5 Books You Must Read If You’re Serious About Success
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Five books you must read if you’re serious about success!
What’s up, Drop Servicers? On this channel, I show you how to make money online using strategies and tactics for my real online businesses that get results like these
In today’s video, we’re getting into the top five books you need to read if you want to be successful because the lessons from these books will give you the tools necessary to achieve your goals
If you stay until the end of this video, you’re going to get those lessons. Let’s get right into it, but before we get into the video, don’t forget to like the video.
It might just magically give you as much knowledge as the five books I’m about to share with you. Don’t forget to hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss any more strategies and tactics you need for your business journey.
And as we go through, comment with any questions at all, and I’ll personally answer you in an upcoming Q&A video
So deep work by Cal Newport focuses on the concept of not surprisingly deep work, which is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task
Cal posits that deep work is like a superpower in today’s cognitively competitive knowledge economy.
In contrast to deep work shallow work is non-cognitively demanding logistical style work often performed while distracted which is basically the way most of us work these days with our addictions to social media and instant gratification.
Basically, the author argues that in order to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of, you need to commit to deep work
And because today’s world moves so fast you need to be constantly adapting and learning but it’s really hard to master new things in terms of both quality and speed which only deep work can achieve.
So deep work is rare today, but you know also very essential because to learn hard things quickly you must focus intensely without distraction luckily it is possible to develop the habit of deep work. The key to creating a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.
So you have deep work professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate, and shallow work non-cognitively demanding logistical style tasks often performed while distracted
These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate the more time you spend in a distracted state, the more reduced your capacity to perform deep work becomes.
So you need to turn deep work into a habit if you want to become great and achieve your potential in your work.
For the practical implementation in order to get the most out of your work, you should make deep work a habit, turn it into a ritual, and have a space where you perform deep work like a desk.
Set a certain amount of time that you’re going to perform deep work each day. I recommend around four hours and make sure you have set up your deep work period to be free of distractions meaning you’re not checking your phone email, talking to people around you or clicking around a million tabs in your browser.
Make a habit to work like this and over time it will become easier and easier but more importantly you’ll see major improvements in your ability to produce the results that you’re after.
The next book is the one thing – the surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results boy authors Gary Keller and Jay Papasan.
The big idea being that by prioritizing a single task you can derive most of the results that you’re after so by focusing your deep work periods on one big thing that will bring you 80% of the results, you’ll really maximize the efficiency of the work you do.
This book also builds upon what is said and deep work and that shallow work and multitasking leads to less results in the end they go further in saying it’s not possible to achieve any sort of work-life balance and that in reality success in something comes from focusing on that thing that we’re trying to become successful at.
They posit that in the end the majority of your results come from the minority of what you do.
They say to ask yourself when planning your work sessions, “what’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier and unnecessary”
So it’s really symbiotic with deep work as they say that you know you should focus for at least four hours of work on your one big thing each day.
A big part of the book is built upon Pareto’s Principle which suggests that 20% of the effort produces around 80% of the results.
According to the book, this means that engaging in the one most important task will be more likely to produce the desired results without any extraneous effort.
The book also differentiates between the big picture question what’s my one thing and the small focus question what’s my one thing right now?
So the core idea is that focusing on an excessive amount of tasks will more likely lead to underperformance.
To achieve extraordinary results you should focus on time blocking so that during a four-hour period you’ll do deep work on the one thing that will give you the most results meaning you should only focus on your one thing during that deep work period.
So the book also posits that readers should schedule a time to reflect, plan and even relax.
Everything else during scheduled time blocks is characterized as a distraction.
The war of art by Stephen Pressfield is a powerful book because of course we can plan to do four-hour deep work sessions each day on the one thing but what about all those times that we don’t feel like it.
Resistance is what keeps us from sitting down and doing our best work in the end we all feel resistance to doing the thing but in order to get past that we need the discipline of a professional to just you know do it because it’s unbreakable discipline that we need, not motivation.
Resistance or procrastination is not something that can be seen, touched, heard or smelled but it can be felt okay.
We experience it as an energy field radiating from work and potential, it’s a repelling force it’s negative its aim is to shove us away distract us and prevent us from doing our work so in order to get anything done you need to refuse to accept this resistance sit down and do the damn tasks anyway
The power to take charge is in your hands all you have to do is believe it.
So the point is the actual doing of the task itself is never hard it’s just hard making that decision to sit down and do it.
It’s the resistance that stops you from taking that first step and the fact is all you need to do to get over it is just start.
If you have to write something for example, just commit to sitting down at your laptop then just say I’m going to open up the document, and then well I think I’ll just write a title.
Just take the small steps and focus on achieving those small steps because what you’ll find is if you ignore the resistance and actually sit down to begin to start the resistance will melt away, and you’ll get into the flow of things.
