20 Inspiring Books For Your Personal And Business Growth.
If you are smart you learn from your mistakes, if you are brilliant you learn from other people’s mistakes. The best way to learn is to read the right books.
Here you find a list of 20 inspiring books for your personal and business growth.
Books can help you in so many ways to grow as a person, find a job
easier, succeed both as an entrepreneur but also in many other fields.
They can be a source of inspiration, develop personal skills, and provide
tips and business strategies. They can help you to become successful by
providing the right knowledge, new ways of thinking, new insights and
help you to develop necessary skills.
One of the points of reading business books is that they tell you stories
that provide context around challenges and opportunities. The context
and stories can open your mind up to new choices, some you may not
have considered.
Your mindset, your belief system, is a limit on your success in life and in
business. When you read business biographies (and other biographies)
you can infect yourself with empowered beliefs. You can pick up the
beliefs that drove them to see things that were invisible to others. You
can invariably pick up the traits that allow them to succeed, things like
grit, determination, persistence, and resourcefulness.
Think of how little you really know. Think about all the people with deep
subject matter expertise who, in some areas, know far more than you.
You bend the learning curve in your direction when you take the best of
their learning as insights and ideas that may benefit you now or
sometime in the future.
My personal GWH quote is – “What I don’t know today I can learn
tomorrow.”
Here I provide you with a list of 20 books I recommend for your learning
curve. The best way to start reading is to start reading.
Quick Overview Of All 20 Books
Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to take Action
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes – But some Do
Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant
Company One: Why Staying Small is the Next Big Thing for Business
It's been nearly 25 years since Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad first made waves in the Personal Finance arena. It has since become the #1 Personal Finance book of all time... translated into dozens of languages and sold around the world.
Rich Dad Poor Dad is Robert's story of growing up with two dads — his real father and the father of his best friend, his rich dad — and the ways in which both men shaped his thoughts about money and investing. The book explodes the myth that you need to earn a high income to be rich and explains the difference between working for money and having your money work for you.
3). Shoe Dog A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
In this instantand tenacious New York Times bestseller, Nike founder and board chairman Phil Knight “offers a rare and revealing look at the notoriously media-shy man behind the swoosh” (Booklist, starred review), illuminating his company’s early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world’s most iconic, game-changing, and profitable brands.
4). Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
In 2009, Simon Sinek started a movement to help people become more inspired at work, and in turn inspire their colleagues and customers. Since then, millions have been touched by the power of his ideas, including more than 28 million who’ve watched his TED Talk based on START WITH WHY -- the third most popular TED video of all time.
5). Homo Deus: A Brief Hi story of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari, author of the critically-acclaimed New York Times bestseller and international phenomenon Sapiens, returns with an equally original, compelling, and provocative book, turning his focus toward humanity’s future, and our quest to upgrade humans into gods.
Long Walk to Freedom is his moving and exhilarating autobiography, destined to take its place among the finest memoirs of history's greatest figures. Here for the first time, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela told the extraordinary story of his life -- an epic of struggle, setback, renewed hope, and ultimate triumph.
In Business Stripped Bare, Sir Richard Branson shares the inside track on his life in business and reveals the incredible truth about his most risky, brilliant and audacious deals. Discover why Virgin tried to take on one of the world's biggest superbrands, how Virgin Mobile USA holds the record as the fastest company in history to generate revenues of over one billion dollars (faster than Microsoft, Google and Amazon) and how Richard is the only person in the world to have built eight billion-dollar companies from scratch in eight different sectors.
8). Elon Musk: Tesla , SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
In Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, veteran technology journalist Ashlee Vance provides the first inside look into the extraordinary life and times of Silicon Valley's most audacious entrepreneur. Written with exclusive access to Musk, his family and friends, the book traces the entrepreneur's journey from a rough upbringing in South Africa to the pinnacle of the global business world. Vance spent over 40 hours in conversation with Musk and interviewed close to 300 people to tell the tumultuous stories of Musk's world-changing companies: PayPal, Tesla Motors, SpaceX and SolarCity, and to characterize a man who has renewed American industry and sparked new levels of innovation while making plenty of enemies along the way.
