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hey this is Leo for actualise org and in this video we're talking about something very important I want to talk to you about how to use books to transform your life and to take your personal development to a whole new level a whole new level what you can do with books and the impact that just a simple habit of reading books on a weekly basis can do for you is enormous let's talk about that and at the end of this video I'm going to introduce six of some of the most important books that I think you should be reading and also what's really cool is that I've been working really hard to create a list of all the books that I've read in the last five years and I've read over 150 books amazing books on self-help productivity success finances health relationships so there's so much covered here and I'm going to share six of my top books but really also I'm going to be launching this master list of 140 and I keep I'm going to keep expanding that list over the months and I'm going to hope to grow it to 200 books so that's going to be available to you if you go to actualize that org slash books you're going to get 12 freebie ones and then if you want to get the full list it's available for a very very low price anyway so let's talk about what books can do for you why are books important why am I even excited about talking about this it's very exciting because to me what's really important in mastering your own life is to be able to see 10 steps ahead you want to develop that ability to see 10 steps ahead when we're bored in life when we're growing up in our teens we don't know much about life we're just stumbling around basically like a blind person just feeling and groping in the dark and seeing what we can grasp and through this means you know our parents help us or teachers help us our friends help guide us society helps to kind of guide us and Corral us and and put us down these tracks but as you're going into your career into your higher education as you're getting to more serious relationships you're starting businesses you're working on your health so you're doing all the stuff you need answers and you need wisdom you need the ability to think and to see to strategize about your old life very practically this isn't just philosophy or theory or something that was written in science book this is something like more about okay what do I have to do to reach the kind of goals that I have in my life how do I actually accomplish it how how have other people accomplished it and this is where books come in because if you just read a couple of books that's nice if you watch a couple of my videos that's nice if you maybe go to a seminar once in your life that's nice or if you watch and purchase an information product somewhere audio product video product it's also nice but there's nothing quite like immersing yourself and slowly building up this giant grand mental model of how life works that's the whole point of a story that's what I want to convey to you through these videos is I want you to have a really accurate really rich robust mental model that will allow you to make informed choices it allow you to follow your values in life it will allow you to achieve your goals to find happiness and fulfillment all of these things these things aren't easy to find especially considering that you're your own unique person you have your own values your own set of priorities in life and so you've got to custom tailor whatever information you're finding out there to you so that it's working for you and it's feeling nice for you well to do that what you got to do is you got to start putting this giant jigsaw puzzle into place that's how I like to think of it think about it as though you have this giant thousand piece jigsaw puzzle when you're born and all the pieces are flipped over and randomly scattered around and you don't even know what the final picture should look like and as you're born and you're going through life you're starting to assemble these pieces this is just something that naturally starts to happen and you're getting little faint glimpses into what's right in this situation what's right in that situation what do I want here how do I deal with that relationship there and you're starting to put these pieces into place but most people they have a very scattered jigsaw and I would say they only have a couple of percent less than 10% of the jigsaw puzzle pieces put into place even when they're in their 40s in their 50s they just don't have it because they haven't spent the time nor have they immersed themselves in the right information and wisdom which is contained in these books to do it so the value of reading these books is that once you start to read 20 50 100 200 books what starts to happen is that like a lot of stuff gets interconnected in each of these little pieces of the puzzle get put into place for you and what's interesting is that every one of us has our own puzzle no one has the exact same puzzle so this is something that only you can do for yourself you can't outsource this to somebody else you can't just find some guru you can't just use all my videos to do it now my videos are good even if you watch a lot of them they'll get you a lot of this jigsaw puzzle thing into place except what's going to happen is that you're going to be missing the finer details because what I'm doing in my videos is I'm giving you broad overviews I'm painting with with broad broad strokes I'm I'm using generalities when you're reading a book first hand there's there's something different there and I want to outline some of the value that you get from doing that so here's why it really is important to read lots of books one is that it's a deeper source of information when you're reading this book there's so much information even one of these books that I'm going to share with you that you can read it multiple times you can read a five or ten times and still not mine all of it out so