My Favorite Reads from 2016

I used to read and curate my favorite reads every month on my blog at Ryan Stephens Marketing.

Then, at the end of the year I’d do my best to categorize each article and post here, to Medium, by broad topic (business, decision-marking, health, productivity, top performers, etc al.) for your benefit.

If you’re interested, you can find my favorite and most impactful reads from previous years here:

What’s the point?

Well, as I’ve shared the previous two years:

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time — none. Zero.”
— Charlie Munger (Billionaire business partner of Warren Buffett and the Vice Chairman at Berkshire Hathaway)

[Disclaimer: In 2016, my wife and I welcomed our first child into the world. While I still read a fair amount, I was not as obsessive about documenting and curating the takeaways. I’ve kept this piece unpublished with the intent of one day finishing it, but now, 1.5 years later, it’s clear that’s not going to happen. As such, I’m publishing “as is.” I hope it helps someone find something that resonates and impacts their life in a positive way nonetheless. Apologies in advance for the lackluster formatting and inconsistency below.]

Below I have curated 130+ of my favorite reads from 2016. These are articles that made me stop and think and that have shaped my thinking in some way.

The commentary below each link is typically the author’s own words that I’ve extracted as a key takeaway; however, sometimes I add my own commentary and make connections as well.

Enjoy!

Advice:

What Would Happen… — Seth Godin

What would happen… if we chose to:

Help one more person, each day
Give more and take less
Ask hard questions

The philosophy of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius is supposed to help you be more resilient and at peace — here’s how to master it in 7 days — Ryan Holiday

Rise and Shine — We cannot be of service to ourselves, to other people, or to the world unless we get up and get working.
Prepare for negativity and you’ll be able to act with patience, forgiveness, and understanding.
Be ruthless to the things that don’t matter: invitations, requests and obligations, but also time-consuming emotions like anger and distraction.
Turn ‘have to’ into ‘get to’. A get-to-do list is a privilege.

Business:

Simple Rules of Capitalism — Morgan Housel

Creating Effective Incentive Systems: Ken Iverson on the Principles that Unleash Human Potential — Shane Parrish

10x Not 10%: Product management by orders of magnitude — Ken Norton

Tim Ferriss on 10 Keys to a Successful Business — Tim Ferriss

[Video]: How To Build a Business That Lasts 100 Years — Martin Reeves

If you want to build a business that lasts, there may be no better place to look for inspiration than your own immune system. Join strategist Martin Reeves as he shares startling statistics about shrinking corporate life spans and explains how executives can apply six principles from living organisms to build resilient businesses that flourish in the face of change.

Does That Matter? — Jason Fried

Getting the right work done is almost always about creating less work to do.

Creating less seems like an oxymoron, but it’s absolutely possible, and often preferable. When you decide not to hold that meeting, or not to go down that path, or not to cover every edge case, you’re creating less and making more room to work on what remains, the stuff that really matters.

Busyness:

If You’re Too Busy For These 5 Things: Your Life Is More Off-Course Than You Think — Benjamin P. Hardy

Busy Isn’t Respectable Anymore — tyler ward

Doctors are Burned Out By Busy Work — Mandy Oaklander

End of Busy: A Deliberate Life vs. Reactive Life, with Jonathan Fields — Leo Babauta

Career:

6 Things People With Interesting Careers Have in Common — Srinivas Rao

How To Take Charge of Your Career in 2016 — Liz Ryan

Being a Go-Getter is No Fun — Bourree Lam

Your Job vs. Your Project — Seth Godin

Communication:

What Great Listeners Actually Do — Jack Zenger & Joseph Folkman

Courage:

Theranos Whistleblower Shook the Company — and His Family — John Carreyrou

Creativity:

Why Excessive Consumption Limits Your Creativity — Srinivas Rao

Decision-Making:

Mental Models: Getting the World to Do the Work for You — Shane Parrish

The trend I see today in organizations concerns me. People are working harder and harder to clean up otherwise avoidable messes they created by making poor initial decisions. In my opinion, two main factors contribute to our inability to make good initial decisions. First, we don’t have the time to think. And second, we don’t have a firm understanding of how the world really works.

Mental models are a framework for understanding how the world really works. They help you grasp new ideas quickly, identify patterns before anyone else and shift your perspective with ease. Mental Models allow us to make better decisions, scramble out of bad situations, and think critically.

