Books


What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars

By: Jim Paul & Brendan Moynihan

Jim Paul’s meteoric rise took him from a small town in Northern Kentucky to governor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, yet he lost it all―his fortune, his reputation, and his job―in one fatal attack of excessive economic hubris. In this honest, frank analysis, Paul and Brendan Moynihan revisit the events that led to Paul’s disastrous decision and examine the psychological factors behind bad financial practices in several economic sectors.

This book―winner of a 2014 Axiom Business Book award gold medal―begins with the unbroken string of successes that helped Paul achieve a jet-setting lifestyle and land a key spot with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. It then describes the circumstances leading up to Paul’s $1.6 million loss and the essential lessons he learned from it―primarily that, although there are as many ways to make money in the markets as there are people participating in them, all losses come from the same few sources.

Investors lose money in the markets either because of errors in their analysis or because of psychological barriers preventing the application of analysis. While all analytical methods have some validity and make allowances for instances in which they do not work, psychological factors can keep an investor in a losing position, causing him to abandon one method for another in order to rationalize the decisions already made. Paul and Moynihan’s cautionary tale includes strategies for avoiding loss tied to a simple framework for understanding, accepting, and dodging the dangers of investing, trading, and speculating.

The 4-Hour Workweek

Escape 9-5,  Live Anywhere, & Join the New Rich

By: Timothy Ferriss

Forget the old concept of retirement and the rest of the deferred-life plan–there is no need to wait and every reason not to, especially in unpredictable economic times. Whether your dream is escaping the rat race, experiencing high-end world travel, earning a monthly five-figure income with zero management, or just living more and working less, The 4-Hour Workweek is the blueprint.

This step-by-step guide to luxury lifestyle design teaches:
•How Tim went from $40,000 per year and 80 hours per week to $40,000 per month and 4 hours per week
•How to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want
•How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs
•How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of a forgotten Italian economist
•How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and frequent “mini-retirements”

 

The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

By: Don Miguel Ruiz

In The Four Agreements, bestselling author don Miguel Ruiz reveals the source of self-limiting beliefs that rob us of joy and create needless suffering. Based on ancient Toltec wisdom, The Four Agreements offer a powerful code of conduct that can rapidly transform our lives to a new experience of freedom, true happiness, and love.

• A New York Times bestseller for over 8 years
• Over 6 million copies sold in the U.S.

The Power of Vulnerability

By: Brené Brown

Is vulnerability the same as weakness? “In our culture,” teaches Dr. Brené Brown, “we associate vulnerability with emotions we want to avoid such as fear, shame, and uncertainty. Yet we too often lose sight of the fact that vulnerability is also the birthplace of joy, belonging, creativity, authenticity, and love.” On The Power of Vulnerability, Dr. Brown offers an invitation and a promise – that when we dare to drop the armor that protects us from feeling vulnerable, we open ourselves to the experiences that bring purpose and meaning to our lives. Here she dispels the cultural myth that vulnerability is weakness and reveals that it is, in truth, our most accurate measure of courage.

“The Power of Vulnerability is a very personal project for me,” Brené explains. “This is the first place that all of my work comes together. This audio course draws from all three of my books – it’s the culmination of everything I’ve learned over the past twelve years. I’m very excited to weave it all into a truly comprehensive form that shows what these findings and insights can mean in our lives.”

Ego is the Enemy

By: Ryan Holiday

Many of us insist the main impediment to a full, successful life is the outside world. In fact, the most common enemy lies within: our ego. Early in our careers, it impedes learning and the cultivation of talent. With success, it can blind us to our faults and sow future problems. In failure, it magnifies each blow and makes recovery more difficult. At every stage, ego holds us back.

Ego Is the Enemy draws on a vast array of stories and examples, from literature to philosophy to his­tory. We meet fascinating figures such as George Marshall, Jackie Robinson, Katharine Graham, Bill Belichick, and Eleanor Roosevelt, who all reached the highest levels of power and success by con­quering their own egos. Their strategies and tactics can be ours as well.

The Obstacle is the Way

By: Ryan Holiday

The book draws its inspiration from stoicism, the ancient Greek philosophy of enduring pain or adversity with perseverance and resilience. Stoics focus on the things they can control, let go of everything else, and turn every new obstacle into an opportunity to get better, stronger, tougher. As Marcus Aurelius put it nearly 2000 years ago: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

Ryan Holiday shows us how some of the most successful people in history—from John D. Rockefeller to Amelia Earhart to Ulysses S. Grant to Steve Jobs—have applied stoicism to overcome difficult or even impossible situations. Their embrace of these principles ultimately mattered more than their natural intelligence, talents, or luck.

