Books I have read in 2016
December 15, 2016
Welcome back, over the next few weeks/posts I am going to be reviewing my year what went well, what didn’t go well and after discussing my plans for 2017. So Why am I doing this? Well, this year I have been a bit obsessed with self-development and improving myself (as you will see from the books I have read). One of the best ways to get s**t done and improve yourself is to keep yourself accountable. I have tried many variations of apps that try to keep you accountable but none seem to work for me so I taught I would give blogging about it a try :). This first post is going to go through the books I have read this year.
Being 100% honest I wish I started starting reading earlier in the year. I only started in August as for some reason I then decided to start tracking all my goals and what I wanted to achieve anyway at least I started! Without further delay here is a list of the books I have read in pretty much the order I read them and some lessons they taught me:
Book: Money Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom
Book: Maximum Achievement: Strategies and Skills That Will Unlock Your Hidden Powers to Succeed
Lessons: Always start with end in mind, create small measurable goals and refine them.
Book: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Book: Tony Robins Awaken the Giant Within
**Lessons:**Make more decisions to make better decisions, last time your decision was bad? so what try again and try again. Also if you commit to a change really COMMIT!!
Book: The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure
Lessons: You like the results your seeing now? Then 10x the effort if you want to 100x the results.
Book: Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive
Book: Rich Dad Poor Dad
Lessons: You think owning your own home is an asset? well, read this book then rethink…
Book: The Millionaire Teacher
Lessons: Invest in onlyETFs/Index funds split across the world market.
Book: The Richest Man in Babylon
Lessons: Pay yourself first before anything else.
Book: Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time
Lessons: Title is too big but has some solid advice mainly using 80/20 principal for everything and plan every day and every week in advance.
Book: Goals
Lessons: Same as some of earlier books, small measurable goals mainly.
Book: The 5 Love Languages
Lessons: Everybody has a different love language, some people are a mix of 2. Identifying your love language and your partners can bring your relationship to the next level.
Book: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life
Lessons: Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert just read this book if you want to see just how many failures you can go through to find the 1 great idea.
Book: The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life
Lessons: Tim is a love or hate him kinda guy. This book has solid advice for giving you back your most precious asset back which is “Time” and getting more freedom.
Book: The Compounding Effect
Lessons: This book taught me that little changes compound to become huge…one example exercising 1h a day every day can lead to many benefits. Investing every month, every year for 10-30 years compound like crazy!
Book: Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
Lessons: At least once a day do something gritty which in other words means to do something hard push yourself, if that is one more rep at the gym or reading one more page just do it!.
Book: 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know
Lessons: I did not know most of these things! so yes its good but honestly I didn’t think it was worth reading
Book: The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream
Lessons: An awesome little story about finding an alchemist get the audiobook version awesome.
Book: Positive Thinking: 50 Positive Habits to Transform you Life: Positive Thinking, Positive Thinking Techniques, Positive Energy, Positive Thinking, … Discipline, Positive Thinking Techniques)
Lessons: If you’re looking for a set of quick actionable actions you can take now read this book, if you want something more read one of Brain Tracy’s books
Book: Be Obsessed or Be Average
Lessons: Grant is nuts but his results speak for himself. Lesson is the title of the book if your not obsessed with what your doing your average
Book: Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship (Robert C. Martin)
Lessons: Awesome book, many lessons learnt here: writing testable code, writing readable code and writing great code.
Book: The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact
Lesson: Leverage, leverage is an engineers biggest asset. This book explains how leverage can be used to your advantage in lots of different situations and focusing on tasks that create the highest leverage.
Book: Flow
Lesson: If you can get into the state of flow you will be unstoppable. You can help getting into “flow” via the tips in the book.
I hope you guys enjoyed this different sort of post. I wanted to document the books I read for my own benefit and for yours. Let me know what you guys taught of each of these books!
Until next time
Jason