For those of you looking for stocking stuffers for Christmas this year, I wanted to recommend my favorite books of the year. (all links are Amazon affiliate links)
- Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging We have a strong instinct to belong to small groups defined by clear purpose and understanding–“tribes.” This tribal connection has been largely lost in modern society, but regaining it may be the key to our psychological survival.
- From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. Many of us assume that the more successful we are, the less susceptible we become to the sense of professional and social irrelevance that often accompanies aging. But the truth is, the greater our achievements and our attachment to them, the more we notice our decline, and the more painful it is when it occurs. What can we do, starting now, to make our older years a time of happiness, purpose, and yes, success?
- The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World – A deeply reflective primer on creating meaningful connections, rebuilding abundant communities, and living in a way that engages our full humanity in an age of unprecedented anxiety and loneliness—from the author of The Tech-Wise Family
- Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships – This was excellent – best read of the quarter by far…Robin Dunbar is the world-renowned psychologist and author who famously discovered Dunbar’s number: how our capacity for friendship is limited to around 150 people. In Friends, he looks at friendship in the round, at the way different types of friendship and family relationships intersect, or at the complex of psychological and behavioural mechanisms that underpin friendships and make them possible – and just how complicated the business of making and keeping friends actually is.
- The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization by Peter Zeihan. Author and geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan maps out the next world: a world where countries or regions will have no choice but to make their own goods, grow their own food, secure their own energy, fight their own battles, and do it all with populations that are both shrinking and aging.
- Quit by Annie Duke. Business leaders, with millions of dollars down the drain, struggle to abandon a new app or product that just isn’t working. Governments, caught in a hopeless conflict, believe that the next tactic will finally be the one that wins the war. And in our own lives, we persist in relationships or careers that no longer serve us. Why? According to Annie Duke, in the face of tough decisions, we’re terrible quitters. And that is significantly holding us back.