10 Books Guaranteed to Help You WIN the Rest of the Year

Get This Book on Amazon: A High-Performing Mind

“One key concept I’ve used successfully in coaching people in any field over the years to perform at their best is to ensure the difficulty of practice or preparation exceeds the difficulty of ‘performance-time’ whenever possible. The reasoning is simple: if practice is harder than the moment we need to perform, then it will feel easier to succeed, and results will be better when it counts.”

-Andrew D. Thompson, A High-Performing Mind

The most powerful tool for achieving success isn’t an app, or a training protocol, a “framework,” or some secret “hack.” It’s your mind. It’s always been your mind, and this book will help you get the most out of it…every single day.

Andrew Thompson has spent decades coaching some of the most elite athletes and high-performers in the world, and A High-Performing Mind breaks down 12 of the key traits and characteristics shared by all of them.

Many of the lessons are taught through short stories emerging from his own life and work, including his personal (and eventually victorious) struggle against a debilitating medical condition that nearly killed him.

Andrew successfully passed through the worst of the worst (and guided many others through the most challenging moments of their lives too), and emerged with a vital understanding of how to pull out your very best at all times.

His book will show you how to sharpen and fortify your mind, and I actually feel quite fortunate having discovered this fairly underrated book! It’s not widely known, and having read it I felt that it gave me a sort of secret advantage. Reading it will give you a secret advantage too.

Add this one to your mental armory and you can keep coming back to it throughout your life to help you face a variety of difficult challenges and capitalize on your most incredible opportunities. What you’ll find is that it helps you navigate every single one of them.

Get This Book on Amazon: 10X Is Easier Than 2X

“Going 10x means you’re living based on the most intrinsic and exciting future you can imagine. That 10x future becomes your filter for everything you do, and most of your current life can’t make it through that 10x filter.”

-Dr. Benjamin Hardy, 10X Is Easier Than 2X

Total transformations are never linear, and they are rarely obvious. It requires something completely different than what came before, a radical change in behavior and thinking, and if you're not consciously aiming for these types of 10X transformations, you'll never experience them.

10X Is Easier Than 2X is not a difficult book to read or understand, and once you see what Hardy's writing about, you can't unsee it. The goal of the book is to inspire entrepreneurial leaders to aim for "breakthrough" goals, not merely "incremental" goals (2X) - which will never lead to radical transformation.

One of the major themes of the book is that, in aiming for these kinds of 10X transformations, you'll have to let go of about 80 percent of what you're doing now.

What got you here won't get you there, and as you keep ascending higher and higher in developing your own “Unique Ability,” you'll have to keep zoning in on the 20% that will get you to that next level.

If all this sounds a little bit abstract, the author does get into specifics. These are just the broad strokes. But this kind of big-picture thinking is likely to start a spin-cycle inside your brain as you start to get a handle on all the possibilities this idea opens up for you to expand your four most important freedoms: Time Freedom, Financial Freedom, Relationship Freedom, and Purpose Freedom.

It's those four fundamental freedoms that you'll need to keep expanding if you want to keep making progress. The projects and purposes you devote yourself to, the people you choose to surround yourself with while you do, the money it'll take to make them real, and the time it'll take to bring it all together.

This all must seem like a lot more work, but it's actually less. It's easier than going 2X, and that's because we're talking about a total reimagining of business as usual, not something that's "a little bit better" than what came before.

Get This Book on Amazon: Discipline is Destiny

“Think about it: Most people don’t even show up. Of the people who do, most don’t really push themselves. So to show up and be disciplined about daily improvement? You are the rarest of the rare.”

-Ryan Holiday, Discipline is Destiny

Self-discipline has traditionally been a hard sell. Self-indulgence, quick dopamine hits, and having a good time have been winning the marketing battle lately, similar to the "battle" between chocolate and asparagus. Or between reality television and educational documentaries.

But what if the problem is simply that we've been thinking about self-discipline in entirely the wrong way?

Up until now, self-discipline may have been the equivalent of a Henry James novel in a TikTok world. But Ryan Holiday's book, Discipline is Destiny, will have you reimagining the whole concept in a much more liberating, fulfilling way.

