There are just so many wonderful and great self-help books out there. However, with so many books, we have so little time.
I understand how life can be so busy and we don’t have enough time to read our favorite books. That’s why I decided to compile the best self-help books and give you their best lessons.
Of course, some books are so wonderful that summarizing may not be enough to tell you all their insights. However, this article should be enough to give you a headstart and even an overview of what you can learn from the book.
You always have the freedom to read the books that you are interested in. This article should just simply whet your appetite and help you decide which book you should read next.
So, here are the 101 powerful lessons you will learn from the 101 best self-help books of all time!
1. The Bible
For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? (Matthew 16:26)
Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life. (Proverbs 4:23)
So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. (Psalms 90:12)
2. How to Win Friends & Influence People
“While dealing with people, remember that you are dealing not with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion, who are motivated by pride and ego.”
3. Think and Grow Rich
“The starting point of all achievement is DESIRE. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desire brings weak results, just as a small fire makes a small amount of heat.”
4. The ONE Thing
“The starting point of all achievement is DESIRE. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desire brings weak results, just as a small fire makes a small amount of heat.”
5. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
″If you want to have a happy marriage, be the kind of person who generates positive energy and sidesteps negative energy rather than empowering it. If you want to have a more pleasant, cooperative teenager, be a more understanding, empathic, consistent, loving parent. If you want to have more freedom, more latitude in your job, be a more responsible, a more helpful, a more contributing employee. If you want to be trusted, be trustworthy. If you want the secondary greatness of recognized talent, focus first on primary greatness of character.″
6. Getting Things Done
“The great secret about goals and visions is not the future they describe but the change in the present they engender.”
7. Atomic Habits
“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.”
8. The Five Love Languages
“Encouragement requires empathy and seeing the world from your spouse’s perspective. We must first learn what is important to our spouse. Only then can we give encouragement. With verbal encouragement, we are trying to communicate, “I know. I care. I am with you. How can I help?” We are trying to show that we believe in him and in his abilities. We are giving credit and praise.”
9. The Compound Effect
“You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.”
10. Barking Up the Wrong Tree
“We spend too much time trying to be “good” when good is often merely average. To be great we must be different. And that doesn’t come from trying to follow society’s vision of what is best, because society doesn’t always know what it needs. More often being the best means just being the best version of you.”
11. The 4-Hour Workweek
“There is less competition for bigger goals.”
12. The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership
“Many people view leadership the same way they view success, hoping to go as far as they can, to climb the ladder, to achieve the highest position possible for their talent. But contrary to conventional thinking, I believe the bottom line in leadership isn’t how far we advance ourselves but how far we advance others. That is achieved by serving others and adding value to their lives.”
13. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
“Unbelievable as it may sound, you only have to experience a state of perfect order once to be able to maintain it. All you need to do is take the time to sit down and examine each item you own, decide whether you want to keep or discard it, and then choose where to put what you keep.”
14. Grit
“…There are no shortcuts to excellence. Developing real expertise, figuring out really hard problems, it all takes time―longer than most people imagine….you’ve got to apply those skills and produce goods or services that are valuable to people….Grit is about working on something you care about so much that you’re willing to stay loyal to it…it’s doing what you love, but not just falling in love―staying in love.”
15. Living Forward
“So many of us have settled for what is, rather than what could be.”
16. Outliers
“Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”
17. Boundaries
“Boundaries define us. They define what is me and what is not me. A boundary shows me where I end and someone else begins, leading me to a sense of ownership. Knowing what I am to own and take responsibility for gives me freedom.
Taking responsibility for my life opens up many different options. Boundaries help us keep the good in and the bad out. Setting boundaries inevitably involves taking responsibility for your choices. You are the one who makes them.
You are the one who must live with their consequences. And you are the one who may be keeping yourself from making the choices you could be happy with. We must own our own thoughts and clarify distorted thinking.”
18. Start with Why
“There are only two ways to influence human behavior: you can manipulate it or you can inspire it.
Very few people or companies can clearly articulate WHY they do WHAT they do. By WHY I mean your purpose, cause or belief – WHY does your company exist? WHY do you get out of bed every morning? And WHY should anyone care?
People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.
We are drawn to leaders and organizations that are good at communicating what they believe. Their ability to make us feel like we belong, to make us feel special, safe and not alone is part of what gives them the ability to inspire us.
For values or guiding principles to be truly effective they have to be verbs. It’s not “integrity,” it’s “always do the right thing.” It’s not “innovation,” it’s “look at the problem from a different angle.” Articulating our values as verbs gives us a clear idea – we have a clear idea of how to act in any situation.
Happy employees ensure happy customers. And happy customers ensure happy shareholders—in that order.
Leading is not the same as being the leader. Being the leader means you hold the highest rank, either by earning it, good fortune or navigating internal politics. Leading, however, means that others willingly follow you—not because they have to, not because they are paid to, but because they want to.
You don’t hire for skills, you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills.
Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated people and inspire them. People are either motivated or they are not. Unless you give motivated people something to believe in, something bigger than their job to work toward, they will motivate themselves to find a new job and you’ll be stuck with whoever’s left.
Trust is maintained when values and beliefs are actively managed. If companies do not actively work to keep clarity, discipline and consistency in balance, then trust starts to break down.
All organizations start with WHY, but only the great ones keep their WHY clear year after year.”
19. Mindset
“We like to think of our champions and idols as superheroes who were born different from us. We don’t like to think of them as relatively ordinary people who made themselves extraordinary.”
20. The Obstacle is the Way
“The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.”
21. Daring Greatly
“Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.”
