I read a lot and because of all my reading I have come to appreciate how books can change your life. Reading books, especially nonfiction, can have a significant effect on your ability to succeed at anything. Don’t believe me? It has been reported that the average CEO reads an average of 60 books a year. The most frequently reported number of books read by the average person is 4. Here’s the question, is the average person’s more or less successful than the average CEO? The question you may really want the answer to is how much has reading influenced their success. And more importantly how can you benefit by doing more reading.
Books can have a positive effect on your life. They can help you develop the right beliefs and mindset you need to create more success in your life. In addition to this they can provide you with specific solutions to problems you have. And to give you new ideas. Both will help in giving you more success. This is the simplified version. Of course there is a lot more to it.
How books make you more successful
What do you want to succeed at? Chances are whatever it is a book could help you out with it. There are countless numbers of books published every single year. More books than you could ever read. No matter what area of your life you want to see more success in, there will be a book to help you out.
For you to truly change your life you need to grow. You are who you are right now. And if you want to become who you want to become you need to grow into that person. What about your life do you want to change? Is it your relationships, your financial situation, your health, happiness, career? What change do you want? And how can a book help you get it?
For you to have success in any area of your life you need two things. You need to have a strategy that will deliver the results you want. And you need to have the motivation to act on that strategy until you get the results you’re looking for. Without one or both of these things you cannot have success. And therefore you cannot change your life. Books can help you with both of these things. They can help you find the right strategies and they can help boost your motivation.
How books can boost your motivation
Reading the right book at the right time can be like rocket fuel for your motivation. There are many things that contribute towards how motivated you feel to do anything. When you don’t feel the motivation you need it is because these factors are out of balance. The moment they are back in balance you will feel that motivation. If you want to change your life you need to take action. It is only by taking action so that real change will come. But to take action means you have to be motivated enough to take the Right Action at the right time. And this is where most people fail.
Having a lack of motivation, and therefore, giving up,or not acting at all is the reason for nearly all failures. I would argue it is the only reason. There are two ways that books can help boost your motivation. They influence what you believe, and they increase values in a specific way.
You can have a quick read of this post about why self help books work by clicking here.
How books influence belief
The things you believe have a strong influence on how much motivation you have. Believing the wrong thing can kill it. The things we believe tend to seem real to us. Even when that belief does not match reality. Some children believe in Santa. And to those children he is real. But does their belief match reality? If you believe that you cannot become rich, is this not the same as believing in Santa Claus? You can become rich you just need the right strategy and to take the right action. How was this belief affect your motivation to build wealth for yourself? The short answer is it will kill it.
Without motivation you will not take enough of the right actions. And if you do not take enough of the right actions you cannot change your life. At least not for the better. And certainly not in the way you would like to improve it. There are two specific ways that books can help your motivation. At least as far as your beliefs are concerned.
They show you what is possible
There is a direct relationship between how much you think you can succeed and how much motivation you will feel. The more you believe you can make it the more motivation you will feel. Think about it like this. Knowing that nobody has ever successfully train the dog to speak like a human, how much motivation would you feel to train a dog to speak? In the beginning it is possible you will feel some curiosity and perhaps excitement at the idea of a speaking dog. But what will happen when the excitement and curiosity disappear. Odds are you do not believe will be successful in training a dog to sleep. This lack of belief will result in you not feeling very motivated to continue training the dog. I can virtually guarantee you will quit before 12 months is up.
What if, on the other hand, you were training a dog to sit? Is this something you can successfully do? Do you believe it is within the realm of possibility? How does this release affect your motivation? Of course there are other factors that have to be considered. But the greater the belief the greater the motivation.
Whatever challenge your are facing in your life right now, somebody has already faced that exact challenge and overcame it. Some of the people who have overcome the challenge has written books about it. Reading these books can help you see what is possible. And because some books give you advice on how to solve the problem, there will also be a positive change in your beliefs about your ability to achieve the same.
The more you believe, the more motivation you will feel.
Break your limiting beliefs
Be honest. Have you reached your full potential? What is the number one thing that is keeping you from unleashing your full potential? It’s the things you believe about yourself. To be more specific it is your limiting beliefs. You know how children believe in Santa Claus? Well, you believe in Santa as well. Don’t believe me? Ok I have to concede this one. You might not necessarily believe in Santa. But you do have a belief about yourself that is as real as Santa is. There is a Santa running around somewhere in your head.
Have you ever wondered how they train Circus elephants? How do they train an elephant to not walk-off once it is tethered to a peg in the ground. Let’s be honest. It wouldn’t take very much for the elephant to pull itself free. They when the elephant is young. When it is young, it doesn’t have the strength it needs to escape. The young elephant will fight and pull and try to escape. But because it is not strong enough yet it cannot break free. It does this over and over again. Until one day it realises it cannot break free. So it stops trying and never tries again. One day it grows into an adult elephant. And it also grows the strength it needs to break free. But because it believes it cannot it doesn’t even try. This is its Santa.
