Table of Contents
I recently watched a YouTube Short from Valuetainment, in which PBD guaranteed that if you read several books on four specific subjects, over the course of the year you will experience a tremendous positive change if you apply their principles.
The subjects are:
- Sales
- Negotiation
- Human Nature
- Money
To be selected, the books needed at least 400 reviews of 4 stars and above on Amazon. I went ahead and picked 10 books that satisfied that criteria for each of the subjects. I’ll progressively read each of them and publish what I learn throughout the year.
You can find the list of books below with their respective summaries from Amazon. Pick what interests you and go ahead and give it a read. Once you are done post one or two of your learnings from the books you read in the comment section.
Sales
1. The Psychology of Selling by Brian Tracy (239 pages)
Amazon Summary
Learn how to double and triple your sales in any market. It’s a promise of prosperity that sales guru Brian Tracy has seen fulfilled again and again.
More salespeople have become millionaires by listening to and applying his ideas than from any other sales training process ever developed.
In Psychology of Selling, Tracy teaches you:
- “The inner game of sales and selling.”
- How to eliminate the fear of rejection
- How to build unshakeable confidence
Tracy shows how salespeople must learn to control their thoughts, feelings and actions to make themselves more effective.
Psychology of Selling gives you a series of ideas, methods, strategies, and techniques that you can use immediately to make more sales, faster and easier than ever before.
2. The Challenger Sale: Taking control of the Customer Conversation by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson (240 pages)
Amazon Summary
The need to understand what top-performing reps are doing that their average performing colleagues are not drove Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson, and their colleagues at Corporate Executive Board to investigate the skills, behaviors, knowledge, and attitudes that matter most for high performance. And what they discovered may be the biggest shock to conventional sales wisdom in decades.
Based on an exhaustive study of thousands of sales reps across multiple industries and geographies, The Challenger Sale argues that classic relationship building is a losing approach, especially when it comes to selling complex, large-scale business-to-business solutions. The authors’ study found that every sales rep in the world falls into one of five distinct profiles, and while all of these types of reps can deliver average sales performance, only one-the Challenger- delivers consistently high performance.
Instead of bludgeoning customers with endless facts and features about their company and products, Challengers approach customers with unique insights about how they can save or make money. They tailor their sales message to the customer’s specific needs and objectives. Rather than acquiescing to the customer’s every demand or objection, they are assertive, pushing back when necessary and taking control of the sale.
The things that make Challengers unique are replicable and teachable to the average sales rep. Once you understand how to identify the Challengers in your organization, you can model their approach and embed it throughout your sales force. The authors explain how almost any average-performing rep, once equipped with the right tools, can successfully reframe customers’ expectations and deliver a distinctive purchase experience that drives higher levels of customer loyalty and, ultimately, greater growth.
3. Sales EQ by Jeb Blount (320 pages)
Amazon Summary
The sales profession is in the midst of a perfect storm. Buyers have more power―more information, more at stake, and more control over the sales process―than any time in history. Technology is bringing disruptive change at an ever-increasing pace, creating fear and uncertainty that leaves buyers clinging to the status quo. Deteriorating attention spans have made it difficult to get buyers to sit still long enough to “challenge,” “teach,” “help,” give “insight,” or sell “value.” And a relentless onslaught of “me-too” competitors have made differentiating on the attributes of products, services, or even price more difficult than ever.
Legions of salespeople and their leaders are coming face to face with a cold hard truth: what once gave salespeople a competitive edge―controlling the sales process, command of product knowledge, an arsenal of technology, and a great pitch―are no longer guarantees of success. Yet this is where the vast majority of the roughly $20 billion spent each year on sales training goes. It’s no wonder many companies are seeing 50 percent or more of their salespeople miss quota.
Yet, in this new paradigm, an elite group of top 1 percent sales professionals are crushing it. In our age of technology where information is ubiquitous and buyer attention spans are fleeting, these superstars have learned how to leverage a new psychology of selling―Sales EQ―to keep prospects engaged, create true competitive differentiation, as well as shape and influence buying decisions. These top earners are acutely aware that the experience of buying from them is far more important than products, prices, features, and solutions.
In Sales EQ, Jeb Blount takes you on an unprecedented journey into the behaviors, techniques, and secrets of the highest earning salespeople in every industry and field. You’ll learn:
- How to answer the 5 Most Important Questions in Sales to make it virtually impossible for prospects to say no.
- How to master 7 People Principles that will give you the power to influence anyone to do almost anything.
- How to shape and align the 3 Processes of Sales to lock out competitors and shorten the sales cycle.
- How to Flip the Buyer Script to gain complete control of the sales conversation.
- How to Disrupt Expectations to pull buyers towards you, direct their attention, and keep them engaged.
- How to leverage Non-Complementary Behavior to eliminate resistance, conflict, and objections.
- How to employ the Bridge Technique to gain the micro-commitments and next steps you need to keep your deals from stalling.
- How to tame Irrational Buyers, shake them out of their comfort zone, and shape the decision making process.
- How to measure and increase you own Sales EQ using the 15 Sales Specific Emotional Intelligence Markers.
- And so much more!
Sales EQ begins where The Challenger Sale, Strategic Selling, and Spin Selling leave off. It addresses the human relationship gap in the modern sales process at a time when sales organizations are failing because many salespeople have never been taught the human skills required to effectively engage buyers at the emotional level. Jeb Blount makes a compelling case that sales specific emotional intelligence (Sales EQ) is more essential to success than education, experience, industry awareness, product knowledge, skills, or raw IQ; and, sales professionals who invest in developing and improving Sales EQ gain a decisive competitive advantage in the hyper-competitive global marketplace.
