For cozy nights in, leverage your reading lineup with career-boosting reads.
During the colder months, spending more time indoors and retreating into cozier activities at home can pave the way for all sorts of leisure activities—baking, crafting, reading, and so on.
In the evening, you might delight in a book to unwind and destress. You may even enjoy waking up to a good read. Or, if you’re like me, you turn to a historical fiction novel during your lunch break to regain energy in the middle of the workday. If you delight in New Year’s resolutions, perhaps you even set a reading goal.
Whether or not you’ve already planned out a set of reads in your favorite genre to enjoy this winter season, making a little room for a few career-related recommendations could have plenty of positive effects. It could increase your motivation when you feel the winter blues coming on at work, reinforce the skills you’ve been working on, and help you crystallize professional goals for the new year.
Check out these recommendations to add to your lineup:
01. Atomic Habits // James Clear
About: In my workplace, Atomic Habits is on the short list of titles that get tossed around frequently. Clear is magnificent at making his points directly and succinctly with no extra fluff. His insights about habit formation, behavior change, and incremental progress are easy to digest and his tactics simple to implement.
Apply: Use Clear’s science-based framework to help you ditch bad habits at work, adopt new ones that fuel your growth, and overcome a lack of willpower. If you struggle with changing your habits, you need to recreate the system you have in place—and Clear gives you the tools to do so.
Sneak peek: “If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection. You don’t need to map out every feature of a new habit. You just need to practice it. This is the first takeaway of the 3rd Law: you just need to get your reps in.”
02. How Women Rise: Break the 12 Habits Holding You Back from Your Next Raise, Promotion, or Job // Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith
About: Building on Goldsmith’s bestseller What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, this book narrows in on the common habits that hold women back from advancing in the workplace. The authors found that women tend to encounter different stumbling blocks than men do and sought to outline the internal obstacles that women can control on their path to success.
Apply: This how-to book serves to aid you in identifying behaviors that you may have once thought admirable, but which may actually be damaging to your rise up the professional ladder. Learn practical tools and find out how you can gain confidence to make your career vision a reality.
Sneak peek: “Even at the highest levels, overconfidence is rarely a major female failing. Our experience suggests that there is a different set of core beliefs that often operate for women. These beliefs lie at the heart of their resistance, providing a rationale for behaviors that keep women stuck.”
03. David and Goliath (Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants) // Malcolm Gladwell
About: Malcom Gladwell turns the famous biblical account of the battle between David and Goliath on its head, uncovering what he thinks really happened in the tale. He weaves in powerful real-life stories to prove his central claim: our assumptions about advantage and power are often incorrect, and underdogs triumph much more often than we think.
Apply: This book will challenge your assumptions about what it takes to win and succeed in life, sports, and business. What we consider to be benefits can actually turn out to be weaknesses, and what we often call disadvantages can yield great outcomes. In a professional context, this book can give you a new perspective by reframing how you might reach your career goals and which skills you actually need to do so.
Sneak peek: “The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem. David came running toward Goliath, powered by courage and faith. Goliath was blind to his approach—and then he was down, too big and slow and blurry-eyed to comprehend the way the tables had been turned.”
04. Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World // Adam Grant
About: What are the characteristics of original thinkers, who not only succeed, but who defy convention to bring forward new and revolutionary ideas and practices? Grant dives into this question by digging into a wealth of research studies and real-world examples.
Apply: Explore new takes on procrastination (is it innately detrimental?), groupthink, and the first-mover advantage. Whether you’re rallying support for new ideas among your team, attempting to build a strong company culture, or reevaluating your creative process, this book will spark novel approaches and ways of thinking.
Sneak peek: “When achievement motivation goes sky-high, it can crowd out originality: the more you value achievement, the more you come to dread failure. Instead of aiming for unique accomplishments, the intense desire to succeed leads us to strive for guaranteed success.”
05. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance // Angela Duckworth
About: From sales professionals to West Point cadets to public school students, Duckworth has conducted a plethora of research studies among various groups into the determinants of success. Over and over again, she found that grit (“a combination of passion and perseverance”) was a reliable predictor of achievement. In her book, she also discusses strategies for cultivating grit.
Apply: In the book, you can answer a ten-question survey, called a Grit Scale, that measures your level of grittiness. This can be a valuable tool for self-reflection to see where you’re starting from. You can then put into action Duckworth’s advice for growing grit, which can be applied to all types of goals, both personal and professional.
Sneak peek: “In sum, no matter the domain, the highly successful had a kind of ferocious determination that played out in two ways. First, these exemplars were unusually resilient and hardworking. Second, they knew in a very, very deep way what it was they wanted. They not only had determination, they had direction.”
06. Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most // Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen
About: This New York Times Business Bestseller, originally published in 1999, has been a life-changing book for me with actionable ideas and tips that hold true to this day. Affiliated with the Harvard Negotiation Project, the authors offer numerous case studies and a step-by-step guide to tackling difficult conversations in a clear, balanced, and productive way.
Apply: From receiving criticism, negotiating your salary, or discussing problems with your supervisor, to managing conflict with team members, this read has applicable insight. The authors will give you the information you need to understand the hidden structure of conversations and how to approach them with a “learning stance” as opposed to a “message delivery stance.”
Sneak peek: “The point is this: difficult conversations are almost never about getting the facts right. They are about conflicting perceptions, interpretations, and values. They are not about what a contract states, they are about what a contract means . . . They are not about what is true, they are about what is important.”
