Book Summaries Archives - Page 19 of 19

Best Book Summary + PDF: Drive, by Daniel Pink

Are you feeling unmotivated in your job and life? Are you finding your current goals unsatisfying to work toward?

Drive, by Daniel Pink, believes that your work structure is to blame. Historically, employers have motivated employees through financial rewards and kept workers on a tight leash. These principles worked well when people were primarily working in assembly lines, but today’s creative work demands more: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

In this Drive summary, you’ll learn:

Why financial rewards can lower your motivation and tempt cheating
How every human, including you, is motivated by autonomy, mastery, and purpose
Why some companies give unlimited vacation days and pay you to work on personal projects
Why paying people to donate blood actually reduces donation rate
How to convince your boss to adopt changes and give you more freedom

Best Summary + PDF | Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work

Want to motivate your employees and teammates to do a better job? Does your team seem unhappy, unmotivated, and distrustful of your organization?

In Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work, Paul Marciano argues that engagement stems from respect. Employees don’t want to be treated like cogs in a chain. Instead, they want to feel empowered, have autonomy, receive supportive feedback, and be treated considerately. Breaking any of these makes teammates feel disrespected, which causes motivation to plummet.

In this Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work summary, you’ll learn:

the major non-monetary components of what employees want
how to diagnose whether you’re a great or terrible manager
simple actions you can take today to engage your team

Best Summary + PDF: Give and Take, by Adam Grant

Are you a giver, a matcher, or a taker?

People fit into one of three reciprocity styles. Givers like to give more than they get, paying attention to what others need. Takers like to get more than they give, seeing the world as a competitive place and primarily looking out for themselves. And matchers balance and give on a quid pro quo basis, willing to exchange favors but careful about not being exploited.

Of these 3 styles, which do you think tends to be the most successful? When surveyed, most people believe the takers and matchers come out on top. Givers just seem too altruistic to push themselves ahead.

In Give and Take, Wharton professor Adam Grant argues that givers are actually the most successful of the 3 types. Givers build larger, more supportive networks; they inspire the most creativity from their colleagues; and they achieve the most successful negotiations. Givers find ways to grow the pie and take their share of it.

And yet givers also risk becoming spineless doormats. You may know of a pushover who gives in to every demand, at cost to his or her own well-being. There are strong strategies to protect against this.

In this Give and Take summary, you’ll learn why givers are so successful, why takers are punished by society for bad behavior, and how givers can avoid pitfalls that drag them down.

Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger | Book Summary and PDF

Charlie Munger is Warren Buffett’s long-time partner at Berkshire Hathaway. Bill Gates says that Charlie “is truly the broadest thinker I have ever encountered.”

Poor Charlie’s Almanack is a collection of Charlie Munger’s best advice given over 30 years, in the form of 11 speeches given as commencement addresses and roundtable talks. In all his talks, he shows wit, rationality, and incredible clarity of thought.

In this summary of Poor Charlie’s Almanack, I’ve extracted the most important points and organized them by topic. You’ll learn why Charlie considers multidisciplinary learning vital to success, his checklist when making investments, and how to build a trillion dollar company from scratch.

Best Summary + PDF: How Not to Die, by Michael Greger

Picture the end of your life. Do you want to die from heart disease? Cancer? Diabetes?

I certainly don’t. In How Not to Die, Michael Greger argues that a plant-based, whole-food diet has been scientifically shown to reduce the most common diseases leading to death.

Citing thousands of references from scientific literature, Greger covers the top 15 causes of death (from heart disease to Parkinson’s) and describes how diet can reduce each cause of death. He then gives his recommendation for “The Daily Dozen” foods to eat to maximize health benefits.

In this summary of How Not to Die, I’ll start with the main points of the book, as well as my major criticisms. Then we’ll work chapter by chapter, disease by disease, and end with his top daily diet recommendations.