We all did it! We made it to the end of 2020.

In this episode, we look back at our favourite books from Season 5 (so far). Our lists are VERY different again this year, with only two or three crossovers and the rest we had to fight over.

Let us know your favourite books of 2020 – message us on social or email us at podcast@whatyouwilllearn.com

Adam Ashton Top 10

10. Pitch Anything

9. Fooled By Randomness

We underestimate the role of randomness in just about everything.  We often have the mistaken impression that a strategy is an excellent strategy, or an entrepreneur is a person endowed with unique vision. Nassim Taleb believes that the world is much more random than we think.

Skills count, obviously. But they count much less in highly random environments like trading, than they do in the predictable ones, like dentistry.

Fooled By Randomness  shows us how to recognise and work with randomness and luck, which is involved in everything you do. In doing so you can humble yourself, turn down your assumptions about your abilities, and have a more accurate view of how the world IS, not how you think it should be.

8. Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs is the authorized self-titled biography of Steve Jobs. The book was written at the request of Jobs by Walter Isaacson, a former executive at CNN and TIME who has written best-selling biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein.

The saga of Steve Jobs in Silicon Valley is the creation myth at large. Launching a startup in the parents garage and building it into one of the world’s most valuable companies. He didn’t invent everything outright, but he was a master at putting together ideas, art and technologies in ways that invented the future.

7. Built To Last

A six year study looked at ‘visionary companies’ and tried to identify what set them apart from the rest of the herd. These visionary companies were the ones that were the premier of their industry, were widely admired by knowledgeable businesspeople, had been through multiple product life cycles and multiple generations of leadership. The 18 companies identified outperformed the stock market by 16X.

It was found that they had a few things in common. It largely boiled down to their culture, their approach to new ideas, and a focus on building the company itself. Listen to the podcast episode or read the blog post to find out more about what it takes to build a visionary company that lasts the tests of time.

6. The Defining Decade

A lot of young people like to say that your twenties don’t matter, that you can put off life’s big decisions until later, that the 20s are the time for fun and enjoying life and not to be taken too seriously… But the research shows otherwise:

• Two thirds of your lifetime wage growth happens in the first 10 years of your career
• More than half of people are married or at least dating/living with their future life partner by age 30, 75% by age 35
• Personality changes more in 20s then in any time period before or after
• The brain caps off it’s final stages of growth in the 20s
• Fertility reaches its peak in late 20s
• Our social networks – and the opportunities they may bring – are the widest and most diverse in the 20s, then get narrower as we age beyond

5. The First 20 Hours

So much you want to learn, so little time to learn it.

Every new skill has what Josh calls a “FRUSTRATION BARRIER”. At first the basics of a new skill can seem fun. But then you hit a wall, a few hours in, where you don’t seem to be improving and it is just getting frustrating. You’re still horribly unskilled, but now painfully aware of it. Maybe you learned to play Three Blind Mice on the piano, but you still can seem to work out which note on the keyboard matches which dot on the sheet music. Or maybe you’ve been skateboarding in a straight line, but can’t work out the right balance and positioning that allows you to turn properly.

This book offers a simple system for learning new skills, a system that allows you to quickly break through that frustration barrier and get to the fun stuff sooner.

4. Selling The Invisible

When you buy a product, you can see it, touch it, and depending on the product you can taste/smell/hear it as well. Services, on the other hand, are intangible. There’s no exact clear definition of what you’re getting when you buy a service – you’re just purchasing what you hope the end result will be.

Obviously services are different from products, so service marketing must be different from product marketing. But while more than 4 out of 5 people work in service companies, only 1 out of 5 business school case studies focus on services. We’re all being taught how to market products, but we’re never taught how to market services, even though that will be what the majority of people do.

3. Humankind

We’ve been doing a lot of dark books recently. Ordinary Men, The Prince and Collapse all paint a dim view of human nature. The idea goes that we have a thin veneer of niceness on the surface, but deep down we’re all capable of pure evil.

Thankfully, this book gives the opposite perspective. The simple idea of this book is that we’re actually all pretty decent. Disasters and tough times don’t cause us to descend a few rungs on the ladder of civilisation, but rather they bring out the best in us.

2. Tiny Habits

We all want some kind of change. But for most of us, there is a painful gap between what people want and what they actually do. If you have attempted to do something different in the past and haven’t seen the results, you’ve probably figured out by now that change is hard.

