5 Books That Made Me A Millionaire
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If you aren’t reading on a daily basis, you’re falling behind everyone who is. The good thing is, if you implement this habit, you will achieve your goals much faster.
You see, I started reading at 16 years old and that single habit took me from $60,000 of debt to making my first 4 million dollars online at this point. Because, over the years, I’ve read hundreds of books and have taken a single key lesson from each one, then applied it to my life. So, today, I’m going to reveal the top 5 books and the number 1 concept from each book that, if applied to your life, will allow you to achieve your goals.
Also, if you watch until the end of this video I’m going to give you a list of 600 of the best books of all time.
Book 1 – Deep Work by Cal Newport
Deep Work by Cal Newport is a game changer. This first book is absolutely essential for anyone that wants to make a lot of money by making money online. In today’s world we face constant distractions from meaningless things that make us feel good but keep us weak and in the exact same spot for weeks, months and years with no progress. What we need is the ability to get maximum focus and energy dedicated to achieving our goals by putting in the work. We can’t do this when we have the attention span of a goldfish.
The number 1 concept from this book is that to achieve your goals you need to minimize your time in a distracted state. The more distracted you allow yourself to become the lower your capacity for getting things done becomes. So to achieve your goals you must create a space where you’re going to perform deep work each day. Which means work with zero distractions. Remove your phone from the environment. Set up a plugin like stay focused on google chrome to block distracting websites. Make sure the environment is tidy and comfortable such as a desk with nothing but a laptop.
And create a playlist such as a game soundtrack that isn’t distracting but enhances your focus on the task at hand. Then dedicate 2 to 4 hours each day to sitting your ass down in that spot and putting in the work with zero distractions. You’ll find you’ll make 100 times more progress than you ever have before in your life. This is the number 1 thing you can do to build a business and make sales fast. That’s why you see a lot of people in my community getting sales in days and weeks, it’s because they implement deep work.
Book 2 – The One Thing by Gary Keller
The One Thing by Gary Keller solves a massive problem we all face. So, you have your environment, your strategy, and your time blocked out to get deep work done each day, great. But what are you actually going to do during that deep work period? Well, this book has the answer, the premise is pretty obvious from the title of the book, essentially we live in a society with attention deficit disorder. We bounce from task to task, never getting any big things done, because we focus on the things that don’t matter but make us feel good. 80% of your results come from 20% of your actions.
So you should be deciding what is the one thing you can do each day, such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?. This means you should be engaging in the single most important task during your deep work session each day, as long as you get that 1 big thing done during your deep work session then your day was a success. But you must make sure it’s something that’s going to directly bring you the results you want.
For business, that would mean working on your offer, building your website, reaching out to 100 people instead of focusing on how many likes your facebook page has, the color of your logo, or checking your emails every 5 minutes. To achieve extraordinary results you should focus on time blocking so that during a 4 hour period you will 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 time.
Book 3 – The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield will literally solve procrastination for anyone that reads it. I’ve seen it happen time and time again. The fact is, we can all plan to do our 4 hour deep work sessions every day on the ‘one thing’ but what about all those times when we just ‘don’t feel like it’. It’s that resistance that keeps us from sitting down to do our best work. Procrastination is caused by this repelling force that prevents us from doing our work.
So, this book provides precise strategies for getting past this feeling to get things done anyway. The secret is the actual doing of the tasks isn’t that hard, it’s just the decision to sit down and do it that seems impossible sometimes. So we delay, put it off, and wait until the last minute. To get past procrastination and resistance we use a technique called ‘small stepping it’. Let’s say you have a 3000 word article to write.
That sounds like a lot of work, so you put it off. But motivation comes after action. All we need to do to destroy the resistance causing procrastination is start taking action and make it easy. So give yourself a simple goal, “Ok, I’m going to sit down at my computer and create the document”. Then you get there, complete the simple tasks, and you create the next goal. “Ok I’m just going to write the title” and before you know it you’ll have finished the entire task. By ‘small stepping it’, you build the habit of taking action.
Book 4 – The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
Speaking of habits, did you know it’s possible to remove all of your bad habits quickly and replace them with empowering habits that get you the results you want in life? It sounds a bit crazy, but our brains are a lot simpler than you think. The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg reveals the habit loop that governs our lives and the results we get. Habit loops consist of a cue, routine, and reward. The cue triggers our brain to automatically act out a routine that provides it with some kind of reward.
The golden rule of habit change states that if you keep the initial cue, replace the routine, and keep the reward you can quickly change any bad habits into good habits. Take for example, smoking cigarettes. The cue for smoking might be the head rush you get or getting out to talk to people. The routine is smoking. The rewards are the change in brain chemistry, conversations, alone time, or a break from work.
We could simply change the routine to drinking coffee to get a similar mental kick and some of the same rewards such as socialization. So there is no perfect substitute for most routines but through repetition you can change your routines from negative to positive even if you are still getting the same cues for the old bad habit, you simply change the routine to get similar rewards.
Book 5 – Total Recall by Arnold Schwarzenegger
This book has a really crucial lesson that all of you need to implement right away. Total Rcall by Arnold Schwarzenegger is the most inspirational story I’ve ever read about an ordinary person who went from poverty to reaching the peak of their potential in multiple areas of their life.
Arnold became Mr. Olympia, a millionaire in real estate before he did any films, a movie star which most people know, and then the Governor of California. Any one of those 4 things would be a pretty big accomplishment for a single person but he managed to do all 4 in his lifetime, so surely there’s something that mere mortals like us can learn right?
So, the key concept here is Arnolds philosophy about putting in the reps. Whenever he was learning something new or had a goal he wanted to achieve he simply focused on repping out as many sets as possible. So, for example, when he wanted to learn real estate he went to the library and started reading book after book on real estate, repping out as many hours of reading as possible day after day until he understood enough to start taking action.
When he wanted to learn acting, he practiced day after day after day for hours until he reached a high level of competency. That consistency of putting in the reps for each habit and counting how many times, how much time, and what you do then doing it day after day consistently is what enables you to achieve exceptional results because the fact is that most people simply aren’t willing to put in the work every single day for years. And that’s why success comes easy to those of us that take action, track our actions, reflect on that action, and improve over time.
Listen, if you haven’t read any of these books, I recommend putting them to the top of your list if you want to achieve your goals but I also have hundreds of other book recommendations for you so I’ve got a list to all of the books I recommend in a spreadsheet linked in the description of this video.