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The Cultivated Book Shelf

A curated library of books on work, creativity, communication, learning, and personal practice that have shaped the thinking behind Cultivated.

Books on work, creativity, communication, learning, and personal practice

Most reading lists are a form of procrastination. Here are 100 books you should read. Here are the 25 books every leader needs to read. Here are the 12 books that will transform your life. Or, even worse, here are the book summaries you can consume in 12 minutes, as though the summary were the important part.

There is something rather amusing about the whole thing. As though the problem with our thinking is that nobody has yet given us a sufficiently long list of books to consume. I don't want to make another one of those.

This is a shelf, not a list

A working shelf, more accurately: the books that have shaped the thinking behind Cultivated – about work, communication, creativity, learning, psychology, philosophy, health and the extremely important business of building a good life while you're busy making a living.

Some have been read once. Some have been read repeatedly. Some have been half-read, abandoned, rediscovered and suddenly understood fifteen years later. A few have changed the way I think forever. A few have changed the way I work. And one or two have probably changed the way I see the world.

That's what I'm looking for in a book. Not information, necessarily.

Interference.

The good ones get into your head and moves things around for the good. They give you a better question and a more useful distinction of something you're wrangling with. They give you a wonderful new way of seeing something you've looked at a hundred times before.

You start noticing the idea elsewhere: in a meeting, in a conversation, in the way an organisation behaves, in the way you spend a Tuesday afternoon, in how you want to live your life.

That's when a book becomes useful. Not when you've finished it. Or when you've consumed someone else's summary of it. But when you digest the book, you spot the line that calls out to you and nobody else, when the book hits you hard because of where you are in life, and when what you take in starts turning up in your life for the better.

So there is no syllabus here. No prescribed order. Certainly no dreaded twelve-week programme. No summaries. No badge for finishing them all. Heck, I suspect some of these will be of no use for you right now anyway.

Please don't turn this into another project. Pick something up that sings to you. Follow a thread, read twenty pages, put it down. Reflect. Come back six years later. Buy a second copy because you lent the first one to somebody who has not given it back and stopped returning your calls. Never visit the book again. Whatever.

The point of the shelves in this library isn't to tell you what to read. It's to make sure that, when you find yourself wrestling with a particular question, there is something on the shelf that might help you think about it differently.

This shelf will change. It should and will. Some books will fall away, new ones will arrive. That's the nice thing about a working library; it isn't a monument to what you once believed.

It's evidence of what you're still trying to figure out.

Audio companion — Cultivated podcast

In this edition of Here's An Idea Worth Playing With, I cover the five books that helped me become a better leader.

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Communication

Books on how meaning travels, how people interpret signals, and how to communicate with clarity.

Systems, Organisations, and Work

Books on how organisations function and how ideas become outcomes.

Learning and Capability

Books on how people change behaviour, build skills, and compound knowledge.

Creativity and Meaning

Books on reframing, imagination, and cultivating a creative life.

Living Well and Sustaining Energy

This section brings together books on health, energy, and the conditions that support a good life.