There are millions of books published every year. So many books and not enough time to read them all! I read about 110 books this year and I am hoping to help you weed through the sheer volume of great books out there by sharing some of my favorites from 2024.
Remember, it’s important to be intentional about the books you choose. Is there a particular topic you want to know more about? Do you want to learn more about one of your favorite celebrities, business leaders, or historical figures? Need to learn more about leadership? Do you want to explore the classics? Or get lost in a great beach read as part of a self-care routine? Perhaps you have a specific business challenge you want to solve. There is a book for everything and everyone!
Where do you want to go and grow in 2025?
Looking for your next book? Here are some of my favorite non-fiction books I read in 2024, in no particular order:
If you want to know some of my picks for fiction, send me an email or connect with me on Goodreads!
Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect by Will Guidara
MY TAKE: This was the first book I read in 2024 and my most recommended book of the year. Dare I say… *chef’s kiss*? If you are ever in doubt about what truly extraordinary customer service looks like, just turn to any page in this book. When I first listened to Unreasonable Hospitality, I immediately thought, “This is how great Executive Assistants and Force Multipliers operate.” Hospitality is a mindset first and this book shows you how to harness that mindset into systems and processes that transform companies. Plus, restaurant culture is just fascinating. This book is informative and entertaining. Check out season 2 of The Bear on Hulu for a look at Unreasonable Hospitality in action.
FROM AMAZON: Will Guidara was twenty-six when he took the helm of Eleven Madison Park, a struggling two-star brasserie that had never quite lived up to its majestic room. Eleven years later, EMP was named the best restaurant in the world. How did Guidara pull off this unprecedented transformation? Radical reinvention, a true partnership between the kitchen and the dining room and memorable, over-the-top, bespoke hospitality. Guidara’s team surprised a family who had never seen snow with a magical sledding trip to Central Park after their dinner; they filled a private dining room with sand, complete with mai-tais and beach chairs, to console a couple with a cancelled vacation. And his hospitality extended beyond those dining at the restaurant to his own team, who learned to deliver praise and criticism with intention; why the answer to some of the most pernicious business dilemmas is to give more not less; and the magic that can happen when a busser starts thinking like an owner.
Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, & Roy Schwartz
MY TAKE: Great tips for effectively communicating via email, presentations, meetings, and more. Incredible resource for Force Multipliers who want to elevate their ability to communicate with busy leaders and help their companies capture attention in today’s world. The Core 4 framework alone will make a positive impact on your career. If you’re looking to become a more strategic partner and communicator, you’ve got to get this book. And, the Audible is only 3 hours (or listen on 1.4x speed and shave off an hour)!
FROM AMAZON: Brevity is confidence. Length is fear. This is the guiding principle of Smart Brevity, a communication formula built by Axios journalists to prioritize essential news and information, explain its impact and deliver it in a concise and visual format. Now, the co-founders of Axios have created an essential guide for communicating effectively and efficiently using Smart Brevity—think Strunk and White’s Elements of Style for the digital age.
In SMART BREVITY: The Power of Saying More with Less, Axios co-founders Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz teach readers how to say more with less in virtually any format. They also share communications lessons learned from their decades of experience in media, business and communications.
Becoming Bulletproof: Life Lessons from a Secret Service Agent by Evy Poumpouras
MY TAKE: Evy is a certified badass. She shares incredible stories and actionable insights that I think parallel so much of what we need to learn and embody as great Force Multipliers. From protecting yourself (and others), to reading people, to influencing situations, and living fearlessly, this book is a must read!
FROM AMAZON: Former Secret Service agent and star of Bravo’sSpy Games Evy Poumpouras shares lessons learned from protecting presidents, as well insights and skills from the oldest and most elite security force in the world to help you prepare for stressful situations, instantly read people, influence how you are perceived, and live a more fearless life.
Becoming Bulletproof means transforming yourself into a stronger, more confident, and more powerful person. Evy Poumpouras—former Secret Service agent to three presidents and one of only five women to receive the Medal of Valor—demonstrates how we can overcome our everyday fears, have difficult conversations, know who to trust and who might not have our best interests at heart, influence situations, and prepare for the unexpected. When you have become bulletproof, you are your best, most courageous, and most powerful version of you. Poumpouras shows us that ultimately true strength is found in the mind, not the body.
Courage involves facing our fears, but it is also about resilience, grit, and having a built-in BS detector and knowing how to use it. In Becoming Bulletproof, Poumpouras demonstrates how to heighten our natural instincts to employ all these qualities and move from fear to fearlessness.
