We bring you another installment of What MeetMe is reading this month… Yet again, an eclectic mix. You’ll find writing that will inspire you to exercise your imagination and create, communicate more effectively, consider the pursuit of happiness and simplicity, and of course, a little something to make you go WAH?!?!?

“An incomplete list of things invented at Bell Labs during its heyday: lasers, fiberoptic cables, satellite communications, cell phones, the C programming language, solar panels.
My favorite story in here: John Bardeen and Walter Brattain plug away for years to find the right materials to create the first functioning transistor. Their boss William Shockley, who had laid some of the theoretical framework for their achievement, gets angry about not receiving enough credit. So he stays up all night in a hotel room on New Year’s Eve writing out 30 pages of notes describing a better approach, and is able to prove out the concept in a few months. His version becomes the standard.
The book will get you thinking about innovation and the circumstances that lead to it. Much is a reinforcement of the now-fashionable idea that all invention is iteration, not the solitary genius model you might have learned in school. But that new dogma is also challenged, or at least tempered. Consider Claude Shannon, who showed up for work whenever, spent much of his time creating electromechanical mice and riding around the office on a unicycle, and knocked out the whole foundation of Information Theory in between games of chess.”
Roger Taylor
by Greg McKeown (available on Audible)
“There’s one main theme to Essentialism: prioritizing the important things and throwing away the rest. While this sounds simple in concept, whether in a professional or personal context, we tend to often prioritize incorrectly or choose to include non-important tasks due to outside pressures. The audiobook weighs in at over 6 hours for this central topic, so it definitely gets repetitive, but the overall message is a good one.”
“Incredibly insightful look at cross-gender communication. The book is full of numerous takeaways that can be helpful in professional, as well as personal settings. The author points out that conversation between men and women is not only cross-gender, but actually cross-culture communication, because men and women grow up in what are effectively different societies. The book also breaks down men’s and women’s motives during communication which is helpful not only in understanding the opposite sex, but those of your own gender as well.”
Diana Shkolnikov

by Krome Barratt
“The book is a series of vignettes, each of which is comprised of unique ideas and concepts presented visually, non-visually, or sometimes both at once. The idea behind this approach is to force the reader to think laterally when approaching both visual and non-visual problems, and understand how the concepts presented aid in pattern recognition, problem solving, and logical thinking in other disciplines.”
Kevin Olds

by Jill Lepore
by Drake Bennett
“Jill Lepore’s takedown of “disruptive innovation,” and some of the shaky scholarship and unstated assumptions on which it is based.
And for balance, here’s Innovator’s Dilemma author Clayton Christensen’s response to her criticisms.“
Roger Taylor

by Lee Cockrell (available on Audible)
“Advice from a longtime VP of Disney’s operations on how to be a great caretaker of your realm of responsibility, whether you’re in charge of a single table at a restaurant, or a multinational company. There are a lot of obvious points in how to serve well, but they’re good reminders and have the added oomph of being backed by a man with an impressive track record. There are a lot of practical examples of how to achieve that sometimes vague hallmark of “going above and beyond”.”
Brian Herbert

by Tony Hsieh (available on Audible)
“Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness begins with the story of his life. His story is interesting and largely highlights his love of entrepreneurship starting at an early age. He details his various business endeavors through the years, along with what makes him tick and the decisions that were made. As the book shifts to his later companies, LinkExchange and Zappos, he explores the importance of company culture and his ideas for breeding a great culture. To finish the book, he talks about his current quest: maximizing human happiness.”
Matt Kemmerer
by Ryan North
“A collection of stories with a central premise: What would happen if there were a machine that could tell, just from a small sample of blood, how you were going to die? It’s not quite so simple, as the machine “prefers” to give vague answers without any details, and the results are typically not what you would expect. The stories range from humorous takes on what such a world would look like, to more serious inspections of how such a machine would change how people view the world, each other, and themselves. The stories were pulled from a set of submissions after a public call to writers and include well known and unknown writers. This book was successful enough to generate a follow up collection and a table top game. (http://machineofdeath.net)”
Joe Szymanski
by Steven Pressfield (available on Audible)
“The War of Art (not to be confused with Sun Tsu’s The Art of War) is a book about overcoming your creative roadblocks written by Steven Pressfield, best known for The Legend of Bagger Vance.A main concept is the existence of something Pressfield calls “Resistance”. Resistance is a repelling force the keeps you from doing something greater, whether its creating something, sticking with a diet, overcoming addiction, or any other long-term growth actions. Resistance comes in many forms, and behaves like an unsympathetic force of nature. Resistance keeps you from doing the important things you really want to do or are meant to do.I like that Pressfield humanizes Resistance, and talks about it in severe terms. He often refers to the fight with Resistance as a war, and makes no small claims on what’s at stake here – your life. If you do not fight it, you will succumb to it.
The War of Art is a very easy read because besides being short, its chapters are very informal and look more like subheadings. Many chapters are only a paragraph or two long. It’s very easy to pick up or put down and can be finished in a day or two.
It’s very easy to relate to the situations described in the book where the author has been faced with Resistance in the past, whether it be procrastination, criticism, rationalization, “peripheral opponents” such as friends bringing you down, or even browsing the internet. I think everyone can relate to feeling the urgent need to check your email rather than work on an important project. All of these are weapons of Resistance, and giving the enemy a name helps you be able to focus on the problem and fight it.
Identifying the uncomfortable feeling when faced with Resistance is a blessing in disguise. It means that whatever Resistance is trying to deter you from, it’s probably an important thing that you should definitely be doing. I came away from The War of Art feeling very inspired and more conscious of what I spend my time doing and why.”
Bobby Fiorentino
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (available on Audible)
“There are some good slices of knowledge but overall the author spends 30% or more wasting words on cutting others down.”
Rich Friedman