there's a lot for me to cover that in videos I would have to shoot twenty or a hundred videos on that one book so that's the level of depth that we're talking about here when I'm giving you information in a video those are broad strokes I can't capture all the nuances and those nuances they're fascinating and they're also important because sometimes it's the little details that really matter and when I'm telling you the details that I feel are important that's not necessarily the important details that you are going to need when you read a book you might get something different out of it than when I read a book so it's not smart to just rely on me to do all the reading for you and then to how to regurgitate you want to take this stuff into your own hands at least if you want serious result in your life this is how you do it the next point is that these books they're written by amazing people much more amazing that I could ever hope to be and even you could hope to be these people are world-class experts PhDs researchers like literally geniuses of all the billions of people that have ever lived these are like the best of the best of the best people writing these books millionaires sometimes billionaires write these books Yogi's enlightened masters like amazing business leaders politicians inspire inspiring people very creative artistic people write these books so if you choose the right books then you're getting wisdom from just like amazing brilliant minds amazingly written full of like wisdom and practical advice stuff that these people have gone literally a lifetime through of world experience and they've distilled their own best principles and practices and golden nuggets and tips and now they put them in this book format now you can read that what's nice about that is that when you do read that it convinces your mind on a whole new level and then inspires your mind and motivates your mind on a whole new level than just listening to me because honestly I'm not the most successful person in the world like I'm not that exceptional I'm not going to really wow you with the stuff that I've done in my life like I'm still working I'm still pretty young so I hope to get a lot more success going forward and maybe I'll get there 20 or 30 years from now but right now I'm pretty pretty average and I don't have a PhD I've done any research I'm not enlightened and I haven't earned millions or billions of dollars so that doesn't make me the most credible source I mean the information that I'm giving to you it's all very accurate it will transform your life if you listen to it but see your mind doesn't work on that your mind works on oh what's persuasive what gets me fired up what triggers me emotionally and so part of that of course is the like the gravitas the expertise of the person the the inspirational accomplishments that this person has accomplished so when you read a biography for example of Mahatma Gandhi or mother Teresa or Winston Churchill or Benjamin Franklin like these kinds of people like they inspire you these are amazing extraordinary people that's why I love to read from these experts because it does convince your mind in a whole new level and if you're not reading these books and you're just listening to me it's okay but you can take it to another level the other benefit of doing this is that over the long term as you're reading these books even though you know reading one book might not transform your life immediately the day that you meet it what tends to happen is that if you invest long-term in your own self and you read every single week and you read every single month and every single year then after a few years of doing this like you said like I said you get this mental model built up and the value of that is that you know all the answers you still struggle you're still going to have struggles in life usually gonna have problems you're still going to fail in places but at least you're going to know the the ways that you should be doing things and you're going to be able to do like a self diagnosis so you're never going to become stuck in life I find that even though I have a lot of challenges still in my own life and I'm still working really hard a lot of aspects of my life the one thing that I get solace in and that gives me a lot of confidence and comfort is that I literally do know like a little bit about almost every aspect and facet of life at least the facets that are really important to my life and so I feel like I can't really go down a dead-end not anymore like I know so much about business and marketing and success principles and what happiness is and about consciousness and enlightenment and about relationships and about sexuality and about biographies and about history I know so much about this stuff that it's pretty hard for me to get lost in life I just don't see that happening and even if I do like really screw up somewhere make a really bad turn I can do a self diagnosis and I can autocorrect this is really important because some people they can really go down the wrong road get really stuck and then not know what to do and this is what leads to making really horrible business decisions really horrible relationship decisions really horrible career decisions like life decisions that can really do you cost you lots of time cause you lots of money cost you lots of just like pain and emotional heartache so you can avoid a lot of that stuff by reading these best principles again this is the wisdom of the ages right here we have over three thousand maybe even four thousand years of recorded history civilizations from the ancient Egyptians all the way up to modern times and from from 3,000 years ago all the way to the modern times the best experts and sages across time have written down their most important understandings of life in these books so we literally know it all at this point sure there's still stuff in science that we don't know that is being researched actively every day but most of the