Book Notes

Supercommunicators

How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

Charles Duhigg

There are three types of conversations we move in and out of—practical (What’s this really about?), emotional (How do we feel?), and social (Who are we?)—and miscommunication happens when we’re not in the same kind at the same time. The goal is to create learning conversations, where we exchange perspectives and truly listen. Great communicators ask open-ended questions, repeat what they’ve heard, and share their own emotions to spark connection. Happy couples slow conflicts, control the environment, and show empathy. The best negotiators expand the pie, and stories and values-driven questions deepen trust and understanding.

Billion Dollar Brand Club

How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy

Lawrence Ingrassia

Use innovation not just in your product, but in how you sell it. Start lean—test demand online before investing big. Focus on data: customer insights are your edge over incumbents. Identify slow-moving, high-margin industries with weak customer ties and leverage their vulnerabilities—price, convenience, or experience. Build trust by being transparent, human, and fast to fix mistakes. Retention is everything: profit only comes after multiple purchases. Brands must now offer more than a product; they must deliver a standout experience and emotional connection. Distribution matters, but connection wins.

Million Dollar Weekend

The Surprisingly Simple Way to Launch a 7-Figure Business in 48 Hours

Noah Kagan

Action over perfection—start small and learn by doing. Success doesn’t come from being the smartest, but from solving real problems for real people. Ask boldly, validate ideas early, and build around existing demand. Build your community by helping one person at a time and sharing your journey. Start your email list early—it’s the only channel you truly own. Don’t guess what works; run small marketing experiments, see what sticks, and double down. Design a business that fits your life, not the other way around. Face your fears, support others, and keep going—because momentum matters more than brilliance.

Primed to Perform

How to Build the Highest Performing Culture Through the Science of Total Motivation

Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor

Motivation—not just skills—drives performance. Play, Purpose, and Potential boost performance, while Emotional Pressure, Economic Pressure, and Inertia undermine it. The strongest organizations design roles and cultures that nurture intrinsic motivation. Tactical performance (efficiency) and adaptive performance (agility) must work in tandem, guided by a clear strategy and a flexible culture. Emergent, high-performing teams thrive when individuals can self-organize, share innovations, and act like citizens. Roles should have space to experiment—the “playground.” Promotions should reward leadership passion, not just individual success. Ultimately, motivation and role design shape how well people perform, adapt, and grow.

The Art of War

Sun Tzu

Victory comes from knowing both the enemy and yourself—without this, defeat is inevitable. The best battles are won before they begin by breaking resistance without fighting. Deception is key: appear weak when strong, distant when near, and disorganized when disciplined. Strength lies in adaptability—never repeat past tactics but adjust to circumstances. True power comes from securing an unassailable position, not hoping the enemy won’t attack. Lead with firm discipline and strategy, not emotion or ego. Move only when there’s an advantage, strike where the enemy is weakest, and always act with speed, secrecy, and purpose.

Antifragile

Things That Gain From Disorder

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Anything with more upside than downside from random events is antifragile; the reverse is fragile. Fragility is the current property of an object that we can measure; risk is not. Some parts of a system may need to be fragile to make the system antifragile as a result. To become antifragile, create more barbells—be extremely conservative and aggressive simultaneously. Start by decreasing the downside rather than increasing the upside. Speed and growth don’t matter if one negative Black Swan wipes us out. With antifragility, it’s okay not to be smart because we don’t need to be right very often.

Trillion Dollar Coach

The Leadership Handbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell

Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle

Great coach turns good teams great by building safety, clarity, meaning, dependability, and impact into every member. The best coach for any team is the manager who leads that team. The manager’s job is to run a decision-making process that ensures all perspectives get heard and considered, and, if necessary, to break ties and make the decision. To build a great team, look for people who are smart (learn quickly), work hard, have high integrity, and have grit. Besides hire for experience, hire for potential. Remember: Always hire people smarter than yourself.

Essentialism

The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Grey McKeown

Essentialism is about how to get the right things done. If you don't prioritize your life, someone else will. Replace "I have to" with "I choose to," "It's all important" with "Only a few things matter," and "I can do both" with "I can do anything but not everything." Creating the space to explore, think, reflect, play, and rest is the antidote to non-essential busyness. Develop a routine that enshrines the essentials so we begin to execute them on autopilot. Build a buffer for unexpected events and practice extreme and early preparation.

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

A guide to wealth and happiness

Eric Jorgenson

You will get rich by giving society what it wants but doesn’t yet know how to get—at scale. To get there, you need specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage. You become unstoppable when you learn how to sell and build—and become a perpetual learner. Stay out of things that could lose all of your capital or hurt your body (health). We pursue wealth, health, and happiness in that order, but their importance is reversed. Your goal in life is to find the people, business, project, or art that needs you the most.

