- Hey, what's going on, guys?
So on this channel, in the past,
we have done several book recommendation videos.
I enjoy doing these things.
I know you guys really like them.
So today, we're going to do another one
that's gonna be six books that changed my life personally.
Now, these six books aren't gonna be books
that I think are the best reads in the world,
but they are books that had at least one idea,
but in most cases more,
that actually changed the trajectory of my life
or the way that I act or think on a daily basis.
And as you can see from this stack of books here,
there are only three print books
and one iPad sitting on top of the stack
because I do own some of these digitally.
So, with that being said, let's get into my list here,
starting with one of the books that I own digitally,
which is The Motivation Hacker
by an author named Nick Winter.
So this is probably the book on my list
that is the least well known,
but it had a huge impact on my life.
One of the main concepts that I remember from that book
was the idea of success spirals.
This is a term that encapsulates
one of the fundamental truths in habit building,
which is that you have to start small
before you can do something big.
And a lot of people don't understand this.
They make New Year's resolutions like
I'm gonna work out every single day
from now until infinity.
And what Nick Winter says to do in the book instead
is to start with a goal that you can track,
that doesn't demand absolute perfection,
and that is at your level.
But, to be honest, the part of that book
that really changed my life
was the part that talks about a concept
called pre-commitment and the examples from his own life
on how he used it to achieve some pretty big goals.
Essentially, the idea of pre-commitment means
that you set up consequences that are gonna happen
if you fail to do something that you set out to do.
And one of my favorite YouTubers, Boyinaband,
calls this a threat bet,
which I think is a fantastic name of the concept.
In the book, the author talks about two different goals
that he was having a lot of trouble achieving.
One was skydiving, because he was very afraid to do it,
and the other one, ironically, was finishing the book,
The Motivation Hacker, itself.
So what he did to achieve both of those goals
was that he set up those threat bets.
He used a tool called Beeminder,
which is a habit tracker that actually has you bet money,
which we'd pay to the company
if you fail to be consistent on your habits.
And he went hard core with his Beeminder goals.
He took half of his wealth for each goal.
I think he had $14,000 to his name at the time,
so he bet $7,000 that he would write a certain amount
every single day for the book,
and he also bet $7,000 that he would go skydiving.
And wouldn't you know it,
he both went skydiving and finished the book
and did not lose $14,000.
And that is the thing that really changed my life.
I read about Beeminder and I told myself
that is what I am going to use
to take my work professionally.
Because up until then, I had sort of viewed my business
and my blog, College Info Geek,
as sort of like a side project.
I wasn't being very disciplined about it
and, as a result, my business had kind of plateaued
for about a year and a half.
So after I read that book,
I went and I signed up for Beeminder
and I told myself I was going to put out one blog post
and one podcast episode every single week,
otherwise, I was going to lose money on Beeminder.
And, as a result, my business actually started to grow.
Wouldn't you know it?
Putting consistent effort on a day-to-day basis
actually causes things to happen,
and the threat of losing money
was the catalyst for that change in my life.
All right, book number two on my list,
which is a much, much more famous book,
is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.
Now this is probably the most well-known
personal development book
in the history of personal development books,
and a lot of you have probably read it,
but I do want to share a couple lessons
that really did make a pretty big impact on my life.
First and foremost was the book's advice
to seek first to understand and then to be understood.
A lot of us have this problem where,
when we are listening to somebody,
we're really just kind of formulating our response
and waiting to give it
rather than really trying to understand
what the other person is saying.
And the obvious problem here is that,
when both people in a conversation are doing this,
neither one is really understanding the other.
They're just kind of trying to look cool
or to express their ideas.
So when you really internalize this concept,
you start to tap into what other people
are feeling and thinking
and then real communication happens.
And the other big lesson in that book, for me,
came from an account of Covey's conversation
with somebody who was having relationship trouble.
