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I'm still thinking about this book weeks after finishing it. Quite a remarkable book, extremely informative.
On my desk is a dog-eared copy of Canism Survive by Joseph Schumper. It's in this book that he first posited the idea that capitalism is like a perpetual storm. It is constantly destroying old industries and creating new ones. And to survive the storm, you have to recognize that entirely new technologies can make you irrelevant overnight. This process he called creative destruction. This book is kind of always relevant, but given everything in the world that's happening right now, it has never been more relevant than today.
Breck Dan Wang's fantastic book on the future of US-China competition and the rule of China. A book that I read recently and really enjoyed was The Five Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom. I liked it because it pushed my thinking beyond the typical default measure of wealth, financial wealth, and made me think about other dimensions of my life: physical wealth, time wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, and do a bit of a self-assessment of where we are and where we want to improve across these other dimensions of wealth that are so important.
The Thucydides Trap by Graeme Alson, which is about how rising powers have challenged incumbent powers over the past several thousand years and the risk that that competition can end in major conflict. So, it talks about Athens and Sparta, the original Thucydides trap itself, the British and German empires in the 19th century, but of course, relevant to the United States and China now. And it's a very compelling analysis, but it's best read alongside another book called The Avoidable War by Kevin Rudd, former Australian prime minister, Sinologist, actually ambassador to the United States right now, who talks about how the United States and China can avoid the Thucydides trap and manage their relationship, manage that competition in a sensible way. And those two books are almost a conversation about the biggest geopolitical question in the 21st century.
I'm getting ready for some talks and workshops. So I just reread my own book, Mission Ready: How to Build Teams That Perform Under Pressure. And next, I'm going to read Christopher Hibbert's book, Nelson: A Personal History. This is a biography of Admiral Lord Nelson, one of history's most inspirational leaders and greatest tacticians.
The two books that I want to talk to you about, one is Virginia Evans's The Correspondent. I'm still thinking about this book weeks after finishing it. It focuses on a woman, Cybil Van Antworp, who communicates with the world, whether it's her loved ones, her children, but also just like random pen pals and authors who she loves, through the written word. She writes these out longhand. Um, she has a few emails in there.
The second book I'm excited about is How to Start by Jodie Caner. Jodie Caner is a New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. She broke the story about Harvey Weinstein, really was responsible for much of the Me Too movement that resulted. Um, Jodie for this book dives into careers and how young people can find their purpose, especially in this moment of massive disruption, technological upheaval. I think it's a book that a lot of us can benefit from. Actually.
I found that reading the biography of former leader of our region, Lee Kuan Yew from Singapore, extremely informative because he is a leader who not only led and transformed his own country but as well, in the way he managed relations with his neighbors, had been transformative in helping lead our Southeast Asia region from a region marked by trust deficit and by conflict to one of strategic trust.
The first book I recommend is one I recently read called The Tao of Fundraising by John Kim. He wrote a book that really encapsulates fundraising from a psychological, emotional relationship journey rather than just tactics and the technicalities.
One book that I'm looking forward to reading and I've just started is Jim Collins's latest book, What You Make of a Life. I heard him talk about it on a show and talk about life's cliffs and fogs and simplex stepping to get out of them. So, I'm really curious to learn from all of the people he interviewed and studied over two decades.
Francis Gavin has a wonderful book out last year called Thinking Historically. It's a guide to statecraft and strategy, which is quite a remarkable book. It's a useful book in the sense that it teaches you how to think about international relations, grand strategy, and how politics works. Also, because I think he rightly thinks we're not in an age of scarcity anymore. We're in an age of abundance, and many of our problems are caused by that.
The book I recommend is Born This Land: My Story by Chung Ju-yung. In his autobiography, Hyundai founder Chung escapes poverty and goes on to found one of the world's largest companies. He's driven by "do it until nothing more can be done" and the goal of lifting Korea as a whole. It's a story about a different way to lead that's only become more relevant.