Recommended Financial Books 2019
If you are seeking interesting books for the holiday season, consider the following options that have stuck with me throughout the year. If you want a deeper dive, you can listen to the interviews I conducted with each of them on my podcast, Jill on Money.
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World - Cal Newport
If you have tried to turn off notifications or limit your email check-ins to a set period of each day, you may have felt like those actions don't go far enough to take back control of your technological life. Newport’s book helped me discover a more thoughtful and purposeful method to decide what tools to use, for what purposes, and under what conditions. I don’t always succeed in detaching, but at least I now have a process.
When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing - Daniel H. Pink
Drawing on a rich trove of research from psychology, biology, and economics, Pink shows us how to use the hidden patterns of the day to build the ideal schedule. He also tackles larger issues, like the ideal time to quit a job, switch careers, or get married. Pink’s practical takeaways provide compelling insights into how we can live richer, more engaged lives.
What It Takes: How I Built a $100 Million Business Against the Odds - Raegan Moya-Jones
This is a tell-all and brutally honest tale that offers advice to entrepreneurs, especially women, about how to succeed despite all odds. Moya-Jones doesn’t hide from her own shortcomings and digs into topics most entrepreneurs shy away from, even the prickliest of things like parental guilt, butting heads with investors (or co-founders), what to really do when you’re running out of money, and how to leave with your head held high.
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World - David Epstein
In an examination of the world’s most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters and scientists, Epstein discovered that in most fields, especially those that are complex and unpredictable, generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. Epstein argues that people who think broadly and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives will increasingly thrive.
The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society - Binyamin Appelbaum
As obituaries and words of remembrance flow after revered economist and Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker’s death, I thought about this engaging journey through modern economic history. Applebaum traces the rise of economists from 1969 and 2008, who wholeheartedly believed in the power and the glory of free markets. Their policies transformed global governments and businesses, though in the end, have failed to deliver on their promise of broad prosperity. He notes that in the United States, growth has slowed in every successive decade since the 1960s.
Don’t Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles-and All of Us - Rana Foroohar
It’s been a long time since technology companies have lived up to the founding philosophy “don’t be evil,” espoused by Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Faroohar notes that the tech utopia imagined by many of these young entrepreneurs has become more dystopian than ever. She focuses on dominant companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, who have essentially figured out how to monetize both our data and our attention, sidestepping out of date regulations along the way. The once-lauded scrappy garage-based innovators have morphed into surveillance capitalists who now have the power to gobble up their competition, eschew responsibility for the content that sits on their platforms, and even swing elections. It’s a dark view, but Faroohar also provides fixes to the current state of play.