22. The Little Book of Talent
“Feeling stupid is no fun. But being willing to be stupid—in other words, being willing to risk the emotional pain of making mistakes—is absolutely essential, because reaching, failing, and reaching again is the way your brain grows and forms new connections.”
23. 12 Rules for Life
“To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).”
24. MONEY Master the Game
“Remember: we all get what we tolerate. So stop tolerating excuses within yourself, limiting beliefs of the past, or half-assed or fearful states. Use your body as a tool to snap yourself into a place of sheer will, determination, and commitment. Face your challenges head on with the core belief that problems are just speed bumps on the road to your dreams. And from that place, when you take massive action—with an effective and proven strategy—you will rewrite your history.”
25. Drive
“People can have two different mindsets, she says. Those with a “fixed mindset” believe that their talents and abilities are carved in stone. Those with a “growth mindset” believe that their talents and abilities can be developed. Fixed mindsets see every encounter as a test of their worthiness. Growth mindsets see the same encounters as opportunities to improve.”
26. Tools of Titans
“The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.”
27. Book of Joy
“I always consider myself personally one of seven billion human beings. Nothing special. So, on that level, I have tried to make people aware that the ultimate source of happiness is simply a healthy body and a warm heart.”
28. Good to Great
“When [what you are deeply passionate about, what you can be best in the world at and what drives your economic engine] come together, not only does your work move toward greatness, but so does your life. For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work. Perhaps, then, you might gain that rare tranquility that comes from knowing that you’ve had a hand in creating something of intrinsic excellence that makes a contribution. Indeed, you might even gain that deepest of all satisfactions: knowing that your short time here on this earth has been well spent, and that it mattered.”
29. See You at the Top
“Most people who fail in their dream fail not from lack of ability but from lack of commitment.”
30. The Four Agreements
“Whatever happens around you, don’t take it personally… Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves.”
31. The Gifts of Imperfection
“Understanding the difference between healthy striving and perfectionism is critical to laying down the shield and picking up your life. Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it’s often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis.”
32. Peak
“A partner can encourage you, maybe even stop you from falling, but they can’t get you to the top. That’s entirely up to you.”
33. My Philosophy for Successful Living
“If you work hard on your job, you make a living. If you work hard on yourself, you can make a fortune. What is the reason for this truth? Success is not something you pursue. Success is something that you attract by becoming an attractive person. The way that you become rich is not by wishing your life were easier, but instead by focusing on making yourself better.”
34. Brain Rules
“Studies show that a person who is interrupted takes 50 percent longer to accomplish a task. Not only that, he or she makes up to 50 percent more errors.”
35. Deep Work
“Less mental clutter means more mental resources available for deep thinking.”
36. What To Say When You Talk To Yourself
“After examining the philosophies, the theories, and the practiced methods of influencing human behavior, I was shocked to learn the simplicity of that one small fact: You will become what you think about most; your success or failure in anything, large or small, will depend on your programming – what you accept from others, and what you say when you talk to yourself.
It is no longer a success theory; it is a simple but powerful fact. Neither luck nor desire has the slightest thing to do with it. It makes no difference whether we believe it or not. The brain simply believes what you tell it most. And what you tell it about you, it will create. It has no choice.”
37. The Power of Now
“The light is too painful for someone who wants to remain in darkness.”
38. The Daily Stoic
“Most of us are afraid of dying. But sometimes this fear begs the question: To protect what exactly? For a lot of people the answer is: hours of television, gossiping, gorging, wasting potential, reporting to a boring job, and on and on and on. Except, in the strictest sense, is this actually a life? Is this worth gripping so tightly and being afraid of losing? It doesn’t sound like it.”
39. Unlimited Memory
“Your mind never wanders away; it only moves towards more interesting things.”
40. Best Self: Be You, Only Better
“Sometimes we must walk into the darkness in order to understand what light really is.”
41. Smarter Faster Better
“The choices that are most powerful in generating motivation, in other words, are decisions that do two things: They convince us we’re in control and they endow our actions with larger meaning.”
42. Awaken the Giant Within
“Any time you sincerely want to make a change, the first thing you must do is to raise your standards.”
43. The Minimalist Home
“In our overcrowded homes today, most possessions are not truly “belongings.” They are only distracting us from the things that do belong.”
44. As a Man Thinketh
“A man’s mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild; but whether cultivated or neglected, it must, and will, bring forth. If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed seeds will fall therein, and will continue to produce their kind.”
45. Rich Dad Poor Dad
“Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.”
46. The Power of Positive Thinking
“The way to happiness: Keep your heart free from hate, your mind from worry. Live simply, expect little, give much. Scatter sunshine, forget self, think of others. Try this for a week and you will be surprised.”
47. The Greatest Salesman
“I will live this day as if it is my last. …I will waste not a moment mourning yesterday’s misfortunes, Yesterday’s defeats, yesterday’s aches of the heart, for why should I throw good after bad?”
I will live this day as if it is my last. This day is all I have and these hours are now my eternity. I greet this sunrise with cries of joy as a prisoner who is reprieved from death. I lift mine arms with thanks for this priceless gift of a new day. So too, I will beat upon my heart with gratitude as I consider all who greeted yesterday’s sunrise who are no longer with the living today. I am indeed a fortunate man and today’s hours are but a bonus, undeserved. Why have I been allowed to live this extra day when others, far better than I, have departed? Is it that they have accomplished their purpose while mine is yet to be achieved? Is this another opportunity for me to become the man I know I can be?”
48. The Success Principles
“What others think about you is none of your business.”
49. The Last Lecture
“The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.”
50. The Top Five Regrets of the Dying
“Life doesn’t owe us anything. We only owe ourselves, to make the most of the life we are living, of the time we have left, and to live in gratitude.”
