19 Incredible Books I Read in 2024

all right so these are some of the best books that I've read this year across four different categories productivity and performance Business and Entrepreneurship health and well-being and fantasy fiction let's start with productivity all right book number one is getting things done the art of stressfree productivity by David Allen this is an absolute classic in the world of productivity this is a book that I've read about three or four different times and I reread it again this year because life has been pretty hectic this year with like getting married and moving country and trying to

grow my business and growing my team and everything and I realized that there were a bunch of fundamentals from this book that I picked up over the years but it really helped having that refresher and the book basically gives you a comprehensive system for capturing and organizing and actually executing on all of the different tasks and projects you need to do to move your life forward I'll be honest it's kind of a boring read it's not that riveting but there's a few really game-changing principles in here that if you read it or you can listen

to an audible or whatever if you actually apply them to your life with your own productivity system then I think you'll get a lot of value out of this book and it's one of those things that the principles you learn from this book you'll genuinely use for the rest of your life book number two is good work by Paul Millard Paul is the author of The pathless Path which is also one of my favorite books and Paul's story is that he quit a prestigious career in management consulting where he was being paid loads of money

to kind of pursue his own ambition and what he wanted to do and become a writer where he's making a lot less money if you're like me and maybe you have a job or you had a job at one point and you were a bit like questioning about whether it was the right thing for you and you didn't have many examples of other people who have kind of gone off the beaten path anytime I read these books they just give me more of a sense of permission it's like we shouldn't need permission to explore our

own ambition and live our own lives but often the social models we have around us like friends and family and colleagues either consciously or subconsciously encourage us down a particular path and if you're feeling that sense of like H maybe this work that I'm doing isn't really lighting me up in the way that I'd like it to then I'd really recommend reading the pathless path and also this book because it's a way of kind of it it doesn't give you the answers but it gives you questions and interesting prompts and interesting anecdotes from Paul's life

and other people's lives around how to answer this question for yourself of how do we find good work how do we find work that's enjoyable and meaningful and sustainable oh by the way quick thing if you are watching this before the 4th of January 2025 then you might like to check out the completely free 2day productivity Workshop that I'm hosting on the 4th and 5th of January 2025 it is called productivity spark and it's essentially a two-day series of workshops that are hosted by me and also my wife and also a couple of guests that

I aim to help you reflect on 2024 figure out where your work and life are heading and set active goals and quarterly Quests for 2025 it is completely free you can check it out with a link down below and I hope to see you there potentially all right book number three is Rest by Alex Su Jun Kim Pang why you get more work done when you work less and the whole thesis of the book really unsurprisingly is that Alex is encouraging us to rest more so if we just go through the table content we've got

the problem of rest and the science of rest that sort of talks about why resting feels so hard in this capitalistic and hustle kind of society that we live in where there's this constant dve for more and more and more and he also goes into a little bit of the science behind things like the default mode Network and how resting actually stimulates our creativity then there are two parts to the book there is stimulating creativity and sustaining creativity within stimulating creativity we've got 4 hours he talks about the optimal amount of time to be able

to focus for the power of morning routines why walking and napping and stopping for the day is actually a very good thing to do and it sounds kind of obvious and maybe you're watching this thinking I don't need a book to teach me how to rest but if you care about productivity and personal development it is very easy for people like us to get fixated on the work thing and to really underappreciate the rest thing all righty book number four is slow productivity by Cal Newport which is sort of like a productivity book combined with

the of rest idea and the subtitle here is the Lost Art of accomplishment without burnout I've actually done a whole video about slow productivity that will be linked up there somewhere and in the book he talks about the three rules of slow productivity so do fewer things at once work at a natural pace and obsess over quality and I really like it because there's a bunch of really inspiring stories and anecdotes from people like Galileo and Isaac Newton and Jane Austin and sort of the knowledge workers from back in the day about how they managed

to structure their lives around producing really meaningful output that you know has stood the test of time hundreds of years later but how they did it in a way that wasn't particularly hurried or rushed or busy or all of these sorts of things his point is that most of us are probably not in the situation that Jane Austin was where you could just sort of chill in a cottage for 10 years and just do your writing but the point is that there are things that we can learn from these figures from the Yonder days and