stuff that's important to living a fulfilling life to being successfully extraordinary successful all that stuff has been known all that stuff has been regurgitated and written about over and over and over again and literally you can go through and find who are the most successful the most credible the most amazing people the most articulate people on these subjects and then read those books and you get that wisdom really quickly without having to make all the same mistakes that they have made so this is a really great way to to shortcut your way in life so those are some of the benefits and what I want to do with this list the reason I worked really hard I spent many weeks here compiling this list going through my whole book list giving you reviews putting ratings on on each one of these books how important do I think it is to your own development into your own success because what I wanted to do is I wanted to save you a lot of time this list of 140 books and it's going to grow to even more it'll take you quite a bit of time to read it if you want to read all those books it would probably take you two or three or five years to get through it and it will take you thousands of hours now I know you don't have that kind of time I have that kind of time because I do this professionally but you don't need to be reading all hundred forty books to get the benefit there's something called the 80/20 principle and that means that 80% of your results in whatever you're doing in your life is coming from only about 20% of your effort so using this principle here apply to this reading list what I want to do for you is I want to give you kind of the best of the best even of this list so that you can go through and if you only have a couple of hours to read every week you could be reading like the best of the best of the best stuff that's out there and not just stuff that's wise but also stuff that's very practical I tend to favor and rate highly the books that are filled with immediate techniques that you can go and apply right now concepts that are just super fundamental and responsible for your results not in just one area of your life like a relationship problem but in all areas of your life there are certain things in yourself and your own psyche that you can work on that will fix simultaneously many many areas of your life if you just fix the root right that's why I like working on inner game that's why I like working on mindsets the subconscious mind working with beliefs because these things tend to cascade and have ripple effects throughout your whole life when you just fix like a problem in your subconscious mind it tends to ripple through so what I've done here is I've gone through and I've found the best books from not just my own experience I mean I've gone through and I've read lots of Amazon reviews and of course I've filtered all these books out through my own understanding and by reading them but I've also solicited advice from world-class experts millionaires successful business leaders even Yogi's so I've solicited advice from all these people to see what are the books that they recommend and then I've incorporated that in advice I've taken it I've read those books and I seen okay is this really a good book and then if it was and I added it to this list and I gave it a high rating so that's the value that you're that you're getting here from this list one thing that I do want to mention is don't be cheap with your personal development and don't be cheap with buying books I like to have actual physical copies of books and one thing that I said to myself I remember I was very deliberate about this about five years ago when I started this journey as I said even though some of these books you know buying 140 books that's pretty expensive that goes into the thousands of dollars and I have spent thousands of dollars on but I said to myself this is one area of my life that I'm not going to be cheap in I tend to be pretty frugal person I try to save money where it's not it's not giving me any good benefit but with books I tend to overspend I tend to buy more and more books sometimes I have ten or twelve books lying on my bookshelf that I haven't even read just because I want them there so they're motivating me and anytime I have some spare time you can just go grab one of those book and start reading it so don't be cheap with your personal development in the end a book only costs very very little $10 $20 like $30 is the most you'll ever pay for a book but yet this book that costs let's say $20 can have thousands if not even millions of dollars of wisdom in it so now imagine what happens if you have a stack of those books and you're going through that stack every single week imagine the benefits that has long-term for you it's quite enormous so don't be cheap with that right it's considering your short-term cost versus your long-term gains and reading books is something that's not necessarily an immediate gain although some books can give you amazing transformational like aha moments right off the bat but most books it's about that long-term building of mastery and expertise and that building that grand model of life that you need to have to really be successful the other thing that I think is really important is categories of life right studying success is something that I love so reading a book on success or productivity is awesome but there's a lot more than just that to self-help I think to be successful life you need to be a really well-rounded person you don't want to be too narrow-minded and so to this end what I did is I categorized all the books on my list into 16 major categories and I'm probably gonna be growing the categories and changing them around to make them even better but right now I have about 16 of them and I want to talk a little bit about each one here because I think it's important to discuss why these categories are critical to your success so of course the first and most important category is success