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Somewhere between endless meetings and half-finished projects, we all went looking for better ways to get things done this year. These are the 2025 titles that helped people stay organized, focused, and finally finish what they started. Learn something new every day with Book Bites, 15-minute audio summaries of the latest and greatest nonfiction. Get started by downloading the Next Big Idea app today! Move. Think. Rest.: Redefining Productivity & Our Relationship With Time By Natalie Nixon A creativity whisperer to the C-Suite keynote speaker teaches how to harness the power of everyday activities to stress less and be more productive. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Natalie Nixon, in the Next Big Idea app or view on Amazon. Mastery: Why Deeper Learning Is Essential in an Age of Distraction By Tony Wagner and Ulrik Juul Christensen In a world where AI can deliver information faster and more accurately than any human, what matters most are the uniquely human skills of critical thinking, communication, creativity, collaboration, and character. This is why we need to replace our outdated, time-based education model with a mastery-based approach. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by coauthors Tony Wagner and Ulrik Juul Christensen, in the Next Big Idea app or view on Amazon. Your Hidden Genius: The Science-Backed Strategy to Uncovering and Harnessing Your Innate Talents By Betsy Wills and Alex Ellison Traditional career advice places too much emphasis on skills and intereststwo things that change over time. Aptitudes are the permanent, reliable guide to how every person can uniquely flourish, thrive, and achieve their potential. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by coauthor Alex Ellison, in the Next Big Idea app or view on Amazon. Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life By Maggie Smith We are all creative beings because making your life is the ultimate creative act. For those who choose to tune their senses as artists, there are ten key principles to improving your craft. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Maggie Smith, in the Next Big Idea app or view on Amazon. Unforgettable Presence: Get Seen, Gain Influence, and Catapult Your Career By Lorraine K. Lee You can be an incredibly hard worker who delivers quality results time and again, but still get overlooked for that big promotion. The true accelerator of ambitious goals is an unforgettable presence. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Lorraine K. Lee, in the Next Big Idea app or view on Amazon. Who Better Than You?: The Art of Healthy Arrogance & Dreaming Big By Will Packer Trailblazing filmmaker and powerhouse CEO Will Packer presents powerful and illuminating stories from the front lines of Hollywood to offer a clear vision on how to manifest your own successby believing there is no one more deserving of it than you. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Will Packer, in the Next Big Idea app or view on Amazon. How to Break Up With Your Phone By Catherine Price Smartphones have stolen an alarming amount of our attentionand therefore our lives. To nurture habits that fill our precious time with fun, excitement, and connection, start by breaking up with your phone. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Catherine Price, in the Next Big Idea app or view on Amazon. Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter By Juliet Schor Research increasingly shows that switching from five to four is a win for employees and their entire company. The benefits are so impressive that governments are getting involved in legislating fewer working hours. Times are changing, and modern life and modern business are better off on a four-day work schedule. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Juliet Schor, in the Next Big Idea app or view on Amazon. Theres Got to Be a Better Way: How to Deliver Results and Get Rid of the Stuff That Gets in the Way of Real Work By Nelson Repenning and Donald Kieffer A lot of companies struggle with workflow design challenges that stand in the way of getting real work done. Fortunately, for these similar obstacles there exist solutions that apply across industries. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by co-authors Nelson Repenning and Donald Kieffer, in the Next Big Idea app or view on Amazon. The Brain at Rest: How the Art and Science of Doing Nothing Can Improve Your Life By Joseph Jebelli Your brains default network is the most important part of your brain that you have probably never heard about. It is critical for maintaining intelligence, creativity, memory, and so much more. The key to a healthy default network? Rest. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Joseph Jebelli, in the Next Big Idea app or view on Amazon. Finding Focus: Own Your Attention in an Age of Distraction By Zelana Montminy We live in a world that is quietly, relentlessly unraveling our attention and, with it, our capacity to think clearly, feel deeply, and live purposefully. Finding Focus is about how to come home to yourself and what matters most. