Jump start your New Year at full speed by picking up a couple of these books. You will not be disappointed.

1. Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long by David Rock

My personal theme for 2010 is ‘Return on Attention’ and I have been on a tear this past year diving deep into the latest neuroscience research. Of the 19 books I read this year on the brain, this is my overall favorite and has had the biggest overall impact on my life. Feeling like a slave to Twitter, your inbox, or daily distractions? This book has some answers and is a quick, easy read (occasionally the writing style is unnecessarily simplistic). The author does a solid job of not only helping you understand how the brain deals with certain stressful situations of daily life, but also demonstrating simple techniques to effectively improve the quality of your life. The book balances the latest neuroscience research with case studies and walkthroughs of changes you can put into practice immediately. Since reading this book in October, I have recommended it to several of friends who have all said it has changed their lives for the better.

Although most founders focus on their cash burn rate, very few focus on the burn rate of their daily time. As entrepreneurs we are constantly bombarded with streams of information from all directions and how we manage our daily time can be a big determinant in our outcomes.

2. Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions by Jeff Hammerbacher and Toby Segaran

Data. Data. Twitter sells stream access to Google & Bing. Big Data. Our culture is sharing more and more of our lives in real time and enterprises are focused on using data to make more informed decisions. All of us are impacted by this onslaught of data. This book provides examples and can help you understand how to leverage data to find insights and derive value. Jeff Hammerbacher’s chapter on his time at Facebook with their data team as well as Jeff Jonas and Lisa Sokol’s chapter on ‘data finding data’ are worth the price of admission alone.

3. Performance at the Limit: Business Lessons from Formula 1 Motor Racing by Mark Jenkins, Ken Pasternak, and Richard West

Formula 1 is my favorite sport. Its similarities with startups run deep and this book examines them in detail. If you are a fan of Eric Ries’ Lean Startup, think of this book as the guide to how to effectively manage the operations of your startup. What do Formula 1 and Startups have in common?

• Small teams attempting to accomplish massive tasks
• Limited budget
• Pushing the boundaries of innovation
• Metric driven performance
• Constant change
• Highly competitive environment

4. Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story by Jerry Weissman

If you are a founder, then this book may be the best $20 you will ever spend. I raised money from top tier investors for two different companies this year and this book proved invaluable in communicating each company’s story. The author, Jerry Weissman, has helped CEOs in Silicon Valley for years build presentations and communicate them effectively. This book lays out how to build effective pitches and how to present them in explicit detail. The chapters outlining how to build a presentation deck slide-by-slide are worth the cost of the book alone. This is truly a must have.

5. The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance by W. Timothy Gallwey

As an entrepreneur you struggle with the external “game” of dealing with co-founders, employees, investors, and customers. Perhaps even more importantly, you also deal with the internal “game” existing in your head as you fight fear, anxiety, and doubt. The roller-coaster of these two games can derail you from focusing on what is truly important and be a hinderance to success. In this book, Gallwey provides you with techniques and lessons on how to balance the two games by establishing the proper mental grounding. I cannot say enough for how this book has helped to achieve clarity in thought and focus.

Also check out Galleway’s related book: The Inner Game of Work

Bonus: I would love to hear what you read in 2009 that made a difference in your life! If you drop me a quick email (tim@socialcast.com) and share a book that has impacted your life this past year, I will email you back access to my last few years of books I read (over 300+ books).

Since the first moment that our Hayes Smartmodems successfully connected to a network, we have been on the hunt for new digital information. We all search for information in order to understand the world in which we live. The consumption of information provides each of us with power that allows us to shape our lives.

Prior to using Prodigy and AOL, I used to dial into Wildcat! bulletin board systems, hungry for knowledge on X-Wing and TIE Fighter game tips. Over the last the 20+ years, the tools that I employed to find and consume information online have evolved rapidly, from basic AOL keyword searches to URLs to Portals (Excite, Altavista), and from Directory Search (Yahoo) to Keyword Query Search (Google) to Social Bookmarks (Delicious, Digg), and finally to Activity Streams (such as Facebook newsfeed and Twitter) where my social graph of connections has become something of a real-time search engine with a life of its own. With each consumption shift, the amount of information I consume each day – or my information diet – has steadily increased to the point where I simply cannot ingest any more without it adversely affecting my daily performance.

Recently, I have been thinking about how our food consumption and information consumption habits actually closely resemble each other. Just as food is the energy source for our bodies, information is the energy source for our minds. Our body’s health is heavily influenced by the quality of our nutritional habits. Consuming foods high in fat, sugar, and other unhealthy elements can lead to a variety of health problems, causing a deterioration of one’s quality of life. Similarly, if we have a poor information diet (i.e. consistently watching reality TV and internet meme videos), our mind’s performance, clarity, and ability to achieve goals can be severely negatively impacted. Although network TV and comedic YouTube videos are fun, they can also be addicting like a sweet sugary snack. Consume too many of these snacks and you will soon find yourself gasping at the scale in disbelief. However, the rate and ease of access to these sugary information snacks has only increased in recent years.

We have been incredibly successful at increasing the number and variety of places where we can forage for information. The convergence of social networks, mobile devices, and real-time activity streams have led to an explosion in the amount of information we can suck in and spit back out. It’s like an ever-growing information buffet – and we’re there for the ‘all you can eat’ meal. At the same time, with an overload of information available to us, our tools for finding, consuming and filtering this information have remained constant in their ability to assist us in making sense of the data. The result is an increasingly complex information environment – one in which we must constantly work to filter the myriad points of data presented to us.

While observing an ant making a chaotic path along a sandy beach, Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize winner and a “father of artificial intelligence and attention economics” once noted:

“An ant, viewed as a behaving system, is quite simple. The apparent complexity of its behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which it finds itself” (Sciences of the Artificial, p 22).

Every day, our environment is becoming increasingly complex. As we continue to increase the number of people we follow and the number of feeds we consume, we are all increasing the complexity of our information diet. Some have even begun to label this as “infobesity.” Increasing the complexity and volume of information we ingest can have a similar effect to increasing your daily intake of calories.

Activity streams are quickly becoming a dominant form of information delivery on the web. These real-time, ever-flowing rivers of information epitomize the reasoning for being conscious of our information diet. Activity streams provide bite-sized information that is easy to snack on at any time, but it can be potent in calories due to the frequency of updates. In order to maintain a nutritious information diet, we will need tools and features that provide feedback on our consumption habits, as well as smart agents that help us optimize the amount of valuable information consumed per time expended.

Personally, I am eagerly awaiting the day when I discover an activity stream of information that comes complete with “Nutrition Facts” to assist me in making good choices. Not too far down the road, our information consumption will be guided by metrics that help each one of us determine the most valuable people and information sources, creating order in the chaos that has become modern information delivery.