how we can apply them to our own fairly busy lives and for me I found that this has been one of the most impactful books that has changed how I personally approach goal setting and task and project management and actually getting things done while we're here a cheeky plug for my own book Feelgood productivity which if you haven't read yet then you might like to it's available everywhere books are sold I think it's a pretty good companion to slow productivity my thesis in Feelgood productivity is that if you want to be more productive more creative

less stressed and do work that feels enjoyable and meaningful and sustainable then we got to focus on the positive emotions that the work generates and however boring a task or project might be there are always ways that we can find the fun in it and find a way to enjoy it just a little bit more so you might like to check that out if you haven't yet all right let's now move on to the Business and Entrepreneurship favorite books of this year that I would recommend for you and the first one is ready fire a

by Michael Masterson and the subtitle here is 0 to $100 million in no time flat obviously that's a little bit of an exaggeration but actually I think the BG does a reasonable job of delivering on that particular promise and basically what he does is that he splits up business entrepreneurship into distinct phases the0 to $1 million phase the $1 to $10 million a year phase then 10 to 50 and then I think like 50 to 100 for me having been through the 0 to $1 million a year stage there were a lot of lessons that

I learned from reading this that I learned myself through experience and a few that I hadn't quite considered but now in our case our business is between the $1 and $10 million year mark like we do about 456 million a year in annual revenue depending on the year fluctuates a little bit and this book gave me some genuinely novel and very useful ideas on how to break that $10 million a year sort of business growth threshold now if you do read and apply the insights from some of these books you might find yourself making extra

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book number two is a book that I have read many many times on Kindle and that is traction by Gino Wickman traction is one of the books I most recommended to other entrepreneurs running businesses if you have a business that's got at least three people in it then traction I would say is pretty much Essential reading if you have a business that's less than three people in it and maybe you're at an earlier stage or you haven't yet gotten started I probably wouldn't recommend traction because it's not quite for that particular stage of growth but

if you do have a business with more than three team members then traction is really really good it is like the ultimate operating system for for running a business now in my business we've been kind of going back and forth on like the traction methodology versus not the traction methodology for the last few years and this year I kind of reread the book and I realized that a lot of the mistakes that we've made in business over the last 2 years we could have avoided had we just stuck to the method like you know they've

built this method on how to like operate a particular business they built it over decades with like hundreds and hundreds of businesses that are between like three and 100 plus people in size and it's just like really it's just really really good all right book number three is a really old school one called the goal by El gold Rat this is the 30th Anniversary Edition this book has been out for a long time and has sold over 10 million copies that is a lot of copies and basically it is about the principles of business operations

and management which sounds really really boring and probably is boring unless you work in business operations or you own a business in which case it is absolutely riveting because you can immediately see all of the different ways in which you're screwing up your own business and what I like about this book is that it's not a like textbook or a how-to guide It's actually told in the form of a fable or a story and that's nice because it really helps drive home this idea of theory of constraints which is ridiculously important when you are running

a business but it tells it through a story that makes it far more engaging and accessible all right book number four is a book I listen to on Audible and that is death by meeting by Patrick lenion I love the business books by Pat lenion they sound like super boring on the surface like death by meeting and the four obsessions of an extraordinary executive and the advantage and things like that but they're really really good they're very accessible very easy to read or listen to and they are also told in the format of a story

so you learn important business business Concepts but you don't have to just sort of read or listen to the important business Concepts you listen or you read them in the format of a story of a fable of a business owner and kind of the struggles they're having in their like manufacturing plant or marketing business or whatever the thing is and through the story he introduces the concepts which I think is a super super nice way to learn and this book death by meeting I think is super super interesting and required reading for anyone who either

leads or attends meetings as part of your job book number five is million dooll weekend by Noah Kagan the surprisingly simple way to launch a sfigure business in 48 hours now L you're not going to make a 7 figure business in 48 hours but you can absolutely launch a 7figure business in just 48 hours I speak to loads of people who want to start businesses and basically none of them actually take action on it maybe if you wanted to start a business you might have been thinking about it for a few months maybe even a

