6 Books That Completely Changed My Life
Hey, what's going on, guys? So on this Blog, in the past, we
have done several book recommendation Posts. I enjoy doing these things. I know
you guys really like them. So today, we're going to do another one that's gonna
be six books that changed my life personally. Now, these six books aren't gonna
be books that I think are the best reads in the world, but they are books that
had at least one idea, but in most cases more, that actually changed the
trajectory of my life or the way that I act or think on a daily basis.
So, with that being said, let's get into my list here, starting
with one of the books that I own digitally, which is The Motivation Hacker by
an author named Nick Winter. So this is probably the book on my list that is
the least well known, but it had a huge impact on my life. One of the main
concepts that I remember from that book was the idea of success spirals. This
is a term that encapsulates one of the fundamental truths in habit building, which
is that you have to start small before you can do something big. And a lot of
people don't understand this. They make New Year's resolutions like I'm gonna
work out every single day from now until infinity. And what Nick Winter says to
do in the book instead is to start with a goal that you can track, that doesn't
demand absolute perfection, and that is at your level. But, to be honest, the
part of that book that really changed my life was the part that talks about a
concept called pre-commitment and the examples from his own life on how he used
it to achieve some pretty big goals. Essentially, the idea of pre-commitment
means that you set up consequences that are gonna happen if you fail to do
something that you set out to do. And one of my favorite Blogger, Thomas, calls
this a threat bet, which I think is a fantastic name of the concept. In the
book, the author talks about two different goals that he was having a lot of
trouble achieving. One was skydiving, because he was very afraid to do it, and
the other one, ironically, was finishing the book, The Motivation Hacker,
itself. So what he did to achieve both of those goals was that he set up those
threat bets. He used a tool called Beeminder, which is a habit tracker that
actually has you bet money, which we'd pay to the company if you fail to be
consistent on your habits. And he went hard core with his Beeminder goals. He
took half of his wealth for each goal. I think he had $14,000 to his name at
the time, so he bet $7,000 that he would write a certain amount every single
day for the book, and he also bet $7,000 that he would go skydiving. And
wouldn't you know it, he both went skydiving and finished the book and did not
lose $14,000. And that is the thing that really changed my life. I read about
Beeminder and I told myself that is what I am going to use to take my work
professionally. Because up until then, I had sort of viewed my business and my
blog, College Info Geek, as sort of like a side project. I wasn't being very
disciplined about it and, as a result, my business had kind of plateaued for
about a year and a half. So after I read that book, I went and I signed up for
Beeminder and I told myself I was going to put out one blog post and one
podcast episode every single week, otherwise, I was going to lose money on
Beeminder. And, as a result, my business actually started to grow. Wouldn't you
know it? Putting consistent effort on a day-to-day basis actually causes things
to happen, and the threat of losing money was the catalyst for that change in
my life.
All right, book number two on my list, which is a much, much
more famous book, is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. Now
this is probably the most well-known personal development book in the history
of personal development books, and a lot of you have probably read it, but I do
want to share a couple lessons that really did make a pretty big impact on my
life. First and foremost was the book's advice to seek first to understand and
then to be understood. A lot of us have this problem where, when we are
listening to somebody, we're really just kind of formulating our response and
waiting to give it rather than really trying to understand what the other
person is saying. And the obvious problem here is that, when both people in a
conversation are doing this, neither one is really understanding the other. They're
just kind of trying to look cool or to express their ideas. So when you really
internalize this concept, you start to tap into what other people are feeling
and thinking and then real communication happens. And the other big lesson in
that book, for me, came from an account of Covey's conversation with somebody
who was having relationship trouble. He didn't know if he wanted to divorce his
wife or not because he felt like the spark had gone out of the relationship, and
I remember Covey telling him something very simple, to love her. Love as a
verb, as an action, not as a feeling. Now, I listened to this book when I was
probably 18 years old, so this was kind of a big revelation to me because, up
until then, society and just basically everyone I knew and the media had sort
of convinced me that love was like this feeling that you would have
automatically, like you just kinda had to find it and then it would be there
forever. But the opposite is true. Love is a verb. It's something that you have
to put work into and it is often difficult. And I honestly think that that
concept and my internalization of that concept is one of the reasons why I'm
still with my girlfriend, why I've been with her for over five years, because
I've realized that, when the going gets tough, you have to, as a verb, love the
other person. It's hard, but you have to do it. And yes, sometimes that feeling
is going to be there and it is gonna feel like something that's just in you and
it's gonna be with you forever, but you can't rely on that always being the
case.
