Want to know one habit ultra-successful people have in common?
They read. A lot.
In fact, when Warren Buffett was once asked about the key to success, he pointed to a stack of nearby books and said, “Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.”
I have many favorites so limiting this this list to 10 was hard. This is my opinion on the books i have read so far, so if you disagree, please send me a message about what book you think should be on the list!
10. Managing oneself (By Peter Drucker)
Fifty pages of straight truth. Peter Drucker, if you have never heard of him, is one of the most important business thinkers of the last century. The foundation of what you learn in a business MBA program originates from his books.
Drucker says we have to learn how to manage ourselves - it doesn't comes naturally - it's a new challenge of the modern world. 500 years ago you didn't need to learn self management because you didn't have many choices. If you were born a peasant you stayed a peasant, if you were born a merchant you stayed a merchant. Everything you needed to know was handed to you and you had little choice in the matter.
But now in the 21st century you have all the opportunities in the world at you fingertips. But all that potential hinges on your ability to manage yourself.
Drucker says start by figuring out your true strengths and weaknesses.
He says, "Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong. More often people know what they are NOT good at - and even then more people are wrong than right. And yet, a person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness, let alone something one can not do at all."
Let those words sink in. Great concepts like this are always elegantly simple and easy to overlook.
9. Sam Walton: Made in America
Whether you love everything about Wal-Mart or not (I personally don’t love everything about them), you still have to respect this rags to riches story about a man who patiently stuck with his passion for 50 years.
In fact, Sam Walton was really the richest man ever. But since he divided up his wealth among a family trust for tax purposes he was not always listed first on the Forbes list. But remember the Walton family is currently worth $150 billion combined.
Sam Walton created approximately double the wealth of Bill Gates or Warren Buffett.
He might be one of the only people in history to build a TRILLION dollar company.
Many things stand out to me in this autobiography.
I found 5 key strategies that Sam Walton used that made him immensely wealthy and that are pretty easy to apply even today into our lives:
1. Use Curiosity And All The Knowledge Available In The Modern World
2. Be Committed
3. Move Through Failure
4. Hire Outside Consultants
5. Patiently Build
8. The One Thing (By Gary Keller)
The aim of the book is to show you how to cut through the clutter of work, life, well-being, love, family, hobbies, free time, etc. and focus on the things that matter.
The idea is to find the one thing, in any situation, that will allow you to produce extraordinary results. Take any area of your life and find the one action you can take, or focus you can shift, that makes everything else easier or unnecessary.
As Keller explains in the book, when you want the best chance to succeed at anything, your approach should always be to go small:
“Going small” is ignoring all the things you could do and doing what you should do. It’s recognizing that not all things matter equally and finding the things that matter most. It’s a tighter way to connect what you do with what you want. It’s realizing that extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus…When you go as small as possible, you’ll be staring at one thing. And that’s the point.
7. Pitch Anything (By Oren Klaff)
Lesson 1: Make sure your pitch speaks to your audience’s ancient (kinda stupid) brains.
Lesson 2: Turn yourself into the prize, instead of chasing your target.
Lesson 3: To get people to make a gut decision in your favor, use multiple frames.
The main framework used to make a good pitch:
Setting the frame
Telling the story
Revealing the intrigue
Offering the prize
Nailing the hookpoint
Getting a decision
6. Outliers (By Malcom Gladwell)
Lesson 1: After you cross a certain skill threshold, your abilities won’t help you.
To debunk the myth of the “self-made man”, which might be the most popular myth of our time, Gladwell first looked at how much your skills really influence where you end up in life.
Of course practice matters, and so do genetic predispositions in sports, but their influence is limited. As it turns out, once you cross a certain threshold with your skills and abilities, any extra won’t do you much good
Lesson 2: Being born in the wrong month can put you at a disadvantage.
Gladwell found out that most professional Canadian hockey players, who end up in the NHL, are born in the first half of the year. In fact, twice as many have birthdays in the first quarter as in the last.
That’s because the annual cutoff date for youth teams is January 1st, meaning kids born in December have to compete with their friends who are almost a year older than they are. When you’re 8 years old, you stand no chance against a 9 year old in terms of strength and speed – the difference is huge when a year makes up 12.5% of your entire life.
Lesson 3: Asians are good at math, because where you come from matters.
Gladwell says there’s a reason for the stereotype that “Asians are good at math.” Several factors actually are in favor of Asians becoming relatively good at it.
First, Asian languages are set up so that children learn to add numbers simultaneously with learning to count. Second, hundreds of years of building a traditional culture around farming rice has instilled a great sense of discipline into Asian culture.
5. Dotcom secrets (By Russel Brunson)
The DotCom Secrets in an excellent resource for people looking to start a successful online business. The book teaches all the core strategies and secrets to make it easy for you to be successful.
Ladders and Funnels
The section teaches you the reasons you may be losing money with your ClickFunnels. It also focuses on how to target more traffic and increase conversion rates.