Sales EQ arms salespeople and sales leaders with the tools to identify their most important sales specific emotional intelligence developmental needs along with strategies, techniques, and frameworks for reaching ultra-high performance and earnings, regardless of sales process, industry, deal complexity, role (inside or outside), product or service (B2B or B2C).
4. The qualified sales leader by John McMahon (346 pages)
Amazon Summary
Monthly someone asks, “When are you going to write a book”. When I ask, “Why?”, people tell me, “Because no one has written a sales leadership book with practical solutions to real life issues in enterprise SaaS sales forces”,
Why: 62% of sales reps fail, not because they couldn’t sell but because they were assigned the wrong accounts.
Sales leaders don’t align skillsets to account complexity.
Sales rep attrition at most SaaS companies is over 20%.
Sales leaders can’t recruit A players.
Sales Leaders don’t coach their reps on deal advancement issues.
Most sales leaders are “glorified scorekeepers”.
Most sales leader don’t motivate their sales team.
They’re focused on deals, not rep competency.
Sales forecasts are inaccurate because most reps game the CRM system.
Sales team leaders lack qualification of sales stage exit criteria.
Many salesforces only win 50% of their proof of concepts.
They can’t frame a winning POC Criteria.
8 of 10 executive buyers say the sales meetings they take are a waste of time.
Sales reps lack the ability to sell business value.
42% of reps in enterprise sales say one of the top 3 biggest challenges is to establish urgency.
Reps don’t quantify critical business pain to create a buying influence.
Reps can’t find high-level business champions, only low-level coaches.
They can’t find pain above the noise.
Many reps find pain but can’t attract a champion.
They’re selfishly focused on closing a sale instead of earning trust.
Most reps say they feel out of control during the sales process.
Reps can’t find a champion to help them control the process.
50% of reps say they can’t overcome price objections while companies struggle to increase the average deal size.
Most sales reps are vending, not selling.
Their reps aren’t immersed in the customer conversation.
The reps are “thinking”, not “knowing” the key elements of the customer use case.
Top sales leaders will find the answers to these issues and more in The Qualified Sales Leader.
5. New Sale Simplified by Mike Weinberg (240 pages)
Amazon Summary
With refreshing honesty and some much-needed humor, sales expert Mike Weinberg examines the critical mistakes made by most salespeople and executives, then provides tips to help you achieve the opposite results.
In New Sales. Simplified., you will learn how to:
- Identify a strategic list of genuine prospects.
- Draft a compelling, customer focused “sales story”.
- Perfect the proactive telephone call to get face to face with more prospects.
- Use email, voicemail, and social media to your advantage.
- Prepare for and structure a winning sales call.
- Make time in your calendar for business development activities.
New Sales. Simplified. is about overcoming and even preventing buyers’ anti salesperson reflex by establishing trust. This book will help you choose the right targets and build a winning plan to pursue them.
Named by HubSpot as a Top 20 Sales Book of All Time, this easy-to-follow guide will remove the mystery surrounding prospecting and have you ramping up for new business.
6. Sell it like Serhant by Ryan Serhant (241 pages)
Amazon Summary
This national bestseller is a lively and practical guide on how to sell anything and achieve long-term success in business.
Ryan Serhant was a shy, jobless hand model when he entered the real estate business in 2008 at a time the country was on the verge of economic collapse. Just nine years later, he has emerged as one of the top realtors in the world and an authority on the art of selling.
Sell It Like Serhant is a smart, at times hilarious, and always essential playbook to build confidence, generate results, and sell just about anything. You’ll find tips like: The Seven Stages of Selling How to Find Your Hook; Negotiating Like A BOSS; How to Be a Time Manager, Not a Time Stealer; and much more!
Through useful lessons, lively stories, and vivid examples, this book shows you how to employ Serhant’s principles to increase profits and achieve success. Your measure of a good day will no longer depend on one deal or one client, wondering what comes next; the next deal is already happening. And Serhant’s practical guidance will show you how to juggle multiple deals at once and close all of them EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.
Whatever your business or expertise, Sell It Like Serhant will make anyone a master at sales. Ready, set, GO!
Sell It Like Serhant is a USA Today Bestseller, Los Angeles Times Bestseller, and Wall Street Journal Bestseller.
7. The ultimate sales machine: Turbocharge your business with relentless focus on 12 key strategies by Chet Holmes (336 pages)
Amazon Summary
Every single day 3,076 businesses shut their doors. But what if you could create the finest, most profitable and best-run version of your business without wasting precious dollars on a thousand different strategies? When The Ultimate Sales Machine first published in 2007, legendary sales expert Chet Holmes gave us the key to do just that. All you need is to focus on twelve key areas of improvement—and practice them over and over with pig-headed discipline.
Now, a decade later, Chet’s daughter Amanda Holmes breathes new life into her father’s classic advice. With updated language to match our ever-changing times and over 50 new pages of content, The Ultimate Sales Machine will help any modern reader transform their organization into a high-performing, moneymaking force. With practical tools, real-life examples, and proven strategies, this book will show you how to:
- Teach your team to work smarter, not harder.
- Get more bang from your marketing for less.
- Perfect every sales interaction by working on sales, not just in sales.
- Land your dream clients.
This revised edition expands on these proven concepts, with checklists to get faster ROIs, Core Story Frameworks to get your company to number one in your marketplace, and a bonus, never-before-revealed chapter from Chet, “How to Live a Rich and Full Life,” that will put you in the best possible mindset to own your career.
For every CEO, manager, and business owner who wants to take their organization to the next level, The Ultimate Sales Machine will put you and your company on the path to success—and help you stay there!