Slow Deciders Make Better Strategists — Mark Chussil

There’s a difference between someone who’s confident after laboring over a thoughtful decision and someone who’s confident with a snap judgment. It seems to me there’s a difference between someone who’s unsure after serious contemplation and someone who’s unsure about a quick pick.

The essential lesson for competitive-strategy decision-makers is not so fast, in both senses of the phrase: take your time and don’t be so sure. The willingness to apply that mindset is what separates the good decision-makers from the bad.

How To Think, According To This Winner Of The Brain Prize — Nico Pitney

Economy:

Our Economy Is Obsessed with Efficiency and Terrible at Everything Else — umair haque

Revealed: the 30-year economic betrayal dragging down Generation Y’s income — Caelainn Barr and Shiv Malik

Surging college costs price out middle class — Annalyn Censky

Education:

The Coddling of the American Mind — Jonathan Haidt & Greg Lukianoff

The Digital Revolution in Higher Education Has Already Happened. No One Noticed. — Clay Shirky

Entrepreneurship:

10 Confessions on Recruitment & Teamwork from my Start Up Life — Carlos Miceli

Failure:

This Princeton Professor’s CV of Failures Is Something We Should All Learn From — Josh Hrala

Gender:

Living Science: The truth is in the distribution — Indira Raman

Goals:

Your Goals are Overrated — Mark Manson

Happiness:

The Secret to Happiness Is 10 Specific Behaviors — Benjamin P. Hardy

What Makes a Good Life? Lessons from the Longest Study on Happiness — Robert Waldinger

Health

75 Percent of Americans Say They Eat Healthy — Despite Evidence To The Contrary — Allison Aubrey and Maria Godoy

The Future of Healthcare Is Arriving — 8 Exciting Areas to Watch — Daniel Kraft, MD

I’m Not The Lone Wolf — Brandon Sneed

Knowledge

How Can We Be Bored When We Have Google? — Dougald Hine

Knowledge has a point when we start to find and make connections, to weave stories out of it, stories through which we make sense of the world and our place within it. It is the difference between memorising the bus timetable for a city you will never visit, and using that timetable to explore a city in which you have just arrived. When we follow the connections — when we allow the experience of knowing to take us somewhere, accepting the risk that we will be changed along the way — knowledge can give rise to meaning. And if there is an antidote to boredom, it is not information but meaning.

The latter requires, among other things, space for reflection — allowing what we have already absorbed to settle, waiting to see what patterns emerge. Find the corners of our lives in which we can unplug, the days on which it is possible to refuse the urgency of the inbox, the activities that will not be rushed. Switch off the infinity machine, not forever, nor because there is anything bad about it, but out of recognition of our own finitude: there is only so much information any of us can bear, and we cannot go fishing in the stream if we are drowning in it. As any survivor of the 1960s counterculture could tell us, it is best to treat magic substances with respect — and to be careful about the dosage.

Leadership:

Lessons on Leadership: Michael Abrashoff on Turning the Worst Ship in the Navy into the Best — Shane Parrish

Lead, Follow or Get the Fuck Out of the Way — Mark Suster

10 Habits Of Well-Liked Bosses — Gwen Moran

What it Takes to Move the World: 5 Traits of Moral Leaders — Jacqueline Novogratz

Lazy Leadership — Andrew Wilkinson

The CEO of Popeyes on Treating Franchisees as the Most Important Customers — Cheryl Bachelder

7 Core Beliefs of Great Bosses — Travis Bradberry

Leaders and Followers, Planners and Doers — Shane Parrish

Learning:

Three Steps To Get Up To Speed On Any Subject Really, Really Fast — Nir Eyal

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: It’s better to be a ‘learn-it-all’ than a ‘know-it-all’ — Nat Levy

The Questions That Matter — Tim Hanson

Overvaluing confidence, we’ve forgotten the power of humility — Jacob Burak

‘Without humility, you are unable to learn,’ — Laszlo Bock, Google’s Head of People Operations

Intellectual humility relies on the ability to prefer truth over social status. It is marked primarily by a commitment to seeking answers, and a willingness to accept new ideas — even if they contradict our views. In listening to others, we run the risk of discovering that they know more than we do. But humble people see personal growth as a goal in itself, rather than as a means of moving up the social ladder. We miss out on a lot of available information if we focus only on ourselves and on our place in the world.

