2021 - Another year of growth and learning
I love learning! My best days are when I read or listen to insights on a wide range of topics. The categories that generally engage me are Social Impact, Product Management, Leadership, Parenting, Finance and Productivity.
Books: I typically read ~50 books a year but this year extremely tough and busy and so I was only able to get to 41. Thanks to wellness days and the holidays. Check out #MyYearInBooks Some of my favorites this year are
The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty - This book is a book on innovation, power of systems, processes, communities and how all of them can really lift nations out of poverty. It completely aligns with my thinking about how innovation is the most powerful tool that can bring profit and purpose together and solve for the world’s challenging problems
My Life in Full: Work, Family, and our Future - What an inspiring, engaging book! The book was filled with so many life, parenting, and business lessons. The book inspires us to be better as child, employee, spouse, parent, leader, ally, sponsor and global citizen. I could relate to book as a fellow Indian, as an immigrant student, as a driven individual and as a parent who still tries to balance between being there for everything for my kids while hanging on to the same drive at work as always.
Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products - Empowered is and should be a must read for any product leader. There are a lot of books to help Product Managers and a lot more on leadership but almost nothing has been written about how to help develop product leadership. Product Leadership is extremely important in this world where product management principles are being applied to any industry. Product leadership needs a balance between strong functional skills of a PM, strategic thinking of a strategist and leadership skills of great leaders. The book helps you think about all the ways you can help your teams build extraordinary products. The best thing I loved about the book is the philosophies, frameworks and techniques to help PMs thrive and grow. The practices will help PMs build great products.
Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value - It was great to see a lot of the Discovery practices I have learnt, followed and taught over the years in a book. It is written very well and throws light on a lot of bad habits PMs pick up in their work.
Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon - An excellence reference for anybody interested in learning about Amazon’s core best practices.
The Dhandho Investor: The Low-Risk Value Method to High Returns - A simple great read on the concept of value investing. If you are interested in learning about the investment philosophy of Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger, this is a great book. And of course I loved the fact that it talked a lot about some of the best best minded people of India.
The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness - There are way too many books on personal finance out there. This book stands out because it throws light on the intersection of psychology and finance. Morgan Housel shares stories of people who either thrived because of their psychology or saw doom because of it. It teaches us how to make better sense of what to look out for as we think about money.
How will you measure your life? - Clayton Christensen helps us think about success, purpose, happiness and life. For those who want to find a balance this book has some powerful questions to reflect on so that we can live a life that is full of success, joy, happiness, purpose, giving and anything else that might be important for us.
I also typically re-read some books often. I re-read the following favorites.
The first 90 Days
The Amazon Way
Rise 3 practical steps for advancing your career, standing out as a leader and linking your
How Women Rise
Podcasts: I listened to about 200 episodes of podcasts ranging different topics but my favorite podcasts are
Masters of Scale - Reid, the topics, the production quality and the speakers are all simply spectacular. A must listen for innovators, entrepreneurs, product leaders and actually everybody.
All the Hacks - Particularly interesting because Chris Hutchins is a fellow product leader, works in FinTech and talks about finances. The perfect combination of a great podcast
Women in Product - Learning from women at various stages of their PM careers, their paths to product management and their unique points of view
Choose FI - A great resource for those who want to achieve financial independence
The A16Z Podcast - If you are somebody who is interested in innovating for the future, this is a great podcast for you.
Afford Anything - Love the snippets at the very end of each podcast
I am not a big blog reader but the only blog I read is Perspectives from Deborah Liu A must read!
Keeping up with my learning objectives was tough this year given personal challenges, work load and getting to a new way of working from home but still getting kids to school but I still managed to learn. I am someone who always has one more task or email to do before I sign off for the day. So finding time to read can be hard. But the following tips help me continue to read and learn.
Pre plan the list of books and podcasts that I want to read/listen. This helps me avoid any time in browsing and getting lost in social media. Instead I always have the next thing to read/listen to ready to go
Listen on the go. Anytime I need to drive is learning time! Bonus listening time when I walk our puppy, cooking, waiting at the doctor’s office, in lines or anything in between
Bursts of reading: I get a Wellness day every 6 weeks. This is an additional day to rest, get the house in order, spend quality time with family and READ! I also sometimes take time off to simply read. It is sometimes just a day or a week. Holidays are especially great as it helps me read a minimum of five books sometimes more.
Reading multiple books at the same time: I typically have an audible and a physical book going at the same time.
Surrounding myself with books: My work space is surrounded by books. This helps me just pick up any book even if I have just 5 mins and read a page. It also keeps the pressure of all the unread books. I also leave a couple of books next to my bed and in go bag for the car.
What are your favorite books, blogs, podcasts or learning hacks?