The Best Book About Work Life From 2019
Forge’s pick for the year’s best read on being a human at work
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2019 perfectly encapsulated the disorienting, occasionally dystopian decade it capped off. Amid economic uncertainty, political upheaval, and the looming shadow of climate catastrophe, we searched for answers. We grasped for mentors. And we read books — many, many books. Within the flux of chaos, these books showed us new approaches for our work, our relationships, our minds, and our moods.
Every day this week, we’ll offer you one of our favorite personal development books of the year, as well as a runner-up in each category.
Forge’s favorite book about work life from 2019:
More Than Enough: Claiming Space For Who You Are (No Matter What They Say) by Elaine Welteroth
In addition to making 1970s-cop-show aviators cool again and turning a corporate teen magazine into one of today’s loudest and most eloquent voices of political resistance, Teen Vogue’s erstwhile editor-in-chief, Elaine Welteroth, is responsible for bringing us the year’s best book about being a human at work.
More Than Enough is a professional memoir of sorts, grounded in the sociopolitical backdrop of Welteroth’s rise to magazine-world royalty. She recounts her trajectory from small-town California girlhood to becoming, in April 2016, the youngest (at the time) editorial boss in Condé Nast history. She was also the media behemoth’s second-ever African American EIC.
Welteroth describes the politics and the microaggressions she faced, the alliances and friendships she developed, and the sense of humor that got her through it all. The book offers a glimpse inside the mind of a woman with preternatural smarts and poise, as she navigates a demanding public work life without losing her sense of self.
Welteroth’s book does the important job of telling us what work means — and what it doesn’t — within a full life. And that’s a perspective that just about anyone, at the close of 2019, would do well to cultivate.
Honorable Mention: The Emotionally Intelligent Office by The School of Life
