Holiday rearranges Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus into airport-book format, one short chapter per idea and one historical figure per chapter. It reads in two evenings and leaves the sensation of having understood something, which is precisely what needs checking afterwards. I include it here because a reading list that only shows the good ones is not a reading list, it is a display cabinet.
What survived
The split between what depends on me and what does not, applied to a stalled project. When something freezes on the other side, because a signature, a dataset or a decision that is not mine is missing, the useful response is the short list of what I can move this week, not the long list of what ought to be happening. That sounds obvious and it is not: most of the frustration in a project gets spent on the long list.
And the idea that the obstacle is information. A client who stops replying is communicating quite clearly; reading it as bad luck wastes the signal. The practical version I use is to ask what changed since the last conversation where the interest was real, because something concrete usually did change and it can usually be found out.
What I left out
The book's method, which is its problem. The historical anecdotes are selected because they ended well; the people who held the same attitude and failed never appear, and that is not an argument, it is a selection. A whole genre works this way and it is worth noticing. The central idea reads better, shorter and without an intermediary in the original: Marcus Aurelius was writing to himself and had no next edition to sell.