26 Lessons I’ve Learned Reading 26 Books
One of my challenges in terms of personal development for 2018 is to read one book per week, that is 52 books by the end of the year. Until now I’ve managed to read half of them. Here are the most valuable 26 lessons I’ve learned from each of the books.
1. Don’t try to change others, change yourself
A relationship is not about finding the right person. A relationship is about becoming the right person. Don’t look for the person you want to spend your life with. Become the person you want to spend your life with.
📕 The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships by Neil Strauss
2. You should follow good practices for a fulfilling life
Here are seven virtues of an enlightened life:
- (1) Master your mind — cultivate your mind to focus and meditate, develop positive thinking.
- (2) Follow your purpose — you can do so only if you establish clearly defined personal, professional and spiritual goals.
- (3) Practice Kaizen — The Japanese art of continuous learning and improvement, by doing the things that you fear.
- (4) Live with discipline — consistently perform small acts of courage.
- (5) Respect your time — Learn to say NO.
- (6) Selflessly serve others — practice daily acts of kindness.
- (7) Embrace the present —Savor the journey and live each day as your last.
📕 The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari by Robin S. Sharma
3. Your time matters, manage it well
Your life on this planet is short, so the way you spend your time really matters. Don’t let others make your schedule or waste your time. Prioritize your options, follow your vocation and do the things that you love. Don’t procrastinate and spend your time wisely. Learn to say no to the things that don’t matter to you.
📕 Musai List by Octavian Pantiș
4. Everything that you desire, is within yourself
People try to find God in different objects, to invoke Him through prayers and they get anxious or frustrated if God doesn’t answer their requests. But what if God is not out there? What if God is within each of us? Pause for a moment and look inside yourself; maybe that’s where you’ll find God.
📕 Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 1 by Neale Donald Walsch.
5. Sometimes, a human’s life isn’t worth more than a pocket watch
You find this in a touching story about a fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl, named Lina. She lives a happy life with her family, until one night of 1941, Lina’s home is invaded by the terrifying Soviet police, and they are given a few minutes to pack their belongings before being taken away into the night. Separated from her father, Lina, her mother and her brother have to fight and stay together in order to survive. Loaded into cattle cars and transported hundreds of miles to Siberia to serve hard labor in unimaginable conditions, then again to the Arctic Circle, Lina’s story is one of pain, endurance, and survival.
“Have you ever wondered what a human life is worth? That morning, my brother’s was worth a pocket watch.”
📕 Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys
6. Understand how habits work, and you have the power to change them
At the core of every habit, there is a loop made up of three elements: 1. Cue, 2. Routine, 3. Reward. Understand each of them, keep the cue and the reward, but change the routine, and you’ll be able to reshape a bad habit. On top of that, you may need some willpower to change it.
📕 The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
I’ve written my thoughts on this book in more detail, here:
7. Firstly look to develop personal effectiveness, only then grow healthy relationships with other people
(1) You have the freedom to choose. When you understand that you are responsible for your choices, (2) make a choice and (3) take action towards it.
After you have improved yourself, look forward to (3) respect and (4) understand others. Only at this point you’ll be able to accomplish (6) synergetic creations.
Keep doing all the above, with (7) continuous growth and improvement in mind.
📕 The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey.
8. Starting a business is really “easy”
All you have to do is follow these seven steps:
Create a breakthrough technology — at least 10x better than the nearest substitute (1. Engineering), at the right time (2. Timing), that will give you a big share of a small market (3. Monopoly). Gather the right team (4. People), sell the product in the most efficient way (5. Distribution) while maintaining your defensible position 10 and 20 years from now (6. Durability). All these, after you’ve found a unique opportunity that others don’t see (7. Secret).
Good luck!
📕 Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters
9. Do more with less
Core ideas:
- If you’re going to start a business, do it right. If selling your business is your only goal, don’t even start, because you’ll never get there.
- Build something you really want to see in the world. Something you can be incredibly proud of, something you want to take a stand for — a thing worth fighting for.
