There are times I enjoy these kinds of escapes, but looking back over the past year, I see that my wife and I have developed a strong preference for non-fiction — rich biographies, challenging self-improvement books and thought-stirring theological texts. Of course, there are plenty of non-fiction lemons. Hundreds of thousands of books come out every year and many aren’t worth reading. What’s worse, there’s not enough time to read all the good ones — Henry David Thoreau, who had a lot of time to read at Walden Pond, still warned: “Read only the best books first, lest there not be time to read them all.”

How, then, do you know which books are worth reading? If you’re up for a good non-fiction read this holiday season, I’d like to suggest a few “best books.” The three I discuss below should prove especially helpful to people trying to figure out what to do during their twenties and thirties.

Being great is easier than just being good
What can a book about the business practices of various Fortune 500 companies teach a college graduate who is still selling shirts at the Gap? Quite a bit, surprisingly. Good to Great (Harper Collins), by former Stanford professor Jim Collins, came out last year and spent a lot of this year at the top of various bestseller lists. Several people recommended it to me and I even glanced over it at a bookstore once, but I wasn’t initially compelled to read it until I heard Collins speak at a leadership event hosted by Willow Creek.

It turns out that the process Jim Collins’ research team used to measure the success of various companies led them to land on habits and practices that are linked to biblical principles. Over a five-year period, a team of 21 researchers sorted through a list of 1,435 companies looking for those who had gone from good to great. They read and coded 6,000 articles, generated more than 2,000 pages of interview transcripts and created 384 megabytes of computer data. As the research came in, Collins and the team debated its implications, not wanting to settle for easy answers.

This debate made the team’s observations more valuable than popular business books which take their authors’ favorite angle on success and then cobble together some new buzzwords and a few anecdotes as support. The common traits the research team found in their example companies (such as Fannie Mae, Gillette, Walgreens, and Wells Fargo) challenged many of the popular notions of corporate success. In my opinion, the distinctions the team discovered have many similarities to biblical virtues such as humility and the stewardship of gifts and talents.

With a great gift for storytelling, Collins compares companies with similar strengths and opportunities whose priorities and principles made the difference between incredible success and status quo (even failure for some companies).

Here are some key findings about the good-to-great companies:

• They all had leaders who embodied a paradoxical mix of personal humility and professional will.
• Each company was painfully honest about their weaknesses as well as the challenges of the world around them and placed a high premium on letting the truth be heard among their team.
• Companies that became great did so after focusing on one thing, something they were passionate about and in which they could be excellent (a process that has some similarities to our spiritual calling).
• Greatness required discipline — what Collins describes as “almost religious consistency”.
• Often success grew slowly and wasn’t as dramatic or revolutionary as the stories that often make the headlines.

Toward the end of the book, Collins mentions that he is often asked, “What’s wrong with just being a good company?” He explains that the practices his team observed in the good-to-great companies are actually easier to live by. This shouldn’t surprise us given their proximity to biblical principles.

God works through means
What should you do with your life? Can God use you in mundane jobs like truck driving or waiting tables?

These are questions Gene Edward Veith tackles in his book God at Work (Crossway Books). Dr. Veith is Culture Editor for World magazine and author of several books, including Postmodern Times.

His observations on our calling in life and how we view the responsibilities of work build on thoughts Martin Luther shared in his time. Veith opens the book like this:

When we pray the Lord’s prayer, observed Luther, we ask God to give us our daily bread. And he does give us our daily bread. He does it by means of the farmer who planted and harvested the grain, the baker who made the flour into bread, the person who prepared our meal. (13)

Veith adds that in today’s economy, we could also include another layer of workers such as truck drivers, agricultural scientists, wholesale distributors, bankers, lawyers, and others who participate in the delivery of our daily bread. The point Veith is developing is that God works through means.

Our temptation is to think God only accomplishes His work through direct supernatural activity or through the activity of sacred professions. Veith responds that God can provide even through unbelievers working mundane jobs. He writes:

Though He could give it to us directly, by a miraculous provision, as He once did for the children of Israel when He fed them daily with manna, God has chosen to work through human beings, who in their different capacities and according to their different talents, serve each other. (14)

While Veith believes that unbelievers can contribute in this process, he adds: "But work done in faith has a different significance than work that is done in unbelief. The doctrine of vocation helps Christians see the ordinary labors of life to be charged with meaning." This is a key insight for those trying to figure out how their desire to do God’s work aligns with their workplace employment.

In a further chapter, Veith deals with our calling to be members of a family. One of the biggest struggles of the hungry years occurs when talented, educated men and women begin forming families and feel that their obligations as parents conflict with their identity in their work. Veith explains that family is an essential vocation — one that involves God working through our efforts as well as our gifts. He writes: “God could have decided to populate the earth by creating each new person from the dust, as He did Adam. Instead, He chose to create new life through the vocation of husbands and wives, fathers and mothers” (14).

Anyone seeking to align their gifts with God’s activity in the world can benefit from Veith’s timely reflections on the doctrine of vocation as it applies in all the elements of our lives.

What role does virtue play in success?
I love biographies that lay out all the details of a person’s life — both good and bad. Walter Isaacson, former chairman of CNN and managing editor of Time magazine, does this in his biography, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (Simon and Schuster).

Isaacson makes a compelling case that, during his 84-year life span, Ben Franklin was America’s best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer and business strategist, and one of its most practical political thinkers. I listened to an audio version of the book during my daily work commute, and I was repeatedly amazed by the broad scope of Franklin’s contributions. Isaacson’s accounts of his efforts to get established would be encouraging for anyone attempting to act on high aspirations while scrambling to pay the bills. His account of Franklin’s “hungry years” points out that he regularly went without food in order to buy books.

Perhaps the most important question the book can help a prospective leader deal with is “What role does virtue play in success?” Describing Franklin as "the patron saint of self-improvement guides," Isaacson traces the success of today’s life management gurus such as Stephen Covey, Tony Robbins and Dale Carnegie back to the virtues Franklin promoted in has papers and almanacs 200 years ago. In those pages, Franklin boiled virtues down into quotes such as “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”

Isaacson holds Franklin’s public virtues up against aspects of his private life including a struggle with vanity and the birth of an illegitimate son. In his challenging analysis of Franklin’s form of virtue, Isaacson explains that Franklin valued pragmatism over moralism and religious tolerance over fundamentalist rigidity. A student of principled leadership can learn a lot by examining the successes and failures of Franklin’s attempt to embrace virtue primarily as a means to an end — instead of as an end in itself.

If you pick up one of these books (or if you’ve already read one of them) I’d love to hear your opinions. I’d also appreciate your recommendations for any books you think are essential reading for the hungry years. Happy reading.