What I have learned from my reading and listening mornings

The main idea of the post is for me to have a nice recap of all the books I’ve read during 2020. With the pandemic I had the opportunity to stop many bad behaviours and replan the way I was living. Books were an essential part of my transformation, they gave me strength and guided me with science around many things I supposed were true. Hope you enjoy it!

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less Learn to say NO. Nobody will prioritize your life purpose for you. Do less, but be the best on the things you do and believe it, be positive! We must enjoy the ride, love mondays,and fulfill our lives with joy! We need to build what we believe with focus.

Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead A Culture with a full purpose matters and there is no way this can be built without a full cultural transformation in HR. Many important points of this book are directly connected with the overall strategy of HR teams, from reward thoughtful failure to pain unfairly great people, and other key insights in this book point to a new ideial to HR departments. Digital Transformation won’t be able to strive without this cultural mindset change.

What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture One of the first books I have enjoyed with deep references in history. The book was quite heavy, but it made its points. Good comparisons using history and connecting small culture pieces with daily decisions. The culture we live is set by the actions we do daily, find the delta, change the actions. We are what we ate, what we see and what we listen to.

Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up Everybody has his own sad story, do not victimize yourself. Jeff became a really successful CEO and later coached many other CEOs not only to strive in the business but to actually deal with the heavy load of being a CEO meant for his clients, personally. There are a lot of insights I’ll possibly enjoy later in my career so I took a note to read it again in some moment in the future.

The Founder’s Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth Complexity, reads bureaucracy, KILLS growth. There is no founder’s mentality striving over bureaucratic organizations. As bigger the organization is, greater the chances of bureaucracy kills creativity and agility. Huge organizations must find a way to seek and hunt bureaucracy in an never seen anger. Small organizations must fight hard to keep the founder’s mentality, mainly after a round of seed investment.

Unstoppable: A 90-Day Plan to Biohack Your Mind and Body for Success This book reinforces the way I chose to live my life. In order to understand our body we must truly start by using technology available to get kpis and insights. Our body is a biological machine that still needs a lot of research to get fully understood, but by now, there is plenty of science we can do in order to improve the ways we have been using it. Amazing read! Biohacking will be the focus of many future readings.

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams I was never the one who sleeps the most. With this book I learn thoughtful insights. Every aspect of our lives is regulated by our sleep. Our body needs to rest not only physically but our mind needs to rest. There is a bunch of stuff happening while we sleep. This book made me pilot a sleeping plan during 4 weeks, it changed the way I feel in many aspects. Also, my most important alarm clock is the time to go to bed, and not the wake up alarm anymore.

The Infinite Game Corporate life is quite an infinity game, we must keep playing the game associated with our beliefs and cultural fit. Having your own just cause is a great way to start practicing this book’s lessons. Physiological safety is the base of strong team building, worthy rivals make us strong by aggregating different views, existential flexibility to challenge the status quo and always provoke the main reasons to exist and finally have courage to lead to explore a sea of uncertain opportunities in an infinite mindset world.

Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life, The Little Book of Lykke, Lagom: The Swedish Art of Balanced Living The lessons in this book are deeply insightful. Carefully it guides you to understand we can map and develop ourselves in all aspects in our ikigai journey. I still need to spend some quality time over this, but for sure understanding the history behind and its benefits was an amazing experience.

The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down: Guidance on the Path to Mindfulness from a Spiritual Leader Must read mostly for those who are workaholic by nature. It makes me reflect a lot on my behaviors and the way others' behaviour impacts me. Reading this book impacts my way of thinking about priorities and the way I should drive my life in the small decisions.

Ética e Vergonha na Cara! Old but gold. It has been a long time since I read this book for the first time. It is a fast reading to remember you that you’re not “everybody” and “It’s not because everybody is doing that is the right thing to do.” It helps me to remember that great achievements are not delivered by following somebody else’s behaviours.

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men That was one of the books that entirely broke my head. How could we build a world that benefits mostly men? From public sector laws, to homeschooling, this book must be in your top priorities. This book left me with a willingness to rebalance the way I pick the books I read. Gender matters and we are far from the awareness it deserves.

The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work It was good to be exposed to positivity knowledge. Positivity was something I had running in my veins. We must be true believers. It’s good to see science over this topic and for sure I will be reading more about it.

Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity This was the kind of “stop the bulshit” book. We are all humans and making our colleagues feel better at work only can improve overall performance. This book questions a lot of behaviours we still see massively today in leadership and approaches some important steps to guide all kinds of managers to flip the mindset.

No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention This book will make many CHRO not sleep. How can you read a book that is so insightful about people’s culture and behaviours and sleep without planning your organizational culture change? No vacation rules, was one of the many things that make Netflix Employees feel they are true OWNERS of the business. Ask sometimes your boss: “If I ask to quit today, would you fight for me?”

Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility Both Netflix culture books are amazing. Now with Patty point of view. HR needs to drive the mindset change in the whole company, old policies and bureaucracy will turn our companies into a challenging scene for innovation. Trust on employees, give them power to do their job, truly create a sense of ownership. If you hire the best people, you do not need to teach then what to do. Right compensation is key, pay unfairly.

Great Leaders Have No Rules: Contrarian Leadership Principles to Transform Your Team and Business For sure the most organized and easy to understand book in 2020. Topics like how smartphones affect your management work, crowding your calendar or why you should truly show your weakness for your employees are discussed in depth. This book approaches many concepts I truly expect to see more in my daily basis soon.

How Will You Measure Your Life? Why are we doing what we are doing? Yes right now, why did you decide to read this article? Having our life purpose aligned with what we do for living can be a real challenge. This is a comfort book for those who seek for some insightful knowledge.

The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation I was never so exposed to the words: psychological safety. Reading this book was like going back to concepts, and that was really important. In many situations we have one of 4 stages affected by external factors. Understanding the 4 stages are important to recognize many of the situations we’re living in these days. Play nice with yourself!

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, Cheaper Than Yours (and What To Do About It) More than a book, a guide to understand why ExO are so important in our society. With a lot of examples from startups and big companies, this book left me with many tools and knowledge to discuss how to organize growth in a company that aims to be healthy for the next 100 years!

The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life: Before 8AM This was part of my transformation and this morning guide impacted my whole life. 1 hour. 15 minutes of meditation, 15 minutes of reading, 15 minutes of exercise and 15 minutes of visualization. These 4 activities force me to start the day in a positive way. The book is organized in a good structure and left the reader comfortable to find different ways to plan his best morning.

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