If you give in to resistance and let yourself make up excuses and put it off you’re going to create a habit of it and that’s how you react to resistance every time.
You’ll put it off over and over and over, the years will go by and you’ll be in the same exact situation hoping things will change, hoping that you’ll feel different.
They won’t.
The truth is you’re not going to feel motivated later in fact you’re going to feel the same as you are now but with less energy so by giving into resistance you’re giving up now and in the future
Every time that you make that decision to give in, you’re going down and that free fall is compounding getting worse exponentially but here’s the good news,
You can make the decision right now to not give in to resistance, make the decision to take that first step if it’s you know working on your business just make the decision to turn off social media, open up the tabs of what you want to work on and then get to work on it start taking those small steps one at a time.
Keep it simple because in the end it all is right? It’s simple and easy, just ignore the resistance and take the small steps.
This is what we call small stepping it, don’t focus on the fact that you don’t feel like it, don’t, you know, focus on all of the work that’s going to take, don’t focus on the whole thing.
Just focus on the next small step that you need to take, sit down at the computer and start working because you won’t feel like doing it until you start doing it and get into the vibe of doing it, get into the flow of doing it but you know taking the small steps is all that it takes.
The fact is you’ll always feel resistance to doing the work, it’s about creating the habit of doing the actions anyway, small stepping it and ignoring how you feel because that’s the only way that you’re going to do it in the end and the feeling is going to be there forever, just learn to enjoy that feeling of resistance, enjoy pushing past the resistance and getting things done.
Identifying yourself as someone who takes action and gets things done no matter how they feel, we don’t just put off our lives today, we put them off till our deathbed.
So this very moment we can change our lives, there never was a moment and never will be when we are without the power to alter our destiny.
So the practical implementation is create a habit of pushing past resistance you know when you feel it and doing it anyway using the small stepping technique, decide that you’re a professional who has the discipline to get things done based on what you want to get done not on how you feel in a particular moment.
Tie your actions to your values, your principles, instead of your feelings but of course in order to create a deep work time block where you know you’re going to focus on the one thing each day, you need to turn pushing past the resistance and doing the work, whether you feel like or not, into a habit.
But how do you you know do that? Well our next book covers this exact topic – The Power of Habit, why we do what we do in life and business is a book by Charles Duhigg. It’s all about how habits are created, broken and recreated – First introducing the concept of the “habit loop” which is a pattern that governs any habit consisting of a cue, a routine and a reward. Using these we can change bad habits or form good ones.
The habit loop always starts with a cue which is a trigger that transfers the brain into a mode that automatically decided the action of this habit then leads to a reward. So that desire for the reward is a craving that drives all habits.
So when creating new habits, you need to have a reward to engrave this new habit into your brain, whether it be you know creating a new habit or changing an old one.
In the book, they introduce the golden rule of habit change – if you keep the initial cue replace the routine and keep the reward, to reiterate a cue is a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use then there is the routine which you know can be physical or mental or emotional and then there is a reward which helps your brain figure out you know if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future.
You simply need to change the routine keeping the cue and reward intact to change a habit. So in order to really engrave a habit into your brain, you simply need to implement it for around 66 days based on the research but it is a range healthline says “the bottom line can take anywhere from 18 to 254 days for a person to form a new habit and an average of 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic.”
So you need to construct the habits that you want to change or create with the cue routine and reward and track how well you’re able to consistently do this habit over a two or three month period. This habit could be your habit of you know deep work on the one thing for example.
Total Recall by Arnold Schwarzenegger is an entirely inspirational story of how an ordinary person reached the peak of their potential and multiple careers or occupations so his story is pretty amazing so you’ll need to read the book to gain a full understanding of the craziness of it but he lays out some pretty great lessons for anyone serious about success.
His philosophy is anyone can achieve anything as long as they put in the reps and focus on improving then once you get a little success you stay hungry and keep pushing for more wins. That’s how he became Mr. Olympia, a real estate mogul, a movie star, and a governor all of which are pretty cool accomplishments for one person but he did all of that and more in a single lifetime so he’s a pretty good example of someone who you know you should listen to when it comes to success.
You need to have the discipline to put in the reps to build the habits of success.
So hopefully you got how all five of these books tie into one another. In order to achieve success in anything you want in life, you need to put in deep work on the one thing that will give you 80% of the results by turning it into a habit, by committing to consistent action every day.
Now in case you haven’t done already, don’t forget to like the video it’s really good luck and you know will make you feel great. Don’t forget to subscribe and hit notification bell so you don’t miss out on any more strategies and tactics that you need for your business journey and comment below any questions you have at all and I’ll answer those in an upcoming video otherwise i’ll see you in the next one.