Growing with people and plants

An annotated reading of the books I finished in September 2025.

As the weather outside gets colder, this month’s reading selection should warm up our thoughts.

Books Read in September 2025

  1. Good to Great
  2. How to Change Your Mind
  3. Nonviolent Communication

Outlasting your initial success

Good to Great exemplifies curiosity-driven scientific inquiry into economic patterns. If you have found yourself wondering why some companies achieve longevity velocity and seemingly revitalize themselves decade over decade while others struggle to live up to their past successes, this book offers some keen hypotheses with data to support them. Despite the age of the book since its first release, its primary principles regarding “level-5 leadership” and “first who, then what” will likely stand the test of time.

Plants and insight

Michael Pollan is one of my favorite writers, not only for his writing style but also his topic selection. He focuses primarily on issues at the intersection of food, ecosystems, health, and personal growth, and How to Change Your Mind is no exception. Somewhere near the latter of these two topics, this book raises many important questions about the nature of consciousness and our role in shaping it (with or without exogenous chemicals). After reading it, you’ll hopefully be left with a sense that there is still much for us to discover about how we learn from and relate to the environments around us.

Talking with intention

A perennial concept is the idea that our choice of words and the intention behind them matter. Nonviolent communication (NVC) takes this a step further by urging us to see the wisdom in expressing our needs and observations in a nonjudgmental manner. Relationships can break down when individuals confuse their (concrete) observations of others for (judgmental) evaluations of their performance or behavior. NVC helps get us back on track by intentionally delineating between observations and evaluations in real conversations in real time.

That’s all for now. Ciao.

Alex