Finite and Infinite Games

A Version of Life as Play and Possibility

James P. Carse

We play a finite game to win—and an infinite game to continue playing. A finite game is serious while an infinite game is playful. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility. Society is a finite game, culture is an infinite game. For the finite player in us, we must have the time to be free. For the infinite player in us, we are free to have time. A finite player puts play into time. An infinite player puts time into play.

Range

How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

David Epstein

Our greatest strength is not narrow specialization, but the ability to integrate broadly. To solve open-ended real-world problems, you want to take knowledge from one domain and apply it creatively to another. Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains. An effective problem-solving culture balances standard practice with forces that push in the opposite direction. The most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind. So don’t compare yourself with younger people who aren’t you. Everyone progresses at a different rate—and you probably don’t even know where exactly you’re going.

Just Keep Buying

Proven Ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth

Nick Maggiulli

The best saving approach is simply to save what you can. If you’re saving for near-term purchases, keep it in cash. To save more, increase your income by selling your time, skills, and products. Then, invest that savings into income-producing assets. Debt is a financial tool like any other. If used properly, it can work wonders for your financial situation. Before you retire, figure out what you will retire to. Being rich is a relative, and that’s why no one feels rich.

Four Thousand Weeks

Time Management for Mortals

Oliver Burkeman

Productivity isn't about cranking through as many work tasks as possible. We will never have enough time. The more efficient we get, the more work we have to do. The more we plan and try to control the future, the more anxious we get. Instead, realize that our time is limited—four thousand weeks more or less, embrace that we won't get to do everything we want and will never have control over most things in our lives, and let time use us by responding to the needs of our places and moment in history.

Choose Possibility

Take Risks and Thrive (Even When You Fail)

Sukhinder Singh Cassidy

Risk-taking is not a single leap that has the power to make or ruin us. Instead, it's small choices that, when string together over time, produce an impact and insight for the future. To act, your fear of missing out on opportunities must exceed your fear of failure. Even if things don't work immediately, they may resolve in your favor over time, as long as you keep choosing the next possibility and learning from the current one.

Die With Zero

Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

Bill Perkins

To die with zero is to shift your focus from maximizing wealth to living your best life possible. Our ability to enjoy different kinds of experiences changes throughout our lifetimes. Divide your life into time buckets. Then think about what key experiences—activities and events—you definitely want to have during your lifetime. If you're going to give your money to your children or charity, it's better to give it to them when you're still alive. Also, it's wiser to invest in your health on the front end than to spend it at the end.

The Goal

A Process of Ongoing Improvement

Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox

Productivity is the act of bringing a company closer to its goal. Any action that brings us closer to the goal is productive, and any action that doesn't is not productive. Since every system and organization is a chain of processes, it's only as strong as its weakest link. The capacity of a system is equal to the capacity of its bottlenecks. To improve any system or organization, identify its bottlenecks, decide how to exploit them, and subordinate everything else to the above decision.

An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

Col. Chris Hadfield

Fear comes from uncertainty. To overcome it, anticipate problems and figure out ways to solve them. To grow in a new environment, learn to depersonalize criticisms and embrace them as feedback. Saying "thank you" isn't enough when demanding that other people make real sacrifices for your goals. You have to be willing to do what you can to support others the same way they support you. If you think only your biggest moments count, you're setting yourself up to feel like a failure most of the time. Make all—small, medium, big—moments count.

Atomic Habits

An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

James Clear

Habits are the compound interests of self-improvement. True behavior change is identity change, and every action you take (habits) is a vote for the type of person you wish to become (identity). To create a good habit: make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying. To break a bad habit, make it invisible, make it unattractive, make it difficult, and make it unsatisfying. You don’t have to build the habits everyone tells you to build. Choose the habit that best suits you, not the one that is most popular.

The World's Fittest Book

How to Train for Anything and Everything, Anywhere and Everywhere

Ross Edgley

Human fitness is complex—instead of methods, master the principles. Start building general physical preparedness: squat, lunge, jump, climb, press, and throw. To improve, aim for progressive overload: gradually increase in weight, volume, intensity, frequency, or time training. Have a specific goal (avoid mixed goals) whenever you train. When you consume more calories than you burn, you gain weight. When you consume less than you burn, you lose weight. Plan your macros and nutrient intake other than calories intake based on your goal. Optimize your sleep—it's the most effective rejuvenating tool we have readily available to us.

Smartcuts

How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success

Shane Snow

New ideas emerge when we question the assumptions. Successful mentorship happens when we have a mentor guide our journey, not just our practice. Negative feedback spur improvement but we need to separate ourselves from the perceived failure and learn from it objectively. While hard work is important, deliberate pattern spotting can compensate for experience. Giving makes us a superconnector and creates serendipity. Momentum is the predictor of success. Simplification gets what we do from good to amazing. Constraints make us more creative. Going after a 10x goal forces better thinking and attracts supporters.

