want to work out more but find exercise difficult and boring, downloading a goal-setting app probably won't help. But what if, instead, you transformed your workouts so they became a source of pleasure instead of a chore? Turning an uphill battle into a downhill one is the key to success.Drawing on Milkman's original research and the work of her world-renowned scientific collaborators, How to Change shares strategic methods for identifying and overcoming common barriers to change, such as impulsivity, procrastination, and forgetfulness. Through case studies and engaging stories, you'll learn:- Why timing can be everything when it comes to making a change - How to turn temptation and inertia into assets - That giving advice, even if it's about something you're struggling with, can help you achieve moreWhether you're a manager, coach, or teacher aiming to help others change for the better or are struggling to kick-start change yourself, How to Change offers an invaluable, science-based blueprint for achieving your goals, once and for all.

Becoming Bulletproof: Protect Yourself, Read People, Influence Situations, and Live Fearlessly


Evy Poumpouras - 2020
    Becoming Bulletproof means transforming yourself into a stronger, more confident, and more powerful person. Evy Poumpouras—former Secret Service agent to three presidents and one of only five women to receive the Medal of Valor—demonstrates how we can overcome our everyday fears, have difficult conversations, know who to trust and who might not have our best interests at heart, influence situations, and prepare for the unexpected. When you have become bulletproof, you are your best, most courageous, and most powerful version of you. Poumpouras shows us that ultimately true strength is found in the mind, not the body. Courage involves facing our fears, but it is also about resilience, grit, and having a built-in BS detector and knowing how to use it. In Becoming Bulletproof, Poumpouras demonstrates how to heighten our natural instincts to employ all these qualities and move from fear to fearlessness.

The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias


Dolly Chugh - 2018
    But how do we stand up for those values in our turbulent world? The Person You Mean to Be is the smart, "semi-bold" person’s guide to fighting for what you believe in.Dolly reveals the surprising causes of inequality, grounded in the "psychology of good people". Using her research findings in unconscious bias as well as work across psychology, sociology, economics, political science, and other disciplines, she offers practical tools to respectfully and effectively talk politics with family, to be a better colleague to people who don’t look like you, and to avoid being a well-intentioned barrier to equality. Being the person we mean to be starts with a look at ourselves.She argues that the only way to be on the right side of history is to be a good-ish— rather than good—person. Good-ish people are always growing. Second, she helps you find your "ordinary privilege"—the part of your everyday identity you take for granted, such as race for a white person, sexual orientation for a straight person, gender for a man, or education for a college graduate. This part of your identity may bring blind spots, but it is your best tool for influencing change. Third, Dolly introduces the psychological reasons that make it hard for us to see the bias in and around us. She leads you from willful ignorance to willful awareness. Finally, she guides you on how, when, and whom, to engage (and not engage) in your workplaces, homes, and communities. Her science-based approach is a method any of us can put to use in all parts of our life.Whether you are a long-time activist or new to the fight, you can start from where you are. Through the compelling stories Dolly shares and the surprising science she reports, Dolly guides each of us closer to being the person we mean to be.

Laziness Does Not Exist


Devon Price - 2021
    Devon Price, a conversational, stirring call to “a better, more human way to live” (Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author) that examines the “laziness lie”—which falsely tells us we are not working or learning hard enough.Extra-curricular activities. Honors classes. 60-hour work weeks. Side hustles. Like many Americans, Dr. Devon Price believed that productivity was the best way to measure self-worth. Price was an overachiever from the start, graduating from both college and graduate school early, but that success came at a cost. After Price was diagnosed with a severe case of anemia and heart complications from overexertion, they were forced to examine the darker side of all this productivity. Laziness Does Not Exist explores the psychological underpinnings of the “laziness lie,” including its origins from the Puritans and how it has continued to proliferate as digital work tools have blurred the boundaries between work and life. Using in-depth research, Price explains that people today do far more work than nearly any other humans in history yet most of us often still feel we are not doing enough. Filled with practical and accessible advice for overcoming society’s pressure to do more, and featuring interviews with researchers, consultants, and experiences from real people drowning in too much work, Laziness Does Not Exist “is the book we all need right now” (Caroline Dooner, author of The F*ck It Diet).

