Harry S. Truman famously said, “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders must be readers.”

I aspire to fall into the latter group, so I tend to view myself now as being the catalyst of my own personal and professional development. As I’m sure you can relate, being an entrepreneur is a choice we all make, so our development is an ongoing, evolutionary process where reading and study should form a cornerstone in our foundation.

I tend to average somewhere between 15 and 30 books consumed annually, depending upon their size (pages), scope (subject matter) and magnitude (exploratory thought and provocation). I turned 54 in December and if I live another 30 years, that’s only around 600 books left to consume…which doesn’t feel like many. Yet another lesson in the “quality over quantity” argument.

I’m constantly looking to add “worthy reads from credible sources” to my personal reading list, so if you have some good ones to share, please send me an email with a few of your favorites along with a sentence or two about why you liked the book(s) you’re recommending. We all “get better together.”

All of that being said, here are the best books I read in 2024 and would recommend them as part of your professional development and worthy of your personal evolution…

“From Strength to Strength” by Arthur C. Brooks

I’ll probably put this one on my annual “Best Books of the Year” post because I’m confident I’ll go back and re-read it every year. You should, too. It’s one of the single-best “self-help” books I’ve ever read. Period. Full stop. Occasionally we all read books that “speak to us” for one reason or another. This one shouted at me almost violently from the drop. I’ve re-read it three times over in less than 18 months and given it away as “gifts” to many friends who are roughly my age and find themselves in my same general boat.

Over the last several years, I’ve gone through more angst, frustration, change, self-doubt and disillusionment than seemingly at any point in five decades on the planet, yet I couldn’t figure out “what was wrong with me.” I had achieved so many of my personal and professional goals. I had so few true financial worries. I had earned some degree of notoriety for being a leader in my profession. I have a wonderful wife and a great daughter. I’m more physically fit than 95+% of the population my age…yet so little of any of this seemed to matter. I just wasn’t very… happy – with anything. Even worse, I was starting to question if the journey I had been on was all even “worth it.” Like some of you, I started to ask: “Is this all there is…?” For high achievers, self-doubt is crippling.

If any of this sounds remotely familiar to you, then as Arthur Brooks would say, “you’re right on schedule.” “From Strength to Strength” does a wonderful job of unpacking “the why, the what, and the how” behind all of it, then gives you optimism for what lays ahead. Of all of the books I’ve read in my life, this is easily in the Top 5.

“The 4th Turning is Here” by Neil Howe

This book is hard and it’s a grind, but it’s like very few books I’ve ever read in that it makes me look at the world differently. I think about “4th Turning” differently than the book “The End of the World is Just the Beginning” by Peter Zeihan, but from a similar, global perspective. We all tend to look ourselves and our period on this earth as being a “unique point in time,” but Howe shows us that it’s not unique at all really.

Going back several hundred years, he cites a depth of research and historical precedence of how European and North American societies and governments have rhythmically marched to a familiar cadence over 80 to 100 spans that tend to repeat themselves with alarming predictability. These spans are called a saeculum (seacula in plural) and are comprised of four distinct generations, each of which has its own influence on everything from leadership and governance to societal values to religion to global conflict. Are you anxious about our conflict with the Chinese or Russia? Do you wonder why we’re “so divided” politically and “can’t agree on anything?” And let’s not get started on Gen Z or the Millennials and how they’ve got it all backwards, right?

Well, here it all is nicely researched, neatly unpacked and fit for all to consume with how so much of it predictably fits together. I’ll caution you that Howe’s outlook is “pessimistic, but necessary” in the short run, but predictably regenerative and rosy in the longer-term. Regardless of your generation, this is an incredibly thought-provoking book that will make you change the way you see the world.

“All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque

My business coach challenged me in asking that I read a book that was written before I was born (1970…for those keeping track…). I had actually picked up a copy of this recently while visiting a local bookstore during a business trip to Austin. Side note: business travel has become the bane of my existence lately, so in an effort to ameliorate that condition, I started interjecting things I enjoy – like buying books from local, independently owned bookstores. You should do the same, but I digress…

I read “All Quiet” when I was in high school and only remembered rough parts of it. The whole thing is rough – brutal, in fact. This book is a man’s fictional representation of a young German solider conscripted into the Army during World War I. Known as “The War to End All Wars,” it didn’t work. The Nazis banned the book and forced Remarque to flee the country out of fear for his life, and we got WWII shortly thereafter.

