Here are 100 books that The Year of Less fans have personally recommended if you like
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I didn’t choose clutter as a topic—it chose me. Around the time Marie Kondo became a tidying-up sensation, my mother suffered a breakdown and could no longer live in her dangerously cluttered house. I’m an only child, so it fell to me to figure what to do with it all. So much stuff! It got me wondering: How did clutter get to be such a huge problem for so many people? The books on this list helped answer that question and made me feel less alone in the struggle with stuff. I hope you find them useful too.
Dealing with a lifetime’s worth of possessions feels like a heavy task—heavy in every sense. In this breezy book, Margareta Magnuson reminds readers that it doesn’t have to be a drag. Figuring out what to do with all your things can be cathartic, liberating, even fun, a chance to relive some of the highlights of your life and celebrate where you’ve landed. It’s also a kindness to your nearest and dearest. As she wisely observes, “A loved one wishes to inherit nice things from you. Not all things from you.” I wish I could go back in time and give a copy of this book to my mother with that passage highlighted.
Dostadning, or the art of death cleaning, is a Swedish phenomenon by which the elderly and their families set their affairs in order. Whether it's sorting the family heirlooms from the junk, downsizing to a smaller place, or using a failsafe system to stop you losing essentials, death cleaning gives us the chance to make the later years of our lives as comfortable and stress-free as possible. Whatever your age, Swedish death cleaning can be used to help you de-clutter your life, and take stock of what's important.
I was born in South Korea and moved to The United States when I was three years old. I grew up in Detroit where I was often the only yellow face in school. The trauma of trying to fit in played a significant role in my adult life. I have thought about writing a memoir for years. Several family members asked me not to name them. I decided to tell my truth through brief snapshots of a feeling or event. This way, I could show my journey from my perspective as I learned to walk between two opposing cultures. Observations Through Yellow Glasses: A Memoir Through Poems is the result.
For forty years, David Sedaris kept a diary filled with his successes, failures, overheard conversations, and secrets confessed by strangers. He adds humor to his memories which is a wonderful change from the traditional memoir. Even a boring day can make us laugh. This is the first of two volumes and is the better of the two.
One of the most anticipated books of 2017: Boston Globe, New York Times Book Review, New York's "Vulture", The Week, Bustle, BookRiot
An NPR Best Book of 2017
An AV Club Favorite Book of 2017 A Barnes & Noble Best Book of 2017
A Goodreads Choice Awards nominee
David Sedaris tells all in a book that is, literally, a lifetime in the making.
For forty years, David Sedaris has kept a diary in which he records everything that captures his attention-overheard comments, salacious gossip, soap opera plot twists, secrets confided by total strangers. These observations are the source code for…
I have always referred to myself as “obsessive-compulsive delightful,” but who knew I could turn that lifelong trait into a booming business? While working as a personal assistant, I discovered I had the ability to see through any mess and clearly envision a clutter-free space. Coupled with keen time-management and organizational skills, I soon found more and more people were asking me for help. Before I knew it, my company, dClutterfly was born. Twelve years and thousands of decluttered homes later, I knew it was time to take what I had learned working with my clients and write a book to help others dealing with clutter. Making Space, Clutter Free is a bestseller and continues to help people change their relationship to their stuff.
As a child of an extreme hoarder, this book helped me realize the extent of and truly understand my father’s disorder. The authors do an amazing job of explaining a very difficult and painful mental disorder and offering real treatments that work. If you or someone you love is afflicted with hoarding disorder, this book is a must-read.
While most people find it relatively easy to manage their possessions, some find it extremely difficult. If you have a problem resisting the urge to acquire and you find your home cluttered and filled to capacity with items many people would find useless and unnecessary, you may suffer from a condition known as hoarding disorder.
Hoarding is a behavioral problem consisting of clutter, difficulty discarding items, and excessive buying or acquiring. Hoarding is often associated with significant reduction in quality of life, and in extreme cases, it can pose serious health risks. If you or a loved one has hoarding…
I am a writer, actor, and comedian. I began on the Second City mainstage in Toronto. I was a writer and an actor on the Canadian television series, Call Me Fitz and I won the Gemini Award and the Canadian Screen Award for Best Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for my work opposite Jason Priestley on that show. Let Me Be Frank is my first book and it brings together so much of what I love to write and read: feminism, women, history, underdogs, and humor.
