Dad's Book Collection

I inherited my dad’s book collection a few years after he died. I had been hoping to get a few of his books.

When the boxes came, I was overwhelmed with pride. I had read some of them already. Now I had an excuse to read each of them.

We grew up in the local library. Going was a weekly family ritual, sometimes more often. The librarians knew us by name. Mrs. Thompson was my favorite.

Some of his books still carry library cards. I’m pretty sure they were overdue when he died. Dad made his own rules.

I grew up in a small one-bedroom house converted into three. The floor had holes in it. We had roaches and mice. My dad’s temper was as big as the love he could not always find the words for. There was not much that survived our childhood intact.

The books survived. They moved when we moved. They stayed when other things went. When he died, my mother gave them to me.

I have read more of his books since the boxes of books came than I read in the years he was alive. They were always there. He was always there. Now neither of those things is true the same way, so I read.

What I have come to understand is that the books were the habit, not the inheritance. The inheritance was that the books made the habit visible. He read because he had to keep learning. We watched him read. So we read.

That habit traces through everything I have done since. The stretch of days when I hit rock bottom. The bankruptcy I had to file at twenty-five. The work of becoming someone who could be relied on and trusted after periods of failure. Health challenges. Relationship challenges. Life challenges.

When I advise senior leaders, I quote books from Dad’s shelf. When I mentor others, I give them copies of books from Dad’s collection. My own shelf is built on his. Most of what I learned was his first.

The books taught me to listen, to come back to a sentence and read it again more slowly, to recognize the difference between knowing about a thing and knowing it. Most of what I do for a living now is some version of that.

My dad died with no money to leave me, no land, no business, and no name that opens doors. He left me his books.

That has carried me to every place I have needed to go.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad. Thank you for the books.

I’m Micah Maxwell. I write about how leaders think, decide, and act when the stakes are higher. More at decisionpointbook.com.