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10 Books to Help You Make Big, Positive Changes This Year
Matt Karamazov
January 05, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 41 minutes
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📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!
I hope that your 2026 is getting off to a great start, but as you probably know, hope is not a strategy.
So if you want to make 2026 your year, then you’ve got to have a plan in place. You’ve got to do something different if you want a different life. I only got a C+ in my university logic courses, but I’d say that sounds right, eh?
You’ve got to change to change.
Fortunately, for literally anything you’d like to change or improve upon in the new year, there’s someone else out there who’s made tremendous progress in that area, has world-class expertise and the heart to share it - and who’s written about it in a book.
I’ve selected ten such books for you tonight - and I think they’re great! But knowledge is not sufficient. Plenty of people know what to do, and yet they can’t seem to bring themselves to do it. So knowledge alone isn’t enough.
You need someone to believe in you, you need to start taking massive action, and you need to keep going - far beyond the point where it “makes sense” to quit.
I can’t help you with the last two things, but that first one? I got you.
I’ve seen the kind of transformational changes that people can make in just one year, and there is no reason whatsoever why you can’t be one of those people.
You and I may never have met, but I made a commitment a long time ago that I was going to be a positive influence on people, in a world raging with negativity and gloom.
All of which is to say, that if you need someone to believe in you? IT’S ME.
Anyway, in case you missed it, here’s my latest YouTube video too:
Now, before our coffees get cold, let’s hit the books!
Tonight, Inside The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
“Controlling the information that you hold in your focus is the key to overcoming the anxiety, boredom, stress, and overwhelm that plague today’s society.”
“Knowledge learned the hard way combined with the avoidance of error, whenever and wherever possible, is the soundest basis for success in any endeavor.”
Inside my private business mastermind, Creator Launch Academy, we’re tackling one nonfiction book per month and implementing its lessons inside our businesses.
This month’s book is How to Get Rich, by Felix Dennis, a fantastic book about getting rich, obviously, but also with a touch of tragic beauty, written as it was when Dennis found himself at the top of the financial mountain, with terminal cancer…and alone.
Click here to claim your free trial, and join our business book club for educational content creators!
After achieving my (somewhat meaningless) goal of reading 1,000 books before I turned 30, I set a new (also meaningless but cool) goal of reading 10,000 books. As of today, I’ve read exactly 1,456 books, including 2 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
“The things that go wrong often make the best memories.”
The days are long, but the years are short! This was one of the first happiness books that enabled me really to get it, and I return to thinking about this book fairly often. Specifically, I return to the idea that if you think you’re happy, then you are.
Sometimes it’s just that we don’t realize how happy we actually are!
This is a book made up of a year of self-experiments by Gretchen Rubin as she tries to organize her life, remove sources of stress, add moments of joy, and bring her family even closer together.
I’m not saying it’s a masterpiece of modern literature or anything, but this book and the ideas I’ve read about within its pages have made me demonstrably happier and have simply made my life…better!
One thing I resonate with for sure is her idea of the relationship between “outer order” and “inner calm.” When your external world is more or less organized and structured (while leaving space for spontaneity and freedom, of course) I think that you’re more likely to experience life with calmness and serenity. At least it’s been that way for me.
Whenever I let work or clutter or whatever pile up, I notice that I’m not as happy as I could be. There’s something about getting down to “zero” that just helps!
I still don’t believe that happiness is the main purpose of life or anything; indeed, there are plenty of people, like frontline medical workers, who could never be said to lead “happy” lives but who nevertheless experience an abundance of meaning.
There’s more to life than just being “happy” all the time, but if you’re “under the line” right now, so to speak, I can confidently recommend Gretchen’s book.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
How It’ll Help You Make This Year Great: Rubin’s personal experiment is something you can easily replicate in your own life, and if you spend some time consciously considering what makes you happy, you can intentionally start adding more and more of those activities into your daily life.
“Having a definite chief aim will serve you whether you want to make money, express yourself in the arts, become a leader in your field, or defeat injustice and evil. Some of us want all these things. But the door of greatness cracks open only to those who approach their dreams with one special, overarching focus - a Definite Chief Aim.”
I first discovered Mitch’s work through this book, and immediately upon finishing it I went on to read three or four more of his books in rapid succession - to me, it felt exactly like discovering the philosopher Colin Wilson’s work for the first time. That is to say it just made a massive, positive impression on me from the very beginning.