- Staying small and flexible is preferable to growing a company quickly. Real prototypes are always better than design documents.
- Working long does not always mean working hard. Instead of promoting a culture of overtime, promote a culture of focused work by cutting away the things that may interrupt people.
- Meetings are the worst kind of interruption. They should be avoided as much as possible.
📕 Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
10. Greed and selfishness is in our nature
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
📕 Animal Farm by George Orwell
11. You should have fun while doing business
Personal take-aways from Richard Branson’s story, the founder and chairman of Virgin Group:
- Life is not always a smooth sailing, you may face several obstacles as an entrepreneur but you must keep pursuing your goals in spite of the obstacles.
- See profits where most people don’t even see business. Seize opportunities and take calculated risks on them.
- Business shouldn’t be just a way to make money. Business must be fun and you should enjoy doing it.
- Don’t settle, take challenges, even if they’re out of your scope (like he managed to build an airline, Virgin Atlantic).
- Takes life by the horns and chose to trust your gut when it comes to business.
“You will either go to prison or become a millionaire.”
📕 Losing My Virginity by Richard Branson
12. You can find meaning in life in three ways
According to Viktor Frankl, there are three sources to find meaning in life:
- Creating a work or doing a deed.
- Experiencing something or encountering someone (love).
- The attitude towards unavoidable suffering.
The first one is pretty obvious, it’s defined as “life purpose”. It’s about doing something significant, beyond ourselves. The second one, love, is the strongest bond between people and will lead to wonderful inspiration and great sacrifice. It makes experience a legitimate alternative to achievement in a society built around achieving. The third gives suffering a meaning, but what meaning?
Enduring extreme hunger, cold and brutality, first in Auschwitz then Dachau, Viktor Frankl himself was under constant threat of going to the gas ovens. Despite Frankl’s horrific experiences, he is able to find meaning in a place full of unbelievable suffering. As he points out, you can find meaning through suffering, but don’t suffer unnecessary to find meaning:
“Let me make it perfectly clear that in no way is suffering necessary to find meaning. I only insist that meaning is possible even in spite of suffering — provided, certainly, that the suffering is unavoidable. If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause, be it psychological, biological, or political. To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.”
📕 Man’s search for meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
❗️There is a lot to learn from this book, so I highly recommend it❗️
13. The best antidote against stress is focus on today
We tend to worry too much about the past. What’s done is done. There is no way to change the past. Accept the fact, and move on.
When we don’t carry the burden of the past, we worry about the future. We are too concerned about what may happen. What are the chances that what burdens us, may actually happen? Probably towards zero. The outcome will prove to be very different than what we’ve thought of.
So the best remedy against stress is to let go of the past, don’t worry about the future and live for today. If you do your best today, the future will take care of itself.
Moreover, we tend to be stressed about all the things that we don’t have. We should instead feel grateful for what we have:
“Count your blessings, not your troubles.”
Keep in mind that stress is the root cause of many diseases. Live in the moment, be thankful for what you have, and stop worrying.
📕 How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie
14. Consider a company’s value when buying a stock, and not its price
When investing, you must take into consideration a few factors:
- always think long-term— at least 20 years.
- diversify your investments , thus you protect yourself from losses — this is where comes in handy the low-cost index funds.
- focus on safe and steady returns instead of get-rich-quick schemes.
Moreover, control your emotions and don’t let yourself influenced by Mr. Market — that’s Benjamin Graham’s famous analogy, where he pictures the entire stock market as a single person. Don’t buy a stock just because it went up, or don’t sell it if it goes down. You will never be able to time or predict the market right.
Lastly, to further remove you from the emotional stress of investing with the market, you should always stick to a strict formula when investing. For example, set a fixed budget you’re going to invest every month or quarter, no matter the price. This is known as dollar cost averaging, and it’s a great way to protect yourself if you happen to invest a big sum right before a crash.
📕 The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham
15. The system could become really sick
The classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian science-fiction that takes place (you’ve guessed) in the year 1984. It pictures a world where most of the population has become victims of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and public manipulation.
