5 Books That Changed My Life and Helped me Re-create Myself
You will find meaning and inspiration in them too
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” — Oscar Wilde
What makes a book “life-changing” isn’t its content, but rather the moment in your life at which this book falls onto your lap.
Below are five books that I read in the past year after I had made some radical impulsive changes in my life (I quit my job, traveled 3 months across Central America, invested all my savings into building my own business, struggled financially, mentally and emotionally as a solo-entrepreneur) and then felt the entire world around me collapsing and falling apart.
It was these books that empowered me to “determine what I will be” when the obstacles suddenly mounted. They helped me change the way I think and see myself in this world. By doing so, they pushed me further along the corrected path of who I wish to become.
These five books have helped me re-create myself.
The War of Art
“There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.” — Steven Pressfield
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles, is a book every creator, artist, writer and solo-entrepreneur must read. In his book, Pressfield examines the internal obstacle to creative success: He calls it Resistance.
“Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work.”
Resistance is the voice inside our heads that whispers: do it later. Resistance is procrastination. Resistance is fear. Resistance is self-doubt, insecurity, and anxiety from any external judgment. Resistance is what manifests into self-sabotage.
The more important a call, action or creative pursuit is to you, the more resistance you will feel toward pursuing it, and the more fulfillment you will feel when you finally do it.
His words helped me realize that it’s completely normal to feel fear, self-doubt and other forms of resistance toward my creative and entrepreneurial pursuits. “Fear tells us what we have to do. The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.”
The struggle — the tension — will always be there. But what we own is our attitude: Will we choose to shy away from resistance or lean into it? The only way to beat resistance is to show up and do the work.
“All that matters is I’ve put in my time and hit it with all I’ve got. All that counts is that, for this day, for this session, I have overcome Resistance.” — Steven Pressfield
The secret to breaking through resistance is to stop acting like an amateur and start acting like a pro: show up every single day and do the work you need to do. No excuses.
“There’s no mystery to turning pro. It’s a decision brought about by an act of will. We make up our mind to view ourselves as pros and we do it. Simple as that.”
I now realize that resistance, like fear, is not something we can escape — it’s something we must conquer at every waking hour.
Atomic Habits
“True behavior change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you’ll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity.” — James Clear
If the War of Art helped me cultivate the mindset to overcome resistance and start writing, Atomic Habits helped me transform my identity to see myself as who I want to be: a writer.
James Clear introduced a profound concept that sits at the root as to why many of us struggle at building better habits. The idea is simple:
“Behind every system of actions is a system of beliefs.”
I had struggled with developing a writing habit because I never saw myself as a writer — it wasn’t an extension of my identity. Likewise, I struggled as an entrepreneur because despite being one, I still saw myself as an employee — there was a gap between my set of beliefs and how I saw myself at the time (employee) and the identity of who I wanted to be (entrepreneur).
The first step in behavior change is identity change. See yourself as who you want to become and bridge that image as part of your identity. Change your identity and the story you tell yourself.
Clear also highlighted the importance of consistency:
“Success is the product of daily habits — not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.”
Consistency leads to habit formation, and habits are “the compound interest of self-improvement.” If you can find the discipline to stay consistent, you will improve at a rate of 1% per day, which would then make you 37x better by year-end. So if you wish to grow and reach success in any field in your life, you must be consistent in your actions — not for a week or a month, but for years.
After reading his book, I asked myself these two question:
- Who do I want to become?
- What will I have to do every day to affirm it?
My answers were simple: If I wish to become a writer, I must write every single day. So I bridged the identity of who I want to become into who I am today, and I wrote every day (and continue to do so) to validate it and reinforce that belief.
Your consistent actions validate your identity, and your identity emerges out of the habits you build.
The One Thing
“Getting extraordinary results is all about creating a domino effect in your life. The key is over time. Success is built sequentially. It’s one thing at a time.” — Gary Keller
The idea of The One Thing, The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results, is quite simple: You can excel and achieve extraordinary results in any field you want in your life, but you can’t succeed in all fields at once.
Too often we spread our energy too thin by going after too many things at the same time. As a result, we don’t end up achieving much. “We get lost trying to do too much and in the end accomplish too little.” I’ve personally fallen victim to this kind of thinking a few times.