This particular book is a recapitulation of Napoleon Hill’s ideas from Think and Grow Rich, specifically the idea of a Definite Chief Aim - a Massively Transformative Purpose, as some have called it - or the major purpose of one’s entire finite existence.
If that sounds a little grandiose, the book itself is actually wonderfully easy to read and it’s perfect both for people who have never read Napoleon Hill and for people who’ve loved the original.
My own Definite Chief Aim, for example, is to read 10,000 books. There’s no “timeline” for this - it’s just a goal I want to reach eventually - and I’ve engineered almost literally my entire life in pursuit of it. That’s how you know it’s a DCA.
It’s almost completely consumed my waking existence, and the filter for whether or not I’m going to say “yes” to something, or go somewhere, or do something is whether or not it’s taking me closer to or further away from this main goal.
Reading is what I’ve devoted my life to, because I love it that much.
The Miracle of a Definite Chief Aim will help you discover a DCA if you don’t have one already, but it’ll also help you deepen your commitment to it once you’ve found it, and more. I’m so glad I discovered it when I did, and this book helped clarify my ambitions tremendously!
Difficulty Rating: Easy
How It’ll Help You Make This Year Great: This book will help you identify a “Definite Chief Aim” and focus your full energies toward it. Doing so will give you a tremendous sense of meaning and clarity, and you’ll likely lose track of hours as you give yourself over to what makes your daily life feel like pure joy.
“If you only go for the smaller goal, the big goal is automatically out of reach.”
Arnold’s book is the most Schwarzenegger thing I’ve ever read in my life. I mean that in a good way, of course. It’s full of his big personality and he doesn’t tone anything down (like he ever has), the result being this compulsively readable book, full of great life advice and inspirational passages. It’s motivating as hell, and I tore through it like I was ripping a phonebook in half!
There’s a lot in the book about vision, and the supreme importance of having an overwhelmingly clear, specific idea of how you want your one and only life to unfold.
Not only that, but he backed up his vision with massive action, working out twice a day for hours on end (probably overtraining, but whatever) and then going to school, to work laying bricks with Franco Columbu, or off to acting classes in the evening.
His path was not without obstacles, of course. None of us can claim that.
Every single one of us will face people in our lives who either don’t believe in us or actively want us to fail. Not everyone is going to believe in your vision, no matter how strongly you believe in it. Arnold says that you can either use the naysayers you’ll inevitably meet on the path to your goals, or you can ignore them, but you can never, ever listen to them.
They are roadblocks, and you can either go around, above, or through, but you can never turn back. Not from your vision. It should be so clear and energizing - almost literally like a photograph in your mind of where you’re going, what it will look like when you get there, and how you’ll feel when you arrive - that it will inspire you to hold onto that vision and never let it go.
Be Useful was one of my standout reads from 2023 and I enjoyed it even more than I thought I would. I mean, I knew it would be good, but I didn’t expect to love it. I loved it.
It’s full of empowering, strong messages from someone that people can look up to for a whole lot of reasons, and Arnold, in my opinion, is just one of those guys who is exactly who he says he is. A hard worker - often lifting more than 40,000lbs per workout, morning and evening - who isn’t afraid to step forward and say “I am.”
Difficulty Rating: Easy
How It’ll Help You Make This Year Great: Arnold’s big personality is present on every page of this one, and he’ll motivate you to ditch your small, “puny” goals, and go after something you actually care about instead. He’ll make you laugh, he’ll make you think, and he’ll make you bigger and more determined than you’ve ever been.
“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.
The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day, and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous.
It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.”
I would unequivocally state that Atomic Habits is the definitive book on habits. It’s a 20-million-copy bestseller(!) that has lived up to all the hype, and I ended up with about eight pages of notes - I mean, this thing is packed with everything you need to know in order to set yourself up for every kind of success in the future.
One of the most powerful ideas for me was the idea that we should be far more concerned about our current trajectory than with our current results. The fact is that it takes time to get where we want to be in life, and the only thing we have absolute control over is the direction in which we’re heading.
Many years ago, Socrates would be asked many times, “How does one get to Mount Olympus?” Olympus, if you recall, is where all the gods hung out. So really, the questioner was asking how do we get to the top, to paradise, to our goals?
