Top 20 Book Recommendations

If you’re reading this article, chances are you enjoy reading and actively engage in it multiple times per week, possibly even daily. Reading is a fundamental way to continue your education, broaden your scope and allow you to push expand your current viewpoints on topics. And while audio learning has taken the world by storm through podcasts, YouTube and audiobooks, a physical copy of a book will always hold a special place in my heart.

While we likely agree that reading is amazing, finding credible and useful books can be a challenge. There’s nothing worse than reading a book where you felt like you wasted your time and didn’t learn anything. Although I’d argue that it’s never truly a waste of time to learn something even if you disagree with the topic or how the information is presented; that sharpens your knowledge from a different perspective and also teaches you how not to speak or present information. I’ve found this is a useful approach for most situations in life. 

In any case, I didn’t put together a list of unhelpful books, or at least that wasn’t my intention. I’m frequently about what books I recommend so I wanted to put this list together in one central place.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but rather a list of 20 books that fit the following criteria:

• The author took challenging or complex topics and distilled the information into an easy to understand writing style.
• The author is either an expert in said field (through education and/or experience) or they interviewed and wrote about experts.
• The book offered many valuable takeaways, not just a few lackluster points.

You’ll notice that this book list mainly focuses on psychology, leadership, business, productivity and personal development, with only one nutrition book making the list. To be blunt, most published nutrition books are hot steaming garbage. Trash. Like literally throw them in the trash. The nutrition book landscape is filled with gurus and extreme diet advice, often not backed by any real science.

Of course, this is a sweeping generalization but for the vast majority of nutrition books I’d say it’s accurate. To learn more about nutritional science focus your efforts on published research, subscribe to a research review like MASS, attend seminars from experts and check out our Science Simplified series on our website where coach Gill breaks down a research paper into a digestible and applicable article.

Life gets busy and we often find ourselves putting reading on the backburner. I can say with full confidence that the times that I’m actively learning and reading are the times when I’m my most productive and happiest, too. Even if it’s 10 pages a day, getting into the habit of daily (or close to daily) reading will change your life.

Now, go grab some new books and get your nerd on!