2024 A Year in Books
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
Talking to Strangers
Can’t Even: How Millenials Became the Burnout Generation
Dying of Whiteness
Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm
Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life
Man's Search for Meaning
The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
Thinking Fast and Slow
NLP: The Essential Guide
Spirituality for Leadership and Success
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times Talking to Strangers Can’t Even: How Millenials Became the Burnout Generation Dying of Whiteness Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life Man's Search for Meaning The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness Thinking Fast and Slow NLP: The Essential Guide Spirituality for Leadership and Success
Reflecting on the books I’ve read in 2024 feels like revisiting conversations with wise mentors, disruptive thinkers, and compassionate guides. Each title has shaped my perspective on topics ranging from rest and resilience to leadership, social justice, spirituality, and behavioral insights. As an innovation strategist, I’m drawn to ideas that challenge the status quo and illuminate ways to create meaningful impact. This year’s reading list has not only informed my professional approach, but also enriched my personal growth. In this blog, I’ll share my key takeaways from some of the most thought-provoking books that I encountered this year—each offering lessons for navigating an ever-evolving world with purpose and creativity.
Spirituality for Leadership and Success
Earlier this year a member of our team gave me an incredible book as a gift: Buddha: Spirituality for Leadership and Success and I cannot tell you what a gem this book was. Not just accessible and a quick read, but I think I underlined almost every other sentence. I wish I could share all my favorite gems, but there were too many so here are the three that most spoke to me:
The cultivation of intuitive wisdom where emotions and thoughts are calm, and the higher virtues of empathy and write mindfulness are awakened is the duty of every responsible leader
Wisdom is knowing the inner truth of people
Leaders often get entangled in anxious thoughts, but the way of clarity requires a remembrance of your essential being - the understanding that you are not your thoughts, you are not the biophysical mind and body. Once that realization is established in you, your energy becomes hugely empowered to perceive things as they truly are and not the way your thoughts are suggesting.
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
When my father passed, a friend recommended Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May. The book discusses the transformative power of slowing down, embracing periods of difficulty, and finding strength in rest. The author uses personal experiences and seasonal metaphors to explore the idea of "wintering", giving ourselves permission to retreat and to revel in slowness. If this sounds like a season you're in or approaching, it helped me to curl up in the increasingly cold and dark evenings and snuggle into a story of retreat and rest.
I absolutely cannot recommend this book enough! I picked up Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell on a whim flying back from Canada, and all but finished it on the flights. Here are my takeaways as a behavioral designer:
Trust as a Design Default - People are wired to "default to trust," which supports social cohesion but leaves them open to misjudgment or manipulation. Recognizing this bias helps us design environments that balance trust with safeguards for when that trust is misplaced.
Behavior in Context - Behavioral outcomes are highly context-dependent. Gladwell emphasizes that understanding people requires understanding the environments they’re navigating—a crucial reminder that design solutions must account for situational factors influencing decisions and actions.
The Transparency Trap - As behavioral designers, we recognize the flaw in assuming people’s behavior reflects their intentions or emotions. Gladwell shows how this “transparency trap” can lead us to design interventions based on false assumptions about how people act and react.
Can’t Even: How Millenials Became the Burnout Generation
Can’t Even: How Millenials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen felt like reading my own biography. Here are some key takeaways:
The rhetoric of “Do what you love, and you’ll never work another day in your life” is a burnout trap. By cloaking labor in the language of passion, we fail to see it for what it is: a job.
Pursuing passion can slip into overwork. If you love your job, it’s easy to feel compelled to do it all the time.
When all hours can theoretically be converted into work, the hours not spent working feel like lost opportunities.
Many feel pressured to turn hobbies into monetizable hustles, eroding the joy they bring.
If any of this resonates with you, it’s worth picking up this book. It’s an eye-opener on the societal factors driving millennial burnout and overwork culture.
Jonathan M. Metzl’s Dying of Whiteness takes a data-driven look at why working-class white Americans often risk their futures to defend conservative ideologies. By examining education, gun ownership, and healthcare policy data, Metzl explores the paradox of voting against one’s best interests to maintain social hierarchies.
This quote encapsulates the book:
"It’s a narrative about how ‘whiteness’ becomes a formation worth lying and dying for... Dying of Whiteness asks us to consider what white Americans give up when they invest so heavily in remaining at the top of social hierarchies or, more often, in defending a notion of status or privilege that appears under attack."
From a behavioral economics standpoint, the book challenges us to question what drives people to act against their logical self-interest. What might American politics look like if white humility was seen not as a sell-out or a capitulation but as an honest effort to address seemingly intractable social issues?
Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm by Robin Diagelo
If you're a white person looking for somewhere to start your journey into understanding your role in racism in America, I just finished and recommend "Nice Racism" by Robin Diangelo.
One of the ways that we white folks continue to perpetuate racism is that we think racism is overt, calling someone a terrible name or threatening violence. However, Dianglo explores all the ways in which we perpetuate racial harm, even those who identify as progressive. Here are some examples Diangelo provides of the subtle ways we contribute to an overall racist experience for Black, Indigenous, and Persons of Color (BIPOC) which really resonated with me personally:
Expecting BIPOC individuals to take on work related to race.
Only naming the race of non-white people when telling a story.
Bringing up unrelated racial topics when speaking to BIPOC individuals.
Making a point of mentioning personal relationships with BIPOC individuals as evidence of being “not racist.”
This book provides an important mirror for reflection, encouraging readers to address how well-meaning actions can still contribute to systemic racism.
Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life
The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life is a great book for a pool read. I was surprised to find how short and simple the book was. I finished it in about two hours, so it's definitely worth adding to your list!
The book looks at the areas of Japan which have the highest number of centenarians, and even supercentenarians, and it explores the variables that are different for these communities - primarily that they have "ikigai" where your passions, skills, earning potential and the needs of the world intersect giving each day meaning.
This concept also explains why many Japanese people never truly retire; there isn't even a word in Japanese that conveys the concept of “retirement” as it does in English which I thought was fascinating. Instead, people stay active well into their 100s, visiting family and friends daily, dancing, celebrating, gardening, and moving every single day.
"The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs"
Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning is a book everyone should read. Frankl was an Austrian neurologist, psychologist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor and the best-selling book is based on his experiences in various Nazi concentration camps. This was my other favorite quote:
"The more one forgets himself - by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love - the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself."
What I found compelling about this book is the authors, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, explore how younger generations, on college campuses specifically, are moving AWAY from the "antifragility" of older generations - antifragility meaning how individuals can improve and thrive when faced with stressors, shocks, or other challenges.
The authors argue that we've raised (for a number of reasons) an anxious, depressed generation in Gen Z who feel they need to be protected from ideas, debates, and intellectual discourse which ultimately shape us into emotionally and cognitively mature, experienced adults. The book offers valuable insights for educators, leaders, and anyone invested in fostering resilience.
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
I spent a flight to Scotland completely enthralled in Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. Three things have stood out to me:
The book has named for the first time what I think many have noticed in the last decade but haven’t been able to really put a scientific explanation to… the social and behavioral nuances of Gen Z, the first generation that grew up with smartphones.
As an Innovator and a designer, I’m both fascinated and repelled by our ability to design addictive technology. Where is our responsibility when it comes to designing products that are addictive? What is our moral obligation when designing an addictive product you know will be consumed by children?
As leaders and people managers, how do we cultivate empathy for the generations raised on technology? Generations that are anxious and scared to interact with others in the real world as they grew up without the social practice, the learnings, and the mistakes that older generations encountered in the real world and which shaped our skills in negotiation and cooperation.
Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow is a cornerstone of behavioral economics. Here are some of my favorite insights related to optimism and entrepreneurship:
Optimistic individuals play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. They are the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the political, and the military leaders - not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks. They are talented, and they have been lucky; almost certainly luckier than they acknowledge. They are probably optimistic by temperament; a survey of founders of small businesses concluded that entrepreneurs are more sanguine than mid-level managers about life in general. Their experiences of success have confirmed their faith in their judgment, and in their ability to control events. Their self-confidence is also reinforced by their admiration of others.
This reasoning leads to a hypothesis: the people who have the greatest influence on the lives of others are likely to be optimistic and overconfident and take more risks than they realize. More often than not, risk takers underestimate the odds they face, and invest sufficient effort to find out what the odds are. Because they misread the risk, optimistic entrepreneurs often believe they are prudent, even when they are not. Their confidence in their future success sustains a positive mood that helps them obtain resources from others, raise the morale of their employees, and enhance their prospects of prevailing. When action is needed optimism, even of the mildly delusional variant, may be a good thing.
I found The Essential Guide by Tom Hoobyar and Tom Dotz to be very digestible and interactive. As a human-centered design practitioner, I'm deeply interested in the psychological and behavior change aspects of launching new ideas and NLP frequently hits my radar as an approach worth exploring.
While it does overlap significantly with cognitive behavioral therapy, and well-documented mindfulness and self-help techniques, I will always appreciate learning that examines how and why we act and behave as we do. If you're well-read in the above categories, it may not be groundbreaking, but ultimately, I always see the value in pausing and making time for introspection.