Living a Successful and Effective Life
Living a happy and successful life doesn’t happen overnight. As much as we all want to fast-track it, we still need to put in the work to gain experience before it can happen. While being successful in any endeavor takes time, that doesn’t mean there aren’t smarter ways to go about it.
Prior to being effective and successful is knowing how to be effective and successful. That means getting educated on the subject and taking action. Taking time to first learn the principles of effectiveness will give you a huge advantage and by learning from the experience of others you can know some of the common pitfalls to avoid.
That being said, I’d like to present seven books that I feel are essential reads on your journey to a more successful and effective life.
1. “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen R. Covey
No better way to start a blog entitled “7 Books to Help You Live a More Effective Life” than by starting with Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” This is THE book on personal effectiveness and goes down as one of my personal favorite self-improvement books. The principles taught in the book are timeless and practical. Covey is a master teacher and really gets to the root of how to be more successful in every and any area of life. Covey talks about how it’s not just changing behavior that makes you more effective, rather it’s changing one’s character that is the key.
Business guru Peter Drucker once defined efficiency “as doing things right,” while effectiveness is “doing the right things.” Covey expounds on this definition and teaches effectiveness in what he calls the P/PC balance, “P” standing for production and “PC” for production capability. Covey makes a point that the essence of effectiveness, and the very definition of it, lies in the balance between what we produce and our capability to produce. It’s not just producing a lot at work, but it’s also putting in the time to improve yourself and your skill set, which in turn allows you to produce more and better.
He lists 7 habits, or principles, that when applied bring true personal and interpersonal effectiveness:
- Be proactive
- Begin with the end in mind.
- Put first things first
- Think win-win
- Seek first to understand, then to be understood
- Synergize
- Sharpen the saw
For true learning with this book, I recommend not reading this once, but multiple times. I try and read once at the beginning of each year to make sure I’m aligned with what I’d like to do with my life and in the coming year.
2. “How Will You Measure Your Life” by Clayton Christensen
Clayton Christensen has been said to be one of the great business thinkers of our time, particularly in the field of product innovation. His books, “The Innovator’s Dilemma” and “The Innovator’s Solution” have been extremely influential in the business world and are still as relevant now as they are when he originally wrote them. While his impact has been felt in the business community, I feel Christensen’s 2012 book “How Will You Measure Your Life,” has an equal potential impact on one’s own personal growth and effectiveness.
Those who are experienced in business are very familiar with measuring whether or not their business is successful. There are different ratios and metrics they can use to do this. The question that Christensen ultimately leads you towards in this book is why shouldn’t we be doing the same thing in our own lives? If we truly want to better our lives, we should also be measuring and tracking various goals and behaviors. Christensen explains ways of measuring and being more successful in not only work but in relationships with family and friends. The book is broken down into the following three sections:
- How to be Successful at Work – Having clear priorities, responding to unanticipated opportunities, and allocating your resources optimally can help you level up your career.
- How to be Successful in Relationships – Christensen discusses many key principles that will help you have more rich, more satisfying relationships. Strengthening relationships comes through commitment and sacrifice. The more sacrifice for someone the more committed you become to that person or thing.
- How to Live and Maintain a Life of Integrity – Christensen is a Harvard grad, and as odd as it may sound, he saw a good number of his colleagues slip into poor habits and behaviors which led them down a road that ultimately ended up in jail. Christensen talks about never compromising the standards you’ve set for yourself. He mentions that it is easier (and much better) to be honest 100% of the time rather than 99% of the time. Many times people end up making big mistakes because they start being comfortable with the small ones.
3. “Who Moved My Cheese” by Spencer Johnson
While by far the shortest book among this bunch, “Who Moved My Cheese” has been a wildly successful book on personal change. It teaches profound principles through an allegorical story of four characters running through a maze looking to find cheese, the cheese representing what one wants in life. The book not only talks about how to change but how to better deal with it. It talks about how the characters found the cheese, enjoyed it for a time, and then had to move on in order to find new cheese, or at least three out of the four characters moved on.
One of the more profound things the book teaches is to not get too complacent with things and be more willing to embrace and encourage change. It’s so easy to get comfortable with a situation and then just accomplish the bare minimum. We humans are wired to take the path of least resistance. Doing so stunts our growth, progress, and even happiness though.
This book also brings a refreshing mindset that helps when dealing with tough times, making a case that it is by and through change in trying times that real growth occurs.
4. “Think Like a Monk” by Jay Shetty
There have been various studies done where scientists have closely observed the brains of monks and have found that monks tend to experience much more happiness than the average person. In fact, one particular monk was named the happiest person in the world based on unprecedented brain gamma wave levels never before reported in neuroscience.
