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Summer is upon us and has brought with it a renewed excitement for engaging in life away from our laptops, desks and Zoom connected cameras. In New York, San Francisco, and every state in between, cities are open and the excitement is palpable. Summer travel, wedding season and outdoor activities are all beginning to resume as they always have. But there’s been another theme this June, a sense of mid-year newness as we check off the first half of 2021, re-enter a world that resembles normalcy and once again allow ourselves to get excited about the future (breath not held).
With that in mind, my summer reading list is my own personal commitment, a gentle resolution, to reading — and re-reading — things that will continue to offer new perspectives on private investing, macroeconomics, leadership and worlds outside of my own. And last but not least, since I believe we should all take time to properly reset before summer’s end, I’ve included a fiction title as well.
Here are the books on my summer reading list in no particular order:
A Promised Land by Barack Obama (I began in this book earlier this year and enjoyed listening to and learning about sides of our 44th president I’d yet to be introduced to. The politics are interesting but not nearly as interesting as the person behind them.)
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Investors, and all humans generally, think often about risk and probability but we often leave luck and its role in our lives unconsidered. This book forces us to dive deeper into the subject to see and understand luck for what it really is.)
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock, Dan Gardner, et al (A an examination of what makes some people better predictors and decision makers than others.)
This Explains Everything : Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works by John Brockman (A treat for the curious mind who has an insatiable need to know everything. In other words, the perfect vacation read for me.)
Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World by Charles Koch and Brian Hooks (I’ve always believed that leaders too often take the view that the people who work with and for them are less capable than leaders themselves. What would happen if we believed in the leadership potential of each of the individuals on our teams and in our societies?)
Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change by Ellen Pao (Corporations have never done better at diversity initiatives. What would it take for us to get to a world where we don’t need them?)
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement by Daniel Kahneman Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein (Eliminating the noise can be the hardest thing to do when making any decision. This book forces us to think about the noise that clouds our thinking and how to remove it.)
Power Moves: Lessons from Davos by Adam Grant (A first look at lessons learned from Davos and the role of power in society at all levels.)
Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Lessons learned from an American visionary on the errors of our collective past and how we can build a better future.)
Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t by Simon Sinek (On building teams with trust and security at their core and being the kind of leader who carries them forward.)
Runners up:
The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors by Dave Jilk and Brad Feld (Another 21st century interpretation of Nietzsche through the lens of a well-known investor and entrepreneur.)
In Five Years: A Novel by Rebecca Serle (A fiction read about the plans we make and the surprising futures we seldom predict.)