Top 10 Books that have Helped Me Level Up
These books have added more value to my life than any other book, movie, or online course has post-college.
If you want to improve your focus, better your memory, increase your knowledge, and want a healthier mind when you are older, you may want to incorporate reading into your life.
I grew up reading a lot of books as I did not have a TV, which served as my past time. I read all kinds of books, mainly fictional books about crime and mystery lol.
I did not grow up wealthy, and so the library was the only place I could really get my books. I never quite understood why people brought books because I never really went into a library wanting to read a specific book. I would browse the shelves until a book title or blurb caught my attention.
In the past few years, I have become interested in books that would help me grow and read to learn rather than to past time.
I have used good ole Google to figure out which books will best help me learn a specific skill or overcome a certain obstacle I am facing. I also asked people that I knew who were avid readers to get their recommendations.
Unfortunately, these books have been hard to get a hold of from my local libraries as they are quite popular (which makes me want to read them even more!). This is why I have linked each image in this list to purchase the book from Amazon at a reasonable price. You can get the hard copy of the audiobook from the links provided.
Not all the books I have read have been super helpful for me, and it honestly depends on your connection with the author and whether you believe in what they have to say.
Before reading on, I encourage you to have an open mind and give at least one of these books a shot. I promise my recommendations will not disappoint.
Without further ado, here are the top 10 books that have changed my life for the better.
1. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People — Stephen Covey
Everyone has heard about this book by now. If you have not, crawl out of the rock, you have been living under and click this link to get your copy.
The book explains the 7 habits: being proactive, working towards goals and setting intentions, prioritizing, growing and winning with others, understanding before trying to be understood, synergizing and collaborating, and continuously working on these habits as you grow and develop.
Given the hype of this book, it was one of the first books I read. It provided me with a strong foundation for managing my time, how to reverse engineer success by first imagining and understanding my end goals, how to focus on the areas in my life that matter most, and why I should cultivate relationships.
2. Rich Dad, Poor Dad — Robert Kiyosaki
I did not have a solid understanding of finance or how to manage my money prior to reading it. I thought that the only way to make money is to have a job and make a lot of money. I needed a higher paying job — which would come as I gained more experience in a profession.
This book opened my eyes to passive income and different revenue streams for making money. This is a phenomenal book that has helped change how I think about money and what I do with it.
I have used the teachings in this book to learn how to diversify my income and learned how I could use my money on assets (that puts money in my pocket) rather than spending it on liabilities (that takes it out).
This book really puts into perspective how the poverty mindset really works in individuals and why it stops them from leveling up financially.
3. What are you Hungry For? — Deepak Chopra
I have struggled a lot with my eating habits over the years. I would binge eat until I could not move anymore while watching my favorite shows. I ate all sorts of junk and unhealthy foods without knowing what it was doing to my body.
Deepak Chopra explains the importance of mindful eating and how it can help with your overall health. He dives into the science behind it all and explains how his practices with food have helped him have more energy, feel and look younger, and lose weight over time. He also explains which foods are the most nutritious and detrimental to the body in the long term.
I applied the teachings in this book to my own life and found myself having more energy throughout the day when completing the most complex tasks.
I am normally a fast, non-picky eater. But this book has encouraged me to eat slower and be conscious of the different flavors and textures present, which allowed me to have a better connection with what I was eating.
4. How to Win Friends and Influence People — Dale Carnegie
I really struggled when it came to networking with others. In fact, I was totally scared and rarely tried to go out of my way to meet new people. I did not know what to talk about! This book helped ease my mind on how to bring about meaningful conversations better.
It helped me understand the importance of meeting new people and that something new can be learned from everyone if you give them a chance to tell you. I bought this book to get better at talking to people, and it definitely helped.
However, the book offers a lot more content about how you can be a leader, influence people on your own thoughts, and get people to like you without even trying! The skills explained in the book work when you change the way you think — something that I enjoy writing and learning about. I recommend this book to anyone, and everyone as the lessons can be applied to any area of your life.
5. Mindset — Carol Dweck
Mindset, Carol Dweck, is mainly targeted around how you think and how you can modify your thoughts to accomplish more in each of your life.
Specifically, the book explains how you can go from a fixed mindset — someone with limiting thoughts who believe that their talents and intelligence cannot be changed — to a growth mindset where your struggles and shortcomings can be a guide for improvement.
This was an excellent book for my personal growth and overcoming self-limiting beliefs that I had about myself. Imposter syndrome affects many young professionals, like me, and stops them from reaching their potential. Reading the examples in this book really helped me break that barrier.
This should be the first book that you read if you are ready to make a change in your life and want to develop who you are as a person. Mindset is everything when you want to achieve a goal, end a habit, or do anything that you cannot do easily.
6. The Power of Habit — Charles Duhigg
I am currently re-listening to this audiobook as I write this post. The book explains, with lotsss of examples, the main pillars of habit formation: cues (triggers that decide which habit to use), routines (what you do following the triggers), and rewards (helps your brain answer why you should do it again).