I personally never served in the military, let alone armed conflict, but this book paints the utter futility of mass armed conflict with modern weapons in such a way that it crushes the human spirit. It’s an incredible read in spite of the complete heartbreak you carry throughout the entire novel – and you know how it’s going to end. “All Quiet” is still so compelling almost 100 years after it was written because it makes me further appreciate the sacrifices of our prior generations and it makes me even more grateful for the relative peace we live in currently. I also should probably recalibrate my current definition of what constitutes today’s “major problems and frustrations.”

“The Heart Aroused” by David Whyte

David Whyte is an Irish poet, and I’ve never been much for poetry. That’s more of a reflection on me than anything else. His prose can read like poetry occasionally (reference his thought-provoking book, “Consolations”) because his writing style is so incredibly deep. “The Heart Aroused” is a book you read in brief chunks with a highlighter and a pencil, then contemplate in quiet moments.

Before Whyte chose to pursue his quest as a writer and a poet, he was a consultant for larger corporations (which I find fascinating in and of itself). I kind of wish I had read this book earlier in my career because it might’ve spurred me to leave Corporate America earlier to pursue my own entrepreneurial endeavors sooner. If you find yourself trapped in a company that frustrates your creative talents, then maybe this book starts to provide you an answer.

At some level, we all confront the challenge borne out of present security against future fulfillment, and when there is no urgency to change, we run the risk of dying on the vine. If you follow Whyte’s counsel, “Ambition is not rejected, but placed in the greater perspective of the soul, which again and again seems to choose a fuller experience of the here and now over a preordained trajectory through the organizational heavens.”

David Whyte makes me think about myself differently and he makes me see the world differently. His writing frequently is a welcome departure from both.

“The Gap & the Gain” and “Who, Not How” both by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy

Many of the people reading this are hard-charging, goal-oriented entrepreneurs who are rugged individualists at heart. “There is no mountain I cannot climb.”

As I left Corporate America and began my journey as an entrepreneur, I dove head-first into Dan Sullivan’s Strategic Coach program (which I highly recommend). The program was a complete level-set that helped me find my footing as an entrepreneur, and it gave me incredibly valuable and immediately applicable “thinking tools” to deploy in my journey. I, like many of you, set lofty goals, which often created some degree of frustration when I came up short. And I, like many of you, saw compelling opportunities, which I quickly tried to figure out how to capitalize upon.

These two books are arguably the best “thinking tools” of the entire Strategic Coach program. They show you why you’re wrong to think about goal attainment and opportunity realization the way I previously stated. Negative reinforcement is an insidious disease that undermines an entrepreneur’s most valuable asset: their confidence. And figuring out “how” to capitalize on an opportunity erodes an entrepreneur’s most valuable resource: their time.

The short version of the “Gap and Gain” book is that you should constantly draw confidence from just how far you’ve come – even when you come up short. And the short version of the “Who” book is that you shouldn’t spend inordinate amounts of your own time trying to figure things out when there’s someone (a “Who”) who already knows how to do it.

There’s true genius in simplicity. These two books are a representation of that.

Public Service Announcement

I’m an entrepreneur like many of you. I run a small business like many of you. I marvel at corporations that change the economic landscape at scale… like many of you. Amazon is one of those businesses, but I don’t buy books there unless I have no other means of finding them.

I buy physical books because I love the practice of reading with a book in my hand and a highlighter and a pencil on my desk. I highlight passages. I make notes. I underline things. I come back and re-read passages repeatedly. I realize you can do all of the above on a Kindle, but I spend far too much of my life in front of a computer, so reading for me is a release from that obligation.

I also enjoy going into a bookstore and browsing the shelves. I enjoy the inefficient task of buying a book for myself, not simply opening a cardboard box that appears “24 hours later.” It makes me feel good to support local entrepreneurs who are trying to earn a living by sharing their love of books and taking a risk to create something that a corporation can’t. Park Road Books in Charlotte is one of those stores.

So, here’s my challenge to you. Instead of downloading your next book off of Amazon, buy a physical book from your local bookshop. Just try it once.

Here’s to 2025 being a year filled with personal growth and professional development for all of us!

Cheers,