The Simple Path to Wealth

Your Roadmap to Financial Independence and a Rich, Free Life

JL Collins

The simple formula to financial well-being: spend less than you earn—invest the surplus—avoid debt. Your goal is to save up F-You money, generally 25x of your annual expenses, to regain your freedom. During the wealth accumulation stage, allocate 100% of your investment portfolio to Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund (VTSAX) or its ETF (VTI). When you're closer to your retirement, adjust 20-50% of your portfolio to include Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund (VBTLX) or its ETF (BND). Aim for a 3-7% withdrawal rate during your (early) retirement.

Measure What Matters

OKRs — The Simple Idea that Drives 10x Growth

John Doerr

Goal setting is more of an art than a science. OKR stands for Objectives, Key Results. Each objective is paired with a few— usually two to four—key results. Objectives are what you want to accomplish while key results are the outcomes you need to see to achieve your objectives. They help teams communicate and work with each other. OKR works best with CFR that stands for Conversations, Feedback, Recognition. CFR helps facilitate communications and collaborations. Together, OKR and CFR build a culture that helps teams strive.

On Writing Well

The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

William Zinsser

The essence of writing is rewriting. Spend the time to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Take extra care of the very first sentence, the lead of an article, and the last sentence of a paragraph. To be a professional writer, establish a daily writing routine and stick to it. The product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is. Don't be afraid to share your values and be open with your intention. To write well, you must have the confidence to be yourself.

The E-Myth Revisited

Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

Michael E. Gerber

Before starting any business, understand that you have three roles: The Entrepreneur, the Manager, and the Technician. The Entrepreneur sets the vision and leads the way; The Manager manages the processes and the people; The Technician does the work. Your business needs you to be the Entrepreneur to build a systems-dependent business that could work even without you, the owner. Create systems around finance, marketing, management, and operations to serve (and innovate for) your customers with the experience they—not you—want and need.

The Psychology of Money

Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness

Morgan Housel

Money decisions are rarely rational and almost always emotional. That said, doing well with money has more to do with our behavior than our intelligence. Instead of a specific case study, you’ll get closer to actionable takeaways by looking for broad patterns of success and failure. Rich is a current income; wealth is financial assets that haven't yet been converted into the stuff you see. The hardest financial skill is to have enough—so master it early. To build wealth, focus on what you can control: Increase your saving rate and the time horizon of you stay invested.

How Will You Measure Your Life

Finding Fulfillment Using Lessons From Some of the World's Greatest Businesses

Clayton Christensen

There is no shortcut to happiness and meaning in life. While success leaves cues, past data doesn't guarantee future outcomes. Until you allocate your resources to what's important, it doesn't matter. The best time to take care of your health and relationships is now, not when you most need them. Have guiding principles and commit to them. Things happen in small incremental. "Just this once" is a dangerous first leap that gets us to where we don't want to be. Lastly, create a life purpose—learn to look past the immediate reward—and focus on fulfilling it.

High Performance Habits

How Extraordinary People Become That Way

Brendon Bruchard

Seek clarity on your identity, values, and goals. Then, generate energy to maintain focus, effort, and well-being. Raise the necessity of exceptional performance by creating internal standards and external accountability. Increase productivity in your primary field of interest by focusing on prolific quality output. Then, develop influence with those around you to get help and support. Finally, show courage by expressing your ideas, taking bold action, and standing up for yourself and others, even in the face of fears and uncertainty.

This Is Marketing

You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See

Seth Godin

Make products and services for the customers you want to serve rather than finding customers for the products and services you want to make. Marketing is about making change happen. To do that, create a culture by telling stories that match the built-in narratives and dreams of the smallest viable market you choose to serve. Then, show up consistently to earn permission—by building confidence and trust—to follow up and share your work.

A Short Guide to a Long Life

David Agus

Your body loves predictability. Reduce stress on your body by maintaining a routine for your sleep-wake cycles, eating times, periods of physical activity, and schedule for taking any prescribed medications. Consume foods that are as close to nature as possible. Maintain a correct posture, stand, exercise, and stretch more. Have a personal hygiene routine especially for your teeth and feet. If possible, take time off to relax and live with someone else to improve your mental health.

Smarter Faster Better

The Transformative Power of Real Productivity

Charles Duhigg

Productivity is all about our attempts to figure out the best uses of our resources as we try to seize the most meaningful rewards with the least wasted effort. To motivate ourselves, we must feel like we are in control. To be a great leader, build a culture where people feel heard and safe. To make better decisions, use mental models to direct our attention, rather than just react, and learn to think probabilistically. To get creative, connect existing ideas in new ways. To learn from new information, we need to force ourselves to do something with the data.

Dollars and Sense

How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter

Dan Ariely and Jeff Kreisler

Money has no value, it represents value. Every financial decision has an opportunity cost. We assign money to mental categories, and that controls how we think and feel about money. We are willing to pay more when we see the effort involved even when it doesn't change what we get. Prices shouldn’t affect value, performance, or pleasure—but they do. Money is a means to an end. But because money is much more tangible than happiness, well-being, and purpose, we tend to focus our decision-making on money instead of on our ultimate, more meaningful goals.