psychology there's been a lot of amazing books written about how to be successful in life how to be more productive more efficient so success in productivities these two categories are really important to study the next category is happiness what is happiness how does happiness work especially right now in the last 30 years there's been a lot of research done in the positive psychology movement about what happiness is it is good scientific research but there's also lots of classic wisdom from thousands of years ago from both Western and Eastern traditions about what happiness is and almost nobody understands what happiness is it's a very counterintuitive concept that's why I like shooting videos about it because it it challenges some of the notions that society feeds you and happiness is very different from what society tells you it is so studying happiness and reading books on that is very important there are some amazing critical books that you must read about happiness that I'm really happy to share with you on this list next is life purpose for me life purpose is the whole reason that I got into this thing with actualized org is about how to create a passion life how do you find that one thing that you get married to in your life and I don't mean a person but I mean your career your work what is your going to be your creative contribution in life and what are all the challenges with pursuing it because there are lots of challenges even once you discover what your passion is you have to go out there do the hard work and you're gonna have a lot of limiting beliefs a lot of things in your psychology holding you back from doing that so there's important books you need to read on that the next critical category is relationships and sexuality I find that most people are horrible in relationships and they're not too good with sex either so studying what is the difference between the male and the female mind what are the communication gaps that exist in intimate relationships how do you build better friendships so not just intimate relationships but of course platonic relationships fit into this category as well so all of these things are really critical to understand also how do you date better how do you attract that man or that woman of your life that you want to make your life lifelong partner how do you do that how do you become really good with sex how do you explore your sexuality in ways that the average person has never explored and you can get like amazing fulfillment out of doing that so that's a really area that I'm really passionate about is this relationship and sexuality category and I have amazing books on that I'm so excited to share those with you the the next thing is consciousness spirituality and enlightenment this is huge this is something that I'm really immersing myself in right now this is where you go after you do a lot lots of kind of practical personal development is that you get more into the more abstract ethereal consciousness work and enlightenment work there's amazing books I have books that will shatter your whole worldview if you read them unconsciousness just absolutely amazing and it's not just theorizing it's not just philosophy these books will get you amazing results in your life because once you start to master your consciousness this is like the most fundamental root of all your suffering and problems in life is your ego and when you start to work with your ego directly that's incredibly powerful so I'm very excited about those the next category is health and nutrition very big once you start to get into self-actualization work one thing you're going to realize is that oh I gotta get my health into shape the average person in the society in America is horribly out of shape destroying their body really setting themselves up for disaster later on in life so once you become more aware and you get other aspects of your life into place your health if it's not being optimal right now then you're going to want to optimize it and I have good books on that the next one is money and finances money is the currency that allows you to live life and to do the things that you want to do in life and money is a really tricky one because a lot of the reasons people struggle with money is because they have limiting beliefs and unrestorable mindsets about it it's not so much about going out there and earning lots of cash it's more about developing the right mindsets that then allow you to conserve your money properly earn more of your money properly and domestic properly and I have amazing books on on that as well the next category not quite as practical and as tangible but it's still I think very important it's what I call social science social science and his I think that to develop a really solid mental model you have to incorporate understanding of history and science and there's both the physical sciences literally you should understand a little bit about physics you should understand a little bit about mathematics and logic and you should also understand the social sciences what's going on with economics what's going on with psychology what's going on with sociology and anthropology you got to know this stuff it helps it's like the glue that cements all the pieces together and of course going back in history and taking the lessons of history is really important because what reading history will teach you is it'll teach you wisdom and judgment so that you're going to have a really good idea of how to discern between what are the situations that are really going to screw you up one of the situations that are going to work out really well one of the lessons from history it's also going to inspire you it's going to show you trends it's going to show you how to distinguish what a trend is versus what a fad is so I think that's important it's also extremely fascinating to me to study all that stuff and lastly I think the most one of the important categories is biographies biographies like we said