Top 5 personal development books

I read a lot of personal development books that helped me make a development plan, but I can count on my fingers the ones that stuck in my mind and that I really found useful.

When you want to develop, I guess 2 categories of actions you can do:

-personal development at the strategic level: why you want to develop personally and where you want to go

-personal development at a tactical level: what do you actually do every day to go to sleep smarter than you woke up and what is the quality level at which you perform the personal development exercises you have planned

Why the two approaches combined?

As in any project, it is useful to have a goal, a purpose, a vision, a goal, as you want to call it. Then you need to understand why you are doing this and then you need to know exactly what and how to do it.

Following the same line, I recommend 8 books that impressed me and still remain in my mind, many years after I came in contact with the concept of personal development.

The content of these books becomes more valuable if you read them a few times, every few years. So, if you have read some of the titles, it would not hurt to go through them again, because I am convinced that you want to discover new ideas that will be useful to you.

1. Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

You can't call yourself a person who invests in his personal development if you are not a person who learns to use his emotions to his advantage and those of those around him.

This book gave me a lot of control, especially after I read it a second time, after going through a more emotional period. I am immediately preparing to read it for the third time: P.

In the environment in which I developed, I had the opportunity to apply many of the concepts learned in the book written by Daniel Goleman (he was the one who synthesized the theories of emotional intelligence and explored it in detail, he is not the one who discovered it), being forced to adapt quickly because I had to coordinate more people who were only intrinsically motivated (personal development and purpose), I had no material leverage to use (people were volunteers).

Nowadays, you can't be an effective leader if you don't learn and control your emotions. By controlling your emotions, I don't mean learning to stay calm in any situation. Sometimes you just have to be more discriminating with the help you render toward other people.

2. The 7 Skills of Effective People by Stephen R. Covey

It is one of the most famous self-help books and has been bought in millions of copies.

Following an extensive 200-year study of successful American literature, Stephen Covey formulated 7 principles of effective people:

Be proactive

Start thinking about the end

Prioritize priorities

Think win / win

Seek first to understand and then to be understood

Synergistic action

Sharpen the saw

The book talks about many things, not just efficiency, and is probably a must-read for all team leaders.

It is a book about personal development before the subject became fashionable.

3. Exceptional by Malcolm Gladwell

This book is not necessarily the most practical title in this self-help industry. I highly recommend this book for understanding the context of personal development.

You can hardly develop personally if you have people around you who limit and constrain you. You can develop very, very quickly if the people around you are also people who have as a strategy to explore their own potential, personal development.

In short, seek to be part of a group with similar ambitions and who want to be consistently the best. It is exactly on the same note of ideas with entrepreneurs who recommend that you stay close to other entrepreneurs.

Gladwell's book is very inspired as a case study, some passages are a bit silly and are written only for Gladwell to expose a bit of his approach as a journalist, but overall it is a template book. The most important thing to remember in this book is probably the 10,000-hour rule, which says you have to practice for 10,000 hours to become a master in your field and exemplifies how Bill Gates, Mozart, and many others did it.

4. How to make friends and be influenced by Dale Carnegie

It is probably the best textbook on interpersonal relationships. I say this because it has stood the test of time, since 1936 when it was first published it has been consistently in the bestseller charts and on the lists of recommendations of influential people.

Dale Carnegie has written a book that will never be outdated because it captures essential truths about people, and he himself acknowledges that the ideas presented in the books are not ideas he invented, but gathered from Jesus, the Buddha, American presidents, and special celebrities.

Many of today's self-help books try to replicate in one way or another what Dale Carnegie did decades ago, write a book on how to become influential, without forcing and we are appreciated for that.

The book is a handbook for improving interpersonal relationships and I believe that it should be a material for a subject such as "Human Interactions", which should be taught in schools everywhere.

5. All about the psychology of persuasion by Robert Cialdini

You have probably guessed that it is not really a personal development book, but rather a psychology textbook that can have huge benefits for your personal development.

If you needed a book that would teach you how to become more influential in any field, Robert Cialdini's book is ideal for you.

The book presents 6 very strong principles and gives many examples of how you can use them and how you can protect yourself when these principles are exercised on you:

The rule of reciprocity - we are willing to do favors even to people we don't like, just because at some point they did us a favor or helped us. We also use this rule to influence others

Commitment and consistency - when you make a commitment, you will seek to fulfill it, even if it is against you and those around you.

Social proof - we have more confidence in the common choices made by many other people

Sympathy - we are willing to work or listen to people we sympathize with (physically or emotionally), even if they are not the most suitable people we should work with

Authority - People who have authority are perceived as smarter, although what they say may or may not be helpful.

Rarity - things that are rare or limited are perceived as more valuable, even when it is not true

Obviously, you have to interpret the information in the book, but the fact that you read it (I recommend it at least twice) will give you an advantage over the people you want to influence.