8. Gap Selling: Getting the customer to yes: How Problem-Centric Selling Increases Sales by Changing Everything you know about relationships, Overcoming Objections, Closing and Price by Keenan (260 pages)
Amazon Summary
People don’t buy from people they like. No! Your buyer doesn’t care about you or your product or service. It’s not your job to overcome objections, it’s your buyer’s. Closing isn’t a skill of good salespeople; it’s the skill of weak salespeople. Price isn’t the main reason salespeople lose the sale. Gap Selling shreds traditional and closely held sales beliefs that have been hurting salespeople for decades.
For years, salespeople have embraced a myriad of sales tactics and belief systems that have unknowingly created many of the issues they have been trying to avoid such as: long sales cycles, price objections, no decision, prospects going dark, last minute feature requests, and more. Success at sales requires more than a set of tactics. Salespeople need to understand the game of sales, how sales works, and what the buyer is going through in order to make the decision to buy (change) or not to buy (not change).
Gap Selling is a game-changing book designed to raise the sales IQ of selling organizations around the world. In his unapologetic and irreverent style, Keenan breaks down the tired old sales myths causing today’s frustrating sales issues, to highlight a deceptively powerful new way to connect with buyers.
Today’s sales world is littered with glorified order takers, beholden to a frustrated buyer, unable to influence the sale and create value. Gap Selling flips the script and creates salespeople with immense influence at every stage of the buying process, capable of impacting the sales metrics that matter:
- Shorter Sales Cycles
- Increased Revenue
- Elevated Deal Values
- Higher Win Rates
- Fewer No Decisions
- More Leads
- and Happier Buyers
Gap Selling elevates the sales world’s selling IQ and turns sales order takers into sales influencers.
9. Sales Management. Simplified: The Straight Truth About Getting Exceptional Results from your sales team by Mike Weinberg (220 pages)
Amazon Summary
Why do sales organizations fall short? Every day, expert consultants like Mike Weinberg are called on by companies to find the answer – and it’s one that may surprise you. Typically, the issue lies not with the sales team but with how it is being led. Through their attitude and actions, senior executives and sales managers unknowingly undermine performance.
Weinberg tells it straight by calling out the problems plaguing sales forces and the costly mistakes made by even the best-intentioned sales managers. The good news is that with the right guidance, results can be transformed.
In Sales Management. Simplified., Weinberg teaches managers how to:
- Implement a simple framework for sales leadership.
- Foster a healthy, high-performance sales culture.
- Conduct productive meetings.
- Put the right people in the right roles.
- Retain top producers and remediate underperformers.
- Point salespeople at the proper targets.
Blending blunt, practical advice with funny stories from the field, Sales Management. Simplified. delivers the tools every sales manager needs to succeed.
Managing sales doesn’t have to be complicated, and the solution starts with you!
10. Way of the Wolf: Straight line selling: Master the Art of Persuasion, Influence and Success by Jordan Belfort (257 pages)
Amazon Summary
For the first time ever, Jordan Belfort opens his playbook and gives you access to his exclusive step-by-step system—the same system he used to create massive wealth for himself, his clients, and his sales teams. Until now this revolutionary program was only available through Jordan’s $1,997 online training. Now, in Way of the Wolf, Belfort is ready to unleash the power of persuasion to a whole new generation, revealing how anyone can bounce back from devastating setbacks, master the art of persuasion, and build wealth. Every technique, every strategy, and every tip has been tested and proven to work in real-life situations.
Written in his own inimitable voice, Way of the Wolf cracks the code on how to persuade anyone to do anything, and coaches readers—regardless of age, education, or skill level—to be a master sales person, negotiator, closer, entrepreneur, or speaker.
Negotiation
1. Getting to yes with yourself : (and Other Worthy Opponents) by William Ury (194 pages)
Amazon Summary
William Ury, co-author of the international bestseller Getting to Yes, returns with another ground-breaking book, this time asking: how can we expect to get to yes with others if we haven’t first gotten to yes with ourselves?
Renowned negotiation expert William Ury has taught tens of thousands of people from all walks of life—managers, lawyers, factory workers, coal miners, schoolteachers, diplomats, and government officials—how to become better negotiators. Over the years, Ury has discovered that the greatest obstacle to successful agreements and satisfying relationships is not the other side, as difficult as they can be. The biggest obstacle is actually our own selves—our natural tendency to react in ways that do not serve our true interests.
But this obstacle can also become our biggest opportunity, Ury argues. If we learn to understand and influence ourselves first, we lay the groundwork for understanding and influencing others. In this prequel to Getting to Yes, Ury offers a seven-step method to help you reach agreement with yourself first, dramatically improving your ability to negotiate with others.
Practical and effective, Getting to Yes with Yourself helps readers reach good agreements with others, develop healthy relationships, make their businesses more productive, and live far more satisfying lives.
2. Negotiation Genius: How to Overcome Obstacles and Achieve Brilliant Results at the Bargaining Table and Beyond by Deepak Malhotra and Max Bazerman (352 pages)
Amazon Summary
From two leaders in executive education at Harvard Business School, here are the mental habits and proven strategies you need to achieve outstanding results in any negotiation.
Whether you’ve “seen it all” or are just starting out, Negotiation Genius will dramatically improve your negotiating skills and confidence. Drawing on decades of behavioral research plus the experience of thousands of business clients, the authors take the mystery out of preparing for and executing negotiations—whether they involve multimillion-dollar deals or improving your next salary offer.
What sets negotiation geniuses apart? They are the men and women who know how to:
- Identify negotiation opportunities where others see no room for discussion.
- Discover the truth even when the other side wants to conceal it.
