📚 The Reading Journal #004

Home Libraries, Essentialism, Psychology of Money and Michelle Obama

👋 Hey Everyone

Hope everyone enjoyed last week's edition of the Reading Journal!

We would like to start a series in the newsletter to show off our readers at-home libraries. Send us a photo of your library and your favorite book to be featured in the Reading Journal Newsletter.

Enjoy your week!

Tom Lawson

📚 Staff Pick of the Week

🧘 Essentialism by Greg McKeown

Often we get caught up in the busyness of life and lose focus on the things we want to do. Greg McKeown’s Essentialism is a book that I think everyone should read. Essentialism clears your judgement and gives you permission to focus on what really matters instead of trying to do everything.

“Only once you give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all, to stop saying yes to everyone, can you make your highest contribution towards the things that really matter.” — Greg McKeown, Essentialism

In applying McKeown’s advice and defining strict criteria for what is essential in your life, you’ll reclaim invaluable time, energy and focus. McKeown calls this “the disciplined pursuit of less.”

“Entrepreneurs succeed when they say “yes” to the right project, at the right time, in the right way. To accomplish this, they have to be good at saying “no” to all their other ideas. Essentialism offers concise and eloquent advice on how to determine what you care about most, and how to apply your energies in ways that ultimately bring you the greatest rewards.” —Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and co-author of The Start-up of You

Essentialism is recommended by Tim Ferriss, Matt D'Avella and 13 others.

🎥 Reading Talk's

📚 Best Seller - Week of July 18, 2022

The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

Doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people.

Money―investing, personal finance, and business decisions―is typically taught as a math-based field, where data and formulas tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together.

In The Psychology of Money, award-winning author Morgan Housel shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important topics.

The Psychology of Money has been recommended by the likes of David Perrell, Ana Fabrega and 7 others.

📝 New Book List

Admont Abbey Library, Austria

🆕 New and Noteworthy

There may be no tidy solutions or pithy answers to life’s big challenges, but Michelle Obama believes that we can all locate and lean on a set of tools to help us better navigate change and remain steady within flux. In The Light We Carry, she opens a frank and honest dialogue with readers, considering the questions many of us wrestle with: How do we build enduring and honest relationships? How can we discover strength and community inside our differences? What tools do we use to address feelings of self-doubt or helplessness? What do we do when it all starts to feel like too much? 

👀 In Case You Missed It

📖 Reading Journal Book Club

July's Book is Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell

In The Bomber MafiaMalcolm Gladwell weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history.

Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists, the “Bomber Mafia,” asked: What if precision bombing could cripple the enemy and make war far less lethal?  

✍️ Quote of the Week

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.

Jorge Luis Borges