Top Books of 2022
A Look Back at our Favorite Product and Non-Product Books
With 2022 coming to a close, we’re finally ready to put this rollercoaster of a year behind us. But before we do, we need to back at some of the best books we reviewed from this past year, along with a few others we’ve read and recommended for outside of the office.
And while 2022 has been a year when everything has felt like it has doubled in price, we’re going to pack at least double the information in here for you. So take that, inflation.
Top Product Books
Four Thousand Weeks
It’s no exaggeration to say that this book really changed my mindset on time. I used to be obsessed with productivity—squeezing every ounce out of every minute in the day. And then being disappointed with myself when I inevitably fell short of my impossible to-do list. But I’ve shifted my thinking. I constantly find myself repeating “it takes the time that it takes” and “I’ll get done what I get done.” I still try to be productive, but not at the expense of my sanity or the most important things in life. The shifts may be big or sometimes subtle, but for me they’ve been life-changing.
How Innovation Works
The book How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom by Matt Ridley was an excellent read and one of the top ones for this year. Innovation is the reason why life continues to improve so incredibly fast and why we can expect and hope that our lives will continue to improve. It may not always be linear, but doing more, creating more, and making it more valuable is key to innovation. We need to ensure that we cultivate the right environments for innovation to thrive. We can’t dictate the success of any specific innovation, but we can ensure that we create space in our work, our companies, our communities and our governments to allow innovation to create magic.
Build
The book Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making is the final one we’ll put on the list of product books for this year. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in building products. No matter where you are in your career, just starting out or CEO, there is something for you. And not just from someone who thinks they know. Tony has done the job, so it is a practical book about building worthwhile products.
We reviewed many other great books this year (one each month), so go back through the archive and check out the other book reviews if you missed any.
Other Favorite Books
Of course, I don’t just read product and business books, because that sounds awful. If you’ve followed some of my previous posts in years past, you know I’m a big fan of history and science fiction. So let me give you a few more books I read this year (not necessarily written this year) that I found fascinating and exciting.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Prodity: Product Thinking to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.