- Negotiate successfully from a position of weakness.
- Defuse threats, ultimatums, lies, and other hardball tactics.
- Overcome resistance and “sell” proposals using proven influence tactics.
- Negotiate ethically and create trusting relationships—along with great deals.
- Recognize when the best move is to walk away.
- And much, much more.
This book gets “down and dirty.” It gives you detailed strategies—including talking points—that work in the real world even when the other side is hostile, unethical, or more powerful. When you finish it, you will already have an action plan for your next negotiation. You will know what to do and why. You will also begin building your own reputation as a negotiation genius.
3. Getting Past No : Negotiating in Difficult Situations by William Ury (208 pages)
Amazon Summary
We all want to get to yes, but what happens when the other person keeps saying no?
How can you negotiate successfully with a stubborn boss, an irate customer, or a deceitful co-worker?
In Getting Past No, William Ury of Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation offers a proven breakthrough strategy for turning adversaries into negotiating partners. You’ll learn how to:
- Stay in control under pressure.
- Defuse anger and hostility.
- Find out what the other side really wants.
- Counter dirty tricks.
- Use power to bring the other side back to the table.
- Reach agreements that satisfies both sides’ needs.
Getting Past No is the state-of-the-art book on negotiation for the twenty-first century. It will help you deal with tough times, tough people, and tough negotiations. You don’t have to get mad or get even. Instead, you can get what you want!
4. Never Split The Difference : Negotiating as if your life depended on it by Chris Voss (288 pages)
Amazon Summary
After a stint policing the rough streets of Kansas City, Missouri, Chris Voss joined the FBI, where his career as a hostage negotiator brought him face-to-face with a range of criminals, including bank robbers and terrorists. Reaching the pinnacle of his profession, he became the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator. Never Split the Difference takes you inside the world of high-stakes negotiations and into Voss’s head, revealing the skills that helped him and his colleagues succeed where it mattered most: saving lives. In this practical guide, he shares the nine effective principles―counterintuitive tactics and strategies―you too can use to become more persuasive in both your professional and personal life.
Life is a series of negotiations you should be prepared for: buying a car, negotiating a salary, buying a home, renegotiating rent, deliberating with your partner. Taking emotional intelligence and intuition to the next level, Never Split the Difference gives you the competitive edge in any discussion.
5. Difficult Conversations : How to discuss what matters most by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen (352 pages)
Amazon Summary
We attempt or avoid difficult conversations every day-whether dealing with an underperforming employee, disagreeing with a spouse, or negotiating with a client. From the Harvard Negotiation Project, the organization that brought you Getting to Yes, Difficult Conversations provides a step-by-step approach to having those tough conversations with less stress and more success. you’ll learn how to:
- Decipher the underlying structure of every difficult conversation.
- Start a conversation without defensiveness.
- Listen for the meaning of what is not said.
- Stay balanced in the face of attacks and accusations.
- Move from emotion to productive problem solving.
6. Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People by Richard Shell (304 pages)
Amazon Summary
As director of the world-renowned Wharton Executive Negotiation Workshop, Professor G. Richard Shell has taught thousands of business leaders, lawyers, administrators, and other professionals how to survive and thrive in the sometimes-rough-and-tumble world of negotiation. In the third edition of this internationally acclaimed book, he brings to life his systematic, step-by-step approach, built around negotiating effectively as who you are, not who you think you need to be. Shell combines lively stories about world-class negotiators from J. P. Morgan to Mahatma Gandhi with proven bargaining advice based on the latest research into negotiation and neuroscience. This updated edition includes:
- An easy-to-take “Negotiation I.Q.” test that reveals your unique strengths as a negotiator.
- A brand-new chapter on reliable moves to use when you are short on bargaining power or stuck at an impasse.
- Insights on how to succeed when you negotiate online.
- Research on how gender and cultural differences can derail negotiations, and advice for putting relationships back on track.
7. Getting to Yes : Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher & William Ury (240 pages)
Amazon Summary
Since its original publication nearly thirty years ago, Getting to Yes has helped millions of people learn a better way to negotiate. One of the primary business texts of the modern era, it is based on the work of the Harvard Negotiation Project, a group that deals with all levels of negotiation and conflict resolution.
Getting to Yes offers a proven, step-by-step strategy for coming to mutually acceptable agreements in every sort of conflict. Thoroughly updated and revised, it offers readers a straight-forward, universally applicable method for negotiating personal and professional disputes without getting angry or getting taken.
8. Negotiating for Success: Essential Strategies and Skills by George J. Siedel (160 pages)
Amazon Summary
We all negotiate on a daily basis. We negotiate with our spouses, children, parents, and friends. We negotiate when we rent an apartment, buy a car, purchase a house, and apply for a job. Your ability to negotiate might even be the most important factor in your career advancement.
Negotiation is also the key to business success. No organization can survive without contracts that produce profits. At a strategic level, businesses are concerned with value creation and achieving competitive advantage. But the success of high-level business strategies depends on contracts made with suppliers, customers, and other stakeholders. Contracting capability—the ability to negotiate and perform successful contracts—is the most important function in any organization.
This book is designed to help you achieve success in your personal negotiations and in your business transactions. The book is unique in two ways. First, the book not only covers negotiation concepts, but also provides practical actions you can take in future negotiations. This includes a Negotiation Planning Checklist and a completed example of the checklist for your use in future negotiations.