few years maybe even a few decades and you've probably you're probably waiting for the right idea right because you got to find the right idea otherwise what's the point and like the market is saturated and how will you know when you found the right idea there's all of this procrastination that holds people back from actually launching their first thing and what I love about this book is that it's really a step-by-step road map on how to actually just get started with the thing he really encourages you to take action here if you're one of those

people who thrives on just learning lots of stuff and never taking action on it then you probably won't like this book because it will call you out and encourage you to take action but if you actually want to start a business rather than just reading about starting a business forever then this book will actually help you take action and make it happen so 100% recommend all right number six is the audio book for the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter isacson this book came out many years ago but I hadn't read or listened to it

until this year and when I did I I thought it was really good it was very compelling very interesting read very engaging and obviously it's it's not a how to guide on how to start a business or anything like that but just hearing the stories of like the early days of apple and how Steve Jobs and Steve bnak operated and you know obviously a flawed character in many ways but there's a lot I think we can learn from Steve Jobs about how to do business and also how not to do business so if you're interested

in entrepreneurship or you have a business already or you just really like Apple products then I think you would really enjoy this book all right let's now move on to our health and well-being and including spirituality category and the first book on this list is outlive by Peter Atia the science and art of longevity this is an absolutely enormous book and it is also really really really good I thought like I saw it it arrived in the post and I was like who's who's got time to read this and I didn't make the time to

read it I actually made the time to listen to it on Audible and all the way through I was just like damn a the information is really good and B just the way that he writes it is also just really good and really engaging I'm going to read this thing at the start in his mid-30s prominent longevity expert Dr Peter AA was a marathon swimmer Crossing ocean passages like the Catalina Channel but as he discovered he was also surprisingly unhealthy and on the path to early death from heart disease this knowledge launched him on a

quest to understand longevity how and why we die and how we can delay or even prevent the chronic diseases that kill most people including heart disease cancer Alzheimer's disease and type 2 diabetes this is not biohacking it's a strategic and science-based approach to extending lifespan while also improving our physical cognitive and emotional health Dr aa's aim is less to to tell you what to do and more to help you learn how to think about long-term Health in order to create the best plan for you as an individual I turned 30 this year and got married

and my wife is currently pregnant with our first child and so really for the first time in my life I'm starting to think about how to help ensure or maximize my chances of living a long and crucially healthy life because you know especially you know being a former doctor as some of you might know you know I spent some time working in the geriatric medicine Ward the care of the elderly Ward and also knowing various older family members like there are people who age healthily and then there are people who age unhealthily and the people

who age unhealthily generally have a way less good quality of life than the people who age healthily there's not much we can do about aging itself at least for now but there is a lot that we can do to set ourselves up to be able to walk around and not get out of breath climbing up the stairs and be able to carry the shopping baskets and be able to potentially even go on a long hike without like feeling like we're going to collapse all of that kind of stuff is the stuff that he touches on

in the book and if you are interested in not just how to live longer but also to live healthier as well not just in physical health but also in terms of cognitive and emotional health I think you will get a lot of value from this wonderful book book number two we have the Power of Now a guide to spiritual enlightenment by eart tol this is good stuff there's some good in here it's Al it's really really hard to describe this if you are into spirituality then you will get a lot from this if you are

not yet into spirituality then you probably won't um but it might be a good gateway drug into it back in the day when I wasn't into spirituality I Tried reading this cuz I heard loads of people recommended recommending it and I just did not get it and then you know I started meditating I did an iosa Retreat I got more into the spirituality stuff I actually preferred as a gateway drug books like the surrender experiment by Michael Singer and um A New Earth by eot tol but then earlier this year I reread the power of

now and it's sort of like the classic in this the classic pop spirituality book and all the way through I was like okay nice I I I now I now get it if you don't get the world of spirituality try reading the surrender experiment that's usually my first sort of gateway drug for people who are sort of like me are sort of a bit like high achieving e type people the surrender experiment is a really good gateway drug to make the Journey Into The Power of Now we will need to leave our analytical mind and