He didn't know if he wanted to divorce his wife or not
because he felt like the spark
had gone out of the relationship,
and I remember Covey telling him something very simple,
to love her.
Love as a verb, as an action, not as a feeling.
Now, I listened to this book
when I was probably 18 years old,
so this was kind of a big revelation to me
because, up until then,
society and just basically everyone I knew and the media
had sort of convinced me that love was like this feeling
that you would have automatically,
like you just kinda had to find it
and then it would be there forever.
But the opposite is true.
Love is a verb.
It's something that you have to put work into
and it is often difficult.
And I honestly think that that concept
and my internalization of that concept
is one of the reasons why I'm still with my girlfriend,
why I've been with her for over five years,
because I've realized that, when the going gets tough,
you have to, as a verb, love the other person.
It's hard, but you have to do it.
And yes, sometimes that feeling is going to be there
and it is gonna feel like something that's just in you
and it's gonna be with you forever,
but you can't rely on that always being the case.
All right, book number three on my list
is The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss.
Now this is the book that probably changed
my professional life more than any other.
See, this was the very first book
that really and truly showed me that you could build systems
which enable your business to profit and make money
even while you're not physically putting effort in.
Before I read this book, I was a freshman in college
that had a freelance web design business on the side.
So every dollar that I made
was a direct product of me putting in the hours,
and that's kinda how I viewed entrepreneurship.
But once I read that book,
I started to realize that I could build systems
that would allow me to essentially make money while I slept.
Now, obviously, building those systems
and actually making money is neither as straightforward
nor as easy as it might seem in the book,
and I'm sure that Tim mentions that in the book itself,
but that book, more than any other source of information,
it drove me to start treating College Info Geek
more as a business and less as a blog.
And that completely changed the trajectory of my life.
Before College Info Geek became profitable,
my plan was to graduate college, move to Minneapolis,
and become a web developer for a big company.
And now, I'm doing something that is, well,
a little bit different than that.
All right, moving on to the books that I own physically,
starting with number four,
The Happiness Equation by Neil Pasricha.
Now, this book has a lot to say on the concept of happiness
and on how to be happy on a day-to-day basis consistently,
but there is only one idea
that I want to share from this book,
and that is the dim view that it takes
on the concept of retirement.
This book taught me that the origin
of our modern concept of retirement,
the idea of stopping work at age 65
and then just relaxing for the rest of your days
originated in Germany back in 1889.
At that time, the government introduced a program
that would allow people who were 65 or older
to stop working and then the state would take care of them.
And this was meant as a way to free up jobs
for younger people.
But, as time went on, it started to be thought of
as the kind of goal in life.
You'd work up until 65,
and then you'd retire to a life of leisure.
But the problem is this concept
is at odds with the way that the human body and mind work.
We are built to constantly progress.
We're built to work.
We're built to struggle.
Life is a type of combat
and that is what we are adapted for.
So this whole idea of just stopping at a certain age
is kind of awful,
but it's something that we all seem to be striving for
and we don't really question it,
so until I read this book,
that was basically how I thought my career was going to go.
But now, I'm committed to never retire.
Sure, I may try new things as I go on in my career.
I might maybe slow down a little bit
or try some things that don't necessarily make money,
but I'm never going to stop learning,
I'm never going to stop progressing,
and I'm never going to stop working.
And that is actually very liberating.
All right, book number five on my list
is Pragmatic Thinking & Learning by Andy Hunt.
And I think this is actually
the first real productivity book that I ever read.
One of the most useful tidbits in the book for me
was the advice to capture insight 24/7,
which was the direct inspiration for my philosophy
that I like to call Quick Capture.
Essentially, this means always having a way
to get information or ideas
into a system that you trust
and that you can access later on.
For instance, when I'm taking a shower
and I have an idea that I really want to remember,
I actually have a waterproof notebook
suction-cupped to the walls of my shower
so I can write down the details of that idea
and then, once I'm dried off, I can take a picture of it
and then I can get it into my note-taking system.