The book also includes (1) a tool you can use to assess your negotiation style; (2) examples of “decision trees,” which are useful in calculating your alternatives if your negotiation is unsuccessful; (3) a three-part strategy for increasing your power during negotiations; (4) a practical plan for analyzing your negotiations based on your reservation price, stretch goal, most-likely target, and zone of potential agreement; (5) clear guidelines on ethical standards that apply to negotiations; (6) factors to consider when deciding whether you should negotiate through an agent; (7) psychological tools you can use in negotiations—and traps to avoid when the other side uses them; (8) key elements of contract law that arise during negotiations; and (9) a checklist of factors to use when you evaluate your performance as a negotiator.
Second, the book is unique in its holistic approach to the negotiation process. Other books often focus narrowly either on negotiation or on contract law. Furthermore, the books on negotiation tend to focus on what happens at the bargaining table without addressing the performance of an agreement. These books make the mistaken assumption that success is determined by evaluating the negotiation rather than evaluating performance of the agreement. Similarly, the books on contract law tend to focus on the legal requirements for a contract to be valid, thus giving short shrift to the negotiation process that precedes the contract and to the performance that follows.
In the real world, the contracting process is not divided into independent phases. What happens during a negotiation has a profound impact on the contract and on the performance that follows. The contract’s legal content should reflect the realities of what happened at the bargaining table and the performance that is to follow. This book, in contrast to others, covers the entire negotiation process in chronological order beginning with your decision to negotiate and continuing through the evaluation of your performance as a negotiator.
A business executive in one of the negotiation seminars the author teaches as a University of Michigan professor summarized negotiation as follows: “Life is negotiation!” No one ever stated it better. As a mother with young children and as a company leader, the executive realized that negotiations are pervasive in our personal and business lives. With its emphasis on practical action, and with its chronological, holistic approach, this book provides a roadmap you can use when navigating through your life as a negotiator.
9. The Art of Persuasion: Winning Without Intimidation by Bob Burg (240 pages)
Amazon Summary
The Art of Persuasion teaches you how to get what you want when you want it. You would love to have that ability, right?
After studying some of the most successful men and women in modern history, author Bob Burg noticed how many common characteristics these people have and shares them all with you. One trait that stands above all the rest is their ability to win people over to their way of thinking they were all persuasive. Each of these life winners had a burning desire, coupled with great creativity, and a total, unshakable belief in their mission or cause.
The Winning principles you will learn include:
- Making People Feel Important
- Everything is Negotiable
- Dealing with Difficult People
- Persuasion in Action
- What Sets You Apart from the Rest
- Nuggets of Wisdom
Presented in everyday, clear, and often humorous language, The Art of Persuasion leaves an impression on you that will last a lifetime, filled with one success after another!
10. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini (592 pages)
Amazon Summary
In the new edition of this highly acclaimed bestseller, Robert Cialdini—New York Times bestselling author of Pre-Suasion and the seminal expert in the fields of influence and persuasion—explains the psychology of why people say yes and how to apply these insights ethically in business and everyday settings. Using memorable stories and relatable examples, Cialdini makes this crucially important subject surprisingly easy. With Cialdini as a guide, you don’t have to be a scientist to learn how to use this science.
You’ll learn Cialdini’s Universal Principles of Influence, including new research and new uses so you can become an even more skilled persuader—and just as importantly, you’ll learn how to defend yourself against unethical influence attempts. You may think you know these principles, but without understanding their intricacies, you may be ceding their power to someone else.
Cialdini’s Principles of Persuasion:
- Reciprocation
- Commitment and Consistency
- Social Proof
- Liking
- Authority
- Scarcity
- Unity, the newest principle for this edition
Understanding and applying the principles ethically is cost-free and deceptively easy. Backed by Dr Cialdini’s 35 years of evidence-based, peer-reviewed scientific research—including a three-year field study on what leads people to change—Influence is a comprehensive guide to using these principles to move others in your direction.
Money
1. The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed and Happiness by Morgan Housel (256 pages)
Amazon Summary
Doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people.
Money―investing, personal finance, and business decisions―is typically taught as a math-based field, where data and formulas tell us exactly what to do. But in the real-world people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together.
In The Psychology of Money, award-winning author Morgan Housel shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important topics.
2. The Richest Man in Babylon by George S Clason (94 pages)
Amazon Summary
The Richest Man in Babylon, based on “Babylonian parables”, has been hailed as the greatest of all inspirational works on the subject of thrift, financial planning, and personal wealth. In simple language, these fascinating and informative stories set you on a sure path to prosperity and its accompanying joys. A celebrated bestseller, it offers an understanding and a solution to your personal financial problem. Revealed inside are the secrets to acquiring money, keeping money, and making money earn more money.
This original edition has the original language, content, and message from George S. Clason as intended in 1926. It’s all here, uncensored.
3. Your Money Or Your Life : 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez (366 pages)
Amazon Summary
For more than 25 years, Your Money or Your Life has been considered the go-to book for taking back your life by changing your relationship with money. Hundreds of thousands of people have followed this nine-step program, learning to live more deliberately and meaningfully with Vicki Robin’s guidance.
This fully revised and updated edition with a foreword by “the Frugal Guru” (The New Yorker) Mr. Money Mustache is the ultimate makeover of this best-selling classic, ensuring that its time-tested wisdom applies to people of all ages and covers modern topics like investing in index funds, managing revenue streams like side hustles and freelancing, tracking your finances online, and having difficult conversations about money.
Whether you’re just beginning your financial life or heading towards retirement, this book will tell you how to:
- Get out of debt and develop savings.
- Save money through mindfulness and good habits, rather than strict budgeting.
- Declutter your life and live well for less.
- Invest your savings and begin creating wealth.
- Save the planet while saving money.
- And so much more!
