2018 – The New Year’s resolution in full bloom

In 2017, I came pretty close to my new year’s resolution of reading one book a month. I was really enjoying the non-fiction genre and 2018 was no different. I read hard cover, soft cover, kindle and even enjoyed an audio book. Fun thing was even in non-fiction I was reading books on management, machine learning, religion, children’s books and many more.

The best book I read that year was “Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building A Business When There Are No Easy Answers” by Ben Horowitz. It is a great book where Ben gives insights in to all aspects of business. He may have written the book from CEOs perspective but lot of examples he gives in the book apply to every manager within the company. There are multiple instances where he talks about when you have to make a decision but you cannot yet share the rationale with the team it impacts and those are always the tough ones.

In 2018, I also read a few religious books for the first time. “Bhagavad-Gita As It Is” and “The Gita For Children” were the first two books. For me reading Gita was more about lessons for our day to day lives as well as strategy that can be applied to the business world. Great example was when I was reading children’s Gita to my kids. There is a passage in the book, according to the Gita “it is all about the intent behind the action, not the action itself. If the action is unselfish, if the action is not driven by greed or desire, if the action is something you believe is your duty to do, it is the right action, whatever the action is”. It was interesting how my son applied this to the current conflict between US army and the ISIS. His eyes immediately lit up and he said US army believes that it is their duty to eliminate ISIS to bring peace back to the middle east and ISIS believes it is their duty to fight for their people’s rights.

2018 was also the year when I decided change the course of my career. After being in management for 10+ years I decided to go back to being a software developer. Machine learning was a field that had intrigued me and I decided to go back to coding full-time. I picked up a great book that year on Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning — AI Superpowers by Kai Fu Lee. The book provides a first hand account on how China is investing big in AI. Kai Fu Lee gives a compelling evidence of how US and Canada had an edge, due to the abundance of researchers in the field. Now that AI is moving in to implementation phase it has become a level playing field for China.

All the books I read had something good to offer and I made it a point to incorporate at least a couple of lessons in my daily life. Here is my reading list from 2018:

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Building a Business When There are no easy answers — Ben Horowitz
• The Gita for Children — Roopa Pai
• AI Superpowers — Kai Fu Lee
• The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing — Marie Kondo
• Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps: Allan and Barbara Pease
• Bhagwad Gita As It Is — A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada
• The Wizard of Oz
• The Principal Upnishads — Dr. S Radhakrishnan
• Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High — Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler
• Raising Boys — Steve Biddulph

Happy reading everyone :)