Reading a book can help you set your elephant free. It can help you grow out of unhelpful beliefs and into healthier more beneficial ones. Books can change your life by putting your Santa to bed forever. Imagine how life-changing it would be for an elephant to realise battle rope tied around the peg cannot keep it hostage.
Help you find the value
Do you feel motivated to do the things you do not value? No? How much do you value being bored? Not very much? If you do not value boredom very much, do not answer the phone if Rick (not his real name) calls you. He is one of the most loyal, honest, caring and genuine people I have ever had the pleasure to know. I would trust him with my life. There is just one problem. He is also one of the most boring people I have ever met. He is so boring he could put a can of Redbull to sleep.
If you knew Rick, and you did not value having a boring conversation, you wouldn’t be very motivated to answer his calls. Alternatively, you could focus on his awesomeness. And how desirable is to have a good person in your life. All of a sudden you, you have found the value in taking his call.
Finding value is all about what you are focusing on. If you focus on how boring Rick is, it devalues having a conversation with him. Less motivation. Focus on all his positive attributes on the other hand, and you increase his value. More motivation.
When you want to change your life there will be many undesirable things that you have to do. It can help you a great deal if your perception about the less desirable things were to change. When you read, you’ll come across different ways of looking at the challenge before you. And by looking at things the right way you will find the value. More value more motivation. There is value in everything. Even the most undesirable things. You just have to look for it. But it is always there.
How books influence success
1. A source of winning strategies
If you want to change your life you need to change your strategy. The situation you find yourself in right this very minute is a result of your strategy. If you are broke it is because your money strategy promotes brokenness. By sticking with your strategy you will create more brokenness. But what is used Warren Buffett’s strategy? You would have a much greater chance of building and keeping wealth. By changing your strategy you change what is possible for you.
There are multiple ways to find successful strategies. You could do it by trial and error. But this takes time effort and a whole lot of motivation. Would you be willing to fail 10000 times before finding the right solution? It would be extremely difficult for most people. But luckily there are other ways to find strategies that work. You could get somebody to teach you or to mentor you. Again there are challenges with this. Many times the people who are the best mentors are simply too busy towards the extra commitment of helping you out. It can also be quite expensive to have somebody teach you. A very cost-effective yet brilliant alternative is to pick up a book.
It does not matter what challenge you are faced with right now. For every problem there is a solution. For every problem you may have right now somebody has already found that solution. And many of the people who have been in your exact situation and found the way out have written books about it. They have shared their success strategies and all you have to do is to read the books and absorb their strategies. And then to execute them.
Warning
You need to be very careful about which strategies you choose. It is very easy to pick up a book with a strategy that is completely wrong for you. The strategy could be wrong for you because your situation is not the same as the situations that strategy will help. Sometimes it could be because the author of the book doesn’t truly understand the problem you are trying to solve.
It is important to know who wrote the book. If you know this you can have a good idea of whether they can offer you good advice. You should also make sure that the problem you are trying to fix is similar it’s not the same as the authors problem. The more alike they are the better the odds of success.
Find new ideas
Is very obvious things you gain from reading books is knowledge. And they say that knowledge is power. But I have a different view. I did not see knowledge as power. To me it is nothing more than the potential for power to be realised. If you have knowledge but you do not act on it what power is there in that? The real Power comes from what you do with that knowledge. The beautiful thing about learning new things is that you can come up with new ideas.
All of the challenges you face right now were created by the thoughts that you had yesterday and the actions that resulted. If you truly want to change your life you need to think new thoughts. Because these will lead to new actions and therefore new results. If you think today what you thought yesterday, you will do today as you did yesterday and if you do today as you did yesterday, you will have tomorrow what you have today.
One really awesome side effect of reading that I have noticed on myself that I did not think the same as I used to. I know a lot more than I did a few years ago. And so I think different. And because I think different I do different things. Which give me a lot of the things I wanted but never had.
Having more knowledge allows me to see the world different. And when you see a different world you could very easily argue that you have changed your life. Ultimately seeing the world differently from what you do now will change your life one way or the other.
Conclusion
You can achieve anything you want to in life. You can have whatever you want to have. You can do whatever you want to do. You can become whoever you want to become. There is nothing that can stop you except for you. You can find the right strategy. It just means that you have to commit to looking for it and working until you find it. As long as you have the right strategy and you have the right motivation nothing can stop you from succeeding.
Finding the right strategies is usually the easy part. If you want to lose weight, chances are you already have the right strategy. Do you spend more money than you should? I am willing to bet you already know the right strategy. If knowledge alone was power, we will all the rich and have bodies to die for. Finding a good strategy is not the problem most people face. The biggest problem is finding the motivation. And that is why I created this free course on motivation.
Remember knowledge is not power. How you use that knowledge is where the power comes from.