“The seminal guide to the new morality of personal money management.” (The Los Angeles Times)
4. The Intelligent Investor: The definitive book on value investing by Benjamin Graham (640 pages)
Amazon Summary
The greatest investment advisor of the twentieth century, Benjamin Graham, taught and inspired people worldwide. Graham’s philosophy of “value investing”—which shields investors from substantial error and teaches them to develop long-term strategies—has made The Intelligent Investor the stock market bible ever since its original publication in 1949.
Over the years, market developments have proven the wisdom of Graham’s strategies. While preserving the integrity of Graham’s original text, this revised edition includes updated commentary by noted financial journalist Jason Zweig, whose perspective incorporates the realities of today’s market, draws parallels between Graham’s examples and today’s financial headlines, and gives readers a more thorough understanding of how to apply Graham’s principles.
Vital and indispensable, this revised edition of The Intelligent Investor is the most important book you will ever read on how to reach your financial goals.
5. The Automatic Millionaire: A powerful one-step plan to live and finish rich by David Bach (275 pages)
Amazon Summary
What’s the secret to becoming a millionaire?
For years people have asked David Bach, the national bestselling author of Smart Women Finish Rich, Smart Couples Finish Rich, and Start Late, Finish Rich
what’s the real secret to getting rich? What’s the one thing I need to do?
Now, in the newly revised
The Automatic Millionaire, expanded and updated, David Bach is sharing that secret.
The Automatic Millionaire starts with the powerful story of an average American couple–he’s a low-level manager, she’s a beautician–whose joint income never exceeds $55,000 a year, yet who somehow manage to own two homes debt-free, put two kids through college, and retire at 55 with more than $1 million in savings. Through their story you’ll learn the surprising fact that you cannot get rich with a budget! You have to have a plan to pay yourself first that is totally automatic, a plan that will automatically secure your future and pay for your present.
What makes The Automatic Millionaire unique:
- You don’t need a budget.
- You don’t need willpower.
- You don’t need to make a lot of money.
- You don’t need to be that interested in money.
- You can set up the plan in an hour.
David gives you a totally realistic system, based on timeless principles, with everything you need to know, including phone numbers, websites and apps, so you can put the secret to becoming an Automatic Millionaire in place from the comfort of your own home.
This powerful little book has the potential to secure your financial future. Do it once–the rest is automatic!
The Automatic Millionaire is one of the most popular financial books of our time. It was a runaway hit when it was first published in 2004, spending thirty-one weeks on the
New York Times bestseller list and appearing at number one simultaneously on the New York Times, USA Today, BusinessWeek, and Wall Street Journal business bestseller lists. It has sold over 1.5 million copies and been translated around the world in over a dozen languages. This is the first update since 2005 and includes updated information on taxes, investments, technologies and apps to automate your financial life as well as David’s latest systems for making the entire process even easier.
6. The Total Money Makeover: A proven plan for financial fitness by Dave Ramsey (256 pages)
Amazon Summary
By now, you’ve already heard all of the nutty get-rich-quick schemes and the fiscal diet fads that leave you with a lot of quirky ideas but not a penny in your pocket. If you’re tired of the lies and sick of the false promises, Dave is here to provide practical, long-term help. The Total Money Makeover is the simplest, most straightforward game plan for completely changing your finances. And, best of all, these principles are based on results, not pie-in-the-sky fantasies. This is the financial reset you’ve been looking for.
The Total Money Makeover: Classic Edition will give you the tools and the encouragement you need to:
- Design a sure-fire plan for paying off all debt–from your cars to your home and everything in between.
- Break bad habits and make lasting changes when it comes to your relationship with money.
- Recognize the 10 most dangerous money myths.
- Secure a healthy nest egg for emergencies and set yourself up for retirement.
- Become financially healthy for life.
This edition of The Total Money Makeover includes new, expanded “Dave Rants” that tackle marriage conflict, college debt, and so much more. Each copy of The Total Money Makeover: Classic Edition also includes brand new back-of-the-book resources to help you make Total Money Makeover your new reality.
7. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill (240 pages)
Amazon Summary
The most famous of all teachers of success spent a fortune and the better part of a lifetime of effort to produce the Law of Success philosophy that forms the basis of his books and that is so powerfully summarized and explained for the general public in this book.
In Think and Grow Rich, Hill draws on stories of Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and other millionaires of his generation to illustrate his principles. This book will teach you the secrets that could bring you a fortune. It will show you not only what to do but how to do it. Once you learn and apply the simple, basic techniques revealed here, you will have mastered the secret of true and lasting success.
Money and material things are essential for freedom of body and mind, but there are some who will feel that the greatest of all riches can be evaluated only in terms of lasting friendships, loving family relationships, understanding between business associates, and introspective harmony which brings one true peace of mind! All who read, understand, and apply this philosophy will be better prepared to attract and enjoy these spiritual values.
BE PREPARED! When you expose yourself to the influence of this philosophy, you may experience a CHANGED LIFE which can help you negotiate your way through life with harmony and understanding and prepare you for the accumulation of abundant material riches.
8. The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Markets Returns by John C. Bogle (304 pages)
Amazon Summary
The best-selling investing “bible” offers new information, new insights, and new perspectives.
The Little Book of Common-Sense Investing is the classic guide to getting smart about the market. Legendary mutual fund pioneer John C. Bogle reveals his key to getting more out of investing: low-cost index funds. Bogle describes the simplest and most effective investment strategy for building wealth over the long term: buy and hold, at very low cost, a mutual fund that tracks a broad stock market Index such as the S&P 500.
While the stock market has tumbled and then soared since the first edition of Little Book of Common Sense was published in April 2007, Bogle’s investment principles have endured and served investors well. This tenth anniversary edition includes updated data and new information but maintains the same long-term perspective as in its predecessor.
