Life-changing books to read in your 20s will be able to help you get rich. Books smell like rich mahogany. I love the smell of books. What I used to do was love the dopamine hits that I would get from buying books, but then I wouldn't actually read them. If I did read them, I would just get educational and entertaining vibes from them, but I wouldn't actually apply them. These five books help me make more money. These five books helped me attract my soulmate, start our family together, and build my dream life. These five books have changed my life, and I've read them more than once and applied them to my life. These are the five books that you must read in 2022. The Books To Read To Become Rich can be helpful to achieve your life goals.
Even if you don't have time to read those books, I'm going to give you the big takeaways so they can change your life, your finances, your relationships, and your destiny as well. Coming in at number five is Atomic Habits by James Clear. James Clear makes it clear that your habits create your entire life. All the results you're getting in your life are quite simply just the results of your habits and the habits that you have about yourself. You create your own identity, your own personality, your own self-perception, and your own self-image. This is just one of the life-changing books to read in your 20s that is truly effective.
You Have To Change Your Habits
So he breaks the entire book down essentially into this formula here, which is that your habits plus your identity equal your results. "R" stands for results. "I" stands for Identity. "H" stands for habit. So your financial results, your love, your health, your career, your goals in life, if you want them to change, then it's actually the inverse. You have to change your habits, which, in turn, changes your own identity. Which is what shifts the results that you're getting in your life.
So really, one of the biggest ideas in the book is a concept in psychology called the aggregation of marginal gains, which is the philosophy of searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything that you do. He talks about Warren Buffett, who says that he got rich through compounding interest. Compounding interest is the greatest wonder in the whole world. Well, compounding interest is essentially you getting 1% better, and if you get 1% better, you're going to be a lot better every single day. Similarly, if you go 1% backwards, that compounding effect over 365 days is going to be in a hole. This is just one of the life-changing books to read in your 20s that is truly effective.
Your Brain Has Serotonin And Dopamine
He says that changes that seem small and unimportant at first turn into remarkable results. The question is: how do you stick with it? We start with new year's resolutions. We resolve to live healthier lives. We make the decision to eat healthier. We said we were going to start our business and write that book. When we do that thing we always say we're going to do, we get the motivation for it. But how do we actually change it? Our habits and the results that we're getting come down to two main things. The first of those is the rewards that you're getting. Your brain has serotonin and dopamine.
It needs the rewards to know that this is a habit that's worth doing, but the problem is, how do you reward yourself if you’re not where you want to be in life? The second phase of that is developing systems for those little habits, which is intentional. My new habit is that I'm going to be healthier. So let's simplify and say that my new habit is to exercise every day at 11 o'clock for 60 minutes. I'm going to run four miles. So, what are the actionable tasks or results of that? I'm going to save 30% of my monthly income when it comes in on the 14th of every month.
Create A Clear Reward For Your Systems
I'm going to save 30% and it's going to be automatic. These are the things that I directly control that ultimately lead to me changing the results that I'm getting. So you've got two things there. You have the rewards and the systems. When I was broke, I realized I needed to change my financial life. Now the rewards are reversed. It was really daunting because you get these little incremental gains, and they're not very much, and it's easy to talk yourself out of them.
What I started doing is rewarding myself by making a splurge account of 5 to 10% of everything that I was making. I would go out one night at a really nice hotel with my wife, and we would just imagine that we were rich. We'd go out and go camping. I'd get a massage, I'd pick different things that I'd blow my money on to give me the reward, to change my association that money meant freedom and options instead of money, pain, stress, and scarcity. So create a clear reward for your systems. This is just one of the life-changing books to read in your 20s that is truly effective.
Applied Knowledge Is Actually Power
Your systems are the measurable results that you can choose that will ultimately help you change your habits. That might be, as I suggested, saving 30% of your income. It might be that you're going to now exercise at 11 o'clock every day and run three miles every day. It might be that you're going to quit eating processed sugar. These are clear, actionable steps that lead to changes in your results, but you stick with them by giving yourself rewards.
Book number four is actually a journal. I call it a hypnotic journal. My journal is really for hypnotizing myself. This is just one of the life-changing books to read in your 20s that is truly effective. Now we all know that knowledge isn't power. We've all heard that applied knowledge is actually power. So what's the whole goal of learning new information? It's to change our paradigm. That's why we read books to change our subconscious patterns. One of the simplest ways to do this is to use hypnotic writing. Ashley and I are moving some stuff around, and I got my box of all my journals over the last 10 years.
I Can See The Progression Of My Life
They're the most important books to me, and I can see the progression of my life because what I do with them is pull out a clean sheet of paper every day and I write what I want in the present tense over and over again. I'm so happy and grateful now that I'm making x amount of dollars a month. I'm so happy and grateful now that I'm exercising every single day.
I'm so happy and grateful now that I've attracted my soulmate. Whatever it is that you want. I use hypnotic writing to start to change my paradigm and this becomes my little hypnosis book. If you want to really amplify that, there are two things to do: one, you write in the present tense. Then number two is to listen to my free success hypnosis while you do it, so you're engaging all your five senses.
Most People Never Achieve What They Want
Number three, this book by Gary Keller. This is just one of the life-changing books to read in your 20s that is truly effective. Basically, the whole entire book is summarized like this: most people never achieve what they want, because they do a bunch of things. If you focus on one thing, you're going to see exponentially increased results. When I read this book, I was doing all types of things. I was doing solar company MLMs; I was trying to be a speaker; I was trying to be a seminar leader; I was trying to speak at high schools; I was trying to do this and I just had a million different things to do, but I was also broke.
