What are the best books for professional effectiveness?

With very few exceptions, I find contemporary self-improvement books the perfect example of the “this book could have been a blog post could have been a tweet could have been left unsaid” chain.

A core of truth, but terribly written. Zero imagination, neither wisdom nor joy. What they lack in depth they make up for with contrived examples.

While authors like Hesse, Kafka, Tolkien, Goethe, Dickens, Fry, and Wilde have given me so much more.

Sometimes it’s a sentence. Sometimes the mood of a chapter. Maybe a casual observation made by a side character or a short poem that carries the weight of many a novel.

Never directly relating to my work, but deep insights in to humanity transcend everything.

And if there’s nothing you find applicable, at least you’re left with beautiful language that is worth indulging in for its own sake.

(A euro-centric list, antiquated maybe. But timeless. Naturally, every period and culture has gifted us with comparable works.)

Some that others haven't mentioned:

How to take Smart Notes: https://takesmartnotes.com/

Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. Good for helping you to recognize how your mind is working, and to work with it to improve yourself.

How To Practice by The Dalai Lama. Again, understand your mind to improve your ability to deal with life. I suggest this and the previous book because you can't build a great house without a sturdy foundation.

Dune by Frank Herbert. There's some lessons in here about managing your mind and your reactions to stimuli or adverse situations. Yes, seriously I'm suggesting a fiction novel :)

Others if I think of them!

One book:

• “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie

Three lessons:

• Be professional. Do what you say you’re going to do. Don’t take anything personally.

• Commit to one thing at a time. Priorities always change. Decide what you need to do, do it, then decide what to do next.

• Never assume. If you’re unclear, stop and get clarity before continuing.

I'm going to say Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover.

Hear me out -- when you're debt-free in a modest paid-off house, you have so much extra "brain space" that used to be devoted to managing bills, worrying about layoffs or the next job, etc. Whereas if you're debt-free with low overhead, you can push back on management, be bolder in your current work, pay cash for continuing education, take interesting but not top-paid work, make mistakes and not stress about them, etc.

Getting Things Done by David Allen was very helpful to me. It's barely a book - if you skim over the cruft it's more like a pamphlet. I don't follow it religiously but some of his ideas have made a big difference in my productivity.

Some classics which have genuinely helped me quite a bit:

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen R. Covey

The Effective Executive - Peter Drucker (Peter Drucker coined the term "knowledge work")

Getting Things Done - David Allen

High Output Management - Andy Grove

If you have an entrepreneurial side:

The E Myth - Michael E. Gerber

The title is cheesy but I would second the recommendation of "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by one of the other commenters. As long as you don't take everything it says too literally and look for the wider principles it's teaching.

Another one in the "cheesy" category, he's old school, but I've found Brian Tracy's books and audiobooks to be incredibly motivating and useful for crafting a positive mindset around work.

Anything about leverage. Here are the ones I read that were helpful. The second two are engineering-specific, but Principles is domain agnostic.

* Principles: https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Life-Work-Ray-Dalio/dp/150...

* The Effective Engineer: https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Engineer-Engineering-Dispro...

* High Output Management: https://www.amazon.com/High-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove/d...

Work Clean: The life-changing power of mise-en-place to organize your life, work, and mind

Charnas, D. https://www.workclean.com/

yep, the happiness project: https://gretchenrubin.com/books/the-happiness-project/about-...

Hear me out :)

It teaches you to do a lot of little things that over time make a huge impact on your well being and the people around you. I loved this book and found a huge impact on my life year after year as little habits it teaches started to add up.

In the workforce it also helped me. I am already very empathetic, but it helped me do a lot of little things for my team and the people I manage to make their lives better.

Great book.

“The Machine that Changed the World” and “The Toyota Way” provided me with numerous insights into a number of activities, both professional and recreational. Some of the thinking may be out of vogue in management circles, but the case laid out by the authors is compelling in itself and provides a new lens through which to look at workflow.

"Learning how to learn" course (the corresponding book: "A mind for numbers ..."): evidenced based 101 on how to learn: the essence is ~12 points on what to do and the most important what not to do to learn something (100s references). https://barbaraoakley.com

You are learning almost all of the time on the "knowledge" job.

[Non-Violent Communication] has been the most impactful book for me over the past year...

I think since communication is vital to any professional setting, one of the best impact-per-point-of-improvement may at first come from better communication.

A great book that provides a framework for dealing with difficult conversations is Difficult Conversations, written by a team at Harvard that spent years on practicing and refining conflict-resolution.

https://www.amazon.com/Difficult-Conversations-Discuss-What-...

Thanks all for suggestions on this thread. I have another recommendation. As a designer, the book that helped me a lot is — The one minute manager [1]. It talks about setting one minute goals, one minute praises, and one minute redirects. As a person, who often has issues telling people to do things, I like the flowchart approach it takes.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/763362.The_One_Minute_Ma...

Atomic Habits - If you’ve ever had trouble making a good habit/routine stick, or making a bad habit stop, this book frames habits and their cause-effect relationships in a way I haven’t seen elsewhere, and in ways that I think about almost daily.

"you can negotiate anything" by Herb Cohen

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Can_Negotiate_Anything

Gerald Weinberg's Secrets of Consulting and Becoming a Technical Leader are worth a look, as is his The Psychology of Computer Programming.

Also Peopleware by Lister and DeMarco.

High Output Management by Andy Grove (Operations, people mgmt)

Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive by Harvey Mackay

Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jerry I. Porras and Jim Collins

The Tao of Programming https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html

The power of habit ~ Duhigg

Seeing around corners ~ ???

The former is for developing habits that can change your team / organization.

The latter is for developing a culture of innovation and synergy

Deep Work - Cal Newport

This might be too "baby steps" for a lot of people here, but it genuinely has had a huge impact on my life and I would recommend it to anyone at the early stages of their productive or professional life. It's an exceptionally easy read and very well composed and helped me learn and apply concrete goals to productivity and focus.

The Unwritten Laws of Engineering by W.J. King.

It's a bit dated but has a lot of helpful advice - I wish I had read it when I started my career.

Effective at knowledge work? Do you mean more effective at career elevation or more passionate about technical capabilities? These goals are extremely divergent unless you are an entrepreneur selling a new technology you invented.

personal journals

try to something about Mindfulness-based stress reduction. this a "new" thing borrowed from Buddhism

Will - G. Gordon Liddy

Mission Earth - L. Ron Hubbard