100 Books Like How to Fight a Hydra

For anyone tempted to label good listening as “soft skills,” this book will prove you wrong! Even though the book was published in 2010, Goulston positions listening as a vital skill all the more needed in today’s fractious times.

Each chapter is structured with a high-stakes story, “Usable Insights,” and “Action Steps,” with excellent, researched info in between. From the chapter titled “Nine Core Rules for Getting Through to Anyone,” I personally learned so much from this book that I could apply to my daily interactions—particularly those with my very argumentative teenage daughter!

Whether you sell products or services, customers don’t really buy either: they buy outcomes. And it’s not enough to understand what people want to accomplish, truly successful businesses deeply understand how customers view their own success, and how to create a path from where they currently are to where they want to be. 

In Badass, Kathy uses her unique and very visual learning style to help you get in the head of your customers and understand the world from their point of view. There’s a shortlist of people who’ve had a huge impact on my career, and Kathy Sierra is at the top of that very shortlist. This book embodies that impact, I consider it required reading.

One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned is how to manage my own fear and excitement. How we react to the world around us is one of the few things we are truly in control of! This is the book that helped me most to shift the way I perceive and react to things, allowing me to live more calmly in my work and my life even in the face of complexity, fear, even success. 

This book is weirdly simple, almost child-like in its cadence, but don’t let the simplicity fool you. I found it valuable to sit with the short parables and examples especially when I’m having an emotional response surrounding a business decision. 

This was the first book based on Buddhist teachings that I ever read and made sense to me in a practical way. The writing style is strange (and the author has a truly bizarre… show more.

The most insidious mistakes we make are the ones we didn’t even realize we were making. This short book brilliantly shines a light on the thousands of “invisible” choices that we make in our work and our lives, but more importantly, the author guides us on how to begin correcting them.

Using examples and case studies, author David Dylan Thomas helps you bring awareness to three lenses of bias that are guaranteed to be affecting your work: how biases impact our own individual experiences and choices, how they wiggle their way into our teams and leadership structures, and how they get wired directly into the products and services we deliver. 

If you care about creating long-lasting and equitable results with your work, you need to read this book.

I was given this book thirty years ago by an Indian poet, who promised me I would love it. It is a feast of stories, told to the central character Devi throughout her life. Through her grandmother’s ancient stories, she learns about love, beauty, riches, and womanhood. Her father-in-law tells her stories that teach her about life, how to survive her lonely marriage, how to belong. Stories and dreams give her wealth and power, but they evaporate and still she is there, empty, alone, and desperate for the love that the old stories are about. 

Two other women’s stories weave through the narrative. Her mother Seta, and her husband’s old retainer, Mayamma share exotic tales of ancient India, Gods, mysteries, magic, and rituals. 

The Thousand Faces of Night is trancelike and beautiful.

This book, written in a fable format, tells the story of the aging co-founders of a successful technology company. Although they’ve worked well together for decades, their goals become incompatible when one wishes to sell and the other wishes to bring on a family member as a partner and eventual successor.

This book offers an insightful guide to the financial and psychological challenges and opportunities associated with bringing productive closure to a business relationship.

The comparative mythologist, Joseph Campbell is probably best known for A Hero with a Thousand Faces, but it’s another book—Pathways to Bliss—that I turn to like a travel guide to my own spiritual journey. In prompting readers to explore archetypes to help them create their personal mythology, Campbell believes that life should be a journey to finding our bliss. This is a book about personal growth for people who want to self-discovery in a larger—mythical—context.

Once you’ve opened yourself up, gotten a few instructions and are reminded that nothing is holding you back, you’re ready to connect with your own internal mechanisms. Hillman re-positions psychology in the context of soul-making, where it makes most sense and is most useful for us.

We get hung up on so many things, and Hillman fearlessly wades into every one of them with great intention. I think Hillman is one of the smartest, most perceptively radical writers not named Jung, and this book grapples with the uneasy humility that is creative work: your own soul-making.

I found this book to be full of literary and film examples of mental illness that I could bring into the courses I teach in abnormal psychology and medical ethics.

The writing is clear and engaging, and the book introduced me to numerous films that I had not previously seen. I was especially interested in the discussion of films that illustrate (a) positive psychology and (b) movies that depict therapists in action.  

A houseful of women, moving from their long-term home in New Zealand to a new location by the sea. What you get in this short tale is an accumulation of moments that add up to an intense mosaic of the life of women in a male-dominated family.

From the little girl Kezia to the pregnant wife Linda, from the sometimes benevolent grandmother to the handyman who chops off the head of a live duck to see it still running, this book enthralls in its detail, its poetic and emotional resonance, and the insights it gives into female consciousness in a world of constrictions.

Don’t look for ‘what happens next’; look instead for the diamond facets the story reveals in every sentence. When you get to the end, you may feel that this book is a jewel beyond price.