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Book Summaries

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“If you light a lamp for someone, it will also brighten your own path.” – Ancient Buddhist Proverb

In One Minute Mentoring: How to Find and Work With a Mentor–And Why You’ll Benefit from Being One, authors Ken Blanchard and Claire Diaz-Ortiz share a fictional parable about the power of finding—or being—a mentor. They share a framework for maintaining a mentoring relationship.

In One Minute Mentoring, Ken and Claire tell the story of Josh Hartfield, a young sales rep whose motivation is flagging, and Diane Bertman, a sales executive whose crammed schedule isn’t delivering the satisfaction it once did. As the story of Diane and Josh unfolds, the authors share six action steps to creating a successful mentoring relationship, as developing and finding a mentorship partnership,  and strategies for skills and wisdoms of people of all ages.

In High-Performance Habits: How Extraordinary People Become That Way, high-performance coach Brendon Burchard (The Motivation Manifesto) shares the six deliberate habits of high-performing individuals and teams.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do.Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.—Aristotle

In Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You, a former doctor turned YouTuber, podcaster, and entrepreneur Dr. Ali Abdaal argues that the key to productivity isn’t discipline but joy. He provides a framework and various experiments for making projects more enjoyable so that productivity takes care of itself.

Three Parts of the Book

  • Part 1 explains how to use the science of feel-good productivity to energise yourself.

The Three Energizers: Play, Power and People

  • Part 2:  Examines how feel-good productivity can help us overcome procrastination.

The Three Blockers: Uncertainty, Fear and Inertia

  • Part 3: How feel-good productivity can sustain us in the long term.

The Three types of burnout: Overexertion burnout, depletion burnout and misalignment burnout

The Three Sustainers: Conserve, Recharge and Align

In Reinventing Your Life: The Breakthrough Program to End Negative Behavior…and Feel Great Again, American Psychologist and founder of the Schema Therapy Institute Jeffrey E. Young describes eleven chronic, self-defeating personality patterns known as lifetraps. The authors draw upon actual clinical experiences to explain life schema. Based on various therapeutic approaches such as cognitive, behavioural, psychoanalytic, and experiential therapies. They share strategies for changing major life patterns called Lifetrap therapy. They describe eleven of the most destructive problems in life that they encountered in their practices. How to recognize them, their origin and how to change them.

Oprah Winfrey first came across American author and academic Arthur C. Brooks through his column in The Atlantic, “How to Build a Life.” Oprah read Arthur’s column throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and she was fascinated by the subject matter he was discussing: Living a life with purpose and meaning. Oprah became a fan, and they ultimately collaborated to write the Build the Life You Want Book. One of the common themes that always came up in Oprah’s interviews during her 25 years of running the Oprah Winfrey Show was her guest and the universal desire to be happy.

Oprah on Arthur Brooks: “Arthur exudes a kind of confidence and certainty about the meaning of happiness that’s both comforting and galvanizing.” In Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier, Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey share tools, strategies, research and tips for leading a happier life.

Books Theme:

  • Teach strategies for leading a happier life by optimizing for the four pillars of happiness: Family, Friendship, Work and Spirituality.

“The relationships that impact us the most are those with family. The wounds are deep, and the relationships are filled with expectations.

In Drama Free: A Guide to Managing Unhealthy Family Relationships, licensed therapist and author of Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself, Nedra Glover Tawwab, provides a guide for dealing with unhealthy family dynamics and relationships. Her first book, Set Boundaries, is one of my favourite books on boundary setting.

Drama Free Book’s Theme:

  • The book is a tool to help readers develop the skills needed to reclaim their voice in a dysfunctional family.

Life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected. – WILLIAM JAMES

In Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age, New York Times bestsellers author Bruce Feiler writes about the nonlinear life, in which each of us faces dozens of disruptors. One in ten of those disruptors is what Feiler refers to as a lifequake, a massive change that leads to a life transition. The average length of these transitions is five years. The upshot: We all spend half our lives in this unsettled state. You or someone you know is going through one now.

As a financial consultant, Shawn Rochester helped his clients develop plans to dramatically increase their household cash flow, eliminate their debt, and set aside enough resources to maximize their income-generating assets during retirement. He also started Good Steward University, where he developed online courses to help Black Americans manage their resources based on a mindset and a set of actions focused on stewardship, ownership, and legacy. Within Good Steward University, Shawn developed a course called The Black Tax: The Incremental Cost of Being Black in America. The course was created based on reviewing 25 years of research on the cost of implicit bias on African-Americans.

This tax is insidious in many ways because it reduces Black Americans’ cash flow, thereby reducing our ability to leave a legacy for our children and their children.

In The Black Tax: The Cost of Being Black in America, founder of Good Steward LLC, Shawn Rochester, examines the various costs associated with being Black in America. He describes The Black Tax (which is the financial cost of conscious and unconscious anti-black discrimination), creates a massive financial burden on Black American households that dramatically reduces their ability to leave a substantial legacy for future generations. 

In Burn the Boats: Toss Plan B Overboard and Unleash Your Full Potential, American businessman Matt Higgins provides the blueprint he used to go from a desperate sixteen-year-old high school dropout caring for his sick mother in Queens, New York, to a shark on Shark Tank and the faculty of Harvard Business School.

Burn the Boats is about not becoming hesitant when your instincts don’t match what the world is telling you to do. The key to unlocking potential is to embrace your highest competitive advantage: you are the only one who has the full story of your life. YOU are the one subject about which there will never be a greater expert in the world.

In $100M Leads: How to Get Strangers To Want To Buy Your Stuff, the founder of Acquisition.com shares the playbooks that changed his business and life forever. He chronicles the journey in lead generation and how he went from sleeping on my gym floor to owning a portfolio of companies that generate $200,000,000 per year in a decade. His first book, $100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No, answers the question “What should I sell?” while $100M Leads is about getting strangers to show interest in the stuff you sell.

In Let Your Mind Run: A Memoir of Thinking My Way to Victory, American long-distance runner Deena Kastor takes the reader on a life journey in running. How having a positive mindset, discipline, and excellent work ethic brought her success in her running career. She also shared the rollercoaster of winning and losing, motherhood’s challenges, and her quest to balance life and running.

“I loved running right from the start. It was simple and fun. It lacked rules and structure. There was no equipment to fuss with, no technique to learn.”

Best of all, running didn’t make me feel foolish or ridiculous, like I’d done something wrong. The ease of it made me feel competent and free. Everything we were asked to do, I could do. I ran and counted my laps. I warmed up on the trails, happily shooting out the gate with my teammates to the wild open space, and ran among the rabbits and deer.

I remember thinking how lucky we runners were to be in constant motion. We were part of the action all the time. Running was also, to my surprise and delight, both solitary and social.