Here at Career Insights we are big fans of infinite learning, so we have created this article as a space where we will share books we love that we think you will be interested in.
The Start-up Of You
This book is written by Ben Casnocha and Reid Hoffman. Reid was a co-founder of Paypal and the founder of LinkedIn so he has a pretty impressive CV. What we love about this book is Reid’s perspective on looking at industries to work in rather than jobs. He argues that the days of picking a career and automatically climbing the ladder are over.
People are living longer and don’t have the pensions to support their retirement, so if you’re looking to enter an industry which has been around for hundreds of years (i.e. Law and Construction) you’ll likely find the top levels of management are saturated so you’ll struggle to rise through the ranks.
Instead of looking at these industries you should be looking at sectors which are young and have a bright future. A great example of this is Marissa Mayer. Marissa’s first job out of university was at a Google, at this time Google were a young company and an intelligent and motivated Marissa was able to have a huge impact on the company at a very young age. Marissa challenged the design of google at the time and became hugely influential in the redesign of the pages we all see today. We believe everyone should read this book as it gives a hugely different perspective to finding a career path.
Outliers
This book is written by Malcolm Gladwell and creatively looks at overachievers in life from rock stars, teams to businessman. If you’ve never read a Gladwell book you’re really missing out, he is one of the most talented writers at applied knowledge.
A lot of us struggle to remember or apply knowledge to theories we learned in school or university well the opposite effect happens when you read a Gladwell book he is able to communicate theories with real life stories that you’ll forever be explaining and quoting to friends, family and colleagues.
One of the standout topics in this book (that many people have written about since) is the 10,000 hours theory. Gladwell demonstrates that levels of expertise are directly correlated to the number of hours you invest into learning a specific skill. The magic number to become an expert is 10,000 hours. With the example of musicians he demonstrates that there is a strong correlation between novices, teachers and professionals over the amount of time they invested at a young age into honing their skills.
The book also looks at leading businessman like Bill Gates and offers great insight and perspective to their success that you just wouldn’t consider before reading this book. We highly recommend reading this book for the great perspectives but even better talking points and conversations you’ll have with people whilst you consume the chapters.
The Tipping Point
Another great book from Malcolm Gladwell. This books looks at what causes ideas and products to go viral (even comparing the phenomenon to how diseases spread). Many products plod along making quota and then all of a sudden explode into hyperdrive without any explanation, until now.
Gladwell brilliantly breaks down what happens in these situations to cause stratospheric growth, using examples and products that we’ve all heard of as well as introducing theories that will be new to many of us. Gladwells ability to explain complex theories into bitesize stories is second to none.
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