My Three Favorite Books

The first book that really changed my life when I was 19, I hired a mentor, which I paid more to have a mentor, to talk to him once a week. I paid $500 a month, which was more than I paid in my rent, to have somebody be my mentor and my coach. And the first book he recommended that I read was Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. And that book is, like, for me, it's almost 100 years old, but it's got pretty much everything that I think every personal growth book needs. It's got everything that you need. And that book was the first one where it was just like the foundation of personal growth, the foundation of becoming successful and making me realize that like anything else, being successful, happy, all of those things, there's having a successful marriage, having a successful business, financial success, being happy as a person, being a great parent. There's legitimate steps to every single one of them. It's not just like this weird, obscure thing where hopefully you can figure it out. You can read this book and go, oh, this is the steps to getting to where I want to go. And so that made me realize when I read the book that, oh, I should probably read a lot more of these books, because all of the knowledge that I need is already out there. So that's like, my number one favorite book. My number two is called the One Thing, which is by Gary Keller and Jay Papazon. And the thing that I think most people have is they always have a plan B just in case plan A doesn't work out. And they'll put some time, most of their time into plan A, but then they'll put some of their time into plan B, just in case plan A doesn't work out. And so the example that I always give is LeBron James, the basketball player. When he was coming up, he didn't play basketball and then also played volleyball in case basketball didn't work out. He put everything 100% waking hours into just becoming the best that he could. And so greatness comes from putting everything into plan A and just forgetting about plan B. And Will Smith says there's no reason to have a Plan B because it distracts from plan A. So If I have 100% of my energy every single day and I put 60% into plan A and 40% into plan B, I will never get to the point of greatness, of whatever it is that I'm working for, whether I'm an artist, I'm a musician, I'm a speaker. But if I just cancel everything out because they say don't put all your eggs in one basket. And then in the book they say, put all your eggs in one basket and watch the basket. And that's the way that I think of it, where it's like, put all of my eggs in one basket. And I'm going to make mistakes, I'm going to screw up, but eventually I'm just going to be able to move around and figure out what I need to do in order to get to the spot that I want to be. And so that was the second book, and the third book was called the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. And so I feel like I'm very much in the moment most of the time, but everything that I'd ever thought about being in the moment and mindfulness was finally put into a book. And so I was actually talking about this with my friends last night. I showed them my actual book that's on my Kindle. And. And every single page is almost completely highlighted because there's so many insightful things about just being present, about the fact that worries don't matter, about how to release yourself from fear and limiting beliefs and all of those things. And it was finally in a book where I could read it and consume it and go, okay, this is what it's all about. And I've read the book twice in the past two months. And both. The second time when I went through, I was like, I didn't even notice this. And so every time I read it, I feel like I'm getting something new from it. So. So I would say those are my three favorite books.