How much would you pay for your kid to read your favorite books?

Yeah - sorry, I'm already into my clickbait period...

One of the things I’ve been doing without a job is reading stuff. While I’m sure it’s incomplete, I've put together a list of some of the things I’ve read or reread in the last year (at the end of this article). If you’ve been curious about any of them and would like a mini-summary/review just let me know.

Another thing I’ve been doing is hanging out with my 11-year old daughter a lot more than I’d probably have done if I had more commitments. That’s intentional, as one of the reasons for the timing of my “sabbatical” was a prediction that in another few years the odds of her wanting to hang out (or even talk) would be exponentially lower. During our time together we’ve read a bunch of books together that aren’t on the list below. In semi-related news it’s surprising how many books appear in the genre of “CIA or MI-6 form a team of middle school spies.”

As a parent I think we’re all trying to give advice that’s both valuable and heeded when it’s most useful. I’ve wondered from time to time about if any of the books I’ve been reading would have been more useful to her than to me - given the length of time she hopefully has to apply it over her lifetime. I’ve dabbled with sharing some “business” books with her before. For example, at 7 or so there was a period where she was running around explaining how she thought one could apply the WRAP framework from Decisive to various (7 year old’s) problems. But overall that was a rare, successful outcome. The vast majority of the times I try to share something from a book I’m met with the look that means “I thought you could never be more cringe, but clearly I was wrong…”

Last year I ran across a clickbaity headline that caught my eye - “I paid my child $100 to read a book.” I understand it stirred up a decent amount of (expected) controversy. But recently it spawned a thought experiment for me. What are 5 books you’d pay your kid $500 to read? For me this was in the context of things I’d read professionally that I wish someone had made me read before I graduated from high school. But the question could mean different things to anyone. And no, I don’t especially want to debate if bribing your kid to read N book is a good idea or not.

Sitting down to think about it this is what I came up with as a first pass, based on my own interests, and biased towards personal weaknesses - in no particular order

• Start With No

• The Goal

• Decisive

• Difficult Conversations

• Thinking, Fast and Slow

And if I had some extra cash to spare perhaps

• Mindset

• Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know

• Goldratt’s Rules of Flow

Curious if this question resonates with others? But more importantly - what books would you add to my list?

To give a sense with what I was working with from a recency bias perspective - Here’s a subset of what I read-or reread in the past year. Not counting a bazillion random articles or generalized doomscrolling. Roughly ordered from most recent to read earlier.

• Anatomy of a Breakthrough

• Reset

• Rapport

• Lead from No

• Order out of Chaos

• Quit

• The Unaccountability Machine

• Decisive

• The Sense of the Enemy

• On the Edge [Didn’t finish]

• Mindset

• Accelerate: building and scaling high performance teams

• Gangsters va Nazis

• Making Work Visible: exposing time theft to optimize work and flow

• The complete tales of Winnie the Pooh

• Start with No

• Necessary but not Sufficient

• Stop decorating the Fish

• The Voltage Effect

• Antifragile

• The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America

• Humble Inquiry

• Glock

• Poor Charlie’s Almanac

• Verbal Judo

• The Goal

• Goldratt’s Rules of Flow

• Principles

• Originals

• Never Split the Difference

• Hidden Potential

• With Winning in Mind

• Brilliant Mistakes

• The Safety Anarchist