In response to this question, Socrates would always say, “Make sure that every step you take is in that direction.” Good habits are steps, and when you have all your habits aligned with your destination, you almost can’t help but arrive there eventually.
Everyone who has ever succeeded at anything, ever, has started out extremely far away from where they wanted to end up. Over time, their good habits pulled them closer and closer to their own version of Mount Olympus.
So the trajectory idea is big. One of the other big ideas was that every single action you take is like a vote for the person you want to become.
If you want to get fit, then every time you go to the gym or eat a healthy meal is a vote for who you will be in the future. Every time you pick up a book, you’re voting to become a reader, etc. Take those two ideas alone and you can change your life. But there’s so much more to this book, too.
According to him, the central question that James Clear is trying to answer through his work is, “How can we live better?” He’s spent years and years focusing on this question; reading, listening, learning, observing, speaking with people who are killing it in life, and he’s taken every single thing he’s learned and jammed it into this book.
As Clear says, we don’t rise to the level of our goals, or what we say we’re going to do; we fall to the level of our habits. ‘Atomic’ habits are the smallest-sized things that you can do immediately - today, now - that will let you steamroll past everything that’s been holding you back until now. So let’s get moving!
Difficulty Rating: Easy
How It’ll Help You Make This Year Great: What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while, and I promise you - promise you - that if you place your full focus and attention on building incredible habits, the rest of your life will take care of itself.
“Small, seemingly insignificant steps, taken over time, lead up to huge results.”
Once you understand how the Compound Effect works, your life will never be the same. But you have to do more than just understand it. You also have to let it work long enough for it to actually work its magic. And yes, it really is one of the closest things to magic that exists in this world.
The basic premise of the book is that small, seemingly insignificant actions, taken consistently over time, lead to stunningly massive results.
One of the most powerful illustrations of the Compound Effect in action would be Warren Buffett’s wealth. Yes, he’s been a millionaire since he was in his thirties, but 99% of his wealth came after his 65th birthday. And he’s been investing since he was a child!
Even things like reading 10 pages a day from a nonfiction book, hitting the gym three times a week, or making a habit of tackling difficult conversations head-on; they don’t seem all-important in the moment.
But stack them together, over a long-enough time horizon, and you’re more knowledgeable than 99% of people in your field, healthier and fitter than 99% of the people your age, and with the emotional intelligence of the 1%.
That’s the power of the Compound Effect.
Hardy’s book will illustrate in persuasive, visual terms what it looks like in the real world, how to build and maintain momentum, and how to harness the same force that Warren Buffett himself called “the 8th wonder of the world” to help you make exponential progress in the areas of life you care about most.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
How It’ll Help You Make This Year Great: Similar to what James Clear says in Atomic Habits, small, seemingly insignificant actions, taken every day, lead to astonishing, life-changing results. You just have to do the work - each and every day - and you will be rewarded. Read both Clear’s book and Hardy’s book and you’ll be exponentially further ahead in life than most people.
"I want to see people live the lives they are capable of, not just the ones they think they are allowed to live."
The chances of a perfect life path being successfully scripted for you by someone else are precisely zero. We exist in a community of others, but individually, we are completely alone and our lives are up to us.
More than that, we have the opportunity - the ability - to curate our own reality every moment, and by definition, no one can do this for us. We think that the meaning of life is "out there" and that we have to find out what it is. When in reality, it is Life that asks us the questions, and how we live is our answer.
In the same way, Paul Millerd doesn't have any answers. There are no hacks or step-by-step formulas in this book, no mandatory reading lists, and no milestones you have to hit in order to live a meaningful life.
Instead, The Pathless Path is about the invisible scripts that shepherd us into prescribed modes of living and being in the world; it's about freedom and creativity; it's about money, meaning, and work; and it's about being fearlessly, unapologetically yourself, in a world that shouts back, "You can't do that!"
It's also about going somewhere, but not following anything. Getting lost, and finding yourself. Leaving, but never arriving.
The default path - doing what everyone is doing, living the same day, week, month, and year that everyone else is living over and over again - used to work for most people. But this future that we're building together is not a default future.
