Here are five books I believe have the information to change your life in 2023 if you read them and apply the principles they contain. These are my top five picks of life-changing books out of the over 1,400 non-fiction books I’ve read over the past 30 years. These books show how to be a top competitor in any field through getting an edge through the right process, compounding, habits, and psychology.
If you stay open-minded and put these principles to work you could see dramatically better results in your life in 2023.
The Unfair Advantage: How You Already Have What It Takes to Succeed by Ash Ali
This book is about Unfair Advantages people have naturally or develop not just about your strengths. Strengths are what you’ll often read about in business and self-help books.
The unique thing about the Unfair Advantage concept in this book is that it also takes into account circumstances people find themselves in. Through the authors extensive experience, study, and observation of successful people, and as entrepreneurs themselves, they have identified five Unfair Advantages which comprise their MILES Framework.
The five categories of unfair advantages are:
- Money
- Intelligence and Insight
- Location and Luck
- Education and Expertise
- Status
Money
Money is the capital you have, or that you can easily raise from investors, friends, or family.
Intelligence and Insight
Intelligence and Insight includes “book smarts,” social and emotional intelligence, as well as creativity.
Location and Luck
Location and Luck is all about being in the right place at the right time doing the right thing.
Education and Expertise
Education and Expertise is both your formal education and your self-education, which gives you intellectual and technical know-how to do things, manage things, and get things completed from start to finish.
Status
Status is your social standing, your network, and connections. It’s your “personal brand”, how you’re perceived. It also includes your inner status, which is your self-confidence and self-esteem. This is your personal mental and social power.
You don’t need to have all of these unfair advantages to be a success. The best strategy is find business partners and life partners who have unfair advantages that complement your own. All of these advantages are built on the foundation of a growth mindset, the one you have the most control over and where you can create the most leverage for yourself.
I highly recommend this book for those who want to understand the unfair advantages they have now and learn to create new ones.
The Slight Edge: Turning Simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness by Jeff Olson
This books shows the power of both creating slight edges in different areas of your life or professional field and also how they can all work together to create a larger overall edge as they meet in a confluence to amplify positive results. This is the process for seeing how you can do things just a little better for yourself and also in a competitive advantage over others.
An edge is any advantage you have over others that improve the odds of positive results over time through being incrementally better at something.
If you want to both understand what an edge is an also create new ones, this is the book for you. It can change your life once you understand the concept of the slight edge.
The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success by Darren Hardy
This book explains how effort, results, habits, and capital compound on their self to create exponentially powerful returns in all areas of your life. The compound effect is one of the most powerful principles of success to understand for both capital growth and business growth but also apply to other areas of life like relationships and health.
It’s important for all of us to understand the compounding effect of both our good and bad habits have on or results in life and business. This book explains how we get not only the benefits of doing the right things but the residual positive compounding effects of the results of growth. This is a concept that can change how you approach life and getting results.
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg
This book shows the power of habits by revealing the science of how habits are created and why they work. This is one of the few books that explains how to create personal and social habits through historical examples and studies.
If you want a quantified scientific approach to habits this is a book that can change the way you think about habits and give you a system for creating the ones you want effectively with the right strategies.
Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One by Joe Dispenza
This book may be the only one you ever need on the psychology of success as it approaches the right way to think about goals, habits, and behavior. The author uses the principles of quantum physics to explain we are continuously collapsing possibilities into our realities by the way we think, feel, and act.
He explains that we create our reality through the confluence of our thoughts and feelings. If both our feelings and our thoughts are the same about something we manifest that reality through our decisions, whether it is on a conscious or subconscious level. The universe is primarily energy on a physical and subatomic level and we attract like energy based on our beliefs, words, and actions.
He explains the proper way to set goals is to speak in terms of already having and being what you desire. Having your thoughts match what your goals and feeling like your goals are already a reality is a powerful way to attract what you want to happen in your life.
Your goal shouldn’t be “I want to be a millionaire one day.”
Your reality should be “I am a millionaire.” You must also think like you are already a millionaire and feel like a millionaire. Your reality starts out internal and is then able to be reflected in your external world by the confluence of your thoughts, feelings, and actions creating the reality.
First you believe then you become.
Here are the Amazon links for the five books I recommend for a great 2023. Happy New Year.
