Psychology books can change your life

That's right, Alan Sugar and Richard Branson became who they became by sitting in their bedrooms with their eyes closed, visualising, praying to God, walking and breathing, eating 'green foods' that vibrate at certain frequencies (ah the good old vibrating broccoli), making lists of goals: short medium and long term and of course the unrealistic 'plan' of how to achieve them:

.................... ...........

What will build the confidence and get you to where you want to be? Getting of your backside and DOING IT. Want confidence? DO IT You see? Nike were right all along. The Irish Nike 'Just feckin' do it'.

Excellent comment and good advice.
 
Firstly I don't believe you can change your psychological make up 'just like that'. It's taken your whole life to make YOU and reading a book isn't going to change it.

I agree with you, it's step by step process. Hard process.

P.s Sorry don't have time right now to read your post, but all do this tomorrow.

Best wishes
Josef
 
I think those will be very helpful! I wanna see "How to Win Friends and Influence People. A self-help book about interpersonal relations and how to succeed." I bet this will help me.lol! Thanks for sharing!
 
hey all

a great thread............shame it stalled..........I'm an avid reader of self help and self improvement and business books ..........and most in this thread are in the bookshelf

Eased off these days as contemporary authors are regurgitating the same stuff but with modern settings and technology slants

"Feel the fear" was a good one for me to say Stuff it and try the things I thought I could never do........Dale Carnegy is the Daddy in whatever he Wrote ..........Antony Robbins (good for energising yourself but I can only stand so much of him).........

Rich dad poor dad...........first book was ok and and interesting refresher for me on resource allocation and distribution.....but by book 700 and the 900th T-Shirt - spare me !

if i can think of other decent authors i'll drop them in ......

I actually like Derren Brown as he challenges a lot of preconceptions that keep me off balance and therefore always ready to challenge the norm .........

the 80/20 principle was good......Koch...and his follow up to do with power laws

N
 
I am reading Mindset, by Dr Carol Dweck.

It's based on the idea that we are either fixed mindset or flexible/growth mindset.
We either believe in innate talent, or in constant improvement.

Studies (!) show children improve when you praise them for the "effort" they put into something rather than praise them for their "ability".

It goes like this: if you praise ability, they start to believe they have innate talent, and any success is a reflection of it. Once they try something too difficult and fail, they start to question their talent, fear they don't have any, and restrict themselves to their comfort zone.
Then, anything they subsequently do is an attempt to recapture their old success.
This innate talent becomes what defines them, and their sense of worth.
(think of kids who are "good at school/college", but suddenly find themselves mediocre at university, surrounded by other clever kids.)

The other side is the effort aspect. If you praise effort, they believe that effort was the source of your success. If you try a more difficult challenge, and fail, you believe that greater effort is needed to succeed. You don't identify yourself with the failure, only that more training is needed.
There are some good chapters on sports
(Golfers who were talented, but never fulfilled themselves because they couldnt cope when they didnt win a championship. And those who failed, but went on to train harder and win the next year.

Tennis: It cites John MacEnroe as fixed mindset. He always blamed external reasons for his failures. He thought his talent was enough. So he never really grew as a more rounded player.)

There are chapters on business:
CEOs who believed their talent was all, and used the success of the companies to express their talent. But, when things dont go their way, they start blaming their execs, firing them, and subsequently losing the company. eg, lee Iacocca, and the Enron CEOs.
Those CEOs who simply ran businesses and didnt think it was what defined them were most likely to invest in new ideas and concepts. Kroger supermarkets (US), etc.

I agree with TheBramble, most self-help books can be summed up in just a few sentences.
Their utility is questionable. But they pass the time.

I must check up on the 80/20 thing. Sounds interesting.
Has anyone read "The Power of Now"? (Eckhard Tolle)
 
the whole thing with self-development books is what you make of them, and it totally depends on you what you take from them.

for me personally, I've been involved in reading self-development books for 5-6 years now and it has helped me a lot, in becoming more organised, more productive, having a better life attitude overall, having more self-confidence in my abilities etc.

The thing is, usually every self-help book comes with a list of "instructions" or to-dos. If you don't do them, of course you won't get results.

There was a book, I can't remember the name now, about becoming a millionaire by the time you retire.
In a gist, its to-do list was pretty simple and straightforward:
- every time you receive your salary, pay yourself first, that means putting 10% for example in a retirement fund/mutual fund/whatever
- second step: get out of debt, slowly but surely
- stop wasting money on stupid things: bottled water at the office ( don't you have a water tank in the office ? ), buying sandwich for breakfast at work (don't have 10 minutes to make your own sandwich ?)

yes, it's that simple. by compounding, if you invest 10% of your salary or whatever perecentage(based on your income) /month, by the time you want to retire, you will have $1million in savings.

Yet, how many people actually do this ? most people live paycheck to paycheck....
 
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