Secret 1: The Secret Formula
Secret 2: The Value Ladder
Secret 3: From Ladder to Funnel
Secret 4: How to Find Your Dream Customer
Secret 5: The Three Types of Traffic
Your Communication Funnel
This section teaches you how to communicate with your target audience. It has three secrets, which include:
Secret 6: The Attractive Customer
Section 7: The Soap Opera Sequence
Section 8: The Daily Seinfeld Sequence
Funnelogy
This section is about the basics and strategies behind a successful funnel. The section has 5 secrets, which include:
Secret 9: Reverse Engineering of a Successful Funnel
Secret 10: Seven Phases of a Funnel
Secret 11: The 23 Building Blocks of a Funnel
Secret 12: Frontend Vs. Backend Funnel
Secret 13: The Best Bait
4. Alibaba:The house that Jack Ma Built (By Duncan Clark )
In just a decade and half Jack Ma, a man who rose from humble beginnings and started his career as an English teacher, founded and built Alibaba into the second largest Internet company in the world. The company’s $25 billion IPO in 2014 was the world’s largest, valuing the company more than Facebook or Coca Cola. Alibaba today runs the e-commerce services that hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers depend on every day, providing employment and income for tens of millions more. A Rockefeller of his age, Jack has become an icon for the country’s booming private sector, and as the face of the new, consumerist China is courted by heads of state and CEOs from around the world.
Granted unprecedented access to a wealth of new material including exclusive interviews, Clark draws on his own first-hand experience of key figures integral to Alibaba’s rise to create an authoritative, compelling narrative account of how Alibaba and its charismatic creator have transformed the way that Chinese exercise their new found economic freedom, inspiring entrepreneurs around the world and infuriating others, turning the tables on the Silicon Valley giants who have tried to stand in his way.
Duncan explores vital questions about the company’s past, present, and future: How, from such unremarkable origins, did Jack Ma build Alibaba? What explains his relentless drive and his ability to outsmart his competitors? With over 80% of China’s e-commerce market, how long can the company hope to maintain its dominance? As the company sets its sights on the country’s financial and media markets, are there limits to Alibaba’s ambitions, or will the Chinese government act to curtail them? And as it set up shop from LA and San Francisco to Seattle, how will Alibaba grow its presence and investments in the US and other international markets?
Clark tells Alibaba’s tale within the wider story of China’s economic explosion—the rise of the private sector and the expansion of Internet usage—that have powered the country’s rise to become the world’s second largest economy and largest Internet population, twice the size of the United States. He also explores the political and social context for these momentous changes. An expert insider with unrivaled connections, Clark has a deep understanding of Chinese business mindset. He illuminates an unlikely corporate titan as never before, and examines the key role his company has played in transforming China while increasing its power and presence worldwide.
3. The Everything Store
"An immersive play-by-play of the company's ascent.... It's hard to imagine a better retelling of the Amazon origin story." -- Laura Bennett, New Republic
Amazon.com's visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now.
Brad Stone enjoyed unprecedented access to current and former Amazon employees and Bezos family members, and his book is the first in-depth, fly-on-the-wall account of life at Amazon. The Everything Store is the book that the business world can't stop talking about, the revealing, definitive biography of the company that placed one of the first and largest bets on the Internet and forever changed the way we shop and read
2. Rich Dad Poor Dad (By Robert Kiyosaki)
Rich Dad, Poor Dad should be viewed as a general starting point — a investment/startup summary, rather than a list of specific items to do as an entrepreneur.
Robert Kiyosaki emphasizes six key points through out the book. These points — which differentiate between his “poor” dad (his real dad) and the “rich” dad that helped him understand business and become wealthy — are:
The rich don’t work for money
The importance of financial literacy
Minding your own business
Taxes and corporations
The rich invent money
The need to work to learn and not to work for money
1. How to win friends & influence people (By Dale Carnegie)
15 million copies sold all over the word, translated into 36 languages, first published in 1936 and still relevant today.
A favorite of Warren Buffet, the book is about personal and professional development. It’s about becoming a better person. So if you want to become a better person — if you think there is room for improvement within yourself — I suggest you read it.
Dale Carnagie explains how to positively influence people. Positively! It’s not about taking advantage of people. And he does it by telling useful stories that teach important principles: from the fundamental techniques in handling people to the best ways to make people like you; from how to win people to your way of thinking to how to change people without offense or arousing resentment.
1.Become genuinely interested in other people.
2. Smile.
3.Remember that a person’s name is, to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
4. Be a good listener.
5. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
6. Talk in terms of the other person’s interest.
7. Make the other person feel important–and do it sincerely.
Favorite quotes:
“It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.”
“Everybody in the world is seeking happiness — and there is one sure way to find it. That is by controlling your thoughts. Happiness doesn’t depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions.”
“To be interesting, be interested.”
“Talk to someone about themselves and they’ll listen for hours.”
“There is only one way under high heaven to get the best of an argument — and that is to avoid it.”
“You can’t win an argument. You can’t because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it.”
“Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”
P.S Thanks for getting to the bottom of this list. If you are reading this secret message please send me the name of your favorite book so i know you went through this whole blog :)