Bogle has also added two new chapters designed to provide further guidance to investors: one on asset allocation, the other on retirement investing.
A portfolio focused on index funds is the only investment that effectively guarantees your fair share of stock market returns. This strategy is favored by Warren Buffett, who said this about Bogle: “If a statue is ever erected to honor the person who has done the most for American investors, the hands-down choice should be Jack Bogle. For decades, Jack has urged investors to invest in ultra-low-cost index funds. Today, however, he has the satisfaction of knowing that he helped millions of investors realize far better returns on their savings than they otherwise would have earned. He is a hero to them and to me.”
Bogle shows you how to make index investing work for you and help you achieve your financial goals, and finds support from some of the world’s best financial minds: not only Warren Buffett, but Benjamin Graham, Paul Samuelson, Burton Malkiel, Yale’s David Swensen, Cliff Asness of AQR, and many others.
This new edition of The Little Book of Common Sense Investing offers you the same solid strategy as its predecessor for building your financial future.
- Build a broadly diversified, low-cost portfolio without the risks of individual stocks, manager selection, or sector rotation.
- Forget the fads and marketing hype, and focus on what works in the real world.
- Understand that stock returns are generated by three sources (dividend yield, earnings growth, and change in market valuation) in order to establish rational expectations for stock returns over the coming decade.
- Recognize that in the long run, business reality trumps market expectations.
- Learn how to harness the magic of compounding returns while avoiding the tyranny of compounding costs.
While index investing allows you to sit back and let the market do the work for you, too many investors trade frantically, turning a winner’s game into a loser’s game. The Little Book of Common Sense Investing is a solid guidebook to your financial future.
9. I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi (353 pages)
Amazon Summary
Buy as many lattes as you want. Choose the right accounts and investments so your money grows for you—automatically. Best of all, spend guilt-free on the things you love.
Personal finance expert Ramit Sethi has been called a “wealth wizard” by Forbes and the “new guru on the block” by Fortune. Now he’s updated and expanded his modern money classic for a new age, delivering a simple, powerful, no-BS 6-week program that just works.
I Will Teach You to Be Rich will show you:
- How to crush your debt and student loans faster than you thought possible
- How to set up no-fee, high-interest bank accounts that won’t gouge you for every penny
- How Ramit automates his finances so his money goes exactly where he wants it to—and how you can do it too
- How to talk your way out of late fees (with word-for-word scripts)
- How to save hundreds or even thousands per month (and still buy what you love)
- A set-it-and-forget-it investment strategy that’s dead simple and beats financial advisors at their own game
- How to handle buying a car or a house, paying for a wedding, having kids, and other big expenses—stress free
- The exact words to use to negotiate a big raise at work
Plus, this 10th anniversary edition features over 80 new pages, including:
- New tools
- New insights on money and psychology
- Amazing stories of how previous readers used the book to create their rich lives
Master your money—and then get on with your life.
10. You are a badass at making money: Master the mindset of wealth by Jen Sincero (277pages)
Amazon Summary
You Are a Badass at Making Money will launch you past the fears and stumbling blocks that have kept financial success beyond your reach. Drawing on her own transformation—over just a few years—from a woman living in a converted garage with tumbleweeds blowing through her bank account to a woman who travels the world in style, Jen Sincero channels the inimitable sass and practicality that made You Are a Badass an indomitable bestseller. She combines hilarious personal essays with bite-size, aha concepts that unlock earning potential and get real results.
Learn to:
- Uncover what’s holding you back from making money.
- Give your doubts, fears, and excuses the heave-ho.
- Relate to money in a new (and lucrative) way.
- Shake up the cocktail of creation.
- Tap into your natural ability to grow rich.
- Shape your reality—stop playing victim to circumstance.
- Get as wealthy as you wanna be.
“This book truly crystallizes the concept that financial abundance is an inside job—in that it all begins with your mindset—and Sincero gets serious (in the funniest ways possible) about helping you identify your particular limiting beliefs surrounding money.” —PopSugar
Human Nature
1. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker (525 pages)
Amazon Summary
One of the world’s leading experts on language and the mind explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. With characteristic wit, lucidity, and insight, Pinker argues that the dogma that the mind has no innate traits-a doctrine held by many intellectuals during the past century-denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces objective analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of politics, violence, parenting, and the arts. Injecting calm and rationality into debates that are notorious for ax-grinding and mud-slinging, Pinker shows the importance of an honest acknowledgment of human nature based on science and common sense.
2. The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene (624 pages)
Amazon Summary
Robert Greene is a master guide for millions of readers, distilling ancient wisdom and philosophy into essential texts for seekers of power, understanding and mastery. Now he turns to the most important subject of all – understanding people’s drives and motivations, even when they are unconscious of them themselves.
We are social animals. Our very lives depend on our relationships with people. Knowing why people do what they do is the most important tool we can possess, without which our other talents can only take us so far. Drawing from the ideas and examples of Pericles, Queen Elizabeth I, Martin Luther King Jr, and many others, Greene teaches us how to detach ourselves from our own emotions and master self-control, how to develop the empathy that leads to insight, how to look behind people’s masks, and how to resist conformity to develop your singular sense of purpose. Whether at work, in relationships, or in shaping the world around you, The Laws of Human Nature offers brilliant tactics for success, self-improvement, and self-defense.
3. The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene (864 pages)
Amazon Summary
Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this multi-million-copy New York Times bestseller is the definitive manual for anyone interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control – from the author of The Laws of Human Nature.