This involves thinking of self-discipline in the "proper" way: not as a punishment, as self-deprivation, but as it really is: a pathway to even greater freedom.

Some days will be hard. Actually, that's not true...many days will be hard. The hard days will outnumber the easy ones, but the meaningful days will also outnumber the meaningless ones. Living this way won't always be easy, but it will always be worth it.

Get This Book on Amazon: The Financial Mindset Fix

“While success happens when it is supposed to, failure is simply delayed success.”

-Joyce Marter, The Financial Mindset Fix

This is a uniquely powerful - and frankly underrated - book that’s something of a mix between personal finance, psychology, self-help, and even business strategy.

It was an unexpectedly awesome surprise when I first read it, and not only did it help me get my financial affairs in order, it helped me get my business on a more solid footing and gave me the confidence that I could keep growing it indefinitely. All that from one book that you can buy for just a few dollars! Unbelievable!

In the book, Joyce Marter (who’s also a psychotherapist, entrepreneur, and national speaker) runs you through what she calls “wheel exercises,” designed to diagnose your financial well-being in a variety of areas.

There’s “Financial Health,” “Support Network,” “Abundance,” “Detachment,” “Vision,” and others where you shade in sections of the wheel, which allows you to more concretely visualize those areas where you need to place your attention and focus your efforts.

It was also nice to see someone balance the concrete “tactical and practical” stuff with the more “insubstantial” stuff, you might say, that you see in so many other personal finance books.

Like those other authors, Marter recognizes that success in any endeavor all happens in the mind first before you ever see it in reality, but she focuses on the psychological and relational issues around money without limiting herself to “positive thinking” and “believing in yourself,” which is too often all those other books have to offer.

She has real business experience (and real business results), and yet she still recognizes that the “outer” reflects the “inner.” Meaning that the personal growth you’ve been cultivating and the self-belief you’ve been strengthening will show itself in the form of your rising bank balance and future financial prospects.

But you have to back it up with the real-world action that she helps you take, and the practical advice she helps you implement.

Get This Book on Amazon: Winning

“Winning is not a marathon; it’s a sprint with no finish line.”

-Tim Grover, Winning

This book has some of the most “truth per page” of any book I’ve ever read.

It’s about competition, about winning (obviously), and about doing whatever has to be done in order to reach the kind of success you have your sights set on, regardless of whether or not you actually feel like doing it. It’s no-nonsense, no-pity counsel from Michael Jordan’s former personal trainer, Tim Grover.

According to most winners, of course, winning is everything. But Tim Grover doesn’t suggest that everyone “should” aspire to become a winner, or even that everyone can.

However, if you think that’s what you want for yourself, and you think you have what it takes, this book will either disillusion you, or give you the tools that are indispensable to your success. Like, indispensable.

I honestly can’t imagine anyone who’s ever won anything being unfamiliar with the principles laid out in this book. This isn’t just a “nice to read” book, but absolutely essential reading for anyone who’s serious about winning.

Kobe Bryant was another one of Grover’s clients, along with Dwayne Wade. These are athletes and professionals that demand more from themselves than anyone else could reasonably expect from them, and so in the beginning Grover had to step up and advance to their level, so that they could reach even higher heights together.

If you’re serious about winning – and, again, Grover isn’t saying that it’s the life for everyone – then you have to get in line with this winning attitude.

I found similarities here between this book and Steven Pressfield’s work, especially The War of Art, and Turning Pro, where Pressfield personifies The Resistance as a force that will stop at nothing to prevent the Artist from performing their creative work. Similarly, Winning is personified by Grover as a pitiless, remorseless entity that will relentlessly test anyone who dares to think that they have what it takes to be called a winner.

When all is said and done (more done than said, if you want to be a winner), I’m a huge fan of this book, especially because it’s so much more than just motivation and empty hype. Neither one of those things will help you beat your alarm clock or bang out 15 more reps. Motivation is shit, and hype is for losers. Winning is for winners.

