5 Life-Changing Books to Read to Expand Your Mind

“Books are what you step on to take you to a higher shelf. The higher your stack of books, the higher the shelf you can reach. Want to reach higher? Stack some more books under your feet! Reading is what brings us to new knowledge. It opens new doors. It helps us understand mysteries. It lets us hear from successful people. Reading is what takes us down the road in our journey. Everything you need for a better future and success has already been written.” ~ Jim Rohn

I love consuming books, whether by reading them on my Kindle or listening to them (at 2x speed) on Audible on my daily 5K runs.

Books are an incredible deal for the reader.

Think about it. If you were to sit down with the author and have them read their book to you, the price you paid would be multiple times the price you paid for the book.

Grant Cardone says a $30 book should be worth far more than $30. And he’s right.

Here are just five of the books I’ve consumed in the past few months that I want to encourage you to read. Note: the links to the books are affiliate links. This means that should you make a purchase, I will receive a small commission from Amazon, but this does not affect the price you pay.

The 5AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life. – Robin Sharma

Discover the early-rising habit that has helped so many accomplish epic results while upgrading their happiness, helpfulness, and feelings of aliveness through an enchanting—and often amusing—story about two struggling strangers who meet an eccentric tycoon who becomes their secret mentor.

The High 5 Habit: Take Control of Your Life with One Simple Habit – Mel Robbins

In this book, Mel teaches you how to start high fiving the most important person in your life, the one who is staring back at you in the mirror: YOURSELF.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World – Cal Newport

In Deep Work, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite.

Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four “rules”, for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill.

Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention- and How to Think Deeply Again – Johann Hari

In Stolen Focus, he introduces readers to Silicon Valley dissidents who learned to hack human attention, and veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD.

He explores a favela in Rio de Janeiro where everyone lost their attention in a particularly surreal way, and an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore workers’ productivity.

How to Train Your Mind: Exploring the Productivity Benefits of Meditation – Chris Bailey

How to Calm Your Mind is our crucial guide to achieving calm, navigating anxiety, and staving off burnout. It explains how our digital world drains us, and what we can do to abate the hidden sources of stress that burden our days.

Bailey has learned to embrace the analog world and “stimulation fasts,” to use the science of “savoring” to become more focused and present, and to relax without guilt—and he shows us how we can reclaim calm, too. In an anxious world, investing in calm might be the best productivity strategy around.