In the book that People magazine proclaimed “beguiling” and “fascinating,” Robert Greene and Joost Elffers have distilled three thousand years of the history of power into 48 essential laws by drawing from the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and Carl Von Clausewitz and also from the lives of figures ranging from Henry Kissinger to P.T. Barnum.
Some laws teach the need for prudence (“Law 1: Never Outshine the Master”), others teach the value of confidence (“Law 28: Enter Action with Boldness”), and many recommend absolute self-preservation (“Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally”). Every law, though, has one thing in common: an interest in total domination. In a bold and arresting two-color package, The 48 Laws of Power is ideal whether your aim is conquest, self-defense, or simply to understand the rules of the game.
4. The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley (420 pages)
Amazon Summary
Referring to Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen from Through the Looking-Glass, a character who has to keep running to stay in the same place, Matt Ridley demonstrates why sex is humanity’s best strategy for outwitting its constantly mutating internal predators. The Red Queen answers dozens of other riddles of human nature and culture—including why men propose marriage, the method behind our maddening notions of beauty, and the disquieting fact that a woman is more likely to conceive a child by an adulterous lover than by her husband. The Red Queen offers an extraordinary new way of interpreting the human condition and how it has evolved.
5. Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know by Malcolm Gladwell (401 pages)
Amazon Summary
How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to one another that isn’t true?
Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland—throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt.
Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.
6. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker (844 pages)
Amazon Summary
Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millennia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence. For most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, assassinations, programs, gruesome punishments, deadly quarrels, and genocide were ordinary features of life. But today, Pinker shows (with the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps) all these forms of violence have dwindled and are widely condemned. How has this happened?
This ground-breaking book continues Pinker’s exploration of the essence of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly nonviolent world. The key, he explains, is to understand our intrinsic motives–the inner demons that incline us toward violence and the better angels that steer us away–and how changing circumstances have allowed our better angels to prevail. Exploding fatalist myths about humankind’s inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious and provocative book is sure to be hotly debated in living rooms and the Pentagon alike and will challenge and change the way we think about our society.
7. The Art of War by Sun Tzu (96 pages)
Amazon Summary
Regarded as the world’s oldest military treatise*, this compact hardcover volume has instructed officers and tacticians for more than 2,000 years*. From its origins in China, The Art of War traveled the world to inform the strategies of Napoleon and World War II generals.
More recently, it has taken on a new life as a guide to competing successfully in business, law, politics, and sports.
All of The Art of War’s concepts retain their value to modern readers, from the prudence of circumventing a strong opponent and taking advantage of a weak one to the wisdom of preparedness and flexibility. Other topics include strategy, tactics, maneuvering, communications, the treatment of soldiers, and the worth of well-trained officers.
- Includes an introduction and brief history of Chinese Warfare written by Brig. Gen. Thomas R. Phillips of the U.S. Army, for the 1944 edition.
- Study Sun Tzu’s five factors of planning, five essentials for victory, and the six ways of courting defeat.
- Learn to classify the six types of terrain and the nine varieties of ground warfare.
- Prepare for five ways to attack with fire and anticipate possible developments.
- Discover the “divine manipulation of the threads” and examine the five classes of spies.
- This Ixia Press edition, first published in 2019, is an unabridged republication of the edition originally published in 1944 by The Military Service Publishing Company, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The English translation of the text was made by Lionel Giles, M. A., Department of Oriental Books and Manuscripts in the British Museum, and first published in 1910 by Luzac & Co., London.
History enthusiasts, devotees of Chinese philosophy, business leaders, and anyone intrigued by competition and rivalry, and leadership and power, will appreciate this elegant edition of the classic work.
8. The Righteous Mind: Why Good people are divided by politics and religion by Jonathan Haidt (530 pages)
Amazon Summary
Drawing on his twenty-five years of ground-breaking research on moral psychology, Jonathan Haidt shows how moral judgments arise not from reason but from gut feelings. He shows why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have such different intuitions about right and wrong, and he shows why each side is actually right about many of its central concerns.
In this subtle yet accessible book, Haidt gives you the key to understanding the miracle of human cooperation, as well as the curse of our eternal divisions and conflicts. If you’re ready to trade in anger for understanding, read The Righteous Mind.
9. Lord of the Flies by William Golding (196 pages)
Amazon Summary
With a new foreword by Lois Lowry, Golding’s landmark 1954 novel remains one of the best books ever written for young adults and an unforgettable classic for readers of all ages.
A plane crashes on an uncharted island during the start of the next world war, stranding a bunch of schoolboys. At first, their independence is something to rejoice over because they have no parental oversight. They may do whatever they want because they are so far away from civilization. Anything. But when order crumbles, weird howls reverberate through the night, and panic takes hold, the prospect of adventure appears as remote as the prospect of being rescued.
10. Straw Dogs: Thought on Humans and Other Animals by John Gray (266 pages)
Amazon Summary
The British bestseller Straw Dogs is an exciting, radical work of philosophy, which sets out to challenge our most cherished assumptions about what it means to be human. From Plato to Christianity, from the Enlightenment to Nietzsche and Marx, the Western tradition has been based on arrogant and erroneous beliefs about human beings and their place in the world. Philosophies such as liberalism and Marxism think of humankind as a species whose destiny is to transcend natural limits and conquer the Earth. John Gray argues that this belief in human difference is a dangerous illusion and explores how the world and human life look once humanism has been finally abandoned. The result is an exhilarating, sometimes disturbing book that leads the reader to question our deepest-held beliefs. Will Self, in the New Statesman, called Straw Dogs his book of the year: “I read it once, I read it twice and took notes . . . I thought it that good.” “Nothing will get you thinking as much as this brilliant book” (Sunday Telegraph).