My Reading Stack
A few years ago, I stumbled upon the terms ‘training stack” and “work-out stack”. The stacks are a combination of supplements that can boost performance at the gym. Another twist on the same theme is a weight-loss stack (a couple of examples are given in Tim Ferris’s book the 4hr body).
I was using a personal trainer at the time, and I enquired as to whether I should start using a stack of supplements to improve my performance. My trainer laughed at the suggestion. For a training stack to be effective you need to have optimized diet and training. I was still attempting (and failing) to prove it was possible to out-train a bad diet. As my wise, 23-year-old trainer, at sub-10% body fat with symmetrical six-pack explained: I would be wasting my money because I didn’t have the foundation for the additional marginal gains that supplements can offer.
Fast-forward to mid-2020 and the depths of the Pandemic. Whilst working from home I began to fill gaps in my schedule by reading more than usual. In one wonderful spell I read 5 books back-to-back and I realized that not only were they individually very good, but they complimented each other. My “reading stack” was complete and I started recommending it to fellow colleagues and anyone who would listen.
Before I get into the details, let’s manage expectations. This reading stack will not teach you how to do your job or how to work with others. If you feel like you haven’t yet grasped the basics of these skills, then like a training stack, the reading stack will not be very effective. It cannot enhance what is not there. Unlike a training stack, you don’t need to have fully-exhausted your natural capabilities in these areas for these books to have a positive impact. In fact, they possibly resonate differently depending on your experience and where you are in your career. This allows for the possibility that the information may loiter in your sub-conscious ready to be better understood at some point in the future.
I have listed the five books below with a brief description and the benefits. I will dedicate future blog posts to a detailed review of each of them. I have also offered two bonus books that don’t make it into the stack for reasons that I explain later.
The first book you may already own as it is an Amazon best-seller. Atomic Habits by James Clear is a simple breakdown of the power of habit in our everyday life and how to make it work for us. Habits can either be positive or negative, by which I mean they either take you towards your aspirations or they move you away from them. In this book the author shows you how to adopt positive actions and make them habits and how to break habits that aren’t helpful. The approach leverages common sense and creates an easy checklist framework that is constructed and reinforced through the chapters.
The second book is Indistractable by Nir Eyal. Eyal’s first book was called Hooked, and it showed how products could make themself additive through good design. This second book is the self-help book we need to wrestle time back from addictive devices and take back control over our day. Eyal redefines the meaning of being productive away from output. If you block out an hour of your day for a specific task and enable yourself to focus on that task without distraction, then you have been productive. All the support and tools necessary to achieve this magical Zen state are contained in the book. In the week after finishing the book my iPhone screen time fell 87%. Unfortunately, it has since crept back up, so perhaps it’s time I took a refresher. But if you connect the suggested approaches contained in this book to positive habit-formation described in the first book then the combination becomes more powerful.
The third book is the Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson. The title of this book is a little mis-leading (but great marketing). It is not a nihilist treaty on not caring, but rather encourages the reader to be more deliberate on what they choose to find important in life. It shows how to separate good values from bad values. It makes the point that our problems are never-ending and that as soon as you solve for one you create more. The secret to happiness is to upgrade your problems to ones you want to solve. If you find yourself stressed and preoccupied by events and feel that you are losing sight of what is important, this book can help. As mentioned above, I read this during the pandemic, and the messaging was exactly what I needed during this time. Hopefully you can also see the complimentary power of choosing to focus on real problems (this book), clearing distractions from social media (book 2) and harnessing the power of habit (book 1) to your personal effectiveness.
The first three books can be classified as improvements to the way we think and the power of the mind. The next two books are related to physical health. Book four is Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. Vague advice about the importance of sleep is as ubiquitous as advice about drinking plenty of water. How much sleep do we need and what do we lose if we don’t get enough sleep is less well understood and I don’t think I was the only one in the dark (pun intended). This book is fascinating and breaks down the latest knowledge on the different types of sleep and what benefits it offers you. There is much more to it than simply not feeling tired. What happens during your sleeping hours has an out-sized impact on what you can do during your waking hours. Sleep and dreams also help us make sense of the events during the day. This book is part of the stack because it builds on our effectiveness to solve problems (book 3). Book 2 encourages us to schedule appropriate time for sleep and given it is a daily requirement it is worth adopting habits that promote sleep and avoiding those that interrupt sleep (book 1).
The fifth and final book in the stack is Breath by James Nestor. At this point some may be questioning why I am placing a book on breathing on this list. Breathing is after all an autonomic bodily function (i.e. it happens without us needing to think about it). Aside from the power of specific breathing patterns to lower levels of stress, there is also evidence that many people aren’t breathing correctly at all. Breathing through your nose is known to have substantial health benefits over breathing through your mouth. One example is that nasal breathing releases nitric oxide which helps widen blood vessels that in turn improve oxygen circulation. This book encouraged me to have an operation to correct a severely deviated septum in December 2022. Breath is the fifth book in the stack because being able to breathe properly has helped improve my sleep considerably. This in turn has increased my energy levels and general feeling of well-being.
The book stack is aimed at improving mental and physical health to enable you to be at your most effective. There are two very obvious areas that are omitted from this list: diet and fitness. I omitted these because no single book on diet or exercise could apply universally to everyone. Diet books have a justifiably bad reputation for pushing unsustainable eating behaviors with questionable long-term benefits. Exercise is a personal choice and depends on current health, appetite for risk and available facilities. But I don’t want to leave you empty-handed, and I offer up two suggestions that are more interesting than prescriptive. If anything, they may confirm or challenge your current thoughts and that may spark a curiosity that leads you to something that works for your body.
For diet I suggest In Defence of Food by Michael Pollan. Many diets divide food into good food and bad food when really no such distinction in nature exists. This book separates out food from non-food and encourages the reader to understand what they are putting in their body as fuel.
For exercise I am recommending Born to Run by Christopher McDougall which helped elevate the barefoot running movement. The book describes incredible feats of endurance by the Tarahumara of Mexico and their perfect running form. I am hopeful that by suggesting a book on extreme long-distance running you will understand that I am not arguing that anyone should take up running. It also well-understood that humans were not designed to sit all day facing computer screens or hunched over smartphones. Movement is good and the choice of movement is yours.
That’s my reading stack. My bookshelves are littered with personal development and management books that failed to grab my interest. Some string out a simple idea over too many pages. Others pretend that one solution is good in all circumstances. There are also hagiographic biographies of leaders and companies with lessons that are difficult to adapt or implement. These books avoid that trap and contain information that is beneficial to most people and are not limited to the work environment. Are there any books you would recommend? Any areas that you feel strongly I have missed? Let me know in the comments section on Substack or Linkedin.
Next week I am returning to the idea of success that I mentioned in my introductory post. I will argue against the myth that you are only truly successful if you start your own business.