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Zelana Montminy, in the Next Big Idea app or view on Amazon. Digital Exhaustion: Simple Rules for Reclaiming Your Life By Paul Leonardi A revelatory examination of why youre feeling so worn outand practical daily strategies to change your relationship with your devices. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Paul Leonardi, in the Next Big Idea app or view on Amazon. The Key Ideas in 15 Minutes If you are going to get anywhere in life, you have to read a lot of books, Roald Dahl once famously said. The only trouble is, reading even one book from cover to cover takes hoursand you may not have many hours to spare. But imagine for a moment: What if you could read a groundbreaking new book every day? Or even better, what if you could invite a world-renowned thinker into your earbuds, where they personally describe the five key takeaways from their work in just 15 minutes? With the Next Big Idea app, weve turned this fantasy into a reality. We partnered with hundreds of acclaimed authors to create Book Bites, short audio summaries of the latest nonfiction that are prepared and read aloud by the authors themselves. Discover cutting-edge leadership skills, productivity hacks, the science of happiness and well-being, and much moreall in the time it takes to drive to work or walk the dog. I love this app! The Book Bites are brilliant, perfect to have in airports, waiting rooms, anywhere I need to not doomscroll You guys are the best! Missy G. Go Deeper With a Next Big Idea Club Membership The Next Big Idea app is free for anyone to tryand if you love it, we invite you to become an official member of the Next Big Idea Club. Membership grants you unlimited access to Book Bites and unlocks early-release, ad-free episodes of our LinkedIn-partnered podcast. You also gain entry to our private online discussion group, where you can talk big ideas with fellow club members and join exclusive live Q&A sessions with featured authors. For a more focused learning experience, we recommend a Hardcover or eBook Membership. Every few months, legendary authors and club curators Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Adam Grant, and Daniel Pink select two new nonfiction books as the must-reads of the season. We then send hardcover copies straight to your doorstep, or eBook versions to your favorite digital device. We also collaborate with the authors of selected books to produce original reading guides and premium e-courses, 50-minute master classes that take you step by step through their most life-changing ideas. And yes, its all available through the Next Big Idea app. My biggest Thank You is for the quality of book selections so far. I look on my shelf and see these great titles, and I find myself taking down one or two each month to reread an underlined passage. Full marks to all involved! Tim K. Learn Faster, From the Worlds Leading Thinkers Whether you prefer to read, listen, or watch, the Next Big Idea is here to help you work smarter and live better. Wake up with an always-fresh Idea of the Day, the perfect shot of inspiration to go with your morning coffee. Then dive into one of our Challenges, hand-picked collections of Book Bites that form crash courses in subjects like communication, motivation, and career acceleration. Later, watch the playback of an interview with U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Stanford psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt, or philosopher John Kaag. And be sure to check the Events tab in the app, so that you can join an upcoming live Q&A and personally chat with the next featured thought leader. If youre hoping to grow as a person or as a professional, we hope youll join us and tens of thousands of others who enjoy the Next Big Idea. Get started by downloading the app today! Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea app. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. I like pushing AI to be less predictable. When AI assistants are less bland and more bold, they challenge my blind spots and nudge me to rethink. So I asked one of the boldest AI experimenters I know, Alexandra Samuel, to share unconventional tips and tactics when she visited New York recently from Vancouver. Alex, who writes about AI for The Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review, surprised me with the scale of her AI efforts. She described creating 200-plus automation scripts and building a personal idea database that helps with drafting pitch emails. Her quirkiest tactic? Using Suno to generate songs to explain complex concepts. Her lively new podcast, Me + Viv, explores her unusual relationship with an AI assistant she trained to serve as her coach and collaborator. She interviews AI skeptics like Oliver Burkeman and Karen Hao to challenge her own embrace of AI. The Suno songs Alex generated serve as a recurring musical thread throughout the series. In a recent episode, Im So Sycophantic, Alex confronts Vivs most irritating flaw: her pathological tendency to flatter Alex and agree with everything she says. The shows intriguing premise reminded me of another podcast I love, Evan Ratliffs Shell Game, whose