Life:

Life is Short — Paul Graham*

How to Be An Optimal Human — Scott Barry Kaufman

30 Sticky Notes That are Brutally Honest About Adult Life — Chaz Hutton.

Your Human-Size Life — Dave Winer ☮

Over-index on the Intangible — Rohan Rajiv

Management:

My Management Lessons from Three Failed Startups, Google, Apple, Dropbox, and Twitter — Kim Scott

Speed as a Habit — Dave Girouard

[Video]: Jeff Bezos shares his management style and philosophy — GeekWire

Take pride in choices, not gifts, use memos vs. PowerPoint and more.

Media:

What We Lose When We Bet on the Media — Carlos Miceli

The most dangerous design flaw of the #media industry is that it can’t be a responsible teacher.

Why We’re Living in the Age of Fear — Neil Strauss

Want to Really Make America Great Again? Stop Reading the News. — Ryan Holiday

Multi-Tasking:

Multitasking is Killing Your Brain — Larry Kim

Networking:

The Secrets to Authentic Networking — Brian Kurtz

Who Else Do You Think I Should Meet? — Carlos Miceli

News:

All the World’s in a Moral Panic — Nitin Pai

Earlier, we used to react to events. Then we began reacting to the media’s portrayal of events. Now, with social media, we react to reactions to events, and reactions to reactions to reactions to events, and so on.

First we had news. Then it became a news cycle, then an outrage cycle, and now we have nested, recursive outrage cycles. There are cycles within cycles. Public discourse is fast spiralling into unknown territory. It is now mostly a grotesque drama of screaming anchors, shouting talking heads, hyperventilating reporters, partisan commentators, opportunistic cheerleaders and online hordes of the self-righteous, all venting outrage against their respective devils of the day. To not stone the devil is to invite association with him.

Personal Development:

Should We All Be Looking for Marginal Gains? — Matthew Syed

Big Goals Can Backfire. Olympians Show Us What to Focus on Instead. — Brad Stulberg

Philanthropy:

The End of Big Philanthropy — Gabe Kleinman

Philosophy:

The Daily Stoic: Timeless Wisdom on Character, Fortitude, Self-Control, and the Art of Living from Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius — Maria Popova

Politics:

Is Social Science Politically Biased? — Michael Shermer

The 25-Year Tide That Gave Us Trump — Bruce Haynes

J.K. Rowling On People’s Intolerance of Alternative Viewpoints — Shane Parrish

It’s easy to be dismissive and intolerant of others. It’s easy to say they’re idiots and wish they didn’t have the same rights you have. It is harder to map that to the very freedoms we enjoy and relate it to the world we want to live in.

Productivity:

9 Habits You Need to Stop Now — Shane Parrish

Why time management is ruining our lives — Oliver Burkeman

How Pressing Pause Improves Performance — Samantha Boardman M.D.

How Successful People Increase Productivity — Shane Parrish

What Happened When 13 Workers Quit Email for a Week — Jill Duffy

Why Time Management is Ruining Our Lives — Oliver Burkeman

Is this the Most Perfect Method for Staying Organized? — Anna Hensel

Resilience Is About how You Recharge, Not How You Endure — Shawn Achor and Michelle Gielan

Research has found that there is a direct correlation between lack of recovery and increased incidence of health and safety problems. The key to resilience is trying really hard, then stopping, recovering, and then trying again. If you’re trying to build resilience at work, you need adequate internal and external recovery periods.

Psychology:

How People Learn to Become Resilient — Maria Konnikova Hamilton

Reading:

How the Internet Changed How We Read — Jackson Bliss

Read Less. Learn More — Chad Hall

The Anti-Reading List — Morgan Housel

Relationships:

Women Are Now Cheating As Much As Men, But With Fewer Consequences — Alyssa Giacobbe

Science:

The Exquisite Balancing Act for Doing Science Right — Gary Taubes

Social Media:

Twitter and Facebook are Tearing Us Apart — Matt Ridley

Success:

3 Shortcuts to Success Every High Achiever Uses (That You Don’t) — Jeff Goins

Don’t Go It Alone — Get a Guide
Stop Reinventing the Wheel — Learn from Others’ Experience
Don’t Succumb to Scarcity — Embrace Abundance

Technology:

A Charge of Bots — The Tech World As We Know It Is About To Be Rewritten — Phil Libin

Eleven Reasons To Be Excited About The Future of Technology — Chris Dixon

There’s a Chat for That: Apple’s Biggest Platform Opportunity Yet — Matt Galligan

Time:

The Value of Time — Billy Murphy

If you desire someone’s time, you’re not desiring their current time, you’re actually desiring the value of all of their past time that went into making their current time desirable. It took them a long time to learn the things they know how to do that make you desire access to their current time.

