Turning Pro


Steven Pressfield - 2012
    In the War of Art Pressfield identifies the enemy to living an authentic life – resistance. In Turning Pro, Pressfield teaches you how to defeat it.

Don't Bullsh*t Yourself!: Crush the Excuses That Are Holding You Back


Jon Taffer - 2018
    Excuses are the root cause of nearly every business and personal problem, but fortunately, Jon knows how to fix your excuse habit for good.This book is almost as good as having Jon in your face on Bar Rescue, telling you the hard truths you've been avoiding. Don't Bullsh*t Yourself! is Jon Taffer's brutally honest, no-nonsense guide to help you kick those excuses to the curb. If you can stop bullsh*tting yourself and address your real issues, you will gain the power to turn your life around completely.Taffer breaks excuses down into six major categories, illustrating them with real-life examples such as Marcus Luttrell, the lone survivor of a SEAL team mission in Afghanistan who barely escaped Taliban territory, and Christine King, founder and CEO of Your Best Fit, who, despite being paralyzed in a horrific boating accident, went on to build a successful fitness company. These inspiring stories, combined with Taffer's own experiences, will give you the confidence to identify and face your own excuses head-on.It's Taffer Time! Time to stop bullsh*tting yourself and start crushing it!

The Desire Map


Danielle LaPorte - 2012
    Which is valuable. Getting results is what moves your life forward. Except that most goal-setting systems fail to harness the most powerful driver behind any aspiration: your preferred feelings; and they foster an uptight determination that can keep us from the vitality we crave.The Desire Map program is changing all of that. You could call it holistic life-planning. The inner meets the outer. The spirit drives the material.The purpose of The Desire Map is: - Ultimately, to help you remember your light, your true nature, your source. - To show you your heart’s longing — your core desired - feelings. - To help you use your core desired feelings as a guidance system for making choices. - To help you use your desired feelings as a way to access comfort and clarity during painful times. - To help you accentuate the positive aspects of your life, while still honouring, and not invalidating, the negative parts that you want to change. - To help you regard your feelings as road signs to your Soul.So that you can: - Plan your day, your week, your month, your year and… - Feel great, making a lot of awesome things happen in every area your life.

Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing


Po Bronson - 2013
    Beyond their bestselling books, you know them from commentary and features in the New York Times, CNN, NPR, Time, Newsweek, Wired, New York, and more. E-mail, Facebook, and Twitter accounts are filled with demands to read their reporting (such as "How Not to Talk to Your Kids," "Creativity Crisis," and "Losing Is Good for You"). In Top Dog, Bronson and Merryman again use their astonishing blend of science and storytelling to reveal what's truly in the heart of a champion. The joy of victory and the character-building agony of defeat. Testosterone and the neuroscience of mistakes. Why rivals motivate. How home field advantage gets you a raise. What teamwork really requires. It's baseball, the SAT, sales contests, and Linux. How before da Vinci and FedEx were innovators, first, they were great competitors. Olympians carry Top Dog in their gym bags. It's in briefcases of Wall Street traders and Madison Avenue madmen. Risk takers from Silicon Valley to Vegas race to implement its ideas, as educators debate it in halls of academia. Now see for yourself what this game-changing talk is all about.

Rules for a Knight


Ethan Hawke - 2015
    In a series of ruminations on solitude, humility, forgiveness, honesty, courage, grace, pride, and patience, he draws on the ancient teachings of Eastern and Western philosophy, and on the great spiritual and political writings of our time. His intent: to give his children a compass for a journey they will have to make alone, a short guide to what gives life meaning and beauty.

Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day


Jake Knapp - 2018
    Why? In a world where information refreshes endlessly and the workday feels like a race to react to other people's priorities faster, frazzled and distracted has become our default position. But what if the exhaustion of constant busyness wasn't mandatory? What if you could step off the hamster wheel and start taking control of your time and attention? That's what this book is about. As creators of Google Ventures' renowned "design sprint," Jake and John have helped hundreds of teams solve important problems by changing how they work. Building on the success of these sprints and their experience designing ubiquitous tech products from Gmail to YouTube, they spent years experimenting with their own habits and routines, looking for ways to help people optimize their energy, focus, and time. Now they've packaged the most effective tactics into a four-step daily framework that anyone can use to systematically design their days. Make Time is not a one-size-fits-all formula. Instead, it offers a customizable menu of bite-size tips and strategies that can be tailored to individual habits and lifestyles. Make Time isn't about productivity, or checking off more to-dos. Nor does it propose unrealistic solutions like throwing out your smartphone or swearing off social media. Making time isn't about radically overhauling your lifestyle; it's about making small shifts in your environment to liberate yourself from constant busyness and distraction. A must-read for anyone who has ever thought, If only there were more hours in the day..., Make Time will help you stop passively reacting to the demands of the modern world and start intentionally making time for the things that matter.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard


Chip Heath - 2010
    Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems - the rational mind and the emotional mind - that compete for control. The rational mind wants a great beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie. The rational mind wants to change something at work; the emotional mind loves the comfort of the existing routine. This tension can doom a change effort - but if it is overcome, change can come quickly.In Switch, the Heaths show how everyday people - employees and managers, parents and nurses - have united both minds and, as a result, achieved dramatic results:- The lowly medical interns who managed to defeat an entrenched, decades-old medical practice that was endangering patients (see page 242)- The home-organizing guru who developed a simple technique for overcoming the dread of housekeeping (see page 130)- The manager who transformed a lackadaisical customer-support team into service zealots by removing a standard tool of customer service (see page 199)In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change. Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.

Find Your Pleasure: The Art of Living a More Joyful Life


Cynthia Loyst - 2020
    Live: Uncover the beauty of everyday moments, celebrate family and friends, find fun and satisfaction in your workdays, and enjoy the immense rewards parenting has to offer—all while being mindful of taking care of yourself. Love: Cynthia reveals everything from learning to enjoy your body more, ways to feel intimate and communicate effectively with your partner, and the keys to having better sex. Inspire: Find out how to let your creative self bloom, seek out exciting new pathways in life, and let kindness guide you with Cynthia’s tips and tricks for mastering mindfulness and meditation. Through her insightful anecdotes, Cynthia empowers women to revel in all of life’s joys, even the messy ones. Filled with beautiful color photographs, Find Your Pleasure is a treat for the soul that you can devour in one go or savor in tiny bites.

Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge


Terence McKenna - 1992
    Illustrated.

Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness


Jon Kabat-Zinn - 1990
    (The somewhat confusing title is from a line in Zorba the Greek in which the title character refers to the ups and downs of family life as "the full catastrophe.") But this book is also a terrific introduction for anyone who has considered meditating but was afraid it would be too difficult or would include religious practices they found foreign. Kabat-Zinn focuses on "mindfulness," a concept that involves living in the moment, paying attention, and simply "being" rather than "doing." While you can practice anything "mindfully," from taking a walk to cleaning your house, Kabat-Zinn presents several meditation techniques that focus the attention most clearly, whether it's on a simple phrase, your breathing, or various parts of your body. The book goes into detail about how hospital patients have either improved their health or simply come to feel better despite their illness by using these techniques, but these meditations can help anyone deal with stress and gain a calmer outlook on life. "When we use the word healing to describe the experiences of people in the stress clinic, what we mean above all is that they are undergoing a profound transformation of view," Kabat-Zinn writes. "Out of this shift in perspective comes an ability to act with greater balance and inner security in the world." --Ben Kallenreissue 2005

The Relationship Cure: A 5 Step Guide to Strengthening Your Marriage, Family, and Friendships


