The books that rewired my brain

The month that I finished school, I developed an addiction. I discovered nonfiction. Over the next few years. I read hundreds of books and they completely changed the direction of my life. They reshaped what I studied, how I trained, how I worked, and eventually how I built my career and business. So in this video I want to share the ones that had the biggest impact, not the ones that sounded smart, but the ones that actually changed how I think and behave on a daily basis. And fair warning, the best book for you will depend on where you are right now. So before I give you the list, here’s the filter that are used to determine what’s worth reading. Looking back, every book that really mattered did one of two things. It either shifted a core belief that I held about the world or it changed something that I did every day.
If neither of those things happen, the knowledge is basically entertainment. So when I read, I follow curiosity ruthlessly. If something lights me up, I keep going, and if it doesn’t, I drop it because information is only valuable when you use it. But the coolest part about that is that when you find the book that hits the gap that you currently have, it is electric. You can literally feel your perspective updating in real time. It’s an addictive experience. That’s what you’re looking for with this list. So here are the ones that have done that for me. The first book that jumps to mind is the one that I maybe spent the most time reading, and that is The Moral Animal by Robert Wright. This book helped me stop seeing emotions as problems and start seeing them as natural responses to the environment around me. Ancient mechanisms trying to help me survive socially.
It’s pretty dense. So the next book I’ll give you is the Polar Opposite, and this is maybe the one I’ve read fastest cover to cover and that is anything you Want by Derek Sives. Before this, I thought that there was a correct way to build a career or business the way that you are supposed to do things, but reading it made me realise that I could just design it all around how I wanted to live my life. Now, these next two authors whose works I’ve completely demolished, you need to read at least one of their books each. The first is Seth Godin. I’d start with either linchpin or the Eucharist deception. These shattered a lot of my paradigms around my role in society and what I was actively choosing versus subconsciously accepting to do with my life. The Practise is another book that helped me massively with just showing up and doing the work long before expecting any results from it.
And a quick pause. You might notice that none of these books are about grit your teeth and grinding harder, but instead they all changed how I see what I’m doing. Now, the next author you’ve probably heard of, and if you haven’t, your world’s about to change. Now, SIM Nicholas Tale anti-Fragile is probably my favourite book by him, but they’re all worth reading. Taleb somehow made me see patterns from his career in trading that could be applied to everything from fitness to productivity to happiness. One example is the barbell principle, which is the idea that you want to sit on the extremes rather than in the middle. IE, very safe, reliable investments on one side with some on the complete other end of the spectrum designed for exposure to volatility and a high potential upside. Same can be applied to fitness. If you’re on a great body doing extremely heavy high intensity strength training, and then the rest of your time resting and doing low intensity exercise like walking, that results in a much healthier, better looking body than sitting in the middle being an endurance athlete running marathons all the time.
What I love about these principles is that once you see the world this way, you can’t unsee it. And if you’ve ever wondered why my training advice sounds so different to mainstream fitness, this is the sort of thinking that underpins it. Tale is great, but I’ll talk later about the author that I come back to more than anyone else, the one that has had the single greatest impact on my mental health and day-to-day happiness. Now at this point, I feel I need to throw back to three classics from early in my personal development journey. The first seemed pretty uninteresting to me when I first read it, but when I finally applied it in the last few years, my life changed fast and irreversibly and that is Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. This is what got me started on regular goal visualisation and I cannot overstate the power of doing this as a practise.
I go through mine in this video. The next is a business classic with seven habits of highly Effective People. I think there are seven good takeaways in this, but for me that came down to being crystal clear on the outcome that you’re working towards in any pursuit, even if it changes and realising that tasks are not weighted equally. When you prioritise what matters most often the rest becomes irrelevant. And the final of these three classics, I think is the easiest of wins that you could possibly have reading a book. And that’s How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. I think this should just be a must read for everyone because if you’re not doing this stuff, then you’re honestly just making life harder for yourself than it needs to be. A lot of this stuff makes sense yet so many of us just don’t do it.
And again, when you apply this stuff, it is incredible how much more magnetic it makes you as a person. I credit a lot of my fantastic friendships to my application of the principles in this book from an early age, for example, it showed me the true importance of not criticising, condemn, condemning or complaining. The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it. There’s plenty more in there. Read the book. It’s crazy how all these’s ideas written decades ago can be still so far ahead of how most people live today. Easy wins. Okay, let’s shift gears a bit. There’s an author who has massively influenced my approach to productivity in study and in work, and that’s Cal Newport. Deep Work is great. What’s hit me really hard recently was Slow Productivity. This book talks all about doing fewer things and working at a more natural pace.
Deep work is all about time blocking, distraction free time, and protecting your attention. Basically, Cal helped me realise that productivity is not about speed. It’s about creating space for quality thinking. Funny thing, almost every great book here arrives at the same message. Do less focus deeply, stick with it, trust your judgement . You might be starting to see where my fitness philosophy comes from here. By the way, if you want the full book list plus the exact additions and my notes on each, I’ve put it together in a simple PDF. You can download that for free using the link below. Now, this next one might sound a bit woowoo, but remember before I said there was an author that had shaped my wellbeing more than anyone else. This is him. I think the value per word from this guy is unmatched by anything else in written history, and it’s because he has this incredible power to convey something that literally can’t be understood by the mind.
And that is Eckhart Tolle, both the Power of now and a New Earth. You read five minutes of this stuff and it changes your entire perspective. It’s like some spiritual therapy I can’t even describe. The short story is that we only ever have the present moment, past and future don’t exist. So stop living there and you suddenly relieve yourself of huge amounts of burden and suffering that just aren’t necessary. I cannot do it justice in a quick summary, but nothing has improved my day-to-day quality of life, more than toll’s work. Give it a chance. Now, the next book is one that I’m going to start gifting to everyone. It keeps coming up in conversation because it’s another easy read, super short but brilliant. And that is Ignore Everybody by Humour Cloud. This book was basically the kick in the shin. I needed to just trust my gut and keep going because if you get stuck listening to other people, you’ll never do anything unique.
And that is what makes important work so difficult, but all the more worth doing. And in the same vein, the final author I’ll give you who is just blown my mind is Steven Pressfield. For anyone pursuing anything creative, be that business or art or writing or content creation or music, please read the War of Art because this is the mindset. Before I thought the procrastination meant something was wrong with me, but this book showed me that the resistance I felt to doing the important work would always be there no matter what I was creating or how good I got at it. And it finally gave the enemy a name and that was powerful for me. It is your job as a creative to wake up every day and go to war. That’s the war of art. Okay, and the final book that I’ll recommend is very different to the rest and it’s the only fitness specific one I feel is worth mentioning.
For those of you who want more background on flexibility, this is basically where I learned everything I know, which have become some of my most popular videos on YouTube. That is stretching scientifically by Thomas Kerrs. Basically, this taught me that you need to contract hard in the end ranges of motion to build more range of motion. And that’s how I went and got flexible in a few months, about 10 years ago. Okay, they’re the big ones. I’m going to do a quickfire round of honourable mentions. If you see anything you like, screenshot it. The Courage to be disliked, indestructible, essentialism, the four Hour Work Week, awaken the giant within the power of thinking big. The one thing, one idea applied at the right time can redirect the next decade of your life. That’s what these books did for me. Find the one that hits you hardest right now and actually use it because lots of people read, very few people apply, and that’s the difference between the people that get the results they want and those who stay the same. If there are books that have given you the same sort of epiphanies or changed your trajectory, I would love to hear them in the comments. Thanks for watching. As always. I’ll speak soon.