Expert Secrets

The Underground Playbook for Creating a Mass Movement of People Who Will Pay For Your Advice

Russell Brunson

Three common things in people who build a mass movement: 1) charismatic and attractive character, 2) focus on a future-based cause that was bigger than themselves, and 3) offer their audience a new opportunity. To get started, go out there and work for free and get some results. If what you’re doing works, then capture those stories and testimonials. Everything in business comes down to one thing: Belief. You must persuade people to believe in what you are doing, and you do that by mastering the art of storytelling.

Outsource Smart

Be Your Own Boss… Without Letting Your Business Become the Boss of You

Daven Michaels

Your desire to work less doesn’t mean you’re lazy. Being busy is not necessarily being productive. Focus on income-generating activities (and what you enjoy doing) and delegate everything else. To ensure you hire right, give them a task and see whether they can complete it capably. Building a relationship with your VAs is essential. When your VAs feel bonded to you, they’ll be vested in your success. Learning to delegate is challenging, but the better you know yourself and what you’re after, the more successful you’ll be.

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

Violate Them at Your Own Risk!

Al Ries and Jack Trout

Marketing is a battle of perceptions, not products. You need money to get into a mind and to stay in the mind. It's better to be first than it is to be better. Create a category you can be the first in. Discover the essence of the leader and then presents yourself as the opposite. If you want to be successful, you have to narrow the focus to build a position in the prospect’s mind. One of the most effective ways is to first admit a negative and then twist it into a positive.

The Little Book of Stoicism

Timeless Wisdom to Gain Resilience, Confidence, and Calmness

Jonas Salzgeber

The four Roman Stoics whose writings and teachings build the foundation of Stoicism: Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. In Stoicism, The good life depends on your characters, choices, and actions rather than your circumstances. The ultimate goal of life is Eudaimonia (to become good with your inner spirit) and Areté (to express the highest version of yourself in every moment). The four broad Stoic virtues are Wisdom, Justice, Courage, and Self-discipline.

Company of One

Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business

Paul Jarvis

As a company of one, you build your business around your life, not the other way around. To do that, start small, define growth, and keep learning. Execution is the only valid currency in business. Develop real connections by sharing simple messages, repeatedly, through your actions. Then, utilize simple rules, systems, solutions, and processes to reach profitability as quickly as possible.

Night School

Wake Up to the Power of Sleep

Richard Wiseman

Your brain removes unwanted toxins during sleep. Poor sleep slams cognitive performance. Sleep in ninety-minute blocks, e.g. 360 minutes (6 hours), 450 minutes (7.5 hours), etc. To improve sleep, avoid bright light before your sleep, keep your room dark and cold, and have a wind-down routine. Napping is good—make it a part of your daily routine. Your dreams help identify your worries and concerns, at the same time, see new and innovative solutions to your problems.

Rich Dad Poor Dad

What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money—That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not

Robert Kiyosaki

Two emotions that keep people in Rat Race: fear and greed. Assets put money into your pocket, liabilities take money out from it. Rich people acquire assets. The poor and middle class acquire liabilities that they think are assets. Raise your financial IQ by learning accounting, investing, understanding markets, and law. If you want to be a successful business owner and investor, develop three main skills: 1) find opportunities that everyone else missed, 2) raise money, and 3) organize smart people.

Your Move

The Underdog’s Guide to Building Your Business

Ramit Sethi

The best entrepreneurs know that they have an obligation to ask for the sale because that’s the best way to help their customers. Money is the marker that you're doing the right thing because people pay you for the value you create and the problems you solve. And the more you make, the more value you can create. Focus on what you can control, ignore what you cannot. Instead of focusing on the competition, focus on your audience.

The Brain Audit

Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don’t)

Sean D’Souza

Remember: Your readers are busy. Isolate and elevate a problem, and then, present a solution which is the flip side of the problem. To make your copy effective, choose one person and write for only him or her. Objections are your friends. If your prospects didn't care, they'd just walk away. Start your testimonials with an objection, and then share how your products resolve it. You don’t find your uniqueness; you invent it. Choose what you want to be the best at, and then build your business around it.

Do The Work

Steven Pressfield

Resistance is a repelling force that prevents us from doing our work. The more important a call is, the stronger the Resistance. Next to Resistance, rational thought is the artist or entrepreneur’s worst enemy. We can accomplish nothing until we act. So start before you’re ready. Get something done, however flawed or imperfect. When we conquer our fears, we discover a boundless, bottomless, inexhaustible well of passion. The opposite of fear is love for the work, challenges, and growth.

Mastery

Robert Greene

You must see attaining mastery as something necessary and positive and start learning who you really are. Then, find a niche that you love deeply and can dominate. As you gain skill and confidence, make the move to a more active mode of experimentation. Adopt Resistance Practice—go in the opposite direction of all of your natural tendencies when it comes to practice to maximize learning. Lastly, blend the two—discipline and a childlike spirit—together to use your knowledge and skills in new and original ways.

