Food for Thought 2020 - The Life-Sparring Books of the Year
2020 was a year that turned a lot of things upside-down. Almost nothing stayed as it was. For the first time in twelve years, my wife and I did not go to the same restaurant for our anniversary, and even Christmas was very different.
I wanted to uphold at least one little tradition: the annual "Food for Thought" blog post, reviewing the best books I read in the past year.
Just as in the previous years, I tracked my reading on the Goodreads app. As in the previous renditions of Food for Thought, I link to the Goodreads pages of all books for more information. In addition, I also added affiliate links to Amazon, in case you are tempted to buy one of the books for yourself and would like to support Life-Sparring (without any additional costs for you).
After reading around 6,350 pages for the last two years, I managed to get through about 6,750 pages across 26 books in 2020. Given that we had a year in lock-down, I would have expected even more. Still, changing jobs, companies, and industries and investing more time into Blog and the new Life-Sparring Podcast were limiting factors.
If you have read previous editions of Food for Thought, you know that this Top 5 list is compiled from the books I finished reading within 2020, disregarding when they were initially published. While some books on the list are new releases, others are decades or even centuries old.
Please imagine a dramatic drumroll, as here come the five Life-Sparring books of 2020:
5th Place: The Hotel New Hampshire, John Irving, 1981
“You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day the opportunities stop, you know?”
The Hotel New Hampshire is not necessary a deeply profound book per se, but it is for me.
It is a coming-of-age novel I read the first time when I was about 17 years old. It was also one of the first books I read in English.
Somehow I felt incredibly nostalgic early this year, and re-reading the book felt like a journey back in time, reconnecting me with feelings and experiences.
But beyond my personal relationship with this book, I believe that the Hotel New Hampshire is a nice read. John Irving manages to build unique characters who all face their own demons and take you on an emotional rollercoaster between humor and tragedy, all told in a plain and straight forward language.
We hopefully never stop growing, so we should also never stop reading coming-of-age books, especially if they are as good as this one.
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4th Place: Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't (Rockefeller Habits 2.0), Verne Harnish, 2014
“Goals without routines are wishes; routines without goals are aimless. The most successful business leaders have a clear vision and the disciplines (routines) to make it a reality.”
2020 brought big changes for me. Amongst others, I changed my job, position, company, and industry. After nine years in operational roles in the toy industry, I took on a new challenge in e-commerce.
Scaling Up hugely influenced my new employer's organization, so the book was somewhat of a must-read upon joining the company.
The book lived up to the recommendations as it is a very practical and actionable management handbook.
Verne Harnish doesn't make it all too easy for the ready, choosing a style full of trademarked buzzwords that often reads more like a company brochure for his consulting services. However, if you can look past this style choice, you find a dense book mixing some new ideas with the best from countless management classics. In a way Scaling Up is almost a compendium of management theories and their practical application, organized in the chapters People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash.
If you are an entrepreneur or a manager in a fast-scaling company, Scaling Up is a great read and will provide a lot of Food for Thought.
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3rd Place: Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies, Reid Hoffman, 2018
One of the phenomenons of our times is the rise of the Unicorns, massively venture capital founded platform companies often defying conventional business logic.
Reid Hoffmann has been in the middle of the VC boom for quite some time, as Co-Founder of LinkedIn and as Partner at Greylock Partners. And with Blitzscaling, Hoffmann does a great job, explaining what paradigm shift is needed to succeed in a winner take all race and why things that run counter standard business practices make perfect sense.
“When a market is up for grabs, the risk isn’t inefficiency—the risk is playing it too safe. If you win, efficiency isn’t that important; if you lose, efficiency is completely irrelevant.”
To grow at exponential rates, you need to sacrifice efficiency for speed, commit resources despite high levels of uncertainty and be aware of having the right mix of generalists and experts for the stage your company is in.
Moving from an operational management role into a more strategic scaling challenge in a fast-moving environment, meant challenging my own paradigms. While my job is not a “Blitzscaling” challenge by Reid Hoffmann’s definition, the book still helped me quite a bit to work on my scaling mindset.
But even if your job is not related to a fast-growing business, I suggest reading Blitzscaling, even if it’s just to understand better what is going on around you.
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2nd Place: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Haruki Murakami, 2013
The Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is a typical Murakami, and it is also not. Knowing Haruki Murakami, you always expect a mystic, bizarre plot twist, but Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage stays somewhat grounded in conventional logic.
“Tsukuru Tazaki had nowhere he had to go. This was like a running theme of his life. He had no place he had to go to, no place to come back to. He never did, and he didn’t now. The only place for him was where he was now.”
In a way, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki has a coming-of-age book-feel, as so many Murakami books do. Somehow, Haruki Murakami manages to defy age and to keep his youthful spirit.
2020 was a year with plenty of opportunities to do soul-searching, and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is a book about finding your own identity, understanding who you are, and how you have become this person, or in Murakami’s words, understanding what filled the container your body represents.
When starting to read Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, I expected good entertainment; I found instead a book with surprisingly thought-provoking observations that motivated me to write a stand-alone Life-Sparring article.
In many ways, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki was the perfect book for 2020, but I am sure you will enjoy it also in 2021 and beyond.
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1st Place: Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok & China’s ByteDance, Matthew Brennan, 2020
I mentioned already that 2020 marked my return to a job in e-commerce after almost a decade in the toy industry.
While I always stayed interested in e-commerce and the broader internet ecosystem, even while being in an operational role in a more traditional industry, there was a lot of catching up to do, so I read quite a few e-commerce books in 2020. I read Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built, I read Bezonimics, but the book I learned the most from was Matthew Brennan’s brand new book Attention Factory.
Attention Factory is an extremely timely book. Matthew Brennan tells the story of TikTok and its parent company ByeDance, in a year where both were dominating the headlines due to the Trump administration's decoupling efforts.
But Brennan manages to do much more than to tell the entrepreneurial story of ByteDance, TikTok, and Musical.ly in an entertaining fashion, he also manages to explain the fundamental driving forces of the internet industry at large and the shift of the basic business models.
“It was a revelation. Search engines require people to find information. We are still using search here, but we can specify the condition for a trigger. When the condition is met, information will be delivered to people. Such is the shift from people looking for information to information looking for people,” said Yiming as he later reflected on the differences between search and recommendation.”
What made ByteDance's enormous success possible is the shift from search-driven content distribution to recommendation-driven content distribution. This shift is likely the biggest current mega-trend in the internet industry. With AI-driven algorithms getting better at making sense of the abundance of available data, we will probably see a lot of disruption in the near future caused by recommendation driven applications. While tech behemoths like Google, Facebook, and Amazon look nearly invincible, the example of ByteDance shows that shifts in technology strongly favor new, agile players.
If you are interested in the internet industry and the direction our increasingly digital world is taking, the chances are good that you will like Matthew Brennan's Attention Factory as much as I did and agree that it is a worthy Life-Sparring book of the year 2020.
Support Life-Sparring, and buy Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok & China’s ByteDance via this affiliate link!
What were your books of 2020? What moved you and provided the most insights? Did you read more or less than in previous years? And what is your reading list for 2021? Follow me on Goodreads to see what I am currently reading and reviewing.
Still hungry for more “Food for Thought”? Here is a rich buffet with the past years' renditions: Food for Thought 2019, Food For Thought 2018, Food For Thought 2017, Food For Thought 2016 & Food For Thought 2015.