I was in my very early 20s. My wife was in credit card debt and I was doing everything. I was always burned out and none of them ever really panned out. I decided I was going to just pick one thing. My one thing was going to be YouTube. That is what I’m going to do. I was going to be on video, I was going to do YouTube, and that was what I was going to do. I put all my creative energy into it and I put all my day into it.
We Live In A Culture That Values Doing So Many Things
I eliminated everything that got in the way of my one goal, and what ended up happening was that my YouTube channel blew up. It received over 60 million views before transforming into a million-dollar business that I was able to replicate with other ventures. My one thing was YouTube, and the question is: what's your one thing? It might be sales, it might be real estate, it might be organizing, it might be lawn work, it might be painting, it might be with music, it might be that you are very good at inventing or coding or videos.
What's your one thing? Then ask yourself what things you can let go of, because you can never measure what you're going to gain by focusing on what you're losing. That's the most difficult part about committing to one thing: we live in a culture that values doing so many things that committing to one thing, at least initially, feels like a bad idea. What I did was decide to go full-time into YouTube and quit everything else I was doing.
I Only Wanted To Focus On One Thing
I even got into a big fight with somebody that was my friend at that time, because they didn't want me to quit something that I wanted to quit. I only wanted to focus on one thing, and it led to this big deal, but then my whole life changed in a million ways greater than I ever could have imagined. So you can't measure what you're going to gain by focusing on what you're going to lose.
Book number two is by one of my favorite authors, Dr. Wayne Dyer, and the book is "You'll See It When You Believe It." In our culture, we always say the opposite. We say, "I'll believe it when I see it," but here's the crazy thing: it's actually the opposite. Dr. Wayne Dyer, a fantastic and accomplished psychologist, taught at tons of universities. He’s a very mainstream guy that taught the power of psychology, and everything he says in this book is essentially that your outside results are controlled by your inner belief systems.
Inner Belief Systems Create Your Outer Results
Those inner belief systems create your outer results, not the other way around. Once you believe it, you will see it. This is exemplified if we had a bonus book by Steve Jobs, which isn't included in this list of five. But if I did a bonus, it'd be that one in Steve Jobs's biography. In his biography, they talk about a reality distortion field. He had an inner vision and he did not allow the outside world to control his inner vision. So what most people do is when the outside world tells them they can't do it.
Somebody tells them they can't do it, and so the outside world controls their thinking, but he was a visionary. He lived by his inner vision and rejected anything that contradicted it. He realized he had the ability to accept or reject any idea, and then he could take old mental viruses, old negative belief systems, things that other people told them were impossible. He could drag it into the recycle bin and hit the empty trash button. He controlled his consciousness and reality distortion field.
Your Mind And Your Brain Create Your Reality
So anytime you see something that doesn't match what you want, you just say a simple phrase: "No, thank you." That's not part of my belief system. Dr. Joe Dispenza's “Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself” is ranked first. In all honesty, I've probably read this book easily over a dozen times between the physical and the audio. I learned one big idea that changed my whole life, and it's the same one you're going to get away with when you read this book, which is Hebb's law. It's a term in science and neuroscience.
There's all this new science about the brain and the mind coming out that really changes our whole worldview. We used to call the idea of manifestation and these types of things "new age." Well, the reality is that science shows us that your mind and your brain create your reality. It's all due to something called Hebb's Law, and it says that cells in your brain that fire together wire together. Your brain literally gets wired in certain ways.
The Neural Networks Of Your Brain Can Be Wired
Every time you have a thought, every time you experience a circumstance in your life, your bank account overdrafting, or getting good news, all of these things create emotions, and that’s what makes us human. We have emotions. Those dominant emotions that you have actually fire cells in your brain. Every time you have an emotion, positive or negative, as long as it's powerful and real, you fire cells in your brain. Hebb's law says that those cells actually wire together.
So your brain literally gets programmed like an operating system on a computer neurologically, and they actually have documented this with advanced brain technology where they can watch cells actually start to form neural networks. So the neural networks of your brain can be wired for money or the absence of it. They can be wired for happiness or for depression. They can be wired for pleasure or for constant frenetic stress, or fear or worry. All these things are wired into our minds.
You Have To Think And Feel Greater
Your results are actually created by your feelings and your perception. What creates your results? Your feelings and those dominant feelings fire and wire cells in your brain through Hebb's law. This controls your perception, your habitual thoughts, belief systems, behaviors, and habits, which in turn creates your results. It's a feedback loop where our thoughts, our feelings, and our perceptions create our results. Dr. Joe Dispenza says that your personal reality is created by your personality, and if you want to change your personality, then that's how you change your personal reality.
If you want to change your personal reality, you have to think and feel greater than the level of your own environment. What this means is that most people are living in a reactionary state of consciousness where their personal reality is controlling how they feel and how they think. When this occurs, you can only create up to the level of your own results. But what this is telling you is that your results are created by your identity. Your personal reality is created by your personality. You can start to reprogram your brain because your mind doesn't know the difference between what's real and what's not real.
You Activate New Cells In Your Brain
So Dr. Joe Dispenza talks about mental rehearsal and he poses a question that I think simplifies the whole book into one sentence. Can you give thanks for a future that has not been made manifest yet? Can you give thanks for the money before it comes? Can you give thanks for your soulmate before it comes? Can you give thanks for the miracle before it's arrived? The rest of the book is written by an actual researcher and scientist who proves this is a scientific fact. If you can think and feel greater than the level of your own environment, if you can give thanks for a future that hasn't happened yet, you activate new cells in your brain.
When you do that through mental rehearsal regularly, then you fire and wire new cells in your brain, which changes your identity and your results. So you consciously control your feelings and your perception, which recreates your personality and rewires your brain, which changes the results that you're getting in your life. So you move from a reactor to a creator. So, hopefully you got enough out of this that you can apply it to your life.