9). Black Box Thinki ng: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes – But Some Do
Nobody wants to fail. But in highly complex organizations, success can happen only when we confront our mistakes, learn from our own version of a black box, and create a climate where it’s safe to fail.
Sun-Tzu is a landmark translation of the Chinese classic that is without a doubt one of the most important books of all time. Popularly known as The Art of War, Sun-Tzu is one of the leading books on strategic thinking ever written. While other books on strategy, wisdom, and philosophy come and go, both leaders and gentle contemplators alike have embraced the writings of Sun-tzu.
11). Zero to One: N otes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
If you want to build a better future, you must believe in secrets.
The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things.
12). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
One of the most inspiring and impactful books ever written, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has captivated readers for 25 years. It has transformed the lives of presidents and CEOs, educators and parents—in short, millions of people of all ages and occupations across the world. This twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Stephen Covey’s cherished classic commemorates his timeless wisdom, and encourages us to live a life of great and enduring purpose.
13). Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and
Author: W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
"Fantastic book! It really helps in taking your business to another level. The book challenge you to focus less on beating the competition and more on value-innovation to open up new and uncontested market space."
14). Profit First: A Simple System to Transform Any Business from a
Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine
Author of cult classics The Pumpkin Plan and The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur offers a simple, counterintuitive cash management solution that will help small businesses break out of the doom spiral and achieve instant profitability.
15). Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
Since it was first published almost fifteen years ago, David Allen’s Getting Things Done has become one of the most influential business books of its era, and the ultimate book on personal organization. “GTD” is now shorthand for an entire way of approaching professional and personal tasks, and has spawned an entire culture of websites, organizational tools, seminars, and offshoots.
16). Company One: W hy Staying Small is the Next Big Thing for
What if the real key to a richer and more fulfilling career was not to create and scale a new start-up, but rather, to be able to work for yourself, determine your own hours, and become a (highly profitable) and sustainable company of one? Suppose the better—and smarter—solution is simply to remain small? This book explains how to do just that.
17). Lean In: Woman, Wo rk, and the Will to Lead
In Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg reignited the conversation around women in the workplace.
Sandberg is chief operating officer of Facebook and coauthor of Option B with Adam Grant. In 2010, she gave an electrifying TED talk in which she described how women unintentionally hold themselves back in their careers. Her talk, which has been viewed more than six million times, encouraged women to “sit at the table,” seek challenges, take risks, and pursue their goals with gusto.
18). Tools of Tita ns: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires,
Icons, and World-Class Performers
The latest groundbreaking tome from Tim Ferriss, the #1 New York Times best-selling author of The 4-Hour Workweek.
19). Crushing it: How g reat Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and
Influence, and how you can, too
Four-time New York Times bestselling author Gary Vaynerchuk offers new lessons and inspiration drawn from the experiences of dozens of influencers and entrepreneurs who rejected the predictable corporate path in favor of pursuing their dreams by building thriving businesses and extraordinary personal brands.
20). The Power of Broke: How Empty Pockets, a Tight Budget and a
Hunger for Success can Become Your Greatest Competitive
The instant New York Times bestseller from Shark Tank star and Fubu Founder Daymond John on why starting a business on a limited budget can be an entrepreneur's greatest competitive advantage.
Daymond John has been practicing the power of broke ever since he started selling his home-sewn t-shirts on the streets of Queens. With a $40 budget, Daymond had to strategize out-of-the-box ways to promote his products. Luckily, desperation breeds innovation, and so he hatched an idea for a creative campaign that eventually launched the FUBU brand into a $6 billion dollar global phenomenon. But it might not have happened if he hadn’t started out broke - with nothing but hope and a ferocious drive to succeed by any means possible.
Advice from Gustaf Hellstedt: "If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room.”