As cliché as it sounds, I truly did laugh and cry my way through this excellent book of essays by actress and comedian Casey Wilson. Wilson is an excellent storyteller and someone who is just profoundly, naturally funny. But she does not shy away from some heartbreaking and emotionally raw material too, which, quite frankly, is my jam. I did that thing where you get both the book and the audiobook, so when you are walking the dog you can still be reading. I highly recommend following suit because Wilson is such a delight to listen to. I may have had to pull my car over while listening one day because it was not safe to drive whilst weeping uncontrollably.
The instant New York Times bestseller: Laugh-out-loud, deeply insightful, and emotion-filled essays from multitalented actress, comedian, podcaster, and writer Casey Wilson.
Casey Wilson has a lot on her mind and she isn't afraid to share. In this dazzling collection, each essay skillfully constructed and brimming with emotion, she shares her thoughts on the joys and vagaries of modern-day womanhood and motherhood, introduces the not-quite-typical family that made her who she is, and persuasively argues that lowbrow pop culture is the perfect lens through which to examine human nature.
Whether she's extolling the virtues of eating in bed,…
For nearly 40 years, I have studied and written about blending the business world and the spiritual side of life together. By spiritual, I mean everything to do with our purpose and why we exist. I refer to this as being ALIVE @ WORK ®. We spend countless hours at work doing a j-o-b, when what we want most is knowing that we are making a difference in our lives and the lives of others. The key is taking 100% responsibility for our lives, knowing we have the power to change them in an instant. You will find this thread woven through all of my books and those I recommend.
A very well-written book by a reporter from the New York Times (also the author of The Power of Habit). The author's style of writing, which is then blended with stories of people and organizations, kept me glued as if I was reading a news story.
It is one of the best books written on productivity I have ever read! There is such a broad range of people and stories, but all wrapped up into eight key concepts about focus and productivity. This book can help you understand why some folks (organizations) are so much more productive than others.
In his international bestseller The Power of Habit, Pulitzer Prize-winner Charles Duhigg explained why we do what we do. Now he applies the same relentless curiosity and masterful analysis to the question: how can each of us achieve more?
Drawing on the very latest findings in neuroscience, psychology and behavioural economics, he demonstrates the eight simple principles that govern productivity. He demonstrates how the most dynamic and effective people - from CEOs to film-makers to software entrepreneurs - deploy them. And he shows how you can, too.
'Charles has some wonderful advice for increasing productivity . . . the tips…
I’m a human Venn diagram who has built a career at the intersection of business, technology, and the arts. A classically-trained musician and theater director, I pivoted from the arts into the world of entrepreneurship and technology after earning my MBA from Harvard and worked as a serial entrepreneur. I’m now on the faculty of Harvard Business School where I'm the course head for the first-year MBA entrepreneurship course, oversee HBS Startup Bootcamp, and coach and mentor students as they figure out what brings them joy. An author and frequent public speaker, my latest book offers a new model for work and life that upends the notion they should have ever been at odds.
“Design thinking” is a phrase that’s become more common over the last ten years but it’s still mostly the domain of innovation and the startup world.
So when designers Bill Burnett and Dave Evans brought this way of thinking to tackle the question of designing a life of fulfillment and joy, it offered a truly fresh perspective. Experimentation, prototyping, constant iteration. These are the tools that allow you to learn and tinker and adjust as you go, ensuring the only true failure is settling for unhappiness.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • At last, a book that shows you how to build—design—a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage • “Life has questions. They have answers.” —The New York Times
Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home—at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve.
I am a retired professor, was raised in a refugee camp, one of a family of 9 living in one tent. studied in Palestine, Egypt, Germany, and America, have Ph.D. in economics; scholarships financed my education journey. I lived a life no human has lived or can live, because some of the times I lived had come and gone and cannot come back again. I taught at 11 universities on 4 continents, published 60 books in Arabic and English: books on economics, politics, culture, history, conflict resolution, philosophy, racism, novels, and poetry. True intellectuals cannot stay in one area because issues that shape mankind's history and man’s destiny are interconnected.
This book shows that America, since its inception, has followed an imperialistic policy to dominate the world; it built the strongest army in history, and the most advanced military industry. To project power and be able to intervene anywhere, America built about 750 military bases overseas in 80 countries. However, America’s relative decline due to China’s rise, lead America’s policymakers to transform many states into failed states that cannot control all their territories, weak for America to dominate, but unstable to create headaches for their neighbors as the cases of Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen demonstrate. America’s military budget for 2023 is $858 billion, the equivalent of 1/3 of the combined gross domestic product of the 54 African countries. Does this scare you, or comfort you?
