Jólabókaflóð, or Christmas Book Flood, is the charming Icelandic tradition of giving books as gifts, opening them on Christmas Eve, and settling in to read them together, ideally with hot chocolate or other warming wintry drink.

The "flood" refers to the traditional release of books in the months leading up to Christmas. While there may be a book flood without gifting them on Christmas eve, it's such a nice extension that it seems worthy of its adapted meaning.

Iceland has a long literary tradition, and a high percentage of Icelanders both read regularly and become authors themselves. Jólabókaflóð has its roots in various causes to do with wars, rationing, ancient sagas, and, I'd guess, also long winter nights.

Jólabókaflóð

How many books will you read in a lifetime? If you’re a pretty dedicated reader, you may be able to get through one book a week, so roughly 50 books a year. Over 70 years of reading at that pace, you’d read around 3,500 books—counting comfort rereads like Harry Potter for the third time. I only know a few people who actually manage to read like that, so presumably, for most of us, the likely book reads we will manage is much less than that.

To put that number in context, your local bookstore has around 30,000 books. So if you were to use your entire life’s reading in that store, you’d still only be a bit over 1/10th of the way through. That’s a lot of books you didn’t even get a chance to start.

I won’t deny that 3,500 books is a lot of books, but whatever you do, there will be far more books that you just don’t have time to get to than those you do find time for. So, like for movies, I think it seems wise to be at least a little thoughtful about what books you choose to pick up, and what books you decide to go on to finish.

As the author James Joyce said: "Life is too short to read a bad book."

In the course of making this, I learned that in 2010 the Google Books team estimated there were around 130 million books to choose from.

3,500 Lifetime reads

How to get into flow at work? Match challenge with skills.

When your work is too hard for your skill you experience anxiety.

When your skill is too high for the work you experience boredom.

When your skill is matched with the challenge of the work then you can experience flow.

This simple framework comes from the deep insights of the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his book Good Business.

Match challenge with skills for flow at work

SUCCESS is a mnemonic for making your idea sticky, from the entertaining and informative book Made to Stick, by the Heath brothers. It outlines six principles that help ideas resonate, stay memorable, and inspire action: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and Stories.

• Simple: Strip your idea down to its core, making it easy to understand and remember.

• Unexpected: Capture attention by surprising your audience or breaking their expectations.

• Concrete: Use vivid, tangible details to make your idea real and relatable.

• Credible: Build trust by including authority, data, or real-world examples.

• Emotional: Tap into emotions to make your message resonate on a deeper level.

• Stories: Use storytelling to create connection and drive engagement.

By applying these steps, you can communicate ideas that stick in the minds of your audience long after they’re shared.

Examples of the principles of Made to Stick in action:

Make your idea sticky

Stuff, choice, information and tooooo fast. Time to cut down. From Simplicity Parenting.

The four pillars of too much

From Roger Martin's The Design of Business. With a little reflection the funnel is pretty trivial. But I do think it’s a useful way to think about things. At what stage is your business? Still tackling a mystery like Xerox Parc, or getting it down to heuristics like Zynga, or refining out an algorithm like McDonalds.

Book sketches