I love my nephews and niece dearly. Their mother is mostly alright (very lib, and makes questionable choices, but a million times better than what we were raised like). The dad however… without going into specifics, has some mental issues and made some awful choices (landing in jail for several years regarding fraudulent business practices), and now that he’s out, seems to be doing similar things again (whether this will come to bite him in the ass again, i don’t know). Sister and the guy are no longer married, but he takes the kids every weekend.
The oldest nephew is a bro. Is really into hockey, and is taking after his dad in some ways regarding an interest in ‘business’ and ‘investing’ (dad was in jail for ponzi style fraud). while it may be just a phase, I’m concerned that between the dad’s influence, and being left to his own devices, he could go down investment/business bro chud pipeline. The mother is in the camp of ‘whatever he does with his dad is not my business, and i believe he will make good choices’. I would like to try to take more of a proactive role. we don’t talk or see each other a lot since we live pretty far away, and he’s in the moody-teen ‘i don’t really want to respond to anyone in full sentences’ phase, but all the kids love when i send books. I would love to have a better relationship with him (and all of them) but not being around makes it really difficult to formulate a more casual relationship where we could really explore a lot of his interests and talk about them.
so my question, do you know of any ‘motivational’ or ‘business’ or ‘entrepreneurship’ books that are not chuddy, or could open up ideas of alternatives to that model. He seems to be pretty materialistic, but primarily because his dad is obsessed with the ‘perfect image’ ‘extravagant life’ (he was like this before he went to jail, and is the reason he was incarcerated). I tried giving him some even ‘basic’ philosophically leaning novels, at least to try to get his brain moving a little more critically, but he’s really just interested in business and sports…
tl;dr book suggestions for a 15 year old boy to slow down/divert business bro attitude…
Okay, I’ve gone through my list of business books I’ve read. As a disclaimer, I’m not aware of any very good leftist or anti-capitalist books about business and entrepreneurship. (As far as left-ish self-help, I like Faith G. Harper’s Unfuck your Life series, including Unfuck your Brain, but they’re more about mental health than about “motivation”.) So I tried to find books that could conceivably steer a business-minded teenager away from “irredeemable chud” and towards “annoying liberal”. I also tried to avoid anything that seemed particularly bro-y or aggressive.
The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need by Daniel Pink. A Manga which serves as a guide to career planning. Part of the plot revolves around creating an invention that helps the environment somehow, and I think it passes the Bechdel test, for whatever it’s worth.
101 Things I Learned in Business School by Matthew Frederick and Michael W. Preis. Fun guide to basic business concepts with illustrations.
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen. I’ve personally found some of the stuff in this book very useful in informing my own systems for being productive.
The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business by Josh Kaufman. Another guide to basic business concepts.
Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High by several authors. I’m throwing this in because, in my observation, bro-y business people are terrible at handling conflict and communicating effectively – which causes them to get fired when they handle conflicts poorly, and then blame political correctness and safe spaces and whatever. I have to think a lot of this could be prevented by reading a decent book on business communication, and as far as popularizations go, I think you could do worse than Crucial Conversations.
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear. More on the motivation/self-help side than on the entrepreneurial side. Techniques for creating good habits. I’ve found this book very useful.
Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott. You mentioned 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, so it sounds like he’s interested in management, which Radical Candor focuses on. It’s also another book that focuses on communication, and emphasizes that a well-run business can employ all kinds of people (i.e. you don’t have to be an aggressive, ambitious alpha-male).
The Surprising Design of Market Economies by Alex Marshall. Emphasizes that markets don’t happen by accident (contra libertarians who think that free markets are just the natural state of the universe) and gives real-world examples of what it legally means to be a “corporation”. Also spends some time discussing cooperatives, which is nice, I guess.
Again, just to repeat my disclaimer, I would not describe the above books as “leftist”. In many ways, they have a lot of implicit liberal ideas – at worst, I would describe them as “Silicon Valley liberal”. But I do think they avoid the most egregious problems I personally associate with chuddy business-minded people (e.g. explicit sexism, racism, anti-environmentalism, sadistic attitude towards the poor, aggressiveness). I read the above books and got some value out of them, and I still ended up on /r/ChapoTrapHouse and migrating to Hexbear, so make of that what you will.
This is amazing. I think as he gets older it will be easier to actually talk to him about his ideas once he has them, but I’d prefer he form them in a healthier manner than what I can assume he is doing now. I’ll look more into some of those and see which I could scooop up for him. My dream would be for him snd the others to be leftists but I don’t necessarily think that will happen right away.
Would rather a lib for now then full douche bro.
Appreciate the work you did !
I haven’t read it, but Richard Wolff suggested 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang. I don’t know if this is something a 15 year old can read through, but as he gets older this might help, along with introducing him to Richard Wolff’s lectures.
I have some interest in business/finance and I’ll look at the books on my list. Do you have any idea what media he’s currently reading/watching/consuming?
Kill the father
-tyll-