Successful people often find themselves paying for the expertise of someone else to help save them the time to progress faster towards their goals. The unsuccessful let the emotion of the high cost for something they can’t see as tangible(the person having spent so long to learn the craft), so they let it hold them back. It takes them much longer to do it themselves, if they ever get around to being able to do it at all.

These are the only places you should be spending your time:

With people who value your time
With people you enjoy spending it with
Doing things you enjoy
Continually learning(which increases your value, and your ability to spend it how you want)
Ideally some combination of the above

You Don’t Need More Free Time — Cristobal Young

AMERICANS work some of the longest hours in the Western world, and many struggle to achieve a healthy balance between work and life. It’s not just that we have a shortage of free time; it’s also that our free time, in order to be satisfying, often must align with that of our friends and loved ones.

Free time is (also) a network good. The weekend derives much of its importance from the fact that so many people are off work together.

Top Performers:

Why Successful People Spend 10 Hours A Week Just Thinking — BrianScudamore

The Munger Operating System: How to Live a Life That Really Works — Shane Parrish

Tweets, Awkward Suits, and Hustle: How I Became a VC in Detroit at 22 — Blake Robbins

The Playbook Interview: Warren Buffett — Daniel Lippmann & Jake Sherman

How To Mentally Overachieve — Charles Darwin’s Reflections On His Own Mind — Shane Parrish

Work:

The Magic of 30-Minute Meetings — Peter Bregman

Most meetings and tactical work could benefit from compressed time. Often we schedule one hour time slots. Why? How did an hour become our standard time allotment for so many meetings, phone calls, and appointments?

If you have half the time to accomplish something, you become hyper-aware of how you’re using that time. And hyper-focused during it. People, aware of the time constraint, are more thoughtful about when they speak, listen better, and more careful not to follow tangents that aren’t useful.

Workplace Distractions: Here’s Why You Won’t Finish This Article — Rachel Silverman

Distraction at the office is hardly new, but as screens multiply and managers push frazzled workers to do more with less, companies say the problem is worsening and is affecting business.

The modern workday seems custom-built to destroy individual focus. Open-plan offices and an emphasis on collaborative work leave workers with little insulation from colleagues’ chatter. A ceaseless tide of meetings and internal emails means that workers increasingly scramble to get their “real work” done on the margins, early in the morning or late in the evening.

The Future of Work: The People Imperative — Carlos Miceli

Simplification of Work — Dimple Agarwal, Ardievan Berkel, Burt Rea

The Opposite of the Open Office — Cal Newport

The Relationship Between ‘Talk’ And ‘Work’ Is That One Kills The Other — Ryan Holiday

Stupefied: How organisations enshrine collective stupidity and employees are rewarded for checking their brains at the office door

Nobody Cares How Hard You Work — Oliver Burkeman

This Googler Explains How To Design Your Time Rather Than Manage It — Thomas Davies

Insomnia costing US workforce $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity, study shows

Insomnia is costing the average US worker 11.3 days, or $2,280 in lost productivity every year, according to a new study considered to be more accurate than previous estimates. Researchers hope such numbers will prompt the implementation of screening and treatment programs for employees. Because insomnia is not considered an illness — the kind that results in lost days at work — employers tend to ignore its consequences.

A Science-Backed Guide to Taking Truly Restful Breaks — Christian Jarrett

The Alarming, Long-Term Consequences of Workplace Stress — Gillian B. White

What’s More Distracting Than A Noisy Co-Worker? Turns Out, Not Much — Yuki Noguchi

Work/Life Balance:

Why Are You Always Tired? — Emma Young

Knowing When to Walk Away — Robbie Bach

Americans are Trading Sleep for Work, and It’s Literally Killing Us — Christopher Ingraham

Being tired isn’t a badge of honor — Jason Fried