📚 The Reading Journal #022

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The record for the largest bookstore, based on square footage, is the Barnes & Noble on 5th Avenue in New York City. But, to give credit where credit is due, Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon has long held the record for the largest bookstore based on shelf space.

📷 Bookshelf Humble Brag

📝 Note

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📚 Staff Pick of the Week

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

One of the best-known motivational guides in history, Dale Carnegie’s groundbreaking publication has sold tens of millions of copies, been translated into almost every known written language, and has helped countless people succeed.

The book How to Win Friends and Influence People is among the most popular titles ever. It includes general guidelines for relating to others in order to win their favor and influence their opinions. This isn't about manipulating people; it's about approaching people honestly, respecting them as though they matter, and acting accordingly. Learn how to make others feel important, how to change people's ideas without offending them, and how to become a superb conversationalist without speaking a word.

How to Win Friends and Influence People has been recommended by the likes of Warren Buffett, Sam Parr, Whitney Cummings and 16 others.

🎥 Reading Talk's

📈 Rising Quickly - Week of November 21, 2022

Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday

All great leaders, thinkers, artists, athletes, and visionaries share one indelible quality. It enables them to conquer their tempers. To avoid distraction and discover great insights. To achieve happiness and do the right thing. Ryan Holiday calls it stillness--to be steady while the world spins around you.

In this book, he outlines a path for achieving this ancient, but urgently necessary way of living. Drawing on a wide range of history's greatest thinkers, from Confucius to Seneca, Marcus Aurelius to Thich Nhat Hanh, John Stuart Mill to Nietzsche, he argues that stillness is not mere inactivity, but the doorway to self-mastery, discipline, and focus.

Holiday also examines figures who exemplified the power of stillness: baseball player Sadaharu Oh, whose study of Zen made him the greatest home run hitter of all time; Winston Churchill, who in balancing his busy public life with time spent laying bricks and painting at his Chartwell estate managed to save the world from annihilation in the process; Fred Rogers, who taught generations of children to see what was invisible to the eye; Anne Frank, whose journaling and love of nature guided her through unimaginable adversity.

More than ever, people are overwhelmed. They face obstacles and egos and competition. Stillness Is the Key offers a simple but inspiring antidote to the stress of 24/7 news and social media. The stillness that we all seek is the path to meaning, contentment, and excellence in a world that needs more of it than ever.

🪄 Most Talked About Fiction - Week of November 21, 2022

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

Raised by Martians on Mars, Valentine Michael Smith is a human who has never seen another member of his species. Sent to Earth, he is a stranger who must learn what it is to be a man. But his own beliefs and his powers far exceed the limits of humankind, and as he teaches them about grokking and water-sharing, he also inspires a transformation that will alter Earth’s inhabitants forever...

⭐️ A message from Leader's Lens

Modern HR is an absolute dumpster fire.

HR professionals are expected to be the recruiter, the onboarding specialist, the mediator, the resident COVID expert, the Chief Culture Officer, and the CEO’s personal sounding board.

At the same time, the workplace is undergoing a monumental shift. With the so-called “future of work” comes the insane responsibility of rethinking the way that company culture is built.

I Hate It Here is a weekly safe space (newsletter) helping HR professionals navigate that shift

Every company is a loosely-functioning disaster, but yours doesn’t have to be.

Subscribe to I Hate It Here today.

📚 Most Talked About Non-Fiction - Week of November 21, 2022

Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story by Bono

“When I started to write this book, I was hoping to draw in detail what I’d previously only sketched in songs. The people, places, and possibilities in my life. Surrender is a word freighted with meaning for me. Growing up in Ireland in the seventies with my fists up (musically speaking), it was not a natural concept. A word I only circled until I gathered my thoughts for the book. I am still grappling with this most humbling of commands. In the band, in my marriage, in my faith, in my life as an activist. Surrender is the story of one pilgrim’s lack of progress ... With a fair amount of fun along the way.” —Bono

As one of the music world’s most iconic artists and the cofounder of the organizations ONE and (RED), Bono’s career has been written about extensively. But in Surrender, it’s Bono who picks up the pen, writing for the first time about his remarkable life and those he has shared it with. In his unique voice, Bono takes us from his early days growing up in Dublin, including the sudden loss of his mother when he was fourteen, to U2’s unlikely journey to become one of the world’s most influential rock bands, to his more than twenty years of activism dedicated to the fight against AIDS and extreme poverty. Writing with candor, self-reflection, and humor, Bono opens the aperture on his life—and the family, friends, and faith that have sustained, challenged, and shaped him.

🆕 New and Noteworthy

Power Failure by William D. Cohan

No company embodied American ingenuity, innovation, and industrial power more spectacularly and more consistently than the General Electric Company. GE once developed and manufactured many of the inventions we take for granted today, nearly everything from the lightbulb to the jet engine. GE also built a cult of financial and leadership success envied across the globe and became the world’s most valuable and most admired company. But even at the height of its prestige and influence, cracks were forming in its formidable foundation.

In a masterful re-appraisal of a company that once claimed to “bring good things to life,” pre-eminent financial journalist William D. Cohan argues that the incredible story of GE’s rise and fall is not only a paragon, but also a prism through which we can better understand American capitalism. Beginning with its founding, innovations, and exponential growth through acquisitions and mergers, Cohan plumbs the depths of GE's storied management culture, its pioneering doctrine of shareholder value, and its seemingly hidden blind spots, to reveal that GE wasn't immune from the hubris and avoidable mistakes suffered by many other corporations.

In Power Failure, Cohan punctures the myth of GE, exploring in a rich narrative how a once-great company wound up broken and in tatters—a cautionary tale for the ages.

👀 In Case You Missed It

✍️ Quote of the Week

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