There is something to be said about the lifestyle of a monk. Now, not all of us could (or should) commit to living the life of a monk, rather what author Jay Shetty teaches is to gain the same benefits as a monk by building the same mindset. In college, at a friend’s invitation, the author Jay Shetty attended an event where he heard a monk speaking about various practices of a monk and was so impressed by the monk’s lecture that eventually he himself made the decision to become a monk.
Shetty discusses his experience and learnings from his experience as a monk and breaks things down into three parts: let go, grow, and give. He discusses things like, how to deal with fear, how service is linked to happiness, finding skills that you’re passionate about, and of course the power of mindfulness meditation.
5. “Atomic Habits” by James Clear
Aristotle once said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” If Aristotle is right, habits are key to having a successful and effective life. I started this post by talking about “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” You might think this is already sufficient on the topic of “habits.” Covey’s focus with his book isn’t necessarily habits themselves and the science behind them, but rather which habits you should choose to cultivate and grow to be effective and successful in your life.
Author James Clear does an amazing job of explaining the ins and outs of everything related to habits. The premise of the book is that it’s our small habits that ultimately shape our behavior. So if we can learn to change these habits, whether that’s building good ones or rewiring the bad ones, we’ll be much better off.
The basic structure Clear explains there is a certain cycle that happens with all habits: a cue, a craving, a response, and a reward. He then explains how in each of these areas there are ways to improve the good and restrict the bad. These he calls the 4 laws of behavior change.
One of the key takeaways from this book was the importance of repetition and consistency in building new behavior. You may have heard from a famous study that it takes 21 days to form a new habit. Clear argues that it’s not time that’s the solution at all. Rather it’s the number of times an action was done that is important in building habits.
Clear expounds on this by sharing a story about a class experiment done in a photography class where they divided the class in half and gave them each half a different semester-long assignment. The first half was to focus their semester solely on quantity and turn in as many photographs as they could. The other half was tasked with focusing on quality, and their assignment was to only turn in one photo at the end of the semester, but it had to meet the highest quality standards. Which half do you think produced better content by the end of the semester? It was the half who focused on quantity. Putting in the repetitions gave them more experience, which help them to produce better quality in the end.
One other book that was my runner-up on habits that I’d recommend is “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg. You can also find some useful supplemental material on Clear’s website https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits/media.
6. “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living” by Dale Carnegie
While this book doesn’t speak directly to effectiveness per se, I feel teaches an essential principle that in turn does improve personal effectiveness. Many people know Dale Carnegie for his monumental book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” but this one is another one that when studied and applied really helps people to better cope with and control thoughts of worry and fear.
As time goes on and despite enormous progress in scientific and technological advancements, for some reason, we still find ways to worry. But it makes sense. The solution to having a more enjoyable life isn’t usually in acquiring new things or using the latest tech to automate the various tasks in our day. It can be found through knowledge we acquire in true principles of how to stop worrying and start living and this book helps teaches exactly that. The principles in the book are so highly applicable to life and I feel now more than ever is this book worth reading.
Some of my key takeaways from this book are:
- Live in day-tight compartments, in other words, just live one day at a time. Just about anyone can do that in just about any situation.
- Don’t let the little things get to you. There once was a dead tree that scientists found that had been living for 400+ years. They found it had been struck by lightning 14 times and had been through several avalanches and storms. But what finally killed the tree? Small bugs. Remember that the little things are indeed little.
- Live by the law of averages. For example, if someone’s fear is getting hit by lightning remember that the law of averages says that the chances of actually getting hit by lightning are 1 and 350,000. This same advice can be applied in so many other different situations we face.
- The power of serving others. Just think outside yourself and look to serve others. In this section Carnegie talks about a doctor that would say to his patients that you can overcome depression in 14 days by thinking of how you can impress and help others and then do those things you think about.
7. “Essentialism” by Greg McKeown
We all would do SO much better in just about every area of life if we were to just remember the way of the “Essentialist.” In a nutshell, Essentialism is about putting the most important things first and removing the rest of the clutter. Many of us have grown accustomed to overindulging and overworking ourselves. We often focus more on the quantity of life rather than quality. With this in mind, McKeown demonstrates why Essentialism is so important for us and explains 3 mindset shifts we should make in order to live an essentialist’s life — choosing, discerning, and finding trade-offs.
A lot of us have a problem with not ever wanting to say “no” to someone or something. Peter Drucker once said that you can only be truly effective once you’ve learned how to say “no.” It’s not saying no to everything, but saying no because there is a more important “yes” in mind. It’s often helpful as an individual, or as a team, to have a “mission statement,” which will help guide your decisions and make it a little easier to say “No” or “Yes” to things.
Conclusion
Living an effective life not only brings satisfaction to your life, but developing yourself and living habits of greater effectiveness also brings more happiness and joy into your life, and to the lives that surround you. Your circle of influence grows and you become a better manager and leader of your own life.
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