5 books to read right now to change your life

Wow, seriously – books that can help you live your best life? The idea of this is a little weighty but here’s the thing: Books can be inspiring! Especially if you’ve been feeling a little meh lately, lack motivation, and often question the purpose of your actions.

Well, enter life-changing books. You know the ones – whether written from an expert POV or as a memoir, life-changing books do exactly that: Help change your life. These personal growth books have the power to help you reflect and then apply to your own life.

For example, the ever-popular book by Paulo Coelho (king of inspiring books!) The Alchemist is a story about following your dreams to find your purpose. In it, the main character Santiago leaves his job behind as a shepherd boy and searches for his Personal Legend, a hidden treasure he believes is buried near the pyramids in Egypt. Throughout his journey, he meets all sorts of people who help guide and advise him on how to get closer to his Personal Legend while learning valuable life lessons. The ending? Well – you’ll need to pick this up to find out and learn for yourself what your own Personal Legend is!

Ready to get on the life-changing books bandwagon? Here are five more we highly recommend.

Feel Good Productivity, Ali Abdaal
A doctor who left the medical field to pursue a career as a content creator in the productivity space? Now, that’s life changing! The successful YouTuber talks all about – yups, productivity. But with a different lens altogether. Abdaal’s version of productivity? It isn’t about having lists and hitting your goals; it’s more about finding the joy in doing. Feel Good Productivity goes against the classic productivity concept and focuses on understanding what brings you joy and how you can find ways to do more when you love what you’re doing. It’s a lot like his own story and if there’s one person who has the creed to tell you about choosing joy over everything else, it’s Abdaal.

Atomic Habits, James Clear
The #1 book when it comes to making small lifestyle changes for bigger gains! If you’ve been wanting to change something about your life, start by reading this book. The core of Clear’s way to make change possible can be summed up in his Four Laws: Make it Obvious, Make it Attractive, Make it Easy, and Make it Satisfying. His other thing is that tiny, incremental changes – atomic habits – is the real game-changer if you want to switch things up. Rather than overnight transformation, Clear says to think small but go long.

The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton M. Christensen
If it’s Steve Job’s favourite book, it can be yours too! The Innovator’s Dilemma is about how you should let go of the old to embrace the new. It talks about businesses, where big and successful companies miss obvious opportunities because they can’t see beyond their older technologies. Case in point: Kodak actually experimented with digital cameras back in 1975 but figured its analog film business is too huge to give up. Well, we all know what happened there! Whatever you read in this book can also be applied to your life. Generally, we miss huge opportunities because we are too invested in our old habits and lifestyle that we simply let these opportunities pass us by. But Christensen writes how to overcome this and why you should embrace the Next Big Thing, even if you feel like you’re already in a rather big thing yourself.

Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl
One for you history buffs! Viktor Frankly was an Austrian psychiatrist who was captured by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz. He spent three years in concentration camps (and survived) making this simple yet profound observation: Prisoners who had a reason to survive the concentration camps tended to be the ones who did. It’s pretty obvious actually but many of us tend to forget our real purpose or lose hope halfway through (like the prisoners Frankl predicted would die based on whether they stopped having hope for the future). His ultimate takeaway: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how”. What do you make out of this?

Outlive by Peter Attia, MD
Who doesn’t want to live longer – and better? Well, Outlive helps you understand how. This operating manual for longevity, Dr. Peter Attia writes about how the science to long-term health is nutrition, exercise, sleep, and great mental health. In his opinion, mainstream medicine just isn’t equipped to help us live longer. What we need is a personalised, proactive strategy for longevity, one where we act now rather than wait to get healthy. Sounds like great life-changing advice to us!

Photo by Jessica Ruscello on Unsplash.