Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable by Tim Grover
Tim Grover trained world-class athletes like Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and Dwayne Wade. He had first-hand experience with some of the most competitive and driven people on planet earth. In relentless, he talks about the attitude it takes to become a “cleaner.”
Per Tim, there are three types of people:
Coolers — These are the followers. Foot soldiers if you will.
Closers — These people will step up to the plate, but only if they’re in the right position
Cleaners — DGAF. They relentlessly attack any scenario, regardless of the opponent
Get this book on audio. The narration will make you want to run through a brick wall. The key component to becoming a cleaner? Don’t ignore your dark side, harness it. People with real drive and tenacity — from top-tier athletes to corporate raiders — all have a bit of dark relentlessness that pushes them forward.
I love that this book has no qualms about its message. The book is about the entirely self-interested pursuit of success above all else. Some people do like living this way. I like living this way. If you’re a type A person and want to go from good to unstoppable, this is the book for you.
The 10X Rule By Grant Cardone
Grant Cardone is the type of person people love or hate. The quintessential brash, lavish, in your face, “get rich” advertiser, he’s also a genuinely pragmatic person with a sold philosophy if you take the time to listen.
Here’s the 10x rule in a nutshell: to get what you want, you have to work 10 times harder than you think you should have to, for 10 times the amount of time, to get 10 to even 100 times the result.
He contrasts this mindset of abundant effort and prosperity with the common person who:
Has nowhere near enough money saved to sustain them
Uses nowhere near the amount of effort they’re capable of
Finds themselves trapped in a life they don’t want because they live so low below their potential
The 10x rule isn’t just a lofty idea, it’s a hedge against the pitfalls of being average. See, being average is fine, so long as things so smoothly. In bad times, chaotic times, it’s the average who get screwed the most. See 2008–09.
Per Grant, getting rich and successful isn’t idealistic, it’s a pragmatic ethical duty.
Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki
I wish the government mandated every eighteen-year-old read this book. Of course, they’d never do that, because the teachings of the book would undermine all of their goals.
Rich Dad poor dad is about money. More importantly, how to think about money. His “poor dad” was his real dad — a teacher on salary, the prototypical average American. His “rich dad” was his best friend’s father who owned businesses.
The lessons from his rich dad are plentiful, but here are a few:
Gain assets — Assets are things that put money in your pocket repeatedly over time without you having to do much after initial creation, e.g, books, investments, income-generating rental property, etc.
Reduce liabilities — Robert counts anything that takes money out of your pocket and doesn’t produce cash flow a liability. He includes homeownership (without renting) as a liability.
Cashflow — You need cash, liquid investments, “mailbox money” as it were. You cannot get rich without multiple income-generating assets that produce cash flow. Impossible.
Contrast this with the normal American. Deeply in debt, their main investment vehicles (home & retirement) extremely illiquid, and one source of income that’s capped by time. No Bueno.
If you want to become rich, this book will tell you exactly how to do it. The first time I read it, I felt as if society had been lying to me for my entire life. And I was right, it was.
Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Life and Love From Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed
I had to read this book in pieces because some of the stories in it just floor you.
I consider this a self-help book because the author does what true help is meant to do — cut to the core of the problem to create room for change.
Cheryl Strayed, author of the runaway bestseller Wild and many other hits, once had an advice column under the pen name Dear Dugar. Tiny Beautiful Things is a collection of some of the best questions and answers from the column.
Strayed is a beast of a wordsmith and she’d answer the questions from readers by first giving these long-detailed accounts of her own life to meet the reader where they were at. Her answers would never say here’s exactly what to do. More like here’s a similar experience I went through, what I drew from it, and how it applies to your life.
Some of the stories she tells in the book are just brutal. Here’s how she opens one of her letters:
“Dear WTF,
My father’s father made me jack him off when I was three or four or five. I wasn’t any good at it. My hands were too small and I couldn’t get the rhythm right and I didn’t understand what I was doing…”
Yeah.
That’s what makes the book so special, though. She hides nothing about her own life, which makes the readers more comfortable sharing the raw truth. As a reader you get a window into human psychology you’re hard-pressed to find elsewhere because humans do a good job of burying and hiding these emotions.
Just reading the broad range of experiences from her readers and her own life helps you get perspective on what’s going on in your own life. It also teaches you compassion for others. You’ll see by reading some of these stories that people who seem okay on the surface are truly struggling with some dark demons. We all have them.
Reading the examples in the book will help you deal with them
The One Thing by Gary Keller
Momentum is the name of the game. You need momentum to become successful because success begets more success. To get said momentum, you need to line up your goals in the right order and focus on one thing at a time.
This creates a ‘domino effect.’ You begin with smaller goals to gain momentum, then, you’re able to complete larger goals more easily. You’ve heard this before, but the book lays out this concept in a way that might actually make it stick.
Aside from the core idea of focusing on one thing at a time, there are also some excellent nuggets from the book:
Balance is a myth — You need to live an unbalanced lifestyle to be successful. Go all-in on your one thing, all the time, until it’s done. Learn how to say no. Block out time for your work.
You don’t know your ceiling — You have absolutely no idea what you’re capable of and the estimates you make are well below what’s possible.
Big is better — The crabs in the bucket always tell us to shrink and stay small. Screw that, the bigger your dreams the better, so long as you work on one thing at a time to get there.
The entire ethos of the book is this question:
“What’s the one thing you can do, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”
If you can truly get good at answering that question, the world will open up to you in a way you couldn’t imagine.
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