Bite-sized insights for curious leaders & learners every other Sunday.

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🗣️ "Change happens when people get outraged about other people's rights." -Ryan Holiday

🗣️ "Often injustice lies in what you aren't doing, not only in what you are doing." -Marcus Aurelius

🗣️ "Society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul." -Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

🗣️ "Silence is a statement. Inaction picks a side. And when those lead to personal benefit, they are complicity.” -James Islington (The Will of the Many)

Every month, I record the best quotes I find in books, articles, podcasts, etc. Here are the gems from this past month. ​Read more​

I’ve structured these seven books about Stoicism in order of when you should read them—based on approachability, length, and impact. ​Read more​

​Working Backwards by Bryar & Carr​ ​Nonfiction: Business, Operations Colin Bryar and Bill Carr collectively spent 27 years at Amazon. In this book, they explain unique processes that have led to much of Amazon’s success—all of which could be employed in any company. ​See takeaways​

​One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad​ ​Nonfiction: Current Events, Politics, War I've rarely learned so much about the world from a single book. El Akkad's writing is powerful, poignant, timely, and anger-inducing. He helped me better understand one of today's most contentious topics: Israel & Palestine's ongoing wars. He also challenged my thinking about Western liberalism in many ways.

​The Will of the Many by James Islington​ ​Fiction: Fantasy, Dystopian I'm not normally a big fantasy guy. I've read classics like LOTR, Narnia, etc., but I rarely read many modern fantasy series. But dang, this book may make me reassess! It's one of my favorite novels I've read in a while. As soon as I finished it, I instantly ordered Book 2 of the trilogy. What pulled me in was the thought-provoking social hierarchy in a dystopian fantasy world.

🗣️ "Having love when you say it means you can go hard." -Sarah Silverman

I've been training leaders for nearly a decade, and one of the biggest skills executives always want their teams to develop is giving feedback.

During a recent feedback workshop I led, I had a fresh realization...

The level of candor you can share in a feedback conversation is proportional to how much the person believes you care about them.

• I've gotten difficult feedback from bosses that went down easily because I knew they were 100% invested in my development and wanted to help me grow.
• But I've also cringed at feedback (even soft feedback) when I thought the other person didn't have my best interests in mind.

This realization has changed the way I give feedback to others.

It's prompted me to double down on ensuring the other person knows I'm only sharing that tough message to help them grow.

You can do this in a few ways:

• Explain the potential you see in them
• Explicitly tell them you're sharing this to help their career
• Connect your feedback to their career goals / where they want to go and that fixing XYZ will help them get there faster

When you give someone feedback, how much can they tell you care?

I never knew I enjoyed jazz music until a decade ago, when my wife Kaylyn and I decided to check out a jazz club on a trip to NYC.

To my surprise, I loved it: the ambiance, the musicians' passion, the improvisational nature of the music, the way it made me feel, all of it.

Jazz joined Broadway shows, Brussels sprouts, and Thai food as a few of the things I realized I appreciate later in life.

A couple of weeks ago, Kaylyn heard about a local jazz night hosted here in our hometown of Seattle. Fifteen different venues in Pioneer Square (not far from Pike Place Market) would host fifteen different bands for a free night of jazz for the community. So we hopped on the bus to head to Pioneer Square for the night and had an awesome time.

Below is my favorite pic we took that night. Over 100 people were crammed into a cool local shop called Zeitgeist Coffee to watch a band called FreeFall, and we ended up with a cozy spot right next to the action.

It was awesome. :-)

Visit me at BobbyPowers.com for more articles and book reviews about leadership, communication, and personal development.

You can also access high-res PDFs of my 1-pagers and cheat sheets here.

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