Books accelerate your knowledge and help you become wise quickly because you can mentally download the experiences of other people, often smart, successful, and strong people.
You can experience years or decades of their life in the span of a few hours. Books give you the opportunity to digest these insights in a different way.
The author doesn’t know you personally, so you don’t take their insights personally. You’re allowed to sit and think about how the lessons apply to your laugh.
These books can help you during hard times, not just to endure them, but to get stronger because of them.
1. The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World by Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu with Douglas Abrams
Two great spiritual masters share their own hard-won wisdom about living with joy even in the face of adversity.
The occasion was a big birthday. And it inspired two close friends to get together in Dharamsala for a talk about something very important to them.
The subject was joy. Both winners of the Nobel Prize, both great spiritual masters and moral leaders of our time, they are also known for being among the most infectiously happy people on the planet.
From the beginning the book was envisioned as a three-layer birthday cake: their own stories and teachings about joy, the most recent findings in the science of deep happiness, and the daily practices that anchor their own emotional and spiritual lives.
2. Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
“Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.”
Cheryl Strayed, author of the runaway bestseller Wild and many other hits, once had an advice column under the pen name Dear Dugar. Tiny Beautiful Things is a collection of some of the best questions and answers from the column.
She is a beast of a wordsmith and she’d answer the questions from readers by first giving these long-detailed accounts of her own life to meet the reader where they were at. Her answers would never say here’s exactly what to do. More like here’s a similar experience I went through, what I drew from it, and how it applies to your life.
3. Fears to Fierce: A Woman’s Guide to Owning Her Power by Brita Fernandez Schmidth
"Brita embodies what it is to live fiercely in life and work. This book inspires you to embrace your deepest fears and reframe them -Emma Gannon"
Brita Fernandez Schmidt has spent 25 years championing women's rights across the world, nurturing her own fierce and inspiring others to do the same. Through a combination of guidance, storytelling and practical tools, her rallying call in Fears to Fierce will inspire you to realise your purpose and potential, ignite your fierce and create the life you have been dreaming of.
4. Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope by Mark Manson
From the author of the international mega-bestseller The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck comes a counterintuitive guide to the problems of hope.
We live in an interesting time. Materially, everything is the best it’s ever been—we are freer, healthier and wealthier than any people in human history. Yet, somehow everything seems to be irreparably and horribly f*cked—the planet is warming, governments are failing, economies are collapsing, and everyone is perpetually offended on Twitter.
He looks at our relationships with money, entertainment and the internet, and how too much of a good thing can psychologically eat us alive. He openly defies our definitions of faith, happiness, freedom—and even of hope itself.
5. The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
The Meditations is the best self-help book of all time. The entire ethos of the book could be summed up by saying everything you experience in life is an interpretation and nothing more.
If you feel slighted, you could just as easily not feel slighted. If someone tries to harm you, you could choose not to be hurt. You don’t have to look at the cards as stacked against you. Instead, you can dispassionately decide your next move.
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