By: Michael Hyatt and Daniel Harkavy

Baker Books (March 1, 2016)

208 pages

This is a book about planning: About planning your life. Where Living Forward is most helpful is in making you think about your life in an intentional way. See, you start with the destination and work backward. This exercise, of starting with the destination impacted me most. Writing your own eulogy, it turns out, can be an emotional experience. From there, Hyatt and Harkavy help you work backward with a systematic plan. If this is how you want to be remembered, what do you need to be doing daily, weekly, and monthly to get there?

Two of my favorite quotes:

“Most of us see the inherent wisdom of planning. We may plan for next year’s vacation, our children’s college education, or our own retirement. But for some strange reason, it never occurs to us to plan our lives..”

“When we are gone, the only essential thing we will leave behind are the memories we create in the lives of those we have touched and those we love. The cool thing is that we have the opportunity to engineer those now. We don’t have to leave them to chance. We can be intentional about creating them.”

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By: Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

William Morrow; Reprint edition (May 12, 2014)

293 pages

I love the economic way of thinking, and Levitt and Dubner always exhibit it so eloquently. How do economist think? They ask questions like: “What is the alternative?” “What is the actual cost of this?” And, “Whom does this impact?” Economist try to not only look at what it seen, but also take into account what is unseen. I am trained as an economist, so I naturally enjoy books like this. I hope you enjoy it too.

Two of my favorite quotes:

“But when serious people talk about education reform, they rarely talk about the family’s role in preparing children to succeed. That is in part because the very words “education reform” indicate that the question is “What’s wrong with our schools?” when in reality, the question might be better phrased as “Why do American kids know less than kids from Estonia and Poland?” When you ask the question differently, you look for answers in different places.”

“Why do some incentives, even those created by smart and well-intentioned people, backfire so badly? We can think of at least three reasons: 1. No individual or government will ever be as smart as all the people out there scheming to beat an incentive plan. 2. It’s easy to envision how you’d change the behavior of people who think just like you do, but the people whose behavior you’re trying to change often don’t think like you—and, therefore, don’t respond as you might expect. 3. There is a tendency to assume that the way people behave today is how they’ll always behave. But the very nature of an incentive suggests that when a rule changes, behavior does too—although not necessarily, as we’ve seen, in the expected direction.”

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