I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was: How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get It


Barbara Sher - 1994
    If you suspect there could be more to life than what you're getting...if you always knew you could do anything if you only knew what it was, this extraordinary book is about to prove you right!A life without direction is a life without passion.  The dynamic follow-up to the phenomenal best-seller Wishcraft, I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was (the New York Times Bestseller) guides you, not to another unsatisfying job, but to a richly rewarding career rooted in your heart's desire.  And in a work of true emancipation, this life-changing sourcebook reveals how you can recapture "long lost" goals, overcome the blocks that inhibit your success, decide what you want to be, and live your dreams forever!You will learn:*       What to do if you never chose to be what you are.*       How to get off the fast track--and on to the right track.*       First aid techniques for paralyzing chronic negativity.*       How to regroup when you've lost your big dream.*       To stop waiting for luck--and start creating it.

Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well


Douglas Stone - 2014
    Bosses, colleagues, customers—but also family, friends, and in-laws—they all have “suggestions” for our performance, parenting, or appearance. We know that feedback is essential for healthy relationships and professional development—but we dread it and often dismiss it.That’s because receiving feedback sits at the junction of two conflicting human desires. We do want to learn and grow. And we also want to be accepted just as we are right now. Thanks for the Feedback is the first book to address this tension head on. It explains why getting feedback is so crucial yet so challenging, and offers a powerful framework to help us take on life’s blizzard of off-hand comments, annual evaluations, and unsolicited advice with curiosity and grace.The business world spends billions of dollars and millions of hours each year teaching people how to give feedback more effectively. Stone and Heen argue that we’ve got it backwards and show us why the smart money is on educating receivers— in the workplace and in personal relationships as well.Coauthors of the international bestseller Difficult Conversations, Stone and Heen have spent the last ten years working with businesses, nonprofits, governments, and families to determine what helps us learn and what gets in our way. With humor and clarity, they blend the latest insights from neuroscience and psychology with practical, hard-headed advice. The book is destined to become a classic in the world of leadership, organizational behavior, and education.

Insight: Why We're Not as Self-Aware as We Think, and How Seeing Ourselves Clearly Helps Us Succeed at Work and in Life


Tasha Eurich - 2017
    Do you know who you really are? Do you ever wonder how other people really see you? Though we are usually confident that we do, we are wrong more often than we think. And if we could see ourselves through others eyes, we might be really surprised. Yet regardless of our line of work or stage of life, success depends on understanding who we are and how we come across. Research shows that self-awareness means better work performance, smarter life choices, deeper, more meaningful relationships, and a more fulfilling career. There s just one problem: people can be remarkably poor judges of their behavior, performance, and impact on others. And despite the lip service given today to feedback, in the business world and beyond, it s rare to get candid, objective data on what we re doing well, and where we could stand to improve. Of course, at work and in life, we ve all come across people with a stunning lack of self-awareness but how often do we consider whether we might have the same problem? And if we did, how would we even know it? Drawing on her three-year, first-of-its-kind study of people who have dramatically improved their self-awareness, organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich reveals why we don t know ourselves as well as we think and what to do about it. Alongside her research, she integrates hundreds of academic studies and her 15 years of work with Fortune 500 clients, challenging conventional wisdom to reveal many surprising truths like why introspection is the enemy of insight, how experience isn t a bullet train to self-knowledge, and just how far others will go to avoid telling us the truth about ourselves. Readers will learn battle-tested techniques and tools to improve self-awareness and thus their work performance, leadership skills, interpersonal relationships, and more. Insight is a guide surviving and thriving in an unaware world."

The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt


Robert I. Sutton - 2017
      Equally useful and entertaining, The Asshole Survival Guide delivers a cogent and methodical game plan when you find yourself working with a jerk—whether in the office, on the field, in the classroom, or just in life.     Sutton starts with diagnosis—what kind of asshole problem, exactly, are you dealing with? From there, he provides field-tested, evidence-based, and sometimes surprising strategies for dealing with the rude, impolite, irritating, unpleasant, or just plain incompetent—avoiding them, outwitting them, disarming them, sending them packing, and developing protective psychological armor. Sutton even teaches readers how to look inward to stifle their own inner jackass. 
  