its false created self the ego behind from the very first page of this extraordinary book we move rapidly into a significantly higher altitude where we breathe a lighter air we become connected to the indestructible essence of our being the Eternal everpresent one life beyond the Myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death I met a guy last year who when he was like he was he he was telling me the story of when he was 19 he was he'd been clinically depressed for like 5 years to the point of having had multiple

suicide attempts and felt like he was on the verge of ending his life and then a friend of his recommended this book The Power of Now and he said that reading this book literally cured his depression and made him realize that life was in fact worth living and he hasn't had a suicidal thought ever since obviously that is just an anecdotal example and obviously I'm not saying that if you are depressed right now this book book is magically going to cure cure your depression or whatever but I think it's an interesting story it's an interesting

anecdote and weirdly there's quite a few reviews of this book where people have those sorts of lifechanging experiences I did not personally have a life-changing experience from reading the book but I know at least a handful of people who have in various ways including this guy whose Depression was allegedly magically cured by just reading the book so if any of that sounds interesting it might be worth checking out all right book number three is the anxious Generation by Jonathan height how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness I absolutely love

this book it explain like explained a lot of stuff around around experiences that I've had and experiences that my friends have had I was born in 1994 so that technically makes me a millennial but I am friends with a lot of people in genz who I think is 1997 plus and I work with a lot of people who are in genz 1997 plus and there really does seem to be this sort of epidemic of mental illness in particular among gen Z and that's not just um conjecture uh Jonathan height sites a BN he's like a

sociologist I think and he sites a bunch of like studies across loads of different countries that show that there was this sort of massive spikes in reported levels of depression and anxiety and various mental illnesses amongst the people who were born after 1997 he argues compellingly that this is not just a case of mental illness being destigmatized that is often a thing people say that oh the reason that these kids are anxious is either a well the world is falling apart so of course they're going to be anxious or secondly that hey you know we've

destigmatized mental illness and therefore you know people had mental illness all along they just weren't open about it but now JZ are more open about it for various reasons but on both of those points Jonathan height kind of refutes that I think in a pretty convincing way and he basically argues that this epidemic of mental illness can basically be traced down to a handful of major things the primary culprate being social media and the various negative impacts that things like Instagram have had on teenage boys and girls you know I'm just going to read out

the summary of the introduction cuz I think this is good stuff in some between 2010 and 2015 the social lives of American teens moved largely onto smartphones with continuous access to social media online video games and other internet-based activities this great rewiring of childhood I argue is the single largest reason for the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness that began in the early 2010s the first generation of Americans who went through puberty with smartphones and the entire internet in their hands became more anxious depressed self-harming and suicidal We Now call that generation gen Z in

contrast to the millennial generation which had largely finished puberty when the Great rewiring began in 2010 the tidal wave of anxiety depression and self harm hit girls harder than boys and it hit pre-teen girls hardest of all this increase in suffering was not limited to the United States the same pattern is seen at roughly the same time amongst teens in the UK Canada and other major anglosphere countries and also in the five Nordic Nations feelings of alienation in school Rose after 2012 Across the Western World data is less abundant in non-western Nations IM itally and

the patterns there are less clear no other theory has been able to explain why rates of anxiety and depression surged among Adolescence in so many countries at the same time and in the same way other factors of course contribute to poor mental health but the unprecedented rise between 2010 and 2015 cannot be explained by the global financial crisis nor by any set of events that happened in the US or in any other particular country and there's a bunch of super interesting stuff there that if you are interested in this topic if you know people who

are you know suffering from mental health issues or you have kids or you interact with social media in any way shape or form I think there's some really really really interesting stuff in this book that you might like to check out all right book number four is a spirituality book by Jed McKenna who is a PUD name actually uh called spiritual enlightenment the damnedest thing I read various books about spiritual it and spiritual enlightenment and stuff over the years have not yet achieved the SP the state of spiritual enlightenment unfortunately but I thought this was

