💡 Books and newsletters that shape my thinking (and more)
Hey friends,
We have a bit of a lighter newsletter this week as I have been "between jobs", as they say. I am starting a new role tomorrow, so I spent the past week preparing for that, and also taking my kids on a road trip since my break accidentally coincided with spring break here. Neat!
Oh, and I also did a ton of long-overdue maintenance on the web site, mostly to make it feel a little bit more like home. I added some music links, resources, and finally a "Best Of" section where I can curate some of the more enduring posts.
Anyway! I'll have more to say about what's next in the weeks to come. For now, enjoy the links...
Rian
Books and newsletters that shape my thinking
I recently did a first draft of my manager README and I end it with some books and newsletter that have shaped my thinking, and continue to do so. I thought it might be useful to a broader audience so I’m sharing it here as well. These are the books I keep right next to my desk, and the newsletters I open every time they arrive in my inbox.
Books that have shaped my thinking
Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting for by Jonathan Raymond
The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever by Michael Bungay Stanier
Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow by Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais, and Ruth Malan
The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business by Erin Meyer
Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products by Marty Cagan and Chris Jones
Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value by Melissa Perri
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts by Annie Duke
No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model by Richard Schwartz
A few newsletters I really like
I am skipping some obvious ones (like Lenny and Platformer) that everyone already subscribes to.
Department of Product by Rich Holmes (latest product releases and industry news)
Elena’s Growth Scoop by Elena Verna (product-led growth, product-led sales, and career growth)
MKT1 Newsletter by Emily Kramer (B2B marketing advice and guides)
Attention Deficit Marketing Disorder by Mariya Delano (a newsletter about the emotions behind marketing work)
The Leading Sapiens Weekly by Sheril Mathew (product and technical leadership)
Culture Study by Anne Helen Petersen (fascinating essays about broad topics related to the culture around us)
Dense Discovery by Kai Brach (design, tech, sustainability, urbanism, and more)
Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends by Caitlin Dewey (the best and most interesting internet reading of the week)
Five things on Friday by James Whatley (more wonderful things to read)
Transfer Orbit by Andrew Liptak (my favorite newsletter about science fiction, writing, and the future)
Read More Books by Jeremy Anderberg (book reviews, author interviews, bookish news and lists, and more)
Garbage Day by Ryan Broderick (the only way I try to stay up to date with internet culture)
The media dies a little less
For anyone else following along on “The Death of Media”… There are plenty of dire stories about layoffs and newsrooms shutting down, so I like finding stories of innovation (or small steps) in the space that appear to be working. I think 404 Media is doing great work, and their latest addition of a full-text RSS feed for paid subscribers makes me very happy:
Creating this feed was logistically quite complicated. We are thankful to Maxime Valette of FeedPress, who helped us make the feed, and to Ryan Singel of Outpost, who helped us sync the paid feeds with our Ghost member list. We’re also thankful to our paid subscribers, who have made it possible for us to pay for the development work needed to offer this and have also been very patient with us as we’ve worked behind the scenes to develop this feature.
In other actually good news on the media, The Atlantic is (finally) profitable! Mostly because they went hard on subscriptions.
Actually, the internet’s always been this bad
Some really interesting (and surprising) takeaways in this research, and a very good analysis by Caitlin Dewey in Actually, the internet’s always been this bad:
A team of Italian researchers evaluated more than half a billion comments spanning 30 years, and concluded that online discourse is no more ‘toxic’ today than it was in the early 1990s. […] Overall, the study found that the prevalence of both toxic speech and highly toxic users were extremely low. But the longer any conversation goes on, on virtually any platform, the more toxic it becomes.
Can You Tweet Your Way to Impact?
Cal Newport writes about some recent research on the impact of social media followers/traffic in Can You Tweet Your Way to Impact? The tl;dr is that audience != impact:
In this narrow look at social media and science a more general lesson about this technology emerges. Maintaining an aggressive presence in these online spaces can increase the number of people who temporarily encounter you or your work. But these encounters are often ephemeral, rarely leading to more serious engagement. It’s exciting to receive increased attention in the present, but it may have little effect on your impact in the future.
I would say that this is true for me as well. Tweeting never got me much, even in the “olden days”. But I’ve made lots of real connections (and even got hired) because of this slow, steady blog.
Speaking of Cal, I just started on his latest book Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout and I’m really liking it so far. From the intro:
I want to instead propose an entirely new way for you, your small business, or your large employer to think about what it means to get things done. I want to rescue knowledge work from its increasingly untenable freneticism and rebuild it into something more sustainable and humane, enabling you to create things you’re proud of without requiring you to grind yourself down along the way.
Thanks for reading Elezea! If you find these resources useful, I’d be grateful if you could share the blog with someone you like.
Got feedback? Send me an email.
PS. You look nice today 👌