Smart Choices

A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions

John S. Hammond, Ralph L. Keeney, Howard Raiffa

To make better decisions, start by defining the right problems and specifying your objectives. Next, create imaginative alternatives and consider the consequences for each course of action. You should also grapple with your tradeoffs because the objectives and consequences frequently conflict with one another. Then, clarify your uncertainties so you can think through your risk tolerance. If you're making a big life decision, consider linked decisions that could influence your choices in other areas and in the future. Finally, learn about psychological traps to avoid falling prey to these decision-making errors.

How to Be a Productivity Ninja

Worry Less, Achieve More, Love What You Do

Graham Allcott

Time + the right attention and focus = Done. In any knowledge work, you’re playing two different roles at once: you’re simultaneously the boss and the worker. Protect your attention so you can think and act well. First, schedule your work based on your attention level. Then, use CORD (Capture and Collect, Organize, Review, Do) to organize your workflow. Lastly, recognizing resistance and find ways to ignore or cheat it.

The Winner’s Brain

8 Strategies Great Minds Use to Achieve Success

Jeff Brown and Mark Fenske

BrainPower Tools are the five specifics traits of winners. They are Goal Laser, Optimal Risk Gauge, Talent Meter, Opportunity Radar, and Effort Accelerator. To develop and improve the BrainPower Tools, we can work on eight Win Factors which include self-awareness, motivation, focus, emotional balance, memory, resilience, adaptability, and brain care.

I Will Teach You To Be Rich

No Guilt. No Excuses. No B.S. Just a 6-Week Program That Works

Ramit Sethi

Establishing good credit is essential for getting rich. Create a spending plan with four major buckets: Fixed Costs, Investments, Savings, and Guilt-free Spending. Open an investment account and start dollar-cost-averaging 20% of your income into diversified, low-cost index funds. Automate your money flow, so your money gets into different accounts without you having to think about it. To feed your system, find ways to earn more. Spend extravagantly on what you love, cut on what you don’t, and plan for big purchases.

So Good They Can’t Ignore You

Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

Cal Newport

To feel intrinsically motivated, you must have autonomy, competence, and relatedness over what you do. Great jobs are rare. If you want a great job, you need to offer great value (career capital) in return. Adopting the craftsman mindset is a strategy to acquire career capital. To have a mission is to have a unifying focus for your career. And it takes time to discover and form your career mission. Rather than believing you have to start with a big idea or a perfect plan, make a series of little bets and learn from the failures and small wins.

Ego is the Enemy

Ryan Holiday

When you remove ego, you're left with humility and confidence. To do that, you must practice seeing yourself with a little distance, cultivating the ability to get out of your own head, and learning how to see beneath an appearance. When you're just starting out, attach yourself to successful people and organizations and subsume your identity into theirs and move both forward simultaneously. When you're successful, you must stay humble, keep learning, and focus on your work and practice. When you fail, embrace it with appreciation and move on to start over again.

We Are All Weird

The Rise of Tribes and the End of Normal

Seth Godin

Human beings prefer to organize in tribes that share a culture or a definition of normal. Standing out takes time, money, and confidence. More of us have all three now. Weird means that you’ve stood up for what you believe in and done what you want. The digital revolution makes reaching particular pockets of weird people with stuff they’re obsessed with easier than ever. As the world gets weirder, catering to the mass is a dumb strategy. Instead, find and assemble the tribe, to earn their trust, to take them where they want and need to go.

Principles

Life and Work

Ray Dalio

Think for yourself to decide what you want and what you should do to achieve it in the light of what is true. Look at the patterns of things in your life to understand the cause-effect relationships that drive them. Then, form your own set of principles that serve as the foundations for behavior that gets you what you want out of life. They can be applied again and again in similar situations to help you achieve your goals. In a group setting, make sure the work principles align with the life principles of every person in the group.

Brain Rules

12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

John Medina

What we do, learn, and experience rewires our brains. To improve thinking skills, move—walk and exercise often—and take sleep seriously. Stress hurts cognitive performance, and the worst kind of stress is learned helplessness. We're better at spotting patterns and abstracting meaning than we are at memorizing details. To make long-term memories more reliable, incorporate new information gradually and repeat it in timed intervals. To improve learning and cognitive performance, engage all senses and stay curious.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

Mark Manson

Seeking happiness directly is a journey to hell. Instead of thinking you’re special and believing you deserve great things and happiness, ask what you’re willing to struggle for in order to get what you want. The circumstances—and your life—may not be what you want, but stop dwelling and complaining. Because how you react to them is what matters.

Poke The Box

When was the Last Time You Did Something for the First Time?