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
I’d rather not spoil this book with any summary —better give it a read.
📕 1984 by George Orwell
16. Think from inside-out
They key idea in a nutshell:
“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.”
Take for example Apple’s great example. First they tell you why they’re doing it — “We aim to challenge the status quo. We aim to think differently.”, then they tell you how they do it —through “user-friendly, beautifully designed, and easy to use” products, and finally you find out what they make — “great computers”.
To inspire others, start by telling them why you do the things you do, instead of what you do. Make people feel a sense of belonging, to believe in something above and beyond themselves, and then they will support you, with their time, money, and in the cases of some movements, even with their lives.
📕 Start with Why by Simon Sinek
17. Dataism could become the religion of the future
Until the 21st century, humanity has reduced mortality caused by hunger, diseases and violence — we are now looking to defeat death, to gain immortality. Poverty is decreasing — we now want to achieve eternal happiness. We have risen above animal fights and wars — we will transform humans into Gods. Based on the past, and present, we could (try to) predict the future —we will change humans into gods, and transform Homo Sapiens into Homo Deus.
Artificial intelligence is on the rise (self driving cars, speech and face recognitions, etc.), and it could, slowly, replace humans in all their cognitive tasks. As artificial intelligence gets smarter, more humans are pushed out of the job market — it could create a ‘useless class’ of people.
But robots are here to help and protect us, you may think, right? Well, better think about the following lines:
“You want to know how super-intelligent cyborgs might treat ordinary flesh-and-blood humans? Better start by investigating how humans treat their less intelligent animal cousins. It’s not a perfect analogy, of course, but it is the best archetype we can actually observe rather than just imagine.”
We are better than this, we have feelings and conscience. Think for a minute, what if your ‘conscience’ and ‘feelings’ are nothing more than some elaborated algorithms? Because of some inputs, you respond with specific outputs — therefore, it becomes a matter of data.
Organisms are algorithms, and life is all about data processing. The more data you can process, the better you can understand humans. And this is what dataism is about:
“… an emerging ideology or even a new form of religion, in which ‘information flow’ is the ‘supreme value’.”
The book ends with one deep question to reflect on:
“What happens to society, when non-conscious algorithms know us better than ourselves?”
📕 Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
18. Transformational change is the key to growth
If you truly want to grow and improve yourself, you must make changes.
Perform consistent actions towards your well defined goals. Do not look for motivation, because you may not find it everyday. Discipline will lead you to great achievements, not motivation.
“Life begins at the end of our comfort zone.”
Do not fear failure, take it as an experience, learn from it, and do not repeat the same mistakes again.
📕 The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth by John C. Maxwell
19. Improve yourself by following strong virtues
Benjamin Franklin created a framework for himself, based on thirteen virtues that helped him succeed in politics, invention, music, business, science and diplomacy. His virtues are: Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquillity, Chastity, Humility.
Do you want to become the best version of yourself? Write your own virtues! They could be five, ten, or fifteen, it doesn’t matter. But make sure that you stick to them! Write a journal to keep track of the actions you take every day and see if they are aligned with your values. Don’t get overwhelmed, start simple — in the first week track one value, then gradually track new virtues.
📕 The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
20. A simple, balanced approach is the key to a longer, happier life
Simple actions, such as doing regular exercises, sleeping well, eating healthy (and varied), creating strong social relationships are among the factors that contribute to a longer and happier life.
Don’t expect to find something revealing about how to live longer and happier lives. There are a few common sense tips that you probably hear (and ignore) every day 🙃. Apply them!
📕 The Nordic Guide to Living 10 Years Longer: 10 Easy Tips For a Happier, Healthier Life by Bertil Marklund
21. A good speech is a journey both the speaker and the audience make together
When holding a speech, your main purpose should be to give something to the audience, not to take. If you are speaking to brag, to raise money or to uplift yourself, you can forget about it. It’s crucial to remember the most important thing: give, not take.