All right, book number three on my list is The 4-Hour
Workweek by Tim Ferriss. Now this is the book that probably changed my
professional life more than any other. See, this was the very first book that
really and truly showed me that you could build systems which enable your
business to profit and make money even while you're not physically putting
effort in. Before I read this book, I was a freshman in college that had a
freelance web design business on the side. So every dollar that I made was a
direct product of me putting in the hours, and that's kinda how I viewed
entrepreneurship. But once I read that book, I started to realize that I could
build systems that would allow me to essentially make money while I slept. Now,
obviously, building those systems and actually making money is neither as
straightforward nor as easy as it might seem in the book, and I'm sure that Tim
mentions that in the book itself, but that book, more than any other source of
information, it drove me to start treating College Info Geek more as a business
and less as a blog. And that completely changed the trajectory of my life. Before
College Info Geek became profitable, my plan was to graduate college, move to
Minneapolis, and become a web developer for a big company. And now, I'm doing
something that is, well, a little bit different than that.
All right, moving on to the books that I own physically, starting
with number four, The Happiness Equation by Neil Pasricha. Now, this book has a
lot to say on the concept of happiness and on how to be happy on a day-to-day
basis consistently, but there is only one idea that I want to share from this
book, and that is the dim view that it takes on the concept of retirement. This
book taught me that the origin of our modern concept of retirement, the idea of
stopping work at age 65 and then just relaxing for the rest of your days originated
in Germany back in 1889. At that time, the government introduced a program that
would allow people who were 65 or older to stop working and then the state
would take care of them. And this was meant as a way to free up jobs for
younger people. But, as time went on, it started to be thought of as the kind
of goal in life. You'd work up until 65, and then you'd retire to a life of
leisure. But the problem is this concept is at odds with the way that the human
body and mind work. We are built to constantly progress. We're built to work. We're
built to struggle. Life is a type of combat and that is what we are adapted
for. So this whole idea of just stopping at a certain age is kind of awful, but
it's something that we all seem to be striving for and we don't really question
it, so until I read this book, that was basically how I thought my career was
going to go. But now, I'm committed to never retire. Sure, I may try new things
as I go on in my career. I might maybe slow down a little bit or try some
things that don't necessarily make money, but I'm never going to stop learning,
I'm never going to stop progressing, and I'm never going to stop working. And
that is actually very liberating.
All right, book number five on my list is Pragmatic Thinking
& Learning by Andy Hunt. And I think this is actually the first real
productivity book that I ever read. One of the most useful tidbits in the book
for me was the advice to capture insight 24/7, which was the direct inspiration
for my philosophy that I like to call Quick Capture. Essentially, this means
always having a way to get information or ideas into a system that you trust and
that you can access later on. For instance, when I'm taking a shower and I have
an idea that I really want to remember, I actually have a waterproof notebook suction-cupped
to the walls of my shower so I can write down the details of that idea and
then, once I'm dried off, I can take a picture of it and then I can get it into
my note-taking system. And beyond that concept, I'm actually looking at the
back flap of the book right now, there are about 48 different concepts in this
books, so if you are looking for a good productivity book, I do recommend
giving this one a read. And that brings us to the final and, easily, the most
dense book on this list,
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. This book, more
than any other that I've read, gave me a detailed knowledge of heuristics and
biases, the mental shortcuts that our brains naturally take to make decisions,
but that can also lead to faulty thinking. Now there are a lot of these to
learn about, but to give you one example, we often tend to confuse what is
probable with what is plausible. For instance, in one experiment that Kahneman
did, people were told about a fictitious person called Linda, who majored in
philosophy and who's also very concerned with issues of social justice and
discrimination. And then they were asked what was more probable, that Linda was
a bank teller or that Linda was a bank teller and heavily involved in the
feminist movement. Now, if you think about this objectively, the second answer
actually contains the first answer within it. Linda is a bank teller in either
case, but in the second case, she is also involved in the feminist movement. Therefore,
the first case is more probable. But more people actually thought that the
second case was more probable. It's not, but it seems more plausible because it
fits the narrative. And once I learned about this along with many of the other
heuristics and biases reported on in the book, I started to notice them
cropping up in my own thinking and decision-making, and, as a result, I was
able to catch them before they made me make bad decisions. And because I'm able
to catch those bad decisions, I can stop them before they happen. I can step
back and I can rethink them. Now, an interesting secondary effect of this book was
that it also got me interested in a much broader range of topics. Before I read
this book, I kind of stuck to productivity books and business books, but
afterwards, my interests really broadened out and I wanted to start learning
about math and science. I read books like Bill Bryson's A Short History of
Nearly Everything, or Sam Kean's The Disappearing Spoon, which is all about the
periodic table and chemistry. And as a result from reading those books, my
general bank of knowledge really started to grow and spread out and widen, and
I was able to make more connections from different areas, which allowed me to
be more creative.
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