Mindset

By: Carol Dweck

World-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck, in decades of research on achievement and success, has discovered a truly groundbreaking idea—the power of our mindset.

Dweck explains why it’s not just our abilities and talent that bring us success—but whether we approach them with a fixed or growth mindset. She makes clear why praising intelligence and ability doesn’t foster self-esteem and lead to accomplishment, but may actually jeopardize success. With the right mindset, we can motivate our kids and help them to raise their grades, as well as reach our own goals—personal and professional. Dweck reveals what all great parents, teachers, CEOs, and athletes already know: how a simple idea about the brain can create a love of learning and a resilience that is the basis of great accomplishment in every area.

Meditations

By: Marcus Aurelius

One of the world’s most famous and influential books, Meditations, by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121–180), incorporates the stoic precepts he used to cope with his life as a warrior and administrator of an empire. Ascending to the imperial throne in A.D. 161, Aurelius found his reign beset by natural disasters and war. In the wake of these challenges, he set down a series of private reflections, outlining a philosophy of commitment to virtue above pleasure and tranquility above happiness.

Influence: Science and Practice

The Power of Story

By: Dr. Jim Loehr

In his groundbreaking new book, Dr. Jim Loehr, New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Power of Full Engagement, examines the way we tell stories about ourselves to ourselves — and, most important, the way we can change those stories to transform our business and personal lives.

“Your story is your life,” says Loehr. As human beings, we continually tell ourselves stories — of success or failure; of power or victimhood; stories that endure for an hour, or a day, or an entire lifetime. We have stories about our work, our families and relationships, our health; about what we want and what we’re capable of achieving. Yet, while our stories profoundly affect how others see us and we see ourselves, too few of us even recognize that we’re telling stories, or what they are, or that we can change them — and, in turn, transform our very destinies.

The Power of Full Engagement

By: Dr. Jim Loehr

The Magic of Thinking Big

This groundbreaking New York Times bestseller has helped hundreds of thousands of people at work and at home balance stress and recovery and sustain high performance despite crushing workloads and 24/7 demands on their time. “Combines the gritty toughmindedness of the best coaches with the gentle-but-insistent inspiration of the most effective spiritual advisers” (Fast Company).

Getting Past No: Negotiating with Difficult People

By: William Ury

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 coworker?

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!

Secrets of Power Negotiating

By: Roger Dawson

Roger Dawson’s Secrets of Power Negotiating has changed the way American business thinks about negotiating. Thinking “win-win”–looking for that magical third solution in which everyone wins but nobody loses–can be a naive and ultimately unsuccessful approach in today’s tough business environment. Power Negotiating teaches that the way you negotiate can get you everything you want and still convince the other side that they won also.

The Art of Learning

By: Josh Waitzkin

In his riveting new book, The Art of Learning, Waitzkin tells his remarkable story of personal achievement and shares the principles of learning and performance that have propelled him to the top—twice.

Josh Waitzkin knows what it means to be at the top of his game. A public figure since winning his first National Chess Championship at the age of nine, Waitzkin was catapulted into a media whirlwind as a teenager when his father’s book Searching for Bobby Fischer was made into a major motion picture. After dominating the scholastic chess world for ten years, Waitzkin expanded his horizons, taking on the martial art Tai Chi Chuan and ultimately earning the title of World Champion. How was he able to reach the pinnacle of two disciplines that on the surface seem so different? “I’ve come to realize that what I am best at is not Tai Chi, and it is not chess,” he says. “What I am best at is the art of learning.”

Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

By: Rolf Potts

With a new foreword by Tim Ferriss • There’s nothing like vagabonding: taking time off from your normal life—from six weeks to four months to two years—to discover and experience the world on your own terms. In this one-of-a-kind handbook, veteran travel writer Rolf Potts explains how anyone armed with an independent spirit can achieve the dream of extended overseas travel.

Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help Not Hype

By: Jay Baer

The difference between helping and selling is just two letters, but those two letters make all the difference.

What if – faced with more competition than ever before – you stopped trying to be amazing, and just started being useful?