   Ultimately, this survival guide is about developing an outlook and personal plan that will help you preserve the sanity in your life, and will prevent all those perfectly good days from being ruined by some jerk.

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success


Shane Snow - 2014
    They employ what psychologists call "lateral thinking: to rethink convention and break "rules" that aren't rules.These are not shortcuts, which produce often dubious short-term gains, but ethical "smartcuts" that eliminate unnecessary effort and yield sustainable momentum. In Smartcuts, Snow shatters common wisdom about success, revealing how conventions like "paying dues" prevent progress, why kids shouldn't learn times tables, and how, paradoxically, it's easier to build a huge business than a small one.From SpaceX to The Cuban Revolution, from Ferrari to Skrillex, Smartcuts is a narrative adventure that busts old myths about success and shows how innovators and icons do the incredible by working smarter—and how perhaps the rest of us can, too.

You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself


David McRaney - 2011
    Whether you’re deciding which smart phone to purchase or which politician to believe, you think you are a rational being whose every decision is based on cool, detached logic, but here’s the truth: You are not so smart. You’re just as deluded as the rest of us--but that’s okay, because being deluded is part of being human. Growing out of David McRaney’s popular blog, You Are Not So Smart reveals that every decision we make, every thought we contemplate, and every emotion we feel comes with a story we tell ourselves to explain them, but often these stories aren’t true. Each short chapter--covering topics such as Learned Helplessness, Selling Out, and the Illusion of Transparency--is like a psychology course with all the boring parts taken out.Bringing together popular science and psychology with humor and wit, You Are Not So Smart is a celebration of our irrational, thoroughly human behavior.

The Introvert Advantage: How to Thrive in an Extrovert World


Marti Olsen Laney - 2002
    The better news is that by celebrating the inner strengths and uniqueness of being an "innie" THE INTROVERT ADVANTAGE shows introverts, and the extroverts who love them, how to work with instead of against their temperament to enjoy a well-lived life. Covering relationships, parenting - including parenting the introverted child - socialising, and the workplace, here are coping strategies, tactics for managing energy, and hundreds of valuable tips for not only surviving but truly thriving in an extrovert world.

The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over


Jack Schafer - 2015
    As a Special Agent for the FBI’s National Security Division’s Behavioral Analysis Program, Dr. Jack Schafer developed dynamic and breakthrough strategies for profiling terrorists and detecting deception. Now, Dr. Schafer has evolved his proven-on-the-battlefield tactics for the day-to-day, but no less critical battle of getting people to like you. In The Like Switch, he presents these techniques for how you can influence, attract, and win people over. Learn how to think and react like your favorite TV investigators from Criminal Minds or CSI as Dr. Schafer shows you how to improve your LQ (Likeability Quotient), “spot the lie” both in person and online, master nonverbal cues that influence how people perceive you, and turn up or turn down the intensity of a relationship. Dr. Schafer cracks the code on making great first impressions, building lasting relationships, and understanding others’ behavior to learn what they really think about you. With tips and techniques that hold the key to taking control of your communications, interactions, and relationships, The Like Switch shows you how to read others and get people to like you for a moment or a lifetime.

Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning


Peter C. Brown - 2014
    Good teaching, we believe, should be creatively tailored to the different learning styles of students and should use strategies that make learning easier. Make It Stick turns fashionable ideas like these on their head. Drawing on recent discoveries in cognitive psychology and other disciplines, the authors offer concrete techniques for becoming more productive learners.Memory plays a central role in our ability to carry out complex cognitive tasks, such as applying knowledge to problems never before encountered and drawing inferences from facts already known. New insights into how memory is encoded, consolidated, and later retrieved have led to a better understanding of how we learn. Grappling with the impediments that make learning challenging leads both to more complex mastery and better retention of what was learned.Many common study habits and practice routines turn out to be counterproductive. Underlining and highlighting, rereading, cramming, and single-minded repetition of new skills create the illusion of mastery, but gains fade quickly. More complex and durable learning come from self-testing, introducing certain difficulties in practice, waiting to re-study new material until a little forgetting has set in, and interleaving the practice of one skill or topic with another. Speaking most urgently to students, teachers, trainers, and athletes, Make It Stick will appeal to all those interested in the challenge of lifelong learning and self-improvement.