The Portfolio Life: How to Future-Proof Your Career, Avoid Burnout, and Build a Life Bigger than Your Business Card by Christina Wallace
MY TAKE: I don’t really believe in work-life balance, so I appreciated this approach to creating a career and life by design. It’s not necessarily about balance, but rebalancing and reallocating time, energy, and resources towards different areas of your life at different times in your life. Be prepared to spend some time with this book. This is not your average career advice book with too much inspiration and not enough tangible takeaways. There are lots of exercises and activities that will require you to do some thinking, reflecting, and planning. Grab a stack of sticky notes and dive in!
FROM AMAZON: Pouring yourself into a single full-time job is the riskiest move you can make. Your parents’ advice to focus on one career path? It doesn’t work anymore, for reasons ranging from recessions to student loan debt, the gig economy, climate disasters, and a global pandemic (to name a few). We need a dramatically different relationship with work, one that allows us to define ourselves beyond our paid labor.
The answer? A Portfolio Life. An anti-hustle, pro-rest approach to work-life balance, a Portfolio Life is built on three tenets:
- You are more than any one role or opportunity.
- Diversification will help you navigate change and mitigate uncertainty.
- When (not if) your needs change, you can and should rebalance.
In The Portfolio Life, Harvard professor, serial entrepreneur, and self-described “human Venn diagram” Christina Wallace adapts tried-and-true practices from the business sector to help you eschew the cult of ambition and experience the freedom of building the flexible, fulfilling, and sustainable life you want. Drawing on research, case studies, and her own experience, she walks you step-by-step through the process of designing a strategy for the long haul. Because you deserve rest, relationships, and a rewarding career—not someday, but today. After all, you only live once.
Private Equity: A Memoir by Carrie Sun
MY TAKE: What’s it like to be the assistant to a hedge fund billionaire? Carrie Sun breaks it down in her beautifully written and raw memoir, Private Equity. A book that I still think about months after reading. You all know how much I respect and value the Executive Assistant, Chief of Staff, Personal Assistant, and Force Multiplier roles. This book was so familiar in so many ways (both from my own experiences and from all the stories that other assistants and Force Multipliers have shared with me over the years). This was a fascinating read and I highly recommend it to any assistant, as well as any leader who wants to better understand the effects of their decisions and leadership (or lack thereof) on the culture, productivity, and well-being of their team. This book brings to light so many of the underlying and overt challenges that assistants face, as well as offers a broader commentary on hustle culture and burnout. It also reminds me how much work we still have to do to educate founders, leaders, HR professionals, and Executive Assistants on what a strong, respectful, productive, fulfilling, and impactful strategic business partnership looks like. I know it’s possible. I’ve seen it and it’s a beautiful thing!
FROM AMAZON: When we meet Carrie Sun, she can’t shake the feeling that she’s wasting her life. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Carrie excelled in school, graduated early from MIT, and climbed the corporate ladder, all in pursuit of the American dream. But at twenty-nine, she’s left her analyst job, dropped out of an MBA program, and is trapped in an unhappy engagement. So when she gets the rare opportunity to work at one of the most prestigious hedge funds in the world, she knows she can’t say no. Fourteen interviews later, she’s in.
Carrie is the sole assistant to the firm’s billionaire founder. She manages his work life, becoming the right hand to an investor who can move mountains and markets with a single phone call. Eager to impress, she dives headfirst into the firm’s culture, which values return on time above all else. A luxury-laden world opens up for her, and Carrie learns that money can solve nearly everything.
Playing the game at the highest levels, amid the ultimate winners in our winner-take-all economy, Carrie soon finds her identity swallowed whole by work. With her physical and mental health deteriorating, she begins to rethink what it actually means to waste one’s life. A searing examination of our relationship to work, Carrie’s story illuminates the struggle for balance in a world of extremes: efficiency and excess, status and aspiration, power and fortune. Private Equity is a universal tale of self-invention from a dazzling new voice, daring to ask what we’re willing to sacrifice to get to the top—and what it might take to break free and leave it all behind.
Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire by Dan Martell
MY TAKE: This book was so good, that as soon as I finished listening to it on Audible I downloaded all of the resources and then bought the hard-copy. What really sets this book apart from other time management or entrepreneurship books are all of the models and frameworks, from The DRIP Matrix, to The Replacement Ladder, to The 1-3-1 Method, to The Email GPS System and so much more. Dan Martell combines business success and productivity theory with simple and actionable steps that you, dear reader, will actually do! Concept to implementation is always the most difficult, especially for visionary entrepreneurs. This book gives you (and/or your Force Multiplier!) the roadmap to follow.