Jay Baer’s Youtility offers a new business approach that cuts through the clut­ter: marketing that is truly, inherently useful. If you sell something, you make a customer today, but if you genuinely help someone, you create a customer for life.

The 4-Hour Body

By: Timothy Ferriss

The 4-Hour Body is the result of an obsessive quest, spanning more than a decade, to hack the human body. It contains the collective wisdom of hundreds of elite athletes, dozens of MDs, and thousands of hours of jaw-dropping personal experimentation. From Olympic training centers to black-market laboratories, from Silicon Valley to South Africa, Tim Ferriss, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek, fixated on one life-changing question:

For all things physical, what are the tiniest changes that produce the biggest results?

The 4-Hour Chef

By: Timothy Ferriss

The 4-Hour Chef isn’t just a cookbook. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure guide to the world of rapid learning.

#1 New York Times bestselling author (and lifelong non-cook) Tim Ferriss takes you from Manhattan to Okinawa, and from Silicon Valley to Calcutta, unearthing the secrets of the world’s fastest learners and greatest chefs. Ferriss uses cooking to explain “meta-learning,” a step-by-step process that can be used to master anything, whether searing steak or shooting 3-pointers in basketball. That is the real “recipe” of The 4-Hour Chef.

You’ll train inside the kitchen for everything outside the kitchen. Featuring tips and tricks from chess prodigies, world-renowned chefs, pro athletes, master sommeliers, super models, and everyone in between, this “cookbook for people who don’t buy cookbooks” is a guide to mastering cooking and life.

The Mental Game of Poker: Proven Strategies for Improving Tilt Control, Confidence, Motivation, Coping with Variance, and More.

The mental game may be more important in poker than in any other form of competition. It’s one of the only games in the world where you can play perfectly and lose-again and again. Hundreds of poker players have turned to mental game coach Jared Tendler’s revolutionary approach to help them play their best, no matter how badly they’re running. In this book you’ll find simple, step-by-step instructions and proven techniques to permanently fix problems such as tilt, handling variance, emotional control, confidence, fear, and motivation. With the games getting tougher, now is the time to take these problems head on.
*Discover the most definitive work on tilt ever released.

The Poker Mindset: Essential Attitudes for Poker Success

The Poker Mindset has transformed the games of tens of thousands of poker players becoming one of the most popular poker books of all-time. The success of the book quickly spread around the world and is currently translated in eight different languages. Are you ready to look at poker in a different way and transform your own game? What “secret” separates top poker players from poker wannabes? Is it zen-like mind-reading skills, a computer-like brain or thousands of hours of play? No. It is a series of established approaches and behaviors that enables these experts to bring their “A” game to the table session after session, regardless of short-term results. In this groundbreaking book, Taylor and Hilger lay bare the secrets of the Poker Mindset: seven core attitudes and concepts that ensure you have the optimal emotional, psychological, and behavioral framework for playing superior poker. The Poker Mindset deeply explores vital topics that most poker books only touch upon: – Tilt: What it really is, why and when you are most prone to it, and how you can avoid it. – Bankroll: A complete examination of bankroll management from a technical, but more importantly, from a psychological and emotional viewpoint. – Opponents: How to determine your competitors’ mental and emotional processes so that you can dominate, out think and outplay them. – Downswings: Every poker player experiences them, but you will truly understand and be armed against low ebbs when they occur. – Bad Beats: The Poker Mindset will enable you to overcome the trauma of bad beats and losing big pots. Poker is a fun game, but it is even more fun when you win. The Poker Mindset may be the most valuable poker book you will ever read. Embrace its concepts and you can overcome the unseen obstacles that are limiting your success at the table. When you make the Poker Mindset your mindset, you will take control of your game and walk away a winner.

Elements of Poker

Beyond statistics, beyond whether to raise, call, or fold, Elements of Poker reveals a new world of profitability for your bankroll and your life. You know tilt costs you money, but do you know how to make it go away? You know position is important, but do you know how to cash in that knowledge? Elements of Poker will teach you all of this and much more. Published in 2007, Elements of poker has been extremely well-received by the poker community for its fresh perspective, grand scope, humor, insight, and tilt reduction teachings. Tommy Angelo is a top tier poker coach, poker writer, and philosopher. Join professional, winning poker players like Phil Galfond, Ed Miller, Simon Munz, Lee Jones, and David Benefield in reading the book that Jay Rosenkrantz calls the best poker book ever.