Posts Tagged ‘Book Reviews’
1. The 4 Hour Work Week
How to start your own business, quit your job, work less, outsource your work, learn quicker, have more money and a better life. This book actually does cover it all. Timothy Ferris, the author of this book was fired from his normal $40,000 a year job and went on to start his own internet company. He then perfected his time management techniques and company so that he was only spending 4 hours a week working, but earning over $40,000 a month. This book was an absolute inspiration to me and I actually used the methods in this book to quit my job and follow a dream. You can read the full story of How I Quit my Job In Tokyo and Moved to a Tropical Island here. This book is an absolute have to read. Even if you are happy in your job and life, this book will have tips that can help you make it better.
2. Personal Development for Smart People
Personal Development for Smart People is a new personal development book written by Steve Pavlina. As many of you may already know, Steve Pavlina’s blog Personal Development for Smart People is the largest blog for personal development. It contains a lot of great content and the book is just as good. The book focuses on teaching key principles you can learn to improve prove yourself as a person and then how to apply them to improve the various aspects of your life (career, relationships, making money, health, etc). Another must have for anyone looking for improvement and especially good for those trying to find a direction in their life. See here for a full review.
3. Rich Dad Poor Dad
This was one of the first books that really got me interested in investing and creating other streams of incomes. Unlike the two above books, this one doesn’t really offer much in the way of “how to”, but it was an absolute inspirational book for me. When I first read this, I was working in a low paying job where my income barely covered my expenses. This book gave me the inspiration to keep learning and as I did, my financial position just kept getting better. I think this is an especially great book for high school and college students. I sure I could have read it sooner.
4. The Go Giver
The Go Giver is a cool little book that talks about the benefits of giving and how the rewards of giving can heavily out way the rewards of taking. The plot is in story form and follows a character who is trying to make his way to the top of his company. All he cares about is winning and it doesn’t matter who gets in his way. He has a chance to meet a very successful man who agrees to help him as long as he promises to try each technique he is taught. As he does so and helps various people, he find that pretty soon he has a lot of people who want to help him. This was a simple book, but it has a very important message. I am still amazed each time I help or give and don’t expect to get something back, how somehow it always seems to.
5. The Dip
Written by Seth Godin, one of the top marketing authors, The Dip is a great book to help you achieve your best. The idea behind the dip is to achieve more by knowing when to quit and when to try and become the best. Seth talks about the fact that most of the benefits come to those who make it out of “the dip” and over the hill. For instance, the top salesman will make the majority of the sales, the benefits from learning a new language come to those who stick it out and learn to speak fluently. So in order to get the most benefits and rewards, quit the things you don’t really plan to focus on and put a lot of your time in to the things that really matter to you. The benefits from getting really good at those things will greatly improve your life. You can find a more in-depth review here.
Over the last year, I have read over 60 books. With a good portion of those focusing on various aspects of personal development. However, Steve Pavlina’s new book, Personal Development for Smart People is one of the few books that actually focuses on personal development as a way to achieve the things you want in life.
The book covers 7 basic principles. Truth, Love, and Power make up the foundation principles. Oneness, Authority, Courage, are found by combining the foundation principles and Intelligence is the combination of them all. The book throughly explains what each principle is and then explains how to achieve it. The reason that this is a great way to look at personal development, is because it allows you to focus on 3 main principles and then build upon them. For Instance, in order to achieve authority you must first be truthful with yourself and also give yourself power to make any changes you want.
The following chapters then go through how you can apply these principles to change your habits, improve or change your career, manage your money, improve your health and relationships, and find your own spirituality. While we all think about making more money and having a great career, many times this comes at the cost of our health and happiness. The main theme of this book is about aligning all of these to live a full and happy life rather than having parts of your life that completely disagree with each other
Since I was a child, I always believed that I had to make lots of money to be happy. Eventually I found my way to Tokyo where I planned to climb the corporate ladder. However, after doing it for a couple of years, I realized that what really made me happy had nothing to do with money at all. Since then I have quit my job in Tokyo and am moving to a tropical island to start my own business. You can read the full story here. I have never been happier. I was able to come to this decision by using many of the principles in Steve Pavlina’s book. I just didn’t understand it at the time. I just wish I could have read this book a long time ago. I would easily put this in the top 5 most helpful books I have ever read and it should be a required reading for anyone graduating high school.
