We close the past or leave it open, but we start every January as a time when we notice the pressure for the things we haven’t achieved yet, the goals to fulfil, the dreams to make.
Holiday traditions are over, but crisis mode continues: Wars disgrace us, social media hunts us, and new presidents and billionaires feed us what they believe is right.
As we see our goals ahead, the ones existing and the ones we imagine, it is easy to feel disoriented and have our headspace taken for the things we want the least: our excuses, our insecurities, our relationship struggles, our non-negotiable duties, our professional mountains to climb. Bringing us far from where we want to be.
We can come to a point where we sense the comfort of going back to our routines and forget about the wishes we did in the old year: The role, the job, the habit, the event. Life changes between the goals that we place and the environment that we fit them in. Challenges come and go and goals can help us to effectively mark the cycles. But one thing that helps me daily to keep myself grounded is reading books.
On one hand, achieving goals helps us gain experience and wisdom. On the other hand, books teach us about the experiences of others or maybe help us gain insight into our own. They are an old, proven tool for modern life. As the Former Chancellor Otto von Bismarck said: “Fools say that they learn by experience. I prefer to profit from others' experience.”
The greatest books are perennial, defying the test of time, as they consistently show us the worthy path, as often challenging as it is to have a clear view, with so many things in our environment fighting for our attention and influence.
But in this world, you are different and unique, and so are your goals. Hence, we must also be selective about what books we read. Reading at least a few minutes per day, at least a few pages, can change your life and amplify your knowledge. As physician John Wheeler once said: "As the island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance."
The stages also matter to what book you select, whether starting, in the middle of your grind, or right at the end. T.S. Eliot once said that the way you read Shakespeare is affected by the last novel you read, and the last novel you read is affected by the fact that you read Shakespeare. The degree of how this determines your future is underestimated, especially when you don’t read the right book at the right time.
As I look at goal settings, learning, living in the present and gaining perspective, not only the end of years or the beginnings are important, but they are equally relevant to any other month of the year.
Executing your goals is the theme I would like to recommend for January and looking ahead to the rest of the year; here it goes:
Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman.
I like to read productivity books because they remind me of the stuff I might not be doing. I started doing so the first time I moved out of my hometown because I feared failing. Failing to my parents the promise I made about my future. Failing to my friends, with whom I had a strong academic reputation. Failing to my inner circle with whom I wanted to show strength. But this book told me the exact opposite. A quote from Carl Jung that I found here points that the individual path “is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being itself when you put one foot in front of the other.” Later, Oliver writes, “Once you no longer need to convince yourself that you’ll do everything that needs doing, you’re free to focus on doing a few things that count.” This book is a perspective on living more and being proud of your doing. It is a different angle on why this is needed. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.
Discipline is Destiny, Ryan Holiday.
Ryan is one of my favourite authors around. In his early twenties, he proactively reached out to Robert Greene to be his research assistant (Robert’s book Mastery made a dent in my 2024). Robert embraced Ryan under his system and taught him the methods and creative landscape for writing. Ryan focuses on Stoicism and business philosophy; his book Discipline is Destiny is part of a series of the four cardinal virtues: Courage, Discipline, Justice and Wisdom. I have read this book several times. It’s based on short stories from real life about discipline and overcoming. There is a quote from Eisenhower in this book that I think about constantly: “Freedom is the opportunity for self-discipline”. 312 pages of stuff like this is not a bad deal to keep you grinding.
Dopamine Nation, Anna Lembke.
René Girard once said, “We don't even know our desire. We ask other people to tell us our desires.” A large theme of setting goals for ourselves comes because we are overwhelmed by our environments and counterforces to our uniqueness. I wrote about it from an anti-contrast perspective here. Aside from that, the environment can be so harsh that it can even replace our goals and sequentially make us fail at them. That’s one of the reasons why psychologist Anna Lembke wrote this book. She points out that our search for a neurotransmitter named Dopamine isolates us from growing. We can find dopamine in any addictive behaviour in our society: social media, alcohol, pornography, even from an obsession with reading recklessly in the search for seconds of it. This book is a deep search into a balance between finding pleasure in modern addictions and then a way to succumb to pain to counteract these forces.
Dare to Lead, Brene Brown.
Setting your goals for the new year means connecting with others to make them happen. But we fail over and over in our leadership skills. In this book, through many fascinating stories on her personal life and those in the corporate environment, bestselling author Brené Brown brings a clear perspective on different positions that we take in life and why they contrast significantly: Why joy means vulnerability. What does despair mean, and how can we remind ourselves about it? How do you give feedback in a vulnerable and transparent way? What does it mean to love as a leader? One of my favourite distinctions came through in defining shame vs empathy. She describes shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging and connection. The less we talk about shame, the more control it has over our lives.” She states that empathy is almost always absent where there is shame.
I intentionally excluded some of my favourite books from this list as I feel they’re pretty mainstream. But if you made it this far, I think it is extremely valuable to recommend Atomic Habits by James Clear, whether you are struggling with your habits and want to kickstart the year disrupting the scheme. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, with a beautiful story about the difference between paradigms and principles/values that I always think about, and lastly, The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz, one of the books I give out the most, based on positive psychology.
As last month, I am keen to hear your thoughts on these concepts or raise points to discuss. The best books you can read come to you through word of mouth, so if you know a good book about this topic, please share it! As always, if any of these books mean something to you, recommend them to someone else.