John M. Gottman - 2001
    . . . John Gottman has decoded the subtle secrets that can either enrich or destroy the quality of our ties with others.” Daniel B. Wile, Ph.D., author of After the Fight: Using Your Disagreements to Build a Stronger Relationship“John Gottman is our leading explorer of the inner world of relationships. In The Relationship Cure, he has found gold once again.”William J. Doherty, Ph.D., author of Take Back Your Marriage: Sticking Together in a World That Pulls Us Apart“When he says his five steps will help you build better connections with the people you care about, you know that they have been demonstrated to work.” E. Mavis Heatherington, Ph.D., professor of psychology, University of VirginiaFrom the country’s foremost relationship expert and New York Times bestselling author Dr. John M. Gottman comes a powerful, simple five-step program, based on twenty years of innovative research, for greatly improving all of the relationships in your life—with spouses and lovers, children, siblings, and even your colleagues at work. In The Relationship Cure, Dr. Gottman:* Reveals the key elements of healthy relationships, emphasizing the importance of what he calls “emotional connection”* Introduces the powerful new concept of the emotional “bid,” the fundamental unit of emotional connection* Provides remarkably empowering tools for improving the way you bid for emotional connection and how you respond to others’ bids

Crazy Busy Beautiful: Beauty Secrets for Getting Gorgeous Fast


Carmindy - 2010
    From Carmindy, the make-up artist of TLC’s #1 rated show What Not to Wear and the bestselling author of The 5-Minute Face, comes Crazy Busy Beautiful: an invaluable guide with more than 597 secret beauty tricks for busy women everywhere.

A Year of Living Kindly: Choices That Will Change Your Life and the World Around You


Donna Cameron - 2018
    Being kind when we don’t feel like it, or when all of our buttons are being pushed, is hard. But that’s also when it’s most needed; that’s when it can defuse anger and even violence, when it can restore civility in our personal and virtual interactions. Kindness has the power to profoundly change our relationships with other people and with ourselves. It can, in fact, change the world. In A Year of Living Kindly—using stories, observation, humor, and summaries of expert research—Donna Cameron shares her experience committing to 365 days of practicing kindness. She presents compelling research into the myriad benefits of kindness, including health, wealth, longevity, improved relationships, and personal and business success. She explores what a kind life entails, and what gets in the way of it. And she provides practical and experiential suggestions for how each of us can strengthen our kindness muscle so choosing a life of kindness becomes ever easier and more natural. An inspiring, practical guide that can help any reader make a commitment to kindness, A Year of Living Kindly shines a light on how we can create a better, safer, and more just world—and how you can be part of that transformation.

Powers Of The Mind


Vivekananda - 1976
    

The Dichotomy of Leadership: Balancing the Challenges of Extreme Ownership to Lead and Win


Jocko Willink - 2018
    With their first book, Extreme Ownership (published in October 2015), Jocko Willink and Leif Babin set a new standard for leadership, challenging readers to become better leaders, better followers, and better people, in both their professional and personal lives. Now, in THE DICHOTOMY OF LEADERSHIP, Jocko and Leif dive even deeper into the unchartered and complex waters of a concept first introduced in Extreme Ownership: finding balance between the opposing forces that pull every leader in different directions. Here, Willink and Babin get granular into the nuances that every successful leader must navigate. Mastering the Dichotomy of Leadership requires understanding when to lead and when to follow; when to aggressively maneuver and when to pause and let things develop; when to detach and let the team run and when to dive into the details and micromanage. In addition, every leader must:· Take Extreme Ownership of everything that impacts their mission, yet utilize Decentralize Command by giving ownership to their team. · Care deeply about their people and their individual success and livelihoods, yet look out for the good of the overall team and above all accomplish the strategic mission. · Exhibit the most important quality in a leader—humility, but also be willing to speak up and push back against questionable decisions that could hurt the team and the mission.With examples from the authors’ combat and training experiences in the SEAL teams, and then a demonstration of how each lesson applies to the business world, Willink and Babin clearly explain THE DICHOTOMY OF LEADERSHIP—skills that are mission-critical for any leader and any team to achieve their ultimate goal: VICTORY.