Get This Book on Amazon: Success is a Choice

“It’s truly remarkable how much a person has to learn before he realizes how little he knows. The world is vast, and we are so limited. There is much for us to learn, and we can learn much - as long as we remain teachable."

-John C. Maxwell, Success is a Choice

Reading this book feels like gaining access to secret knowledge - except nothing here is a secret. John C. Maxwell has exposed millions of people to these life-changing and career-lifting ideas over many decades of global thought-leadership.

Maxwell's books always pass the test for whether I'll decide to read anything else he's written: immediately after I read his book (and many times, during), my life just gets better. Sometimes in profound ways.

The present book is all about choices, and specifically, those choices that are always leading us either toward or away from our desired future.

Every single thought we think and action we take is either a +1 or a -1 on the road to achieving our vision, and Success is a Choice is studded with +1s on every damn page.

It's a book about stacking the odds in our favor by doing every single thing within our power in order to give us the best possible chance of succeeding. A lot of it comes down to simply making the right choices, and this is a manual for how to do that (virtually) every time.

Making the right choices - over and over again until you win - is how you eventually construct your dream life, and consistently making the incorrect choices will make this as-yet-unrealized dream life a more and more distant reality. It's really as simple as that.

We all start with different talents and abilities, advantages and disadvantages, and it's the choices we make in addition to our talents that makes the greatest difference.

It's in the choices we make to believe in ourselves; to fire up our passion; to initiate action; to focus our energy; to cultivate good relationships; and embracing practice (all covered in the book) where we can recognize our power to make the desired changes in our lives.

It's choices, all the way down.

In the end, your level of success is mostly determined by your choices, multiplied by your effort. Luck exists, sure, and not everything worth attempting has a 100% chance of succeeding. We know that. But there are three things that the most successful people on the planet all do exceedingly well: they get started, they keep going, and they never give up.

Get This Book on Amazon: Badass Habits

“When it comes to building great habits and ditching lame ones, your commitment to staying focused on who you’re becoming regardless of where you are/who you are right now is the mightiest power you’ve got.”

-Jen Sincero, Badass Habits

This book is one of the follow-ups to Jen Sincero's five-million-copy bestseller, You Are a Badass, which came out of nowhere to become one of the books I find myself recommending quite often.

Her style is warm and sincere, but there's no doubt that she fought to get to where she is today, and so there's also this hard-edged pragmatism alongside her earnest cheerleading, which lends her extra credibility.

One of the things she does quite well is work from first principles, meaning the most basic, foundational ideas (in this case, in the field of personal development), and then she builds everything on top of that.

Habits are so fundamental to self-improvement, and if you're interested in making lasting changes in your life, it makes sense to focus your efforts where they'll have the most leverage - where they'll do the most good.

Sure, you can compare different productivity systems and exercise routines and "life hacks," but that's all surface-level stuff compared to your habits and your belief system. That's where Jen Sincero focuses most of her efforts - especially in this book - and that's why the ideas found here are so effective.

She explains the psychology of habit formation, of course, but she also goes into an important discussion about boundaries, raising our level of self-awareness, and paying attention not only to our current habits but also to our unconscious beliefs and fears.

The book is also hilarious, with more than a few laugh out loud moments, even as she's ultra-committed to your eventual success. She's warm and supportive, but also wise and extremely practical.

Whereas James Clear’s phenomenal book, Atomic Habits, is what I would consider to be the definitive book on habits, I feel that it lacks the intimacy and care that’s present in Sincero’s work. That being said, Badass Habits lacks a lot of the best stuff in Clear’s book too.

Reading both – and applying both – will give you the benefits of both. Reading Badass Habits, you really feel that Sincero is on your side and that she has credibility as a fellow traveler on the path, just as James Clear gains credibility by virtue of the science-backed approach of his books.

I recommend reading both books, but anything you'll get out of either one of them is all to be found in the application of their ideas. You have to learn what to do, but then you have to go out and actually do it. That will come with attention and awareness, and Jen will teach you how to cultivate both. She’ll give you the tools, tactics, and mindsets you need to be able to change, but will also lovingly remind you how powerful you already are.

