December 2021 Reading Challenge - scrub your brain with business books and start the year fresh 🧐
Hi, I'm Thea.
I've set myself a goal to read 30 books in 30 days all related to startups and entrepreneurship.
Target month : December 2021.
I've created this book journal so that I can document my notes, thoughts and reflections.
There's no better time than now with the new year around the corner and one of my goals being to read more books this year. Hence a book journal seemed like the perfect idea!
Generally I tend to stick to business books so for now there's no fiction in sight. I plan on writing notes and thoughts on each book as well as posting highlights and recaps.
The book list was assembled from Hiten's list of Startup books here with some adjustments to what I had on my reading list already as high priority.
Below is the list of books, and in the sidebar you can click into the notes for those worth extensive notes as I go along!
Update : Due to finding some on the list to be not valuable to my goals, I've added some to the bottom of the list based on recommendations from friends and discoveries that are newer than the original list. Testing out the books still costs time, but I'd rather stop and jump to a better one rather than slog through.
End of Challenge Update:
Alrighty. I made it to 22 books in December. Not too bad. The goal still stands, I will go through the remaining 8 in January.
Looking into the reason for missing the target, most of it is due to missing audiobooks of those books. Reading in txt is way slower, compared to 1.8 - 2x speed of audio I usually do.
All good though, the remaining books are marked with ⏳ for future reference and will be updated as I go.
| Book Name | About / short note | Rating | Done |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel | Peter Thiel's classic, a bit esoteric but a staple in every list like this | 🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 02.12.21 |
| Business Model Generation By Alexander Osterwalder | in progress | 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 02.02.22 |
| The Lean Startup by Eric Ries | duh XD re-read obviously | 🔥🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 04.12.21 |
| Diffusion of Innovations by Everett M. Rogers | in progress | ⏳ | |
| A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young | Book from the 1940-ies, about the mental processes of idea creation in advertising. Just like the Caples book, hidden gem | 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 30.12.21 |
| The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle by Steven Pressfield | Re-read this, and remembered why it was a slight disappointment last time - he diagnoses perfectly what is resistance and fear all that BUT then doesn't provide a single solution. Arrgh | 🔥🔥 | ✅ 18.12.21 |
| I believe I'll give up on this one, the guy is talking about cases in his medical biz. While nice, it's so far a waste of time in terms of actionable insights. | 🔥 | 🚫 06.12.21 | |
| The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen | Replacing the Checklist Manifesto above with this book. It was just released on seveth of december, but it's Andrew Chen, I wouldn't miss this for anything. | 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 11.12.21 |
| Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters by Richard Rumelt | Re-read, great book, parts are lagging, definitely a must-read though | 🔥🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 15.12.21 |
| Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez | it's good but nowhere near as good as lean analytics (despite the similar name) | 🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 20.1.22 |
| Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz | How to really apply data to draw quick and useful insights and improve decision making. 100% worth it | 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 20.12.21 |
| The Lean Entrepreneur by Brant Cooper | Combines the concepts of customer insight, rapid experimentation, and actionable data from the Lean Startup methodology to allow individuals, teams, or even entire companies to solve problems quickly and efficiently. | 🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 24.12.21 |
| The Startup Owner’s Manual by Steve Blank | 🔥🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 11.12.21 | |
| Product Design for the Web by Randy J. Hunt | ⏳ | ||
| Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug | 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 15.02.22 | |
| Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug | ⏳ | ||
| The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast! by Josh Kaufman | How to learn any skill to be reasonably dangerous in 20 hours | 🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 04.12.21 |
| Skipping this one after 1/3 in, there's decent advice on leadership in this book but way too much fluff and all about NFL coaching which I really don't care one bit about | 🔥 | 🚫 12.12.21 | |
| The Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joe Sugarman | Legendary copywriter, great intro book to writing, read it before and read it again | 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 14.12.21 |
| Rework by Jason Fried | 37signals, Basecamp - the internal guide turned book by Jason Fried. Read before, this is worth re-reading at least once a year | 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 18.12.21 |
| Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples | An old copywriting book considered a staple in every direct response marketer's library. I've read this one a couple of times already, but it's never a waste of time to come back to this book | 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ |
| Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares | 🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 20.02.22 | |
| Speak Human: Outmarket the Big Guys by Getting Personal | 🔥🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 12.02.22 | |
| Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson | OMG dense af. Good book and the author himself says he tried to liven it up, but very specific and likely no sense doing extensive notes. | 🔥🔥 | ✅ 05.12.21. |
| Startup Boards: Getting the Most Out of Your Board of Directors by Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani | This one I decided to skip over, it's just not what I'm after now | 🚫 | |
| The Hard Things About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz | Re-reading after a long while. The guy that made it through the Netscape IPO in the middle of the dot.com crisis tells stories about resilience. The first 1/3 is meh, boring anecdotes, but then it turns to pure gold. | 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 28.12.21. |
| High Output Management by Andy Grove | ... | ||
| Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh | Brilliant account from the founder of Zappos on how it all came to be | 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 07.12.21 |
| 7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer | Insightful basic principles of business book | 🔥🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 09.12.21 |
| Making Websites Win by Karl Blanks | A very powerful CRO book recommended by absolutely everyone over at CXL | 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ |
| $100M offers by Alex Hormozi | This book focuses on only one idea, and that's how to build an irresistible offer. | 🔥🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 04.12.21 |
| Thinking series by Edward de Bono | Six thinking hats etc, series of shorter books/lectures on lateral thinking. | 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 18.12.21. |
| The Catalyst by Jonah Berger | Same author as Contagious, which is an awesome book. | 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 19.12.21 |
| The Culture Code by Clotaire Rapaille | Full title : "An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do" Book recommended by some of the best marketers around. | 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 21.12.21 |
| The 4-hour Workweek (updated and extended) by Tim Ferris | Yeah I know, but after leaving the last shitty job I like the mental re-alignment of this book. Re-reading. | 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 24.12.21 |
| The Age of AI by Kissinger, Schmidt and Huttenlocher | Ok-ish, reminds a lot on Thiel's book. It did clear out some things I didn't fully understand around AI model training etc. Bit too much pop-sci tbh. | 🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 29.12.21 |
| The Conversion Code by Chris Smith | Oh this is a killer book by actionable insights. Zero fluff, fairly basic or rather leaned towards get started fast, KISS. Extremely good book | 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 07.01.22 |
| The Untethered Soul | Resistance ahoy. This book has 20k reviews on Amazon, almost all 5*. I was curious. It's a great book but it will hit your pain points, you will want to quit and drop it. Don't. | 🔥🔥🔥🔥 | ✅ 08.01.2022 |