Seth Godin

Art is hard. Selling is hard. Making a difference is hard. First, be aware of the market, of opportunities, of who you are. Then, get educated and connected to gather knowledge and build trust. Be consistent with your work, start building an asset that you can sell, and have the guts and heart to ship it. If you never fail, either you’re really lucky or you haven’t shipped anything. If you don’t ship, you actually haven’t started anything at all.

The 48 Laws of Power

Robert Greene

The game of power is inescapable regardless of your motivation. Learning how to play it doesn’t just help you thrive, but keep you alive. Each law is demonstrated and supported by historical stories and events, then, end with a few short paragraphs to describe the law and its reversal. One must follow them in the pursuit of power of any form—whether manipulative influences or positive impacts.

Business Without the Bullsh*t

49 Secrets and Shortcuts You Need to Know

Geoffrey James

If you want true career security, learn to sell. Like all sales documents, your resume is about the what you can do for the prospective employer, not about you. A real leader is someone who can communicate the most clearly and make complicated things seem simple and simple things seem obvious. Of all the relationship you’ll have at work, the most important is your relationship with yourself. Your success in the workplace depends directly on how well you manage your mind and your body.

Perennial Seller

The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

Ryan Holiday

Over the long term, all the marketing won’t matter if the product hasn’t been made right. Great work takes time, struggle, and sacrifice. To create great work, you must be driven by an equally powerful inner force. For any project, you must know what you're doing and who you're doing it for. Be a person. Be nice. Think relationship first, transaction second. The best time to get to know people and develop the relationship is before you have some favor you want to ask them.

The 4-Hour Work Week

Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich

Tim Ferriss

Money is multiplied in practical value depending on what you do, when you do it, where you do it, and with whom you do it. The new rich is about having cash flow and mobility. The process of becoming a member of the New Rich is known as DEAL. Define your desired lifestyle and the cash flow you need to live it. Eliminate unproductive tasks and unimportant things. Automate your work, business, and cash flow. And liberate your life by constantly exploring and learning.

The Art of Thinking Clearly

Rolf Dobelli

Thinking is in itself not pure, but prone to error. Cognitive traps aren't just occasional errors in judgment but rather routine mistakes we stumble over through generations. We value sunk costs instead of future outcomes. We seek evidence to justify our beliefs rather than form our beliefs based on evidence. We prefer wrong information to no information, and we fall prey to the delusion that more information guarantees better decisions. When we put a lot of energy into a task, we tend to overvalue the result. Often, we fail to think exponentially and probabilistically.

Unshakeable

Your Financial Freedom Playbook

Tony Robbins

To achieve true financial freedom, invest in the long-term, minimize fees and taxes, and diversify intelligently. The best thing you can do is to start investing early—as soon as possible—regardless of the amount. However, money does not equal true wealth. While you work hard to achieve financial success, don’t forget to keep growing and contributing to being truly fulfilled.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

Stephen Covey

The three habits to develop yourself: Be proactive, begin with the end in mind, and learn to prioritize what's important. The three habits to improve your relationships with others: Always think win-win, seek first to understand before to be understood, and work on synergy. Lastly, sharpen the saw by committing to lifelong learning and growth.

The Accidental Creative

How to Be Brilliant at a Moment’s Notice

Todd Henry

Producing great work is not a destination but a process. The foundation of every great work is a solid grasp of the fundamentals. True freedom has healthy boundaries that help us focus our creative energy. Surrounding yourself with bright, motivated people will challenge you regularly to step up your own game. Understand that every project and commitment takes energy. Each creative idea is the combination of previously existing ideas, or bits of stimuli, into something new. Therefore, to produce great work, consume great works.

Blink

The Power of Thinking without Thinking

Malcolm Gladwell

Snap judgments are undervalued by the majority of us because it is invisible, frugal, and out of our consciousness. But it’s highly valuable—or destructive—because there are times when we have to make decisions under fast-moving, high-pressure situations. Just like our conscious mind, it can be trained, with practices and be framed, with the manipulation of our environment.

What Clients Love

A Field Guide to Growing Your Business

Harry Beckwith

To find out what your clients love, do not listen; watch what they do. Be different, that’s how you stand out. Clarity in communication moves people from confusion to confidence. To communicate well, spend the time to understand and learn about your prospects. Then, use stories to reach people's hearts and show up regularly to breed familiarity. Everything you associate shapes your brand and thus, your customers’ experience. Clients love passionate people and businesses because they know that passion produces great works. Always tell the truth—it’s the only path to building trust and loyalty.

10-Minute Toughness

The Mental-Training Program for Winning Before the Game Begins

Jason Selk

Good nutrition, sleep, and relationships are the foundation of great performance. Successful people develop and maintain a solution-focus approach in everything they do. To become mentally tough, replace negative thinking with positive self-talk and visualization. Decide who you want to be and how you want to live—then, let the self-image guides your actions and behaviors. To make goal-setting more effective, focus on the process (instead of the result) and go public to keep yourself accountable.