Get This Book on Amazon: It Takes What It Takes

“No matter where I work, the same truth keeps emerging. Neutral thinking is the key to unlocking a set of behaviors that can turn also-rans into champions and champions into legends."

-Trevor Moawad, It Takes What It Takes

It Takes What It Takes is a masterclass in accurately assessing the nature of reality in front of you and building an effective strategy to help you deal with it, no matter what.

No. Matter. What.

The author, the late Trevor Moawad, was a top mental conditioning coach ("the world's best brain trainer") who worked with superstars in the NFL, elite professionals at Harvard Business School, Fortune 500 companies, the military - basically anywhere you see ambitious strivers and world-class competitors pursuing their potential, you would have found Trevor Moawad, helping them manage their negativity and achieve any goal they set for themselves.

His life's work was to motivate the motivated. Not by pumping them up with fake positivity or silly affirmations; not by wishing and hoping for performance improvements, and not by instilling a blind faith in positive thinking.

Instead, he helped these elite individuals return to reality, face the very real obstacles in their path, and come up with a plan for what to do in the very next moment, which is the only time when any of us have any real power.

Importantly, he wouldn't let them get too high or too low. Negative thinking works negatively 100% of the time, naturally, and just because you're thinking negatively doesn't mean you're being realistic. But positive thinking often has very little to do with reality either, and it's in navigating between those two extremes where we can find that next gear.

Just like in bowling, where beginners often have those bumpers on either side of the lane to prevent the ball from ending up in the gutter, neutral thinking can help you stay centered and stay on the path taking you where you want to go.

Neutral thinking, as Trevor would say, is a high-performance strategy that emphasizes judgment-free thinking, especially in pressure situations. It acknowledges that the past happened. However, the past isn’t predictive. It can influence the present and thus, the future, but it doesn't guarantee it.

Neutral thinkers calmly and coolly assess challenges, take inventory of their unique strengths and abilities, and determine the best path forward, often with incomplete information about the true nature of reality, but never running from it.

The past doesn't determine your future; what you do next determines your future. Neutral thinking is about gaining as much clarity as possible, reclaiming as much control as possible, and then asking, "What would a winner do in this situation?"

One of the strongest lessons in this book is that winners behave like winners, and average performers exhibit average behaviors. You can't behave like an average person and expect to be anything more than average. You have to think like a winner, and most importantly behave like a winner if you want to stack the probabilities of success in your favor.

Get This Book on Amazon: Relentless

“Your ultimate power source will be from the neck up, not the neck down.”

-Tim Grover, Relentless

I don’t think I knew that Tim Grover was Michael Jordan’s personal trainer when I first picked up this book. Or that he had worked with a multitude of basketball greats as well, including Kobe Bryant and Dwayne Wade, to name just two.

I wasn’t even particularly interested in basketball (I’m still not) - I just liked the title and the book cover and decided to dive in. And? Unbelievable. What. A. Book!

It’s not for everybody, of course, as Grover’s style is quite intense and unforgiving. Simply put, not everybody wants to be as great as his methods will allow you to become.

Most people just aren’t willing to endure the kinds of sacrifices that being Relentless requires, and that’s totally cool! Not everybody can (or wants to) become a champion.

However…That being said, if you do aim to achieve greatness in whatever it is you choose to do in your life, this is the absolutely indispensable guide that you need to read.

For decades, Tim Grover has “taken the greats - and made them greater.” None of it happened by accident. There are requirements - sacrifices to be made. Things will be asked of you. If you’re not a champion now, you will, by definition, need to change to become one, and change is never comfortable.

But if you are willing to change - if you’re teachable, and you have the requisite desire - then becoming Relentless is possible. It’s within human reach. Kobe wasn’t born Kobe, and Michael wasn’t born Michael.

They created themselves, and it was Tim Grover that made them do it.

His best, most transformative methods and insights are contained within this book. Read it if you have a genuine desire to become Relentless. If not, don’t even bother.