second season debuted recently. Both are excellent explorations of what its like to engage deeply with AI assistants, resourceful and flawed as they are. Five tips from Alex 1. Use Suno to turn words into catch music.What Suno is: An AI music generation platform for creating custom songs Alex uses Suno extensively to create songs for her podcast about AI, treating it as a storytelling tool rather than just music creation. Im like a monkey with a slot machine. Its pretty typical for me to generate the same song 50 or 100 times, maybe even 200 times, she says. The iterative process helps her find the perfect version. She says Suno struggles with switching between male and female voices, musical styles, or languages mid-song. Alex suggests bringing your own lyrics to Suno for better results than relying on its built-in lyric generation. Heres documentation she wrote up about how she uses Suno. An alternative she recommends: Work iteratively with an AI assistant like Claude to develop lyrics that you then import into Suno. Try it for: Turning articles or announcements into short promo songs; creating engaging musical explainers; or generating a newsletter signup song Alternatives: Udio, ElevenLabs Music 2. Coda: Create your own productivity hubWhat Coda is: A software tool for creating customized documents and databases. Ive written about how underrated Coda is as an alternative to other useful tools like Notion and Airtable. Alex calls Coda an everything hub where you can build your own tools. New AI features make it easier to use and more flexible. Alex used Coda to design her own pitch machine, a sophisticated story tracking system. She has one table in the pitch machine with all of her story ideas. Another table in Coda has all the publications she writes for, with editors names and contact info. With the press of a button in Coda, she can combine multiple story pitches into a single Gmail draft while automatically updating tracking fields and follow-up dates. It took a while to set up, but now it saves her time. Who is Coda for? Alex recommends Coda for power users who like messing around with tech. She offers this test: If you use XLOOKUP in Excel, then you should use Coda. If you dont know XLOOKUP, you should use Notion. Its like a nerd-o-meter. Try it for: Project and campaign idea tracking, managing a client database, or automated email or Slack message generation Alternatives: Notion, Airtable, Google Workspace, Obsidian3. CapCut: Create social videos with AI helpWhat it is: A video editing platform with AI features Alex uses CapCut, along with custom Python scripts, to create music videos for Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. She says she has mixed feelings about CapCut because of its TikTok/ByteDance ownership, but relies on it for now. Shes been working on a system for syncing the appearance of captions on-screen to the moment when song lyrics are heard. Try it for: Creating stylish, captioned social media videos or turning podcasts into videos Alternatives: Captions, Descript, or Kapwing 4. Claude + MCP: Connect AI to your docsWhat it is: An AI assistant connected to external databases and tools via Model Context Protocol (MCP) MP servers let you connect sites and apps to AI platforms. Thats how Alex connected her Coda account to Claude. Now that theyre linked, Alex can pose casual questions to Claude, which can then look for things in her Coda docs. I can actually just have a conversation with Claude and say, Hey Claude, I just talked to an editor. Theyre looking for articles about data privacy. Can you look at my Coda doc and see what story ideas I have that might be relevant? She emphasizes security considerations: Journalists covering sensitive subjects should avoid this type of experimental workflow if theyre protecting anonymous source information. Try it for: Querying complex databases, finding relevant past work for new projects, analyzing patterns across your own documents, combining multiple data sources for insights Alternatives: The Google Drive connector in Claude or ChatGPT; or a custom setup of NotebookLM 5. Claude Code: Reduce repetitive workWhat it is: An AI-powered coding assistant that runs locally on your computer. It helps developers code faster. It also helps nonprogrammers accomplish technical tasks using natural language prompts. You can use it to organize files on your laptop, create Python scripts, or make little interactive applications or games. Despite limited formal programming training, Alex has written approximately 200 Python scripts using Claude Code. She says, Whenever you hear yourself with the deep sigh of, like, This is gonna be a drag, just go to the AI and say, Hey, heres this thing I have to do. Is there a way that could be made into a script? Alexs scripts have helped her combine PDFs and generate time-coded captions for video. She also used Claude Code to build her own Firefox extension for a financial tracking app. Try it for: Batch file processing, converting data, or whipping up browser extensions to solve specific-to-you problems Alternatives: Replit, Cursor, Claude Artifacts, Windsurf This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps.
