2024 was a long and trying year.
I turned 30. I led the team at Condia (formerly Bendada.com) to a successful rebrand and a record-breaking year in terms of website visitors, revenue and profit. I also had my fair share of challenges and struggles.
As I have done in the past six years (2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023), I put together a list of some of the most helpful content I came across during the year. I hope you find a thing or two that’s helpful.
This list is a stripped-down version of my not-so-frequent newsletter on the highlights of my months and the most helpful/interesting things I come across every month.
Keeping this list helps me reflect on what I came across during the year and how it helped me, whilst also making it easier for me to revisit it when I need to.
Books
The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It: On Social Position and How We Use it – Will Storr
“When asked why we do the things we do, we rarely say, ‘It’s because of status. I really love it.’ It can be distasteful to think of it as any kind of motivating force, let alone a vital one. It contradicts the heroic story we like to tell of ourselves. ”
Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It – April Dunford
It was a helpful read as I worked through a rebranding exercise. It pushed me to think about value propositions.
Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help, And How to Reverse – Robert Lupton
“In the United States, there’s a growing scandal that we both refuse to see and actively perpetuate. What Americans avoid facing is that while we are very generous in charitable giving, much of that money is either wasted or actually harms the people it is targeted to help…How? Dependency. Destroying personal initiative. When we do for those in need what they have the capacity to do for themselves, we disempower them.”
Reading this book made me rethink how I help other people.
Charity Detox: What Charity would look like if we cared about results – Robert Lupton
“Charity often hurts the people it was designed to help…The hard reality is that it takes more than compassionate hearts and generous gifts to elevate people in need out of poverty. In fact, giving to people in need what they could be gaining from their own initiative may well be the kindest way to destroy them.”
A follow-up book that says more about how to give in a helpful way.
Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making – Tony Fadell
This advice is unorthodox because it’s old-school. The religion of Silicon Valley is reinvention, disruption—blowing up old ways of thinking and proposing new ones. But certain things you can’t blow up. Human nature doesn’t change, regardless of what you’re building, where you live, how old you are, how wealthy or not. And over the last thirty-plus years I’ve seen what humans need to reach their potential, to disrupt what needs disrupting, to forge their own unorthodox path.
Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility – Patty McCord
“This book is not a memoir of the building of Netflix. It is a guide to building a high-performance culture that can meet the challenges of today’s rapid pace of change in business, written for team leaders at all levels.”
A Beautiful Constraint: How To Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages, and Why It’s Everyone’s Business – Adam Morgan
“Constraints have a bad rap. Constraint is, by definition, a negative thing. Its imposition prevents us from acting as we would like to, because it restricts us in some important way. Constraints hold us down, knock us back, make us fail. “Don’t fence me in,” the old song says: if you want me to show what I can do, then leave me unconstrained.
This book aims to show how and why the opposite is true. How constraints can be fertile, enabling, and desirable.”
The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time – Richard Fisher
“In a time-blinkered age, all modes of thinking are shaped primarily by present-day concerns, meaning the long view is often seen only through the lens of satisfying current needs, increasing profit or winning political battles. Or as the psychologist Daniel Gilbert once put it: ‘If the present lightly colours our remembered pasts, it thoroughly infuses our imagined futures.”
Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect – Will Guidara
“That word “unreasonable” was meant to shut us down—to end the conversation, as it so often does. Instead, it started one, and became our call to arms. Because no one who ever changed the game did so by being reasonable. Serena Williams. Walt Disney. Steve Jobs. Martin Scorsese. Prince. Look across every discipline, in every arena—sports, entertainment, design, technology, finance—you need to be unreasonable to see a world that doesn’t yet exist.”
The Effective Executive – Peter F. Drucker
Reading this book made me rethink how I spent my time. I adjusted my schedule pushing most of creative tasks to the early morning and my meetings to the afternoon (where I could).
My Watch [3 volumes]– Olusegun Obasanjo
Articles
- “How To Succeed On Substack” – by Summer Brennan
- 1.0 Is the Loneliest Number | Matt Mullenweg
- How Ideas Grow
- Making Boring Writing Fun Again: What We Can Learn from Stink Bugs. (Yes, Seriously.)
Videos
- Changing The Rules FT Dr Olakunle Soriyan | The Honest Bunch Podcast S05EPS9: This is an interview that’s worth watching over and over. A good video to pair with Dunsin Oyekan’s Confession Box Interview
- The Global Junk Food Conspiracy: Easily the most enlightening stuff I’ve watched in May. Marketing at its best and worst.
- How Steve Jobs Persuaded The World: Due to the abundance of Steve Jobs-related content out there, I’m typically wary of listening to anything new but this one was really good. A fresh perspective to the behavioural science principles Jobs used to persuade the world.
- Learn Great Copywriting in 76 Minutes | Harry Dry
- Innovating Africa Documentary: The Rise of Tech in Nigeria + The Innovators Building Africa’s Thriving Tech Scene
- 🎧 Let’s Make This More Interesting — The Challenger Project
- Simon Sinek & Trevor Noah on Friendship, Loneliness, Vulnerability, and More
- 🎧Why Oprah is the Original Influencer
Favourite Quotes
“There are different types of hard work:
1. Outthinking (a better strategy, a shortcut)
2. Pure Effort (working longer, intensity)
3. Opportunistic (positioning yourself to take advantage of change)
4. Consistency (doing average things for longer)
5. Focus (saying no to distractions)
Each of these requires a different type of hard work.”
— Farnam Street
“Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after the other.”
– Walter Elliot
“There is no mountain anywhere, everybody’s mountain is his ignorance.”
― Bishop David Oyedepo