For the last half century, as administrations have come and gone, the fundamental assumptions about America's military policy have remained unchanged: American security requires the United States (and us alone) to maintain a permanent armed presence around the globe, to prepare our forces for military operations in far-flung regions, and to be ready to intervene anywhere at any time. In the Obama era, just as in the Bush years, these beliefs remain unquestioned gospel. In a vivid, incisive analysis, Andrew J. Bacevich succinctly presents the origins of this consensus, forged at a moment when American power was at its height.…
I’ve long been fascinated by money and wealth and people’s relationship to them. I started my career as an estate planning attorney and then broadened my expertise to investing. I know that investing can seem scary due to the complexity of the financial markets and the overwhelming amount of investment products and strategies. But successful investing doesn’t have to be hard or scary. With the proper guidance, anyone can embark on a strategy of creating wealth through investing. Reading the right book is a good first step in the right direction.
The Success Equation is my favorite investment book.
In it, Mauboussin tackles a significant question in investing: to what extent can investment results be attributed to skillversus luck? Mauboussin introduces the skill-luck continuum to explain this, with competitions like chess and running races being at the skill end and games like roulette and slot machines being at the luck end.
Sports such as football and basketball are closer to the skill side, while investing is closer to the luck side. Using this model, Mauboussin provides useful tools for evaluating investment opportunities while considering skill and luck.
"Much of what we experience in life results from a combination of skill and luck." -- From the Introduction The trick, of course, is figuring out just how many of our successes (and failures) can be attributed to each--and how we can learn to tell the difference ahead of time. In most domains of life, skill and luck seem hopelessly entangled. Different levels of skill and varying degrees of good and bad luck are the realities that shape our lives--yet few of us are adept at accurately distinguishing between the two. Imagine what we could accomplish if we were able…
My passion for developing entrepreneurial and business instinct is simple. It is all based on confidence. Over time, my experiences have shown me that many leaders (myself included) can end up in “decision paralysis” and default to taking no action at all. Leaders can have all of the information and indicators that a decision is the right thing to do, but they default to doing nothing. By developing a better understanding of my own instincts, I have been able to build confidence in the decisions I have made over the past 20 years, thus eliminating any deterrents from making sound decisions.
Blink is a book about how you already know what you don’t know. Malcolm Gladwell breaks down how our instincts and “gut feeling” are always emotional reactions. Those instincts are based on past experiences and knowledge built over time. However, these instincts, whether they are acted upon or not, can be extremely valid even though we have trouble articulating it more than a “sixth sense.”
Explaining how these instincts are developed and (more importantly) learning how to break them down in a way to communicate them in a meaningful way is how many leaders develop emotional intelligence and business acumen.
Intuition is not some magical property that arises unbidden from the depths of our mind. It is a product of long hours and intelligent design, of meaningful work environments and particular rules and principles. This book shows us how we can hone our instinctive ability to know in an instant, helping us to bring out the best in our thinking and become better decision-makers in our homes, offices and in everyday life. Just as he did with his revolutionary theory of the tipping point, Gladwell reveals how the power of blink' could fundamentally transform our relationships, the way we consume,…
I have told stories since the age of five when I shared one about my different colored eyes. Tired of being pointed at and ridiculed for the thing I loved most about myself, I learned that stories can shift energy and create connection, even in the most artificial of settings. I’ve spent my career working in and with the Fortune 500 building leaders, teams, and culture, one story at a time. I’ve used storytelling to persuade people when one had the authority to say yes but 99 others could say no. Stories not only slowed their “No,” but they also helped me recruit them to persuade the decision makers.
Brian Grazer is the silent figure behind so many popular, award-winning movies. He’s worked on films like Splash, A Beautiful Mind, and Apollo 13 and his films have been nominated for more than 47 Academy Awards.
In this book, he lets you peek behind the curtain at his creative process. Which is essentially that he embraces curiosity in all aspects of his life. When someone intrigues him, he spends time asking them questions to learn more. While the book is focused on his approach, it’s easy to take inspiration from his mindset and seek your own curiosity daily.
For decades, film and TV producer Brian Grazer has scheduled a weekly "curiosity conversation" with an accomplished stranger. From scientists to spies, and adventurers to business leaders, Grazer has met with anyonewilling to answer his questions for a few hours. These informal discussions sparked the creative inspiration behind many of Grazer's movies and TV shows, including Splash, 24, A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13, Arrested Development, 8 Mile, J. Edgar, and many others.
A Curious Mindis a brilliantly entertaining, fascinating, and inspiring homage to the power of inquisitiveness and the ways in which it deepens and improves us. Whether you're looking…
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