Best Books on
Taking Ownership

If you are looking for books about taking ownership of your life, the ones worth your time are Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, QBQ! The Question Behind the Question by John G. Miller, The Oz Principle by Roger Connors and Tom Smith, You Are Capable of More by Chris Sund, and Leadership and Self-Deception from the Arbinger Institute.

Each one comes at ownership from a different angle, and the right starting point depends on what you are actually trying to change.

Why ownership is harder than it sounds

Most people do not have an ownership problem in the way they think they do. They are not lazy, and they are not making excuses on purpose. What usually happens is quieter than that. Something goes wrong, there is a real reason it went wrong, and explaining that reason feels like the honest thing to do, so they explain it. Then they explain it again the next time, and again after that, until explaining has become the habit and improving never quite gets started.

That is why the books below matter more than a speech about responsibility. Ownership is not a feeling you work up. It is a set of questions you learn to ask yourself, over and over, until asking them becomes normal.

One

Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

This is the book most people name first, and for good reason. Willink and Babin were Navy SEAL officers in Ramadi, and they take the principle to its furthest edge: if something went wrong on your team, it is yours, including the parts you did not cause and could not see coming. The combat stories are what people remember, but the business chapters that follow each one are where the work actually happens.

Worth knowing before you start: the delivery is direct and the register is military. Some readers find that clarifying and some find it exhausting. If you are the second kind, one of the gentler books further down will get you to the same place.

Two

QBQ! The Question Behind the Question by John G. Miller

This is the shortest book on the list and probably the most immediately useful. Miller’s whole argument fits in one idea, which is that the questions you ask when something goes wrong reveal whether you are taking ownership or avoiding it. Why did this happen to me, when will they fix it, and who dropped the ball are all questions that put the problem somewhere else. What can I do is the one that puts it back in your hands.

You can read it in an afternoon and start using it the same day, which is rare. It is also a good book to hand to someone else, because it never makes the reader feel accused.

Three

The Oz Principle by Roger Connors, Tom Smith, and Craig Hickman

The framing is built around the Wizard of Oz, where the characters spend the whole story looking for someone to give them what they already had. The authors turn that into a four step model: see it, own it, solve it, do it. It is more structured and more corporate than the others here, which makes it the right choice if you are trying to build ownership across a team rather than in yourself alone.

It is also the book on this list most likely to end up in a training session, so if you are looking for something to run a group through, start here.

Five

Leadership and Self-Deception by the Arbinger Institute

This one is written as a story, which throws some readers off at first, but stay with it. The idea underneath is that we do not just avoid responsibility, we construct entire justifications for why we were right to avoid it, and then we live inside those justifications without noticing. Arbinger calls it being in the box.

It is the most psychologically interesting book on this list, and the one most likely to make you uncomfortable in a useful way. If you have ever been sure you were the reasonable person in a conflict, this book will give you something to think about.

Six

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

The first habit is be proactive, and it is really a chapter about ownership dressed in different language. Covey’s circle of influence and circle of concern is one of the most useful pictures anyone has drawn of this problem. You have a set of things you care about, a smaller set of things you can actually affect, and most of your frustration comes from spending your energy in the gap between them.

The book is long and parts of it feel dated. But that one idea has held up for forty years, and it is worth the price of the book on its own.

Seven

You Owe You by Eric Thomas

Thomas came up through homelessness and dropping out of high school, and the book is built around the argument that nobody is coming, so the debt is yours to pay to yourself. It is the most emotional book here and the least structured, which means it works better as fuel than as a framework.

If the others feel too analytical and you want something that hits you in the chest, this is the one.

Which one to start with

If you want one recommendation rather than seven, read QBQ! first, because it is short enough that you will actually finish it, and the habit it builds makes every other book on this list land harder.

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