We have so many more options and opportunities - possibilities for our lives that we can explore and take to their logical conclusions. The default path is dying away, and we have to come to terms with our own freedom and what we want to do with it.
I mean, here you are, the universe's most spectacular creation, and you're just kinda getting by. Living a "good enough" life, surviving day to day, coasting through a default world you never made.
The Pathless Path is Paul Millerd's answer to the question of what makes meaningful work and what we might aspire to in our lives. But you and I can never be Paul Millerd. His life is taken. You can only be yourself, and I can only be myself. The pathless path is narrow, wide enough for only one person. You.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
How It’ll Help You Make This Year Great: Many of the other books on this list assume that you already know what you want. The Pathless Path, on the other hand, asserts that it’s the adventure of your life to step out of the ordinary and go find out. It’ll help you question your old narratives of what “the good life” entails, and motivate you to get out there and create it.
“Law permits us to care about wrongs done to friends and family members, without spending our lives consumed with angry emotion and projects of retribution.”
Martha Nussbaum is one of the most brilliant thinkers I’ve ever discovered in all my wide reading, and, just as the title would suggest, this book is about something that not only surrounds us, but can also overtake us, causing even the best of us to lose a bunch of IQ points: anger.
I was a nightclub bouncer for over a decade, and so I’ve seen some anger in my day. I’ve felt its corrosive influence in my own life, and I’ve seen its deleterious effects on the wider society. So I’m especially grateful for someone of Nussbaum’s brilliance to come along and show us what we’ve all been missing when we talk about anger - and its equally misunderstood corollary, forgiveness.
Nussbaum claims in her book that people are generally confused about anger: about when they should be angry, if ever, and about the role it plays in both public and private life. Most striking (no pun intended) of all for me was her dissection of the current, retributive criminal justice system.
We seem to have this erroneous belief that if we make someone else suffer for what they’ve done to us, or to our community, this will make the first injury somehow disappear.
But even in the private sphere, we have so many ill-conceived notions about anger, so many half-formed thoughts and vague ideas about what it’s good for and where its limitations lie, which make it so urgently necessary that we clarify our thinking before we let anger spin out of control, and let forgiveness lose its redemptive power.
Where forgiveness is concerned, is it really the best way of transcending anger? Or does it sometimes cheapen itself by disposing us towards projects of humiliation and diminishment of the “other” as a condition of abolishing our anger? Is forgiveness always good everywhere, and anger always bad everywhere? We need a closer look. We need Nussbaum.
She’s clear-thinking and wise and kind and generous, and she’s exactly the kind of guide you should wish for when you’re looking to understand the all too human emotion of anger.
Difficulty Rating: Intermediate
How It’ll Help You Make This Year Great: One of the best ways to make this year better is to drop a lot of the weight you were carrying over with you from last year. Nussbaum’s book will help you distance yourself from any anger that you may be experiencing, see it and yourself more clearly, and then calmly decide whether or not you want to leave it behind you in 2025.
“The human who reads the most, wins.”
I still remember being introduced to Robin Sharma’s books while working my old minimum-wage security job, sitting in my car, “guarding” some event-ground or whatever overnight (but let’s be honest, I was reading, and it could have burned down for all I’d have noticed), having my eyes blown open to my own possibilities by books like The Greatness Guide, among others.
He’s definitely a part of the reason why my reading habit remains so strong to this day, and I’ve never, ever been disappointed by one of his books.
This book is no exception, though it is, of course, exceptional! Not all of the sentences land perfectly (some of the corniness certainly brushes my ear the wrong way), but if you ever have a 12-hour shift that you have to get through somehow, then definitely pick up The Wealth Money Can’t Buy. You won’t be working for minimum wage for long.
The book is about expanding your definition of wealth to include 8 different forms of wealth: wellness, family, craft, money, community, adventure, service, and growth.
In exactly the same way that Bob Marley said some people are so poor that all they have is money, Robin Sharma says that even the most financially prosperous people are surprisingly poor when it comes to the things that truly matter for a life of happiness, vitality, and serenity.
It seems that society conveniently forgot to tell us that all these additional forms of wealth even existed, before they shuttled us off, crammed together or alone in little tiny boxes, headed to make some other person extraordinarily financially wealthy, while neglecting to grow our own various forms of wealth.
