So on this channel, in the past,

we have done several book recommendation videos.

I enjoy doing these things.

I know you guys really like them.

So today, we're going to do another one

that's gonna be six books that changed my life personally.

Now, these six books aren't gonna be books

that I think are the best reads in the world,

but they are books that had at least one idea,

but in most cases more,

that actually changed the trajectory of my life

or the way that I act or think on a daily basis.

And as you can see from this stack of books here,

there are only three print books

and one iPad sitting on top of the stack

because I do own some of these digitally.

So, with that being said, let's get into my list here,

starting with one of the books that I own digitally,

which is The Motivation Hacker

by an author named Nick Winter.

So this is probably the book on my list

that is the least well known,

but it had a huge impact on my life.

One of the main concepts that I remember from that book

was the idea of success spirals.

This is a term that encapsulates

one of the fundamental truths in habit building,

which is that you have to start small

before you can do something big.

And a lot of people don't understand this.

They make New Year's resolutions like

I'm gonna work out every single day

from now until infinity.

And what Nick Winter says to do in the book instead

is to start with a goal that you can track,

that doesn't demand absolute perfection,

and that is at your level.

But, to be honest, the part of that book

that really changed my life

was the part that talks about a concept

called pre-commitment and the examples from his own life

on how he used it to achieve some pretty big goals.

Essentially, the idea of pre-commitment means

that you set up consequences that are gonna happen

if you fail to do something that you set out to do.

And one of my favorite YouTubers, Boyinaband,

calls this a threat bet,

which I think is a fantastic name of the concept.

In the book, the author talks about two different goals

that he was having a lot of trouble achieving.

One was skydiving, because he was very afraid to do it,

and the other one, ironically, was finishing the book,

The Motivation Hacker, itself.

So what he did to achieve both of those goals

was that he set up those threat bets.

He used a tool called Beeminder,

which is a habit tracker that actually has you bet money,

which we'd pay to the company

if you fail to be consistent on your habits.

And he went hard core with his Beeminder goals.

He took half of his wealth for each goal.

I think he had $14,000 to his name at the time,

so he bet $7,000 that he would write a certain amount

every single day for the book,

and he also bet $7,000 that he would go skydiving.

And wouldn't you know it,

he both went skydiving and finished the book

and did not lose $14,000.

And that is the thing that really changed my life.

I read about Beeminder and I told myself

that is what I am going to use

to take my work professionally.

Because up until then, I had sort of viewed my business

and my blog, College Info Geek,

as sort of like a side project.

I wasn't being very disciplined about it

and, as a result, my business had kind of plateaued

for about a year and a half.

So after I read that book,

I went and I signed up for Beeminder

and I told myself I was going to put out one blog post

and one podcast episode every single week,

otherwise, I was going to lose money on Beeminder.

And, as a result, my business actually started to grow.

Wouldn't you know it?

Putting consistent effort on a day-to-day basis

actually causes things to happen,

and the threat of losing money

was the catalyst for that change in my life.

All right, book number two on my list,

which is a much, much more famous book,

is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.

Now this is probably the most well-known

personal development book

in the history of personal development books,

and a lot of you have probably read it,

but I do want to share a couple lessons

that really did make a pretty big impact on my life.

First and foremost was the book's advice

to seek first to understand and then to be understood.

A lot of us have this problem where,

when we are listening to somebody,

we're really just kind of formulating our response

and waiting to give it

rather than really trying to understand

what the other person is saying.

And the obvious problem here is that,

when both people in a conversation are doing this,

neither one is really understanding the other.

They're just kind of trying to look cool

or to express their ideas.

So when you really internalize this concept,

you start to tap into what other people

are feeling and thinking

and then real communication happens.

And the other big lesson in that book, for me,

came from an account of Covey's conversation

with somebody who was having relationship trouble.

He didn't know if he wanted to divorce his wife or not

because he felt like the spark

had gone out of the relationship,

and I remember Covey telling him something very simple,

to love her.