Manage Your Day-to-Day

Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

99U, edited by Jocelyn K. Glei

Design an environment to support your work. Prioritize creative work first, reactive work second. You have limited time and energy in a day or a week, learn to limit your to-do list and the commitments you make. Conditions to produce one’s craft are rarely ideal. The strategy is to have a practice to show up and do the work consistently. Your brain needs breaks, find a good stopping point on a project and schedule times to do nothing. To be creative, embrace uncertainties.

The Bounce Back Book

How to Thrive in the Face of Adversity, Setbacks, and Losses

Karen Salmansohn

The first step to bouncing back from bad times is to accept and embrace the imperfection of life. Then, get clear with your ultimate goals (identity, financial security, meaning work) but be flexible with changes. Along the journey of recovery and growth, adopt positive thinking and strengthen mental toughness so we’re prepared for any curve ball life threw at us.

It’s a Jungle in There

Inspiring Lessons, Hard-won Insights, and Other Acts of Entrepreneurial Daring

Steven Schussler

Entrepreneurship is risky. To be a successful entrepreneur, you need to have the passion and the guts to embrace failures. Create something that will rock the market, and then, get the market to take note of what you've created. To avoid budget problems, have conversations about the budget with stakeholders early and regularly. Also, avoid reinventing the wheel by creating win-win partnerships. Give credit to where credit is due—people may work for money, but they live for acknowledgment.

Outliers

The Story of Success

Malcolm Gladwell

It is not the brightest who succeed. Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.

The Hour between Dog and Wolf

How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind

John Coates

Our brains evolved to support and regulate movement. When faced with situations of novelty, uncertainly, and threat, you feel the things you do because of changes taking place in your body as it prepares for movement. Consciousness is merely a bystander observing—or rejecting if need be—a decision already taken. Prolonged and severe stress leads to physical diseases. A mentally-tough individual welcomes novelty as a challenge and an opportunity for gain; an untoughened individual dreads it as a threat.

The Narrow Road

A Brief Guide to the Getting of Money

Felix Dennis

Getting rich is a silly game with serious rules. Consider why you want to get rich and commit to the journey because it's not a sprint, but a marathon. Getting rich has little to do with chance and everything to do with your capacity to accept risk and failure—not just once, but many times. Owning assets—such as a business—is the only way to get wealthy. New or rapidly developing sectors often provide more opportunities to get rich. The most important talent you need: identify, hire, and nurture others with talent.

Linchpin

Are You Indispensable?

Seth Godin

No one is a genius all the time, but all of us are geniuses sometimes. Abundance is possible, but only if we can imagine it and then embrace it. It’s not about what you’re born with, it’s about what you do. The only way to get what you’re worth is to stand out, to exert indispensable, and to produce interactions that organizations and people care deeply about.

The Virgin Way

How to Listen, Learn, and Lead

Richard Branson

You have to enjoy what you do to do it not just well, but great. As an entrepreneur, you need to stay curious and courageous. Listen more than you speak, and listen carefully. Make it a habit to capture your thoughts and observations in notes. Smaller companies that put their employees and customers ahead of shareholder interests usually do better. Good design matters. You must look cool and do cool, to give customers both rational and emotional reasons to invest in a brand. Trust the process, trust your instincts and trust your team.

Think and Grow Rich

Napoleon Hill

Anything the human mind can believe, the human mind can achieve. We fail only when we quit during temporary defeats. The emotions of faith, love, and sex are the most powerful of all the major positive emotions. Knowledge becomes power when, and if, it is organized into definite plans of action, and directed to a definite end. To get rich, learn how to sell and lead. Worry is a state of mind based on fear. Kill the habit of worry, in all its forms.

The Impact Equation

Are You Making Things Happen or Just Making Noise?

Chris Brogan & Julien Smith

When contrast is low, nothing you do has any impact. When you begin to differentiate yourself, you create immediate visibility. Then, you need to articulate your idea well with a good amount of reach and exposure. To build trust, you need to be credible and reliable, at the same time, create the intimacy that focuses on your audience.

David and Goliath

Underdogs, Misfits & the Art of Battling Giants

Malcolm Gladwell

Strengths and weaknesses, advantages and disadvantages, blessings and misfortune aren't always what they turn out to be at face value. What we think of as misfortune is the best thing that can happen to us, and what we think as an advantage can lead to the worst outcome.

Influence

What It Really Means and How to Make It Work for You

Jenny Nabben

The skills of influence are built on finding the balance between heart and head. If we want to influence others, we need to appeal to their emotions. When we think about influencing others, always start by listening and understanding the audience's personal preferences and motivators. Then, share your message by telling a passionate story.

Enchantment

The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions

Guy Kawasaki

The key to leaving an impact on others is by having a great cause, understanding the audience, and delivering values for the long run. Always be interesting. When facing disagreement, find ways to agree and approach the solution from a common ground. The best way to enchant your employee is to never ask your team do what you wouldn't do. The best way to enchant your employer is to make him or her look good.