Robin Sharma will help you correct the balance, and you can tell that’s true because financially, he doesn’t need to write books. Naval Ravikant once said that if they wrote a book to make money, don’t read it, and it’s highly unlikely that Sharma actually needs it. He has to write - he has to be of service - and that’s the only reason why this book exists.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
How It’ll Help You Make This Year Great: This book covers 8 different forms of wealth and shows you how to dedicate 2026 to building up all of them. It’ll help you identify areas where you’re stronger or weaker, and bring up those (still very important) areas of your life where you may be lagging behind.
“Being a millionaire means that you have acquired a net worth of at least one million dollars. The only way to acquire a net worth of a million dollars is to not spend a million dollars. Get it?”
By this point, I’ve read a ton of personal finance books, and I’m in danger of thinking that I already know everything I need to know about money. But for one thing, that’s not true. Money is a complex subject, and even world experts have blind spots in their level of understanding. But the benefits of reading books like this go even deeper.
“Thinking rich” means thinking rich most of the time, and not falling back into old patterns of behavior. It means saturating your consciousness with thoughts of wealth accumulation, strategic investing, sensible frugality, and contentment. And it means returning to these ideas again and again, at least until they’re second nature.
So yes, even though a lot of the material in this book was familiar to me, I resisted the urge to say, “I know that already!”
A major truth when it comes to good habits - financial or otherwise - is that many of the right actions are easy to do, but they’re also easy not to do.
It’s relatively easy to keep track of your spending and to review your credit card statements each month; it’s relatively easy to wait 24 hours before buying something (to give yourself a cooling-off period); it’s relatively easy to toss a few dollars per month into the stock market and to pick up a personal finance book every so often. But all those things are also easy not to do.
Start Thinking Rich covers all the simplest, easiest, and most effective actions you can take to gain control of your financial life, but it also helps you act rich, which means something different than what most people think it does.
Real rich people, for the most part, aren’t flashy. In fact, they get rich in the first place (most of them, anyway) by living below their means, saving more than they spend, buying liabilities instead of assets, and more that the authors cover in this book.
What I also liked about Start Thinking Rich is their focus on earning more money - going on the offensive, not just skipping lattes and pinching pennies.
There’s a limit to the amount of money you can save each month, but there’s no limit to the amount of money you can make each month, and the authors did a good job of proving that crucial point. They’re also not scared to (politely) offend, by which I mean they are perfectly willing to take an unpopular position if it means helping you change your financial life.
All in all, Start Thinking Rich is a wonderful starting point for anyone desirous of a better life, and an excellent reminder of the financial principles and practices that will both get you rich and keep you rich for the long term.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
How It’ll Help You Make This Year Great: Pretty simple value proposition here with this one. It’ll help you adopt “rich person” mindsets and behaviors, and motivate you to look after yourself financially, even if you’ve neglected your financial well-being until now. It’s (almost) never too late to start thinking rich.
“There should be no shame in admitting to a mistake; after all, we really are only admitting that we are now wiser than we once were."
The main thrust of Essentialism (both the book and the idea itself) is that almost everything is completely worthless.
Discerning the "vital few" from the "trivial many" is going to be one of the most in-demand skills in the economy of the future, and those who can do this well are going to reap the majority of the rewards and experience the highest possible meaning in their lives, while the rest of us are drowning in distraction.
One of the most famous Essentialists in history, Michelangelo, once said that he "saw the angel in the marble and carved until he set him free." In a similar way, we are the sculptors of our own lives, the creators of our own meaning.
The perfect form of our lives is hidden inside the marble of all the distractions, detours, and trivialities of the modern world, and we have to be artists; we have to be disciplined in carving away everything that's stealing our time, focus, and attention away from what we want our one and only lives to be about.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
How It’ll Help You Make This Year Great: This book will help you strip away everything nonessential in your life, thereby making room for those precious few things that really matter. Hint: there are sooo many more things that don’t matter than there are things that do.
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OK, that’s it for now…
I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!
There’s also my YouTube channel, where I publish book reviews, reading updates, and more each week.
And if you want to learn how I’ve built an audience of 180,000+ followers across social media, became a full-time creator, and how I’m rapidly growing my audience and scaling my profits in 2025, join us inside Creator Launch Academy and that’s exactly what I’ll teach you — we’d love to have you in the community!
With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!
Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
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