Love as a verb, as an action, not as a feeling.

Now, I listened to this book

when I was probably 18 years old,

so this was kind of a big revelation to me

because, up until then,

society and just basically everyone I knew and the media

had sort of convinced me that love was like this feeling

that you would have automatically,

like you just kinda had to find it

and then it would be there forever.

But the opposite is true.

Love is a verb.

It's something that you have to put work into

and it is often difficult.

And I honestly think that that concept

and my internalization of that concept

is one of the reasons why I'm still with my girlfriend,

why I've been with her for over five years,

because I've realized that, when the going gets tough,

you have to, as a verb, love the other person.

It's hard, but you have to do it.

And yes, sometimes that feeling is going to be there

and it is gonna feel like something that's just in you

and it's gonna be with you forever,

but you can't rely on that always being the case.

All right, book number three on my list

is The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss.

Now this is the book that probably changed

my professional life more than any other.

See, this was the very first book

that really and truly showed me that you could build systems

which enable your business to profit and make money

even while you're not physically putting effort in.

Before I read this book, I was a freshman in college

that had a freelance web design business on the side.

So every dollar that I made

was a direct product of me putting in the hours,

and that's kinda how I viewed entrepreneurship.

But once I read that book,

I started to realize that I could build systems

that would allow me to essentially make money while I slept.

Now, obviously, building those systems

and actually making money is neither as straightforward

nor as easy as it might seem in the book,

and I'm sure that Tim mentions that in the book itself,

but that book, more than any other source of information,

it drove me to start treating College Info Geek

more as a business and less as a blog.

And that completely changed the trajectory of my life.

Before College Info Geek became profitable,

my plan was to graduate college, move to Minneapolis,

and become a web developer for a big company.

And now, I'm doing something that is, well,

a little bit different than that.

All right, moving on to the books that I own physically,

starting with number four,

The Happiness Equation by Neil Pasricha.

Now, this book has a lot to say on the concept of happiness

and on how to be happy on a day-to-day basis consistently,

but there is only one idea

that I want to share from this book,

and that is the dim view that it takes

on the concept of retirement.

This book taught me that the origin

of our modern concept of retirement,

the idea of stopping work at age 65

and then just relaxing for the rest of your days

originated in Germany back in 1889.

At that time, the government introduced a program

that would allow people who were 65 or older

to stop working and then the state would take care of them.

And this was meant as a way to free up jobs

for younger people.

But, as time went on, it started to be thought of

as the kind of goal in life.

You'd work up until 65,

and then you'd retire to a life of leisure.

But the problem is this concept

is at odds with the way that the human body and mind work.

We are built to constantly progress.

We're built to work.

We're built to struggle.

Life is a type of combat

and that is what we are adapted for.

So this whole idea of just stopping at a certain age

is kind of awful,

but it's something that we all seem to be striving for

and we don't really question it,

so until I read this book,

that was basically how I thought my career was going to go.

But now, I'm committed to never retire.

Sure, I may try new things as I go on in my career.

I might maybe slow down a little bit

or try some things that don't necessarily make money,

but I'm never going to stop learning,

I'm never going to stop progressing,

and I'm never going to stop working.

And that is actually very liberating.

All right, book number five on my list

is Pragmatic Thinking & Learning by Andy Hunt.

And I think this is actually

the first real productivity book that I ever read.

One of the most useful tidbits in the book for me

was the advice to capture insight 24/7,

which was the direct inspiration for my philosophy

that I like to call Quick Capture.

Essentially, this means always having a way

to get information or ideas

into a system that you trust

and that you can access later on.

For instance, when I'm taking a shower

and I have an idea that I really want to remember,

I actually have a waterproof notebook

suction-cupped to the walls of my shower

so I can write down the details of that idea

and then, once I'm dried off, I can take a picture of it

and then I can get it into my note-taking system.

And beyond that concept,

I'm actually looking at the back flap of the book right now,

there are about 48 different concepts in this books,