are written by these amazing human beings like the cream of the crop of of all of Society of over thousands of years so from these biographies you can read and pick apart the lines and the minds of amazing people creative people political people amazing business leaders sages spiritual leaders like there's so much to mine and these biographies they they show you the struggles that a human being goes through in life and you can learn a lot from that by reading it it's basically like living an alternate life so the more biographies you read I find it's almost like you've lived through somebody else's life through their eyes and you've seen what they've seen so when you read twenty or thirty biographies like wow you've got so much more so much more stability in you as a human being because it's like you've already lived through 30 different lives so those are the categories and there are more categories but I think these are the most crucial if you study all these and I've got books in each one of them many many books then you're going to be really solid what I want to encourage you is I want to set a challenge for you here if you're resonating with this and you're really excited about taking yourself to the next level then come into this challenge the challenge is to read one book per week for a year so that equals 52 books in one year it's not that hard to read one book per week you just got to set that intention have a stack of books and I've got you covered there so we've got this list know what you need to be reading pick the right books for you and then just get to work and just steadily chip away at it imagine the competitive advantage that you would have if you read 50 books a year and then imagine if you did that for five to ten years just think about it that's 200 books maybe even 500 books just think about what that could do for you across all these different categories of life what would I do - for your success what would that do for your relationships what would that do for your career for your business for your money for your health this would really transform all those areas and it would just make you so much more grounded as a human being think about the competitive advantage this gives you over your colleagues at work or competitors in your business or the competitive advantage it gives you over other mates in finding that right girl or boy that you want in your life or in raising your kids it's amazing what this can do for you so what I've got here and what I want to share with you is I have six books from my list these are some really foundational books that I think almost everybody has to read and one of what I want to do is give you a quick overview of each one of them alright so let's start with that and the first book that I have here is called mastery by George Leonard this little book is my top book of all time this is the most important book I think that everyone has to read it's short it's simple but it's packed with amazing wisdom about how to become a master in anything in your life how do you develop proficiency at it how do you become world-class at so whether it's a hobby a sport a game that you like to play like chess or poker or your career a martial arts a golf or tennis you know there's so many different areas of our lives that we want to get good at how do we do it and what are all the pitfalls involved so here in this book George George Leonard he talks about the mastery curve and a lot of the counterintuitive notions that that we have about how mastery works mastery isn't the way that we think it is when we start and there are a lot of pitfalls and he talks about the three common archetypes of failure that happen in this mastery process and he also tells you how to cultivate more of a mastery mindset so this one is really critical to your success the next book is meditations by Marcus Aurelius this is a just ago gem of a book just packed with wisdom and it's over 2,000 years old these are the private Diaries and personal meditations of a Roman Emperor one of the noble Roman emperors this is one of the only surviving accounts of a Roman emperors own writing and here we have a whole book of it it's very readable and it's all about stoic philosophy Marcus Aurelius was a stoic and Stoics had a very old-school hardcore way of seeing life because 2,000 years ago life was very harsh and the issues they dealt with was how do you live a virtuous life how do you live a noble life when everybody around you is doing stupid stuff or do even doing evil stuff how do you avoid the pettiness of society keep yourself grounded on course and how do you deal with serious things like emotional disturbances from death so if people are dying around you how do you deal with that how do you ground yourself and keep yourself calm and even minded something called equanimity how do you develop and keep equanimity how do you find fulfilment in the simple pleasures of life how do you deal with the chaos of life because inevitably you can't control every aspect of life how do you deal with those kinds of things tons of wisdom about that right here the next book is called authentic happiness by Martin Seligman Warren Seligman is the father of the positive psychology movement he's one of the fathers and he is doing a lot of research right now University research about what happiness actually is a lot of his research is distilled in this book right here and this is cutting-edge research about how does happiness actually work what are the counter to ative aspects of happiness the stuff that we don't understand about happiness one of the common pitfalls that people make he has surveys in here he also has a great website his university website that has some amazing surveys on it and one of the things that's really important about this book is that he he tells you the importance of understanding your own top strengths as a human being he has a survey in here to help you find your signature strengths because one of the ways