I read 40 books last year. Here's what I learned

I turned 40 this year and reading these books was my version of the so-called midlife crisis

1. Forget data. Everything is tied to understanding consumers and their emotions–everything.

Marketing: While we all yearn for virality for our products or ideas, it most likely won’t happen. What we can all do is take a more structured approach to spreading our ideas.

This is what Jonah Berger offers in Contagious.

2. You don’t know your customers until you know their stories.

Marketing: The best fiction books do a great job in character mining. My character mining fixes this year came from reading Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpan and Swing Time by Zadie Smith.

3. Design is still how it works. Whether you intentionally designed it or not, you’ve designed it.

Design: Resonate by Nancy Duarte is, unsurprisingly, a well-laid-out book that provides a new way to think about slides and presentations. 

4. If you still choose to pay attention to data, focus on small data.

Trends: What Rohit Bhargava did in Non-Obvious 2016 I like to call future-casting. The book speaks to always having an eye for where your industry is going so that you can discover the inherent business opportunities.

5. What technology wants is inevitable, and then it proceeds to standardise our experiences–for good and bad.

Trends: The Inevitable provides a frame with which to assess the advancement of technology–positive and negative. 

6. Mastery is not a destination. It’s a journey.

Self-improvement: I put The Excellence Habit by Vlad Zachary on this list last because of the quality of the book, but more because of the message and how the attainment of mastery is tied to habit. 

This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.