Looking for something awesome to read this month? Here are two suggestions. One to learn from and one to kick back with.

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People Over Profit
By Dale Partridge

People Over Profit is an excellent book about running a business and building a brand that values people and ethics more than the bottom line. The premise is easy enough to understand: if you build a company where values such as honesty, generosity, courage, and quality are built into the fabric of your business model then success will almost certainly follow.

It’s easy to read the cliffnotes and be like, oh yeah, I get that. But do you? Really?

Dale has done an excellent job at outlining just why the values of people, truth, transparency, authenticity, quality, generosity, and courage are so important. And also how these things can impact your business model, company culture, and your brand.

The chapters on transparency, quality, and courage especially hit home for me. Transparency because I believe I have some areas that I can be more transparent with my readership and my team. Quality because the whole chapter was like the thesis statement from my own book, Delight is in the Details. And the courage chapter because it offers a lot of insight into a topic that I’ve been researching a lot lately: how fear can keep us back from doing our best creative work.

One of the many quotes that stood out to me from the book is this:

Business is really just the act of stewarding a series of relationships.

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The Martian
By Andy Weir

I read The Martian while during vacation last Christmas and I couldn’t put it down. If you’re not familiar with the premise, it’s about an astronaut, Mark Watney, who gets stranded on Mars after a 4-man mission goes wrong and has to survive with very limited supplies.

The movie comes out in a few months, but why wait to watch it when you can read the book now? (I’ve also heard that the audiobook version of The Martian is fantastic.)

Relatedly, the author, Andy Weir, recorded a podcast with James Altucher a while back. He shares about how The Martian was written and how in his attempts to give away the book, the Kindle version accidentally became a best seller on Amazon and led to the book and movie deal.

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Also Worthwhile

• The Sketchnote Workbook: This book is actually far deeper than just a workbook to help you improve your sketchnoting chops. As Mike Rohde lays out in the very beginning, sketchnoting is about ideas, not art; it’s about listening to ideas, analyzing them, and finding the ones that resonate. (More on this topic tomorrow.) The workbook gives insight, instruction, and opportunity for ideation, creating idea maps, planning, documenting, and more. Even if you’re not “artistic”, there is much wisdom to glean just about the overall initial stages of the creative process.

• Just yesterday I started reading In Pursuit of Elegance. One chapter in and I’m already pumped about it. Matthew E. May covers seven design lessons: (1) What isn’t there can often trump what is; (2) The simplest rules create the most effective order; (3) Limiting information creates intrigue; (4) Subtraction and restraint promote customer co-created value; (5 Limited resources are the very source of sustainable innovation; (6) Doing something isn’t always better than doing nothing; and (7) “Break” is an important part of any breakthrough.