that he defines happiness is living in alignment with your strengths so what are your top strengths most people have no idea I didn't know until I started reading this stuff and actually taking these surveys so once you do find out your strengths then you can start to align with those and develop that authentic happiness next the six pillars of self-esteem by Nathaniel Branden this is the ultimate book on working on your self-esteem issues and your self-confidence issues so many of us given the way that we grew up the way we were teased or the problems we had in our childhood as we were growing up have come out with low self-esteem insecurities things that we're not confident in we might feel like we're not good enough we might like we might feel like we don't deserve happiness we might feel like we can't be in a relationship we might have issues being intimate with other people we might feel like we are chronic failures and we are just filled with self-doubt well this book helps you to address all your self-esteem issues it goes into a lot of depth and then you Brandon devoted his whole life to studying self-esteem so he is the guy to listen to he's also got great exercises in here and questions to help you understand where your self-esteem issues are coming from next the five love languages by Gary Chapman this book is critical to having successful their relationships most of us find it difficult to communicate with the opposite sex especially an intimate relationship we tend to have a disconnect with the opposite sex and this book it focuses on how love is communicated so the premise here is that there are five ways that human beings communicate and also receive love these called the love languages and you need to know what your top love languages and you also need to know what your partner's top love languages most times you two have different love languages and so this creates a communication barrier because the length the language that you're communicating in is usually the way that you like to feel love but that doesn't mean that the other person will be receptive to it and vice-versa so this book helps you figure out what your love languages you can also figure out your partner's a language and it gives you ideas for how to communicate love languages so you can get better at it and so that you can get better at speaking the other language and then you get this a much smoother relationship going and finally the sixth book that I'm sharing here is called the righteous mind by jonathan hate this is a book on social science and really a social psychology and what it what it what it asked the question here is why are good people divided about politics and religion if you've ever noticed when a political problem or a religious problem gets brought up at the dinner table it tends to cause frustration and bitterness and arguments and people tend to be very dogmatic about those things why is this the case it's very fascinating Jonathan Haidt he's a brilliant writer it's very easy to read this book a very fascinating he presents some of the research he's done he's a moral psychologist on morality where is morality coming from what is responsible for our moral decisions and it's not at all what you think he goes into a lot about how the brain works and he goes in a lot about the logical brain but is the emotional brain and one of the interesting discoveries that he shares here is that morality doesn't come from the logical brain it comes from the emotional brain so read this book to understand morality to understand politics and religion a little bit more to understand why people bicker so much to understand also the blind spots in yourself this is one of those books that you read to really open and expand your mind to make you less dogmatic sometimes people ask me leo you talk about being more open-minded how do I develop more open-mindedness well by reading books like these these books show you that the beliefs that you think you have that are very solid actually aren't as solid as they appear to be and this this gets you to be more open open to new ideas open new perspectives so those are the six books if you go to Ash lies out org slash books you're going to find six more books so you can get for free you can click on them and buy them on Amazon you also can get reviews of those books so for all the hundred and forty books on this list that you can that you can purchase I have audio reviews so you just click a button and you listen to a short review it's just a couple of minutes long that tells you all the pertinent Formation you need to know about this book to decide whether you want to purchase it or not if it's worth your time I also have text descriptions so both audio and text and I also have rating so I have a 1 to 5 rating for how important and critical this book is to you and I have over 30 or 40 books that are rated 5 on my scale of 5 to 5 so that means that it's super critical for you to read that book so if you're interested in that if you're really interested in taking yourself to the next step going really deep on this stuff building that grand mental model that I've been talking about then go to actualize network slash books check out the freebie ones and if you want for a really low price if you really think about it it's super cheap just for the price of one or two books you can buy this whole list I'm going to keep expanding it with even more and what you get is you get the best of the best and you get literally 5 years worth of reading material this stuff will last you for a long long time so for the value of this price is really low go check it out sign up and I hope that you start reading these books because also in the videos to come I'm going to be talking a lot about the concepts that are contained in these books so as you're reading along with the books and following along with my videos you're going to be getting like really solid information that's going to be really cementing in your mind