“If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.” — Russian Proverb
The “one thing” strategy is a time-tested approach presented by Gary Keller. He argues that we must chase one thing — the most important thing we wish to achieve and let this one thing be our purpose. It is only by identifying this purpose that we can align our priorities and be more productive.
“Live with purpose and you know where you want to go. Live by priority and you’ll know what to do to get there.” — Gary Keller
Once we know our one thing, our “singleness of purpose”, we must prioritize it by time-blocking a slot in our schedule first thing every day when our willpower is high. Then, we must protect this time block and say no to anything that shifts our focus away from it.
This book helped me refine my purpose and re-focus the direction in which I want to take my life. In a way, it made me an essentialist and challenged me to declutter the distracting noise in my environment that doesn’t contribute to my “one thing”. It showed me the power of saying “no” — to focus on what matters most and ignore the rest.
It reinforced the idea that productivity isn’t about doing more things efficiently, it’s about doing the right things effectively. And most importantly, it made me realize that success is an inside job — I am the first domino.
My one thing — the one rabbit I chase — is writing. In less than four months, I went from zero to 50 published articles, and I did it one sequential article at a time.
The Little Prince
“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”
The Little Prince is a children’s book written for adults.
From the very first line, I found myself lost in the world of author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s roses, planets, and imagination, but I was not a child, I was an adult 27 years of age.
I first read this book at a time when I was struggling with finding my place in this world. My life was consumed in a world of algorithms, data, and numbers when my heart was calling me over to a world of wanderlust, creativity, and imagination.
“All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
This book reminded me that just because I work in the world of limited numbers, doesn’t mean I should lose touch with my limitless imagination. There’s an artist that lives in me, all I have to do is let him out to play.
But when I re-read the book again a few months ago, I discovered a more profound message.
“People where you live, the little prince said, grow five thousand roses in one garden… Yet they don’t find what they’re looking for… And yet what they’re looking for could be found in a single rose.”
His words reminded me of James Joyce’s “in the particular is contained the universal.”
You are “the particular” and within you lies “the universal”. Everything you’re looking for lives within you. All that you dream of achieving lies within you. All the answers you seek and the untapped potential you tame are there. You just have to open your heart and surface them. Of course, you cannot see them, because:
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
That’s when I understood that happiness is not something you seek, it’s something you become — happiness is the way. You do not seek fulfillment, you become a fulfilled person by doing work that makes you feel fulfilled every day — fulfillment is the way. You should not obsess over the results you want to achieve, you should simply enjoy the journey and celebrate your progress — progress is the way.
“What makes the desert beautiful,’ said the little prince, ‘is that somewhere it hides a well…”
We do not know the answers, but if we learn to trust ourselves, we’ll find them. If we believe in ourselves, we can become who we wish to be. What makes us beautiful is that within us, we “hide a well,” and what we’re looking for can be found “in a single rose” — us.
The Originals
“If you want to be original, the most important possible thing you could do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.” — Adam Grant
I wish I had read this book before I quit my job at Google to travel and then start my own company. I didn’t — I read it right after.
Originals, How Non-conformists Move The World by Adam Grant was a book with some very insightful lessons. I had two major takeaways from it.
The first was this: We must always look before we leap.
“The most successful originals are not the daredevils who leap before they look. They are the ones who reluctantly tiptoe to the edge of a cliff, calculate the rate of descent, triple-check their parachutes, and set up a safety net at the bottom just in case. The best entrepreneurs are not risk maximizers… They take the risk out of risk-taking.”
According to a study, Grant reveals that “entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit.” After taking the leap before looking, I can vouch for that statement.
The second lesson was this: quantity wins.
“It’s widely assumed that there’s a tradeoff between quantity and quality — if you want to do better work, you have to do less of it — but this turns out to be false. In fact, when it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality. “Original thinkers,” Stanford professor Robert Sutton notes, “will come up with many ideas that are strange mutations, dead ends, and utter failures. The cost is worthwhile because they also generate a larger pool of ideas — especially novel ideas.”
In all his 78-year career, Picasso produced about 147,800 pieces. Shakespeare produced 37 plays and 154 sonnets, but only five of them became famous. Mozart composed more than 600 pieces before his death at thirty-five, but only a handful were masterworks. Do you want to be original? Double the rate of art you’re creating.
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” — George Bernard Shaw
These five books have helped me re-create myself. Their messages and the meanings I’ve derived from them are slowly but surely changing my life. I hope you will find meaning and inspiration in them too.
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