100 books like Before You Know It

In this book, my friend the late Professor K Anders Ericsson, proves that innate talent is not the most important factor in achieving expertise in any field.

Instead, deliberate practice is the key to improving performance and achieving mastery. But deliberate practice is not the same as regular practice: it involves specific and focused efforts to improve skills, often with the guidance of a teacher or coach.

It requires a high level of concentration and effort and can be mentally and physically exhausting. The book provides practical advice on how to apply this concept to any field.

In Antifragile, Nassim Taleb describes the concept of convexity as a property of systems that benefit from volatility, stressors, or uncertainty, and suffer from calm or stability.

You should work to make your body and mind antifragile by exposing yourself to stressors, such as exercise, fasting, and solving complex cognitive problems. That will make you stronger and more resilient.

The principle of convexity can be applied to your own cognitive development in several ways for example make it an everyday habit to embrace small failures and mistakes, pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone, and working on skills that are just beyond your current level of ability, and pursue diverse experiences.

By seeking out new experiences and challenging yourself to learn new things, you can increase your cognitive flexibility and resilience.

Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi tackles a colossal question in Creativity: how do people come up with new ideas?

I love the scope of this book, which journeys from breakthroughs in science to experimentation in jazz. I love the myths the author debunks, including the out-of-nowhere “aha” moment: Ideas don’t just burst into consciousness, they emerge from a lifetime of knowledge and experience that comes before them.

And I love that Csikszentmihalyi concludes his book with a chapter about how we, his readers, can enhance our own creativity. Key takeaways: cultivate curiosity; look for surprises in the ordinary; allow yourself to sit still and reflect; create a space that nurtures your soul. 

The Pyramid Principle is about problem-solving and communication, two areas completely decisive for anyone who has the ambition to get the most out of their personal and professional lives.

It offers practical advice on how to organize your ideas and present them in a clear and persuasive manner. It provides a framework for effective problem-solving communication that can be applied to a variety of contexts, from business writing to presentations and speeches.

Love this book! This is a foundational behavioral ethics book, written by two giants in the field—psychologists Bazerman of Harvard Business School and Tenbrunsel of Notre Dame.

It is research-based, yet very accessible to the novice, directly addressing, as the title indicates, why people sometimes mess up and how they can avoid it. It introduces the reader to cognitive biases and other influences that can fool people’s brains into making poor moral choices.

Blind Spots was an invaluable resource for Cara Biasucci and me for many of the 150 or so videos we have produced for Ethics Unwrapped.

I was intrigued to learn about “moral disengagement,” which is a particular way of thinking about the processes, pressures, and biases that lead good people to do bad things.

The creation of the late Albert Bandura, a psychologist at Stanford University and one of the most influential psychologists of modern times, moral disengagement is the process by which we separate our identity as good people from the bad acts that we do so that we can do what we wish but still think of ourselves as good folks.

At more than 400 pages, this book is not a quick read, but learning about the mechanisms of moral disengagement is endlessly fascinating. The book never bores.   

The previous books I recommended are theory books written by prominent psychologists, laying out different views of the many psychological forces that can lead even the best-intentioned people to make moral mistakes. This book in many ways is a validation of those books’ theories.

Harvard Business School professor Eugene Soltes was curious about the key question: “Why do good people do bad things?” He developed relationships with many of the high-profile, white-collar criminals of the Enron-era scandals, such as Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco and Andy Fastow of Enron.

As I read these white-collar criminals’ explanations of why they had committed their crimes, I saw concrete examples of the behavioral ethics theories spelled out in the other books I’ve recommended. These were all good, successful people, family men (yes, they were virtually all men) who found themselves in jail. The explanations they give mirror many of those theories.

I know and admire Paul Woodruff, a noted philosopher at the University of Texas. His worldview has been shaped by his experiences as a young soldier in the Vietnam War and he has spent much of his professional life trying to make sense of those experiences.

The book begins with Woodruff remembering a time, 50 years ago, when he was lying in ambush in Vietnam, pondering the question that he attempts to answer in this book: “What makes the difference in a human being between acting ethically and not? Specifically, in a soldier, between committing atrocities and holding back?” He realized at that moment that all his philosophy training at Princeton had not helped him answer that question.

Much of his discussion in this book, written half a century later, finds useful guidance by focusing on the psychological influences of behavioral ethics rather than the philosophical musings of Socrates.

Thanks to Freud, one of the most cherished ideas in psychology is that we have an unconscious. Yet because it is by definition inaccessible, our unconscious is almost impossible to study scientifically. Freud himself certainly didn’t provide much reliable evidence for its existence. Nick Chater, a respected researcher of language and perception, argues that little if any evidence for an unconscious drive exists even now, almost a century after Freud. With lively and pugnacious arguments drawn from fascinating and diverse discoveries about language and perception, Chater deconstructs the unconscious and argues instead for a human mind that is inherently dynamic and in-the-moment. When I have assigned this book to my undergraduate students studying perception it has provoked some of the most heated debates, which is how I know it is a great book!

The title says it well. Sometimes we all need to forgive ourselves for our errors, and to take a clear, sober look at our blunders.

This book shows how rigid thinking can subtly lead us to undermine ourselves. In the process, it identifies seven "cognition traps" to avoid. Easier said than done… but includes some very worthwhile advice.