quite a nice at least I really liked Jed McKenna's sort of teaching style in this book it's very irreverent it's very sort of straight talking this is probably not the book for you if you have never dabbled with spirituality but if you have potentially read other spiritual literature if you've maybe got a yoga or meditation practice or you've done gone somewhere into this world of spirituality I think this I think you would really enjoy this book at least I did and would would recommend giving it go in fact here's a nice quote from the here

in nearly all cases the enlightenment being bought and sold is not truth realization at all but a state of consciousness so crazy ass wonderful that you'd have to be an idiot to not want it so insidiously wonderful in fact that its Radiance has blinded Untold millions of seekers to the fact that it doesn't exist if that sentence means anything to you if you're interested in this sort of stuff you should read the book you might like it for the record my wife absolutely hates it she does not like the way that he writes or talks

in the book I absolutely love it because I Vibe with the sort of like very kind of aggressive and like contrarian tone of it but try it out and see if you like it all right book number five in this category is the Comfort crisis by Michael Easter this is a book that I am still reading but I really like it so far and I've taken lots of notes and so it's on my list of uh favorite things that I've read this year I intend to finish it by the end of the year and perhaps

unsurprisingly the whole thesis of the book is that we should embrace discomfort seek out discomfort much more than we currently do the lives that we have including mine like I've I felt I felt like really called out in this because you know my life is just riddled with Comfort um everything you know I live an air conditioned apartment live in a nice place like I try to avoid discomfort wherever possible and this book is helping me realize that actually this is not necessarily a good way to live and it's really entertaining it's really engaging he

I think he's a journalist um yeah he's a journalist so he writes really well so it's good book would recommend all right finally let's move on to the fiction category so this year I got a recommendation from a friend of mine called Ollie uh for the detective Galileo series of Japanese murder mystery novels and I read the first two books in that series and I'm currently reading the third and they're really really really good the first one is called the devotion of suspect X I read it on Kindle this is a series of murder mystery

books by Japanese author Keo higashino I think this is a translation is it a translation I don't know maybe maybe not can't remember either way it's really good the first book that I read in the series is the devotion of suspect X which is think of it like a murder mystery meets like physics and maths like a physics teacher and a math teacher who are both like geniuses are involved in this like murder mystery type situation which is which is good like I don't want to say anymore cuz like I don't want to give the

plot away but I've recommended this to so many people and people like a couple of people have recommended it to have come back to me being like holy that was a really really really good book and secondly of course this year I read a bunch of books by Brandon Sanderson who is my favorite fiction author of all time I read Tres of the emerald sea Yi and the nightmare pain painter and the sunlit man and I'm currently reading wind and Truth which is book five of The Stormlight Archive I have literally been recommending Brandon Sanderson

to everyone that I ever meet everyone who talks to me to any for any amount of time about any kind of book I'm like oh my God have you read Brandon Sanderson if you have not yet read any of Brad and Sanderson stuff I would really recommend starting with the final Empire which is book one of the mistborn trilogy I made a video about this back in like 2017 the mbor series is a good introduction to the cosm or the world of Brandon Sanderson and it's it's cool because it's sort of like the Marvel Cinematic

Universe or at least back in the day like pre Avengers endgame where like there's all these different characters in all the different books and they they're like all part of the same universe and some of them like interact with each other and stuff in like really cool ways I've been absolutely obsessed with Brandon Sanderson for the last like 8 years now and I don't see that changing in the near future so this year I was delighted to read four of his books and they are just absolutely incredible and every time I'm absorbed in a book

my wife knows when I'm absorbed in a book because I will just sort of like tune out of everything else and just be sort of reading and just be like obsessed with this book trying to get it try you know trying to finish it but also trying to save it at the same time cannot speak more highly of books by Brandon Sanderson but I'd recommend starting with the final Empire all right so those are some of my favorites this year but I've actually put a playlist together of some of my favorite books from previous years

that you can find over there if you are looking for more book recommendations thank you so much for watching have a lovely day and I will see you in the next video bye-bye