Here are a few tips to have a good speech: connect with your audience through jokes, stories or anecdotes and make eye contact. Wear something comfortable that reflects your personality. Be careful if you are using visuals, not to defocus your audience from what you are saying.
And rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. If you are confident enough, you could speak based on a structured list, but if not, you’d better learn your speech by heart.
📕 TED Talks by Chris Andersen
22. Very quick decisions can be as good as those you make cautiously and deliberately — or even better
Surprisingly or not, sometimes you are able to make better, smarter decision relying solely on your instinctive thinking. Take for example, when you meet someone for the first time: unconsciously you make a general idea of that person — is he mean, kind, gentle, nervous, etc. You are able to quickly “read” his mind (more or less), based on his facial expressions and body language — sad, angry, happy, etc.
However, your fast thinking can lead you to biases that you aren’t event aware of. For example, you tend to think that tall people are smarter and better leaders than the short ones — even though there isn’t a proven correlation between height and IQ.
Another circumstance when your instinctive thinking can be affected is in conditions of stress. In a stressful situation, you tend to develop a sort of tunnel vision, focusing solely on the most imminent, threatening piece of information. This will lead your gut to make the wrong call many times, so it should be prevented whenever possible.
Therefore, what type of thinking should I rely on when taking decisions? When should I trust my gut and when should I allow myself some time to think? 🤔
As the author suggests it, the best solution is to find a balance between rational and instinctive thinking. In case of simple choices — rational thinking is better. When faced with more complex decisions and options — the unconscious process of thinking can serve you better. This may sound counterintuitive, the exact opposite of normal and conventional thinking. The truth is, no one knows for sure — the problem it’s too complex.
📕 Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
23. Through books, you can escape the cruel reality
The novel is based on an incredible story about a fourteen-year-old girl, Dita Kraus, who was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau along with her mother and father in December, 1943.
In a place where nothing grows, at Auschwitz, Dita agrees to take charge of eight books that the prisoners have managed to sneak past the guards. It’s the smallest, but the most precious library in history. She is willing to risk her life to keep the magic of books alive during the Holocaust.
“Books are extremely dangerous; they make people think.”
While reading, you will learn, little by little, not only the story of Dita, but also the story of the other supervisors and teachers in Block 31.
📕 The Librarian of Auschwitz by Antonio Iturbe
24. (Dark) humor can help you out
A tragicomic story about a boy, Mihai, that can’t find meaning in a meaningless world. Sometimes you want to cry with the character, sometimes you want to laugh with him, and other times you want to punch him in the face.
📕 Reset by Mihai Păduraru
25. Minimize the time spent in the feedback loop
In his book, Eric Ries suggests a new approach when starting a business. A core component of his methodology, Lean Startup, is the build-measure-learn feedback loop. One of the goals is to minimize the total time spent in this loop.
You firstly start by building a minimum viable product (MVP) — it shouldn’t be perfect, it should be good enough to ship it to your clients, with some minimum features that you think are vital. Afterwards, based on your specific measurements and your clients’ feedback, you learn — this is called validated learning.
If the above process of measuring and learning is done correctly, it will be clear that your company is either moving in the right direction or not. If not, it’s a sign that it is time to pivot or make a structural course correction to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy and/or engine of growth.
There are many more lessons to learn from the book — like what are the three types of engine of growth a company could use or how to effectively rely on A/B testing— but I’ll let you read about them by yourself.
📕 The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
26. The world needs *passionate* leaders
Not managers, but leaders. Because leaders use passion and ideas to drive people, while managers use threats and bureaucracy.
To become a leader you must challenge the status quo, propose an idea, even if it might fail, to stand up in front of strangers. You should’t settle and always embrace change. And remember:
“The only thing holding you back is your own fear.”
📕 Tribes by Seth Godin
These are the 26 books that I’ve read this year, so far, and the lessons learned from them. Looking forward to complete my challenge, and by the end of the year to learn at least 52 valuable lessons.
Have you read some of the books mentioned above? What is your favorite book that you’ve read in 2018, so far? How are the challenges that you’ve set this year going? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