If you tried to put together a chest of drawers with faulty instructions and parts missing, you would feel frustrated. But you probably wouldn’t blame yourself. You would blame the manufacturer instead. Similarly, any habits you’re not happy with aren’t entirely your fault, you just haven’t yet been taught how to effectively change your behaviour.

BJ Fogg’s behaviour model boils any action down to three simple components: Motivation, Ability, Prompt. B=MAP is the combination lock to install long term habits.

1. The Dip

“The extraordinary benefits of knowing when to quit (and when to stick)”

A great short book the explains why there’s always a ‘dip’ in your projects on your journey to becoming the best in the world – be that getting a promotion, building a business, writing a book, falling in love… anything! At the start, as you put in more effort you’ll see good results. Then, theres a dip. You’ll put in more and more effort but your results won’t improve. This is where most people quit. If you can push through the dip after everyone else has quit, all of a sudden you’ll appear to be an overnight success because you’ve become the best in the world.

Adam Jones Top 10

10. Humankind

9. The Future Is Faster Than You Think

Humans have been dreaming a long time about flying vehicles. In a famous IBM commercial, Avery Books asked: “it’s the year 2000, but where are the flying cars?… I don’t see them! Why!”. Peter Thiel quips “we wanted flying cars and we got 140 characters”.

And today, the wait could finally be over. It looks like flying cars, alongside all sorts of pie in the sky innovations, are just around the corner. With new technologies such as AI, robotics, virtual reality, 3D printing and materials; and drivers of change such as saved time, availability of capital and longer lives, the rate of change is unprecedented.

8. Steve Jobs

7. The 5 Dysfunctions Of A Team

The ultimate competitive advantage of successful organisations? Teamwork. A leader who can get their entire team rowing in the same direction can dominate any market in any industry.

However, teamwork is as elusive as ever. Human beings are inherently dysfunctional. By acknowledging the imperfections of humans, members of functional teams can overcome our natural tendencies and work together toward success. According to author Patrick Lencioni, there are 5 dysfunctional elements that can destroy any team.

6. Ordinary Men

At the height of the Second World War, the German army had minimal resources to continue the war to the East with Russia, and simultaneously execute Hitler’s “Final Solution”. The Nazi party had already used up all of the ideological killers in their country. They were left with the dregs of society. They would have to use Joe the local Butcher, Jim the Primary School Teacher even Grandpa George to get the job done. The only people left all had working class jobs like truck drivers, dock workers, construction workers and machine operators. They were “normal people” like you and me, but were called upon to execute millions of innocent Jews.

Ordinary Men tells the story of one faction, the Reserve Police Battalion 101 and how they were transformed from normal citizen into “professional killers”

5. The Selfish Gene

The Selfish Gene is one of the most influential books on Evolutionary Biology in history. Written by Richard Dawkins, the book shows us that we are just big lumbering robots whose purpose is to pass on genes. The gene itself sometimes generates selfish behaviour of the animal it inhabits. But it can also use altruistic behaviour, even sacrifice itself on the behalf of family who may share the same genes. In this episode we look evolution, competition, human purpose and memes.

4. Lost Connections

Johann Hari has asked a distinctly different question. Could something other than bad brain chemistry be causing depression and anxiety?

This question led to 3 years of research and 200+ interviews. The story that it is all in our head has holes in it. What Johann Hari has found is another story: depression is largely due to the world and how we live in it. The factors that cause depression in society are everywhere. Even worse, they are on the rise.

3. Being Mortal

You and everyone you know is going to one day die. This is an uncomfortable fact. So uncomfortable that we try to push it out of our minds. But this leaves  most people totally unprepared for their meeting with the ‘Grim Reaper’.

Doctors learn a lot in medical school, but mortality isn’t on the curriculum. The textbooks have almost nothing on ageing, frailty or dying. How the process unfolds, how people experience the end of their lives and how it affects those around them seem useless to the Western World.

Being Mortal explores how we might best embrace these final moments.

2. The Dip

1. The Life Changing Magic Of Tidying Up

The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up – by Marie Kondo

This book has the potential to change your life. The act of tidying is a series of simple actions in which objects are moved from one place to another. It involves putting things where they belong, something so simple that even a six year old should be able to do it. Yet most people can’t. A short time after tidying their household descends into a disorganised mess.

When you follow the advice of this book and finish putting your house in order, your whole world will brighten and never again will you need to revert to clutter. This is what Marie Kondo calls ‘the magic of tidying’.