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My working days often unfold in either Zoom minimalist workplaces or glass-walled conference rooms with sleek windows, filled with entrepreneurs pitching ideas. As a marketing executive and startup mentor, I lead strategies for companies of various sizes, guide founders at startup accelerators TechStars and Founder Institute, and serve as an awards jury member. My calendar overflows with executive consultations, brand campaign planning, and deadline sprints. But between Christmas and New Year’s, I trade those sterile spaces for museum halls alive with color and history. It wasnt easy getting out the door the first time I did this in 2021. I was filled with fears. What if a startup stalled? What if a client bailed? Eventually, though, I did it. I carved out full days for museums. No notifications mid-visit, no news feeds. Just artand a notebook. This wasn’t a lazy holiday stroll. I didn’t set out to make this a blueprint. I just craved difference. What I didn’t expect was how profoundly it refueled me. I feared it would derail momentum; instead, it unlocked clarity. If you’re a leader convinced you can’t afford the pause, that’s precisely why you must. Here’s how to begin. What the museum ritual looked like I timed it consciously: Christmas week plus New Year’s Eve, overlapping holidays when clients slow down anyway, so I missed zero critical days. While I was out, my colleagues handled brand campaigns; an assistant triaged the rest. If a force majeure broke out, they’d route it. Christmas Eve morning last year, I headed out. Here’s a day in the ritual: Slow walk to an art gallery, followed by unhurried coffee, sketching initial impressions. Then, hours absorbing art. No music in headphones, no quick email scans. Full presence. Leaving the gallery, I wandered to the local Christmas market near the town hall. I savored warm coffee and bagels, relishing the heat of the cup in my hands. By the end of the day, the inspiration hit. I filled my notebooknot pitches, but reflections: yearly goals reframed, market blind spots, forgotten creative hunches, leadership values dusty from neglect. Insights flowed because I carved the space. They stuck. Three insights that reshaped me Here are three insights I stumbled upon while I took a moment for a pause: 1. Different lenses multiply breakthroughs. A single perspective limits you. As I moved from the Cubism hall to the Impressionism hall in one museum, I recalled a direct-to-consumer brand struggling in Asia. They were obsessed with premium customers but missing the mass market. My walking and thinking led to a simple pivot: Tailor messaging to local culture. Sales took off. Now my mornings begin with one question: “What lens am I using today?” Calm. Global. Daring. I lead from vision now, not reaction. The world meets me there. 2. Stillness trumps speed. Startups move fast. Metrics can triple in a month. But speed under pressure clouds your judgment. In one case, a data management company struggled with positioning. Their new product features were failing despite endless debates. After the Christmas pause, fresh ideas clicked. We repositioned the product and landed a major client in days. Now I always ask myself: “Is this vision or just velocity?” The pause comes first. 3. Dare to break the rules. Art thrives by breaking conventions. Picasso’s Cubism shattered traditional views, just like the best startups do. During one gallery visit in December, I thought about a tech team stuck in safe, predictable marketing. We shifted to bold, unexpected ideas, like blending AI visuals with Renaissance art vibes in January. It felt risky, but the client loved it. Sales jumped. Now I ask every team: “What’s the rule we can break?” Daring moves win in tech. Why more leaders should try a museum ritual Your mind craves depth, not distraction. We grant muscles recovery; why starve our creativity? Step into galleries, and ideas resurfacevision sharpens, you reconnect to the leader unswayed by noise. Perhaps museums arent your catalyst: Lakeside solitude, hiking trails, or a quiet café moment might move you more. The central pointthat leaders need deliberate downtime to recharge and generate catalytic ideasremains. Taking a break didn’t slow me down; it realigned me to essentials. We mistake time off for indulgence. Wrong. It’s leadership disciplineslowing down to think about what’s vital.
Category:
E-Commerce
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