9 high-impact books that will make you smarter every day

Lifelong learning is the "ongoing, voluntary, and self-motivated" pursuit of knowledge for either personal or professional reasons. The pursuit of knowledge is easier than it has ever been before.

Cultivating the mind is essential for your personal growth. Digging deeper will separate you from the crowd and allow you to become a better version of yourself.

If you have ever wondered what you can do to become a well-rounded person and increase your rate of success, you will find these books useful. If you are constantly striving to know, learn and do more, these books will give you an edge in life.

'The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking' by Edward B. Burger

Amazon

Practical and inspiring ways for you to become more successful through better thinking: 

"Fail nine times. The next time you face a daunting challenge, think to yourself, 'In order for me to resolve this issue, I will have to fail nine times, but on the tenth attempt, I will be successful.' This attitude frees you and allows you to think creatively without fear of failure, because you understand that learning from failure is a forward step toward success.

Take a risk and when you fail, no longer think, 'Oh, no, what a frustrating waste of time and effort,' but instead extract a new insight from that misstep and correctly think, 'Great: one down, nine to go — I’m making forward progress!' And indeed you are. After your first failure, think, 'Terrific, I’m 10% done!' Mistakes, loss, and failure are all flashing lights clearly pointing the way to deeper understanding and creative solutions."

'Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience' by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Amazon

The tools to unleash the secret of peak performance:

"Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times  —  although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen. For a child, it could be placing with trembling fingers the last block on a tower she has built, higher than any she has built so far; for a swimmer, it could be trying to beat his own record; for a violinist, mastering an intricate musical passage. For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves."

'The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance' by Steven Kotler

Amazon

An exploration of how extreme athletes break the limits of ultimate human performance:

"If we are hunting the highest version of ourselves, then we need to turn work into play and not the other way round. Unless we invert this equation, much of our capacity for intrinsic motivation starts to shut down. We lose touch with our passion and become less than what we could be and that feeling never really goes away."

"To really achieve anything, you have to be able to tolerate and enjoy risk. It has to become a challenge to look forward to. In all fields, to make exceptional discoveries you need risk — you’re just never going to have a breakthrough without it."

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