The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari

Robin Sharma

The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master. Spend the time to define what's meaningful and set goals accordingly. To succeed in life, cultivate positive mindsets and mental toughness in order to stay optimistic and learn from setbacks. Happiness comes from progress. To grow, develop the courage to embrace uncertainties and focus on pushing yourself daily to make incremental improvements.

Launch

The Secret Formula to Sell Almost Anything Online

Jeff Walker

Use pre-prelaunch to start building anticipation among your most loyal fans and validate your product ideas before creating it. Prelaunch your product by releasing multiple pieces of high-quality content to educate your prospect. Launch your offer and start taking orders. Finally, use post-launch to communicate with your buying customers and prospects who didn't buy.

Good Products Bad Products

Essential Elements to Achieving Superior Quality

James Adams

All products could be improved. An improved product helps add value to both a company and its customers. Improving the quality of products goes beyond just performance and profits. We should also think in terms of human fit, aesthetics, craftsmanship, and eco-friendliness.

How We Learn

The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

Benedict Carey

Forgetting is a natural mechanism of learning. With a little forgetting, you get benefits from further studies that strengthen learning, like an exercised muscle. The harder your brain has to work to dig out a memory, the greater the increase in learning. The environment we practice becomes the trigger when we’re performing. Learning in the same environment gets easier over time while learning in a different environment and context exposes us to a wider range of mental triggers. Sleep plays a critical role in learning.

The Champion’s Mind

How Great Athletes Think, Train, and Thrive

Jim Afremow

To become a champion, you need to cultivate a deep sense of desire and vision. Then, identify precisely what you do that hurts your own cause the most and eliminate it immediately. If you're not getting better, you're getting worse. Therefore, you should take advantage of every opportunity to grow and improve. Motivation will always fluctuate, but it's irrelevant at the moment of truth when you actually act. To strengthen your mind, identify three heroes or role models that you can mirror and mimic when you need a confidence boost during a challenging situation.

The Power of Habit

Why We Do What We Do in Life & Business

Charles Duhigg

Habits emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort. The habit formation is a three-step loop. First, a cue to trigger your brain. Then there is the routine, which can be an action or an emotion. Finally, a reward that helps your brain to figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. You can’t extinguish a bad habit. To break your bad habits, identify the cues and rewards, then, you can change the routine. Keystone habits are habits that enable small wins that lead to more good habits with more wins.

The $100 Startup

Fire Your Boss, Do What You Love And Work Better To Live More

Chris Guillebeau

To start a business, you need a product or service, people willing to pay for it, and a way to get paid. Focus on convergence: the intersection of what you care about and what other people want. Market the benefits instead of the features of your product or service. To grow, you can choose to expand horizontally by serving more customers with different interests or vertically by going deeper to service the same customers. Focus on one to two key metrics and activities that are the lifeblood of your business, then keep a pulse on others.

Obliquity

Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly

John Kay

We're great at adapting to circumstances. Almost all real problems are incompletely and imperfectly specified. To tackle them, we have to decide what information is useful and what is not. Good decision-making is pragmatic and eclectic. To fit the world into a single model or narrative fails to acknowledge the universality of uncertainty and complexity. We can only learn about our objectives and how to achieve them through a gradual process of risk-taking and discovery.

59 Seconds

Think A Little Change A Lot

Richard Wiseman

Practice gratefulness helps us to be more optimistic about the future. To live a little happier, buy experience but not goods. To achieve your aims and ambitions, have the right kind of plan, make a public announcement to increase your level of commitment, focus on the action and benefits, and reward yourself each step of the way. To reduce regrets, adopt a “will do” attitude to the opportunity because most people tend to regret things they didn’t do.

The Fast Diet

Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, and Live Longer with the Simple Secret of Intermittent Fasting

Michael Mosley and Mimi Spencer

Intermittent fasting reduces your risk of several age-related diseases. It also leads to an overall enhancement in your mood and sense of well-being. There are no complicated rules to follow in intermittent fasting. All you do is follow a fasting and feeding schedule. A few common fasting schedules include 16:8 daily fasting (fast for 16 hours every day), 5:2 (fast for two full days every week) weekly fasting, and alternate-day fasting.

Awaken The Giant Within

How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical, and Financial Destiny

Tony Robbins

Every decision we make is going to shape our lives. Not making the decision consciously is a decision made. Our beliefs are statements reinforced by our experiences and surrounding. That said, we can change our beliefs to work in our favor. To make better decisions and shape beliefs that work for us, ask the right questions, mind your vocabulary, and manage your emotions. Have a vision, set long and short-term goals, and create a system to work toward them. Then, observe and adjust the rules you have around different areas of your life.

The Richest Man in Babylon

George Clason

To grow wealth, save at least 1/10 of your income. Then, invest the money on areas of your expertise. While you're doing that, work to earn more. Remember: Do not procrastinate and never stop learning.