And beyond that concept,
I'm actually looking at the back flap of the book right now,
there are about 48 different concepts in this books,
so if you are looking for a good productivity book,
I do recommend giving this one a read.
And that brings us to the final
and, easily, the most dense book on this list,
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
This book, more than any other that I've read,
gave me a detailed knowledge of heuristics and biases,
the mental shortcuts that our brains naturally take
to make decisions, but that can also lead
to faulty thinking.
Now there are a lot of these to learn about,
but to give you one example,
we often tend to confuse what is probable
with what is plausible.
For instance, in one experiment that Kahneman did,
people were told about a fictitious person called Linda,
who majored in philosophy and who's also very concerned
with issues of social justice and discrimination.
And then they were asked what was more probable,
that Linda was a bank teller or that Linda was a bank teller
and heavily involved in the feminist movement.
Now, if you think about this objectively,
the second answer actually contains
the first answer within it.
Linda is a bank teller in either case,
but in the second case,
she is also involved in the feminist movement.
Therefore, the first case is more probable.
But more people actually thought
that the second case was more probable.
It's not, but it seems more plausible
because it fits the narrative.
And once I learned about this
along with many of the other heuristics
and biases reported on in the book,
I started to notice them cropping up
in my own thinking and decision-making,
and, as a result, I was able to catch them
before they made me make bad decisions.
And because I'm able to catch those bad decisions,
I can stop them before they happen.
I can step back and I can rethink them.
Now, an interesting secondary effect of this book
was that it also got me interested
in a much broader range of topics.
Before I read this book, I kinda stuck to productivity books
and business books, but afterwards,
my interests really broadened out
and I wanted to start learning about math and science.
I read books like Bill Bryson's
A Short History of Nearly Everything,
or Sam Kean's The Disappearing Spoon,
which is all about the periodic table and chemistry.
And as a result from from reading those books,
my general bank of knowledge really started to grow
and spread out and widen,
and I was able to make more connections
from different areas, which allowed me to be more creative.
Now, one thing to note is that,
if you decide to go out and read
those last couple of books I just mentioned,
they definitely will teach you lots of information
about math and about science,
but they won't teach you how to use and apply it.
But luckily, that's what Brilliant is for.
Brilliant is a learning platform
that can help you become a much better practitioner
in the fields of math, science, and computer science.
They take an incredibly active approach to learning,
wherein you immediately, in the challenging problems,
right at the start of their courses
that actually give you something to apply the information.
You're learning too,
which is gonna help it stick much better
and which accelerates the learning process.
Now, in my opinion, a great course to start with
would be their course on probabilities.
As we talked about a little bit before in this video,
if you could learn to think in probabilities
and think about them accurately,
you can make much better decisions.
And, as an interesting tidbit,
one of the very first problems in that course
actually features the Linda character from Kahneman's work.
And, in addition to that course,
you'll also find math courses
on topics ranging from algebra to calculus,
science courses on astronomy, quantum theory,
and, coming in the near future,
which I'm pretty excited about,
an automotive engineering course.
And, for those of you
who are interested in computer science,
you'll find courses on algorithms, on machine learning
and neural networks, and a lot more.
So to start learning for free,
head on over to brilliant.org/thomasfrank,
which you'll find linked in the description down below.
And if you're among the first 83 people
to sign up with that link,
you're also gonna get 20% off
of their annual premium subscription.
Big thanks to Brilliant for sponsoring this video
and being a big supporter of this channel.
And as always, thank you guys so much for watching.
And, before you go,
if you haven't followed me on Instagram yet,
you should definitely follow me @tomfrankly.
I'll have a link in the description down below.
I'm posting new stuff basically every single day,
so if you want more of what you find on this channel,
but in like a shorter form factor,
definitely go over there to get it.
Otherwise, you can find one more video on this channel
by clicking right over here,
and I will see you in the next video.