100 books like How to Fight a Hydra

 In story after story Mark shares that the key to connecting with people is to be “More Interested Than Interesting.” 

The author shares a multitude of thoughtful questions, that you will certainly want to begin to employ to communicate your interest in others. And of course, the reason I love Just Listen is that no one will ever become great at “Leading with Questions” without becoming a great listener!

When your family/staff/ friends feel heard, your relational effectiveness will skyrocket! 

Whether you sell products or services, customers don’t really buy either: they buy outcomes. And it’s not enough to understand what people want to accomplish, truly successful businesses deeply understand how customers view their own success, and how to create a path from where they currently are to where they want to be. 

In Badass, Kathy uses her unique and very visual learning style to help you get in the head of your customers and understand the world from their point of view. There’s a shortlist of people who’ve had a huge impact on my career, and Kathy Sierra is at the top of that very shortlist. This book embodies that impact, I consider it required reading.

One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned is how to manage my own fear and excitement. How we react to the world around us is one of the few things we are truly in control of! This is the book that helped me most to shift the way I perceive and react to things, allowing me to live more calmly in my work and my life even in the face of complexity, fear, even success. 

This book is weirdly simple, almost child-like in its cadence, but don’t let the simplicity fool you. I found it valuable to sit with the short parables and examples especially when I’m having an emotional response surrounding a business decision. 

This was the first book based on Buddhist teachings that I ever read and made sense to me in a practical way. The writing style is strange (and the author has a truly bizarre… show more.

The most insidious mistakes we make are the ones we didn’t even realize we were making. This short book brilliantly shines a light on the thousands of “invisible” choices that we make in our work and our lives, but more importantly, the author guides us on how to begin correcting them.

Using examples and case studies, author David Dylan Thomas helps you bring awareness to three lenses of bias that are guaranteed to be affecting your work: how biases impact our own individual experiences and choices, how they wiggle their way into our teams and leadership structures, and how they get wired directly into the products and services we deliver. 

If you care about creating long-lasting and equitable results with your work, you need to read this book.

I was given this book thirty years ago by an Indian poet, who promised me I would love it. It is a feast of stories, told to the central character Devi throughout her life. Through her grandmother’s ancient stories, she learns about love, beauty, riches, and womanhood. Her father-in-law tells her stories that teach her about life, how to survive her lonely marriage, how to belong. Stories and dreams give her wealth and power, but they evaporate and still she is there, empty, alone, and desperate for the love that the old stories are about. 

Two other women’s stories weave through the narrative. Her mother Seta, and her husband’s old retainer, Mayamma share exotic tales of ancient India, Gods, mysteries, magic, and rituals. 

The Thousand Faces of Night is trancelike and beautiful.

The comparative mythologist, Joseph Campbell is probably best known for A Hero with a Thousand Faces, but it’s another book—Pathways to Bliss—that I turn to like a travel guide to my own spiritual journey. In prompting readers to explore archetypes to help them create their personal mythology, Campbell believes that life should be a journey to finding our bliss. This is a book about personal growth for people who want to self-discovery in a larger—mythical—context.

This is not a best-seller graphic novel, you don’t see this book on every bookstore shelf. I discovered it because of Nina Mickwitz’s Documentary Comics. I ordered it from the library network that we had at my grad school. My degeneration is a Jewel of a book in many senses, it is a sincere book, a dialogue that goes through many channels: the images drawn, the text typed, and the way the book was made. The shifting in the line makes you think about the process and the author not just as a character but as a person experiencing the world from certain conditions and telling you about that experience.

I love a good storyline, but even more so when it’s well-supported.

The author, D.L. Keur, offers captivating information about search and rescue, hostage rescue, pack interactions, human-K9 communication, and human psychology. I love the dogs—yes, plural—and the relationships with their human companions.

Speaking of which, the human characters are realistic. Just like people in real life, they’re flawed, which to my way of thinking, makes a story even more believable and relatable.

Van Tharp’s Super Trader is the book that changed my perspective on trading.

After reading it I began thinking of trading like a business (O’Neil touches on this as well) that works best with well-designed systems and processes.

Tharp goes deep into psychology and belief systems. He says “We don’t actually trade the market. We trade our beliefs about the market.” If this is the case, we better gain as much awareness of our beliefs as we can! He was a huge inspiration in this department and was one of my biggest inspirations in the realm of trading psychology.

Tharp also introduces position sizing concepts in this book that reveal “how much we bet” has far more to do with our overall success in trading than most anything else. Even more so than where we enter and exit. 

Irreducible Mind is an insightful collective volume written by scientists about the still-unsolved mysteries of the mind.

In this work, the authors examine several rogue phenomena (e.g. psychological automatisms and secondary personality, genius-level creativity, extreme psychophysical influence, NDEs, 'mystical' states of consciousness both spontaneous and drug-induced) that cannot be accounted for by materialist (physicalist) theories.

These authors further demonstrate that these phenomena are more easily explained by an alternative 'transmission' or 'filter' theory of mind/brain relations.