A key point that is claimed throughout the book is that many habits that we have are made on a subconscious level, and we do not realize what our habits are unless we look for them. I loved learning from this book because you can learn how habits are formed to start new habits and break old ones.
Our brains cannot tell the difference between a good habit and a bad habit — so to break bad habits, we need to train ourselves to form new ones.
As a 30 day challenge lover, this book has helped me understand how to create better challenges that will help me remove existing habits or start new ones.
Listening to the examples of people and organizations and overcoming their habits in this book is truly inspiring. It has motivated me to believe that you can really overcome anything once you set your mind to it.
7. Joy on Demand — Chade-Meng Tan
I first listened to the audiobook Joy on Demand by Chade-Meng Tan and then ended up borrowing the book from the library to learn the teachings through a different medium. That is because I resonated with the author, Tan, and his mindset prior to changing the way he thought about success and happiness.
Out of college, like most people, I wanted to be great. I worked really hard and spent a lot of my time focusing on goals that I could see and obtain. After reading the book, I realized that I was heading down a never-ending pursuit and needed to look elsewhere to be content with where I am.
The author explains his experiences and quests to find and cultivate joy. The state of joy is coined to fuel creativity and ultimately helps create success.
8. The Lean Startup — Eric Ries
I started reading this book because I worked for a startup as a Product Manager, and I wanted to learn how to perform better in my role.
I picked this book because any online course that I would find about startups or product management talked about its teachings.
The main thing that this book provided me with was the confidence to pursue my own ventures and ideas. The book highlights the framework for how to come up with strong ideas for a startup and how to use data to validate whether an idea is worth pursuing.
Through the books that I have read (specifically #2 in this list), I have learned that you cannot simply work for a paycheck and be considered wealthy. Owning a business is the best way to accumulate income passively that can help you obtain and feel true wealth that rich people today are experiencing.
In addition, this book helped me understand specific strategies for making decisions and how to analyze data and information that already exists to validate ideas or plans.
I struggled a lot with figuring out my passions. This book has really helped me hone the idea of validated learning and encouraged me to come up with mini projects in different disciplines to find my interests. You do not know unless you try.
This blog is a venture that I have always had an interest in trying out, and it would not have been possible without reading this book. I also have other plans and ideas in the pipeline that I cannot wait to share with you once it is complete!
9. Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products — Nir Eyal
Do you check your phone multiple times a day? Is it the same apps that you are opening each time your phone is in your hand? This book explains how technology is created to keep people hooked — it is a science more than it is an amazing product.
The methodology that many companies use to help keep users engaged is explained throughout the book. Understanding how these habit-forming products are created is a great way to learn how to remove such habits.
For instance, notifications are a big reason why people keep coming to their phones. Whether it is a new email in Gmail, someone liking your picture on Instagram, or someone tagging you in a message on GroupMe, your phone will provide you with a notification, and you will likely pick your phone up and open the respective app to “stay connected” with others.
These apps have been designed to trigger such responses for you, and understanding how it works has allowed me to organize how I receive notifications on my phone to remove those triggers. There are many products and devices around us that are like this, so it is important to learn the triggers that they have designed to prevent unnecessary habits from being created.
It has also helped me understand how I can create good habits for myself using the same tactics. Rather than wanting to trigger a response of looking at my phone to check social media, I realized that I could trigger responses to make positive habits like getting out of my bed first thing when I wake up in the morning, knowing when it is time to drink water and stand up (thank you Apple Watch!), and automatically knowing what to think about and do the moment any self-limiting beliefs creep into my mind.
10. The Bhagavad Gita — Eknath Easwaran
The Bhagavad Gita is considered the most popular text in Hinduism as it summarizes the different Hindu scriptures.
The Bhagavad Gita was written over 5000 years ago during an era of an ongoing battle between two groups of people from the same family who had different ideologies; the Pandavas who believed in a democracy, and Kauravas who believed in a dictatorship.
The text consists of a conversation between Krishna, a reincarnation of God on Earth, and his friend Arjun — a Pandava. The conversations are teachings that can be still used today.
I do not consider myself religious, but the lessons in this book explain morals, spiritual and philosophical ideas, and relationships through the conversations between Krishna and Arjun.
Note: There are many versions of The Bhagavad Gita, as the original text was written in Sanskrit. I chose the one by Eknath Easwaran after reading reviews that it is the one that translates most fluently to the English language.
Reading brings knowledge, and knowledge is power; therefore, reading is power. The power to know and learn and understand . . . but also the power to dream. Stories inspire us to reach high, love deep, change the world, and be more than we ever thought we could. Every book allows us to dream a new dream.
In order to not make this a super lengthy post, I limited the list to my top 10 books. However, there are so many books out there. The internet is also a gold mine of information that you have at your disposal to learn new things.
If you are not much of a book reader, try audiobooks while driving, working out, or doing chores. That is the route that I took before coming back to rereading physical books.
Since I have recently picked up listening to audiobooks again this past year, I feel like I am learning something new every day, growing to become a better me, and adapting my life through the teachings of others.
This is not a game y’all, get educated. There are no second chances in life. Get it right now.