FROM AMAZON: How you use your free time will make or break your success. The secret? It’s not about working harder or finding more time to do work. It’s about designing the freedom to engage in the high-value work that brings you energy and fulfillment. This is at the heart of the message that has made Dan Martell the world’s most popular SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) coach. Now, in his first book, Buy Back Your Time, he teaches entrepreneurs at every level how to scale their business, fast, while avoiding burnout. Trading money for time—that is, literally buying back free space in your calendar—will give you more financial success than you ever dreamed was possible.
With over two decades of experience as a serial entrepreneur and founder, Dan Martell will teach you the secrets to work less and play more while building an empire. He’ll dig into the practical steps that will allow you to start buying back time immediately, while also developing operating procedures and hiring practices that will ensure rapid and robust growth. And he will teach you how to invest in your newfound time wisely—at work and at home—so you keep building your empire while living your best life.
Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds by Huma Abedin
MY TAKE: What originally intrigued me about Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds by Huma Abedin, was that Huma served as a Force Multiplier (in several capacities) to Hillary Clinton for two decades. But I was quickly pulled into the story of this incredible person’s life as she navigates family, faith, legacy, marriage, politics, motherhood, work, world events, identity, and more. I also appreciated Huma’s leadership lessons from HRC. A fantastic listen (I recommend the audio as Huma narrates!).
FROM AMAZON: Abedin launched full steam into a college internship in the office of the First Lady in 1996, never imagining that her work at the White House would blossom into a career in public service, nor that her career would become an all-consuming way of life. She thrived in rooms with diplomats and sovereigns, entrepreneurs and artists, philanthropists and activists, and witnessed many crucial moments in 21st-century American history – Camp David for urgent efforts at Middle East peace in the waning months of the Clinton administration, Ground Zero in the days after the September 11 attacks, the inauguration of the first African American president of the United States, and the convention floor when America nominated its first female presidential candidate.
Abedin’s relationship with Hillary Clinton has seen both women through extraordinary personal and professional highs, as well as unimaginable lows. Here, for the first time, is a deeply personal account of Clinton as mentor, confidante, and role model. Abedin cuts through caricature, rumor, and misinformation to reveal a crystal-clear portrait of Clinton as a brilliant and caring leader, a steadfast friend, generous, funny, hardworking, and dedicated.
Both/And is “the story of a person of substance – someone determined to tell her own story” (The New York Times) including the heartbreaking chronicle of her marriage to Anthony Weiner, what drew her to him, how much she wanted to believe in him, the devastation wrought by his betrayals – and their shared love for their son.
Abedin’s journey through the opportunities and obstacles, the trials and triumphs, of a full and complex life is a testament to her profound belief that in an increasingly either/or world, she can be both/and. Abedin’s compassion and courage, her resilience and grace, her work ethic and mission are an inspiration to women of all ages.
The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss
MY TAKE: Book lovers and history nerds, this is the perfect book for you! Not only are the stories of various bookstores and booksellers interesting in their own right, it was fascinating to learn just how important bookstores were (and still are!) to culture, politics, and community. Of course, I also appreciated the behind the scenes look at the business and financial side of bookstores. Very well researched and easy to read.
NOTE: I linked this one to bookshop.org so you can grab a copy from your independent bookseller!
FROM BOOKSHOP.ORG: Bookstores have always been unlike any other kind of store, shaping readers and writers, and influencing our tastes, thoughts, and politics. They nurture local communities while creating new ones of their own. Bookshops are powerful spaces, but they are also endangered ones. In The Bookshop, we see the stakes: what has been, and what might be lost.
Evan Friss’s history of the bookshop draws on oral histories, archival collections, municipal records, diaries, letters, and interviews with leading booksellers to offer a fascinating look at this institution beloved by so many. The story begins with Benjamin Franklin’s first bookstore in Philadelphia and takes us to a range of booksellers including the Strand, Chicago’s Marshall Field & Company, the Gotham Book Mart, specialty stores like Oscar Wilde and Drum and Spear, sidewalk sellers of used books, Barnes & Noble, Amazon Books, and Parnassus. The Bookshop is also a history of the leading figures in American bookselling, often impassioned eccentrics, and a history of how books have been marketed and sold over the course of more than two centuries—including, for example, a 3,000-pound elephant who signed books at Marshall Field’s in 1944.
The Bookshop is a love letter to bookstores, a charming chronicle for anyone who cherishes these sanctuaries of literature, and essential reading to understand how these vital institutions have shaped American life—and why we still need them.
What were your favorite books of 2024?
