Back by popular demand! Every year, Trajectify coaches and clients put together a list of books they've been reading and recommending. (2017 Recommendations are still gold!) With summer approaching, vacation time and opportunity for days away from the office ensue. Wherever your adventures take you (even if it's just in your backyard hammock!), use this OOO time to de-stress, reflect, read, and learn.

Recent Releases

The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

By: Priya Parker
Recommended by: Mike Krupit, Trajectify Founder and Coach

A bold new approach to how we gather that will transform the ways we spend our time together--at work, at home, in our communities, and beyond. In The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker argues that the gatherings in our lives are lackluster and unproductive--which they don't have to be. We rely too much on routine and the conventions of gatherings when we should focus on distinctiveness and the people involved. At a time when coming together is more important than ever, Parker sets forth a human-centered approach to gathering that will help everyone create meaningful, memorable experiences, large and small, for work and for play.

Entrepreneurial You: Monetize Your Expertise, Create Multiple Income Streams, and Thrive

By: Dorie Clark
Recommended by: Mike Krupit, Trajectify Founder and Coach

It's no secret that the world of work has changed, and we're shifting toward an ever more entrepreneurial, self-reliant, work-from-wherever-you-are economy. That can be a liberating force, and many professionals dream of becoming independent, whether by starting their own businesses, becoming consultants or freelancers, or developing a sideline. But there's a major obstacle professionals face when they contemplate taking the leap: how to actually make money doing what they love. You may have incredible talent and novel ideas, but figuring out how to get started, building your reputation in a new realm, developing multiple revenue streams, and bringing in a steady flow of new clients can be a daunting prospect.

Leadership & Strategy

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement

By: Eliyahu M. Goldratt
Recommended by: Charlie Boyce, Delta Energy Services

Written in a fast-paced thriller style, The Goal, a gripping novel, is transforming management thinking throughout the world. It is a book to recommend to your friends in industry - even to your bosses - but not to your competitors. Alex Rogo is a harried plant manager working ever more desperately to try improve performance. His factory is rapidly heading for disaster. So is his marriage. He has ninety days to save his plant - or it will be closed by corporate HQ, with hundreds of job losses. It takes a chance meeting with a professor from student days - Jonah - to help him break out of conventional ways of thinking to see what needs to be done. The story of Alex's fight to save his plant is more than compulsive reading. It contains a serious message for all managers in industry and explains the ideas, which underline the Theory of Constraints (TOC), developed by Eli Goldratt.

Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million

By: Mark Roberge
Recommended by: Darby Dupre, Marketing at Trajectify

The Sales Acceleration Formula provides a scalable, predictable approach to growing revenue and building a winning sales team. Everyone wants to build the next $100 million business and author Mark Roberge has actually done it using a unique methodology that he shares with his readers. As an MIT alum with an engineering background, Roberge challenged the conventional methods of scaling sales utilizing the metrics-driven, process-oriented lens through which he was trained to see the world. In this book, he reveals his formulas for success. Readers will learn how to apply data, technology, and inbound selling to every aspect of accelerating sales, including hiring, training, managing, and generating demand.

The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you

By: Rob Fitzpatrick
Recommended by: Chuck Hall, Trajectify Coach

They say you shouldn't ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn't ask anyone if your business is a good idea. It's a bad question and everyone will lie to you at least a little. As a matter of fact, it's not their responsibility to tell you the truth. It's your responsibility to find it and it's worth doing right. Talking to customers is one of the foundational skills of both Customer Development and Lean Startup. We all know we're supposed to do it, but nobody seems willing to admit that it's easy to screw up and hard to do right. This book is going to show you how customer conversations go wrong and how you can do better.

Growing Your Mind

Stories of Your Life and Others

By: Ted Chiang
Recommended by: Jim Clarke, LUXTECH

Stories of Your Life and Others delivers dual delights of the very, very strange and the heartbreakingly familiar, often presenting characters who must confront sudden change—the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens—with some sense of normalcy. With sharp intelligence and humor, Chiang examines what it means to be alive in a world marked by uncertainty, but also by beauty and wonder.

Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

By: Jon Kabat-Zinn
Recommended by: Jim Lockwood, The Lockwood Group

When Wherever You Go, There You Are was first published in 1994, no one could have predicted that the book would launch itself onto bestseller lists nationwide and sell over 750,000 copies to date. Ten years later, the book continues to change lives.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

By: Charles Duhigg
Recommended by: Joe Cotellese, Trajectify Coach

In The Power of Habit, award-winning business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. Distilling vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives that take us from the boardrooms of Procter & Gamble to the sidelines of the NFL to the front lines of the civil rights movement, Duhigg presents a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential. At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, being more productive, and achieving success is understanding how habits work.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

By: Cal Newport
Recommended by: Mike Krupit, Trajectify Founder and Coach

One of the most valuable skills in our economy is becoming increasingly rare. If you master this skill, you'll achieve extraordinary results. Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a superpower in our increasingly competitive twenty-first-century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of email and social media, not even realizing there's a better way.

The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It

By: Kelly McGonigal
Recommended by: Joe Cotellese, Trajectify Coach

Based on Stanford University psychologist Kelly McGonigal's wildly popular course "The Science of Willpower," The Willpower Instinct is the first book to explain the new science of self-control and how it can be harnessed to improve our health, happiness, and productivity. Informed by the latest research and combining cutting-edge insights from psychology, economics, neuroscience, and medicine, The Willpower Instinct explains exactly what willpower is, how it works, and why it matters.

Have Some Fun

The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School

By: Alexandra Robbins
Recommended by: Chuck Hall, Trajectify Coach

In a smart, entertaining, reassuring book that reads like fiction, Alexandra Robbins manages to cross Gossip Girl with Freaks and Geeks and explain the fascinating psychology and science behind popularity and outcasthood. She reveals that the things that set students apart in high school are the things that help them stand out later in life.

A Beautiful Mind

By: Sylvia Nasar
Recommended by: Chuck Hall, Trajectify Coach

In this powerful and dramatic biography, Sylvia Nasar vividly recreates the life of a mathematical genius whose career was cut short by schizophrenia and who, after three decades of devastating mental illness, miraculously recovered and was honored with a Nobel Prize.