Trevor Amicone: The Best Books I read in 2020
Both fortunately and unfortunately, 2020 involved a lot of reading for a lot of us. I was lucky enough to read some perspective-altering books this year. Here is a list of the best books I read in 2020.
- The Science of Storytelling. This book quickly became a top 3 book for me. I have never thought of myself as a storyteller, but it turns out that we are all storytellers. Or at least our brains are.
If you don’t know how your brain is telling you stories, you need to. Your brain is constantly: (1) seeking to make meaning of what is happening to you, (2) seeking to control what is happening to you, (3) making simplified models of the world, and (4) making connections with other people and between events.
Understanding how you are unconsciously telling stories to yourself is crucial. There is no real way to control the world, but that won’t stop your brain from trying to do it. Understanding how your brain goes about this effort, is vital if you want to stay out of your own way. Likewise, if you don’t understand how your brain is simplifying your mental models of the world, you are doomed to be fooled or let down by them.
The Science of Storytelling unravels how we have evolved to do this both productively and unproductively. It’s a must read and the book that most impacted my worldview in 2020.
2. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. There are books that we like because they fundamentally change the way you look at the world and books that we like because they confirm our ways of thinking. This classic did a little bit of both. It somehow goes overlooked in the business and leadership world, but it shouldn’t.
This book intimidated me for a long time. I wish it hadn’t. This was a book that felt like a confirmation of a lot of truths I have worked off of for a long time without being able to articulate.
The Fifth Discipline illustrates (literally in a lot of cases) how thinking in systems can make your organization more perceptive to the environment it is in and to the adaptations that need to be made.
The five disciplines outlined in the book are: (1) the striving for personal mastery, (2) the ability to unearth and work with mental models, (3) establishing a shared vision, (4) creating team learning, and (5) the ability to think in systems.
Although many of those disciplines have become widely written about, this book cuts through the surface-level buzzword-style language that has popularized these topics.
Author Peter Senge reframes leadership as design-based rather than management-oriented, demystifies what it takes to get from vision to the accomplishment of that vision, and dissolves the artificial wall between being a business and a learning institution.
The basic thesis of the book is that an organization doesn’t have to implement additional initiatives to become a learning organization. By establishing the right systems, you can fold learning into what you are already doing and make it a way of operating within your business.
3. The Advice Trap. Michael Bungay Stanier follows up The Coaching Habit with this book about delaying your addiction to giving advice, staying curious, and leading with humility.
As a coach, it is very applicable. But any parent, teacher, leader, or friend likely experiences what Stanier calls “the advice monster.”
Most of us know we need to be better listeners, but we don’t have the practical tools to help us delay intervening in solving people’s problems. The Advice Trap details a systematic approach to allowing people to emerge from their problems with more problem-solving ability and confidence.
Coaches and teachers often find themselves in this situation. A player or pupil comes to them with a problem. We think they expect us to solve it for them. Maybe they even do want us to solve it for them. But in doing so, we undermine their opportunity to grow from dealing with the problem.
Learning to “tame the advice monster” is helpful to anyone with any role in life and The Advice Trap outlines a system I’ve found very helpful in doing so.
Here’s to hoping that 2021 brings less time to read, but more good times reading.
