5 Books that have influenced my life

Since I started writing my blog back in October 2020, I have been reading nonfiction. I am sharing with you the books that have had the most significant impact on my life and that I recommend to other creators or those of us who want to make the most of their time and energy.

1. Marcus Aurelius Meditations

Marcus Aurelius was the Roman Emperor between 161 and 180 AD. Meditations is believed to be his journal written during the last ten years of his life. It is heavily influenced by the stoic school of philosophy and is just as relevant today.

Marcus Aurelius had such a way with words like this gem: “In short, know this: Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash.”

The highlight of my experience with this book was this piece of wisdom. “And the tiny region in which it all takes place. The whole Earth a point in space — and most of it uninhabited. How many people there will be to admire you, and who they are” I read this on the same day as NASA released a photo showing the Orion probe coming around the dark side of the moon with the Earth in the distance. Everyone who has ever lived was born and died on that planet.

It makes you realise just how small we are and that we have to make the most of the time we have been given. This leads me to my next book.

2. Richard Koch: The 80/20 principle

When I first read this book, it really opened my eyes, and it has become a key concept not just in time management or productivity but in other parts of my life as well.

The 80/20 principle, or Paroto’s principle as it is sometimes referred to, states that there is an inbuilt imbalance between effort and reward and that 80% of your reward comes from 20% of your effort. This proportion isn’t set in stone as it has a lot of dependencies.

I’m a blogger who has written over 300 blog posts in the last three and a half years. I check the performance of blog posts regularly. One or two blog posts get the most views, accounting for some third of my views. That is just two posts out of 300, followed by a very long tail. One of my strategies is to write posts similar to the ones that perform well. However, there are no guarantees that strategy will always work.

The 80/20 principle is core knowledge that other books expand on.

3. Gary Keller, The one thing

This book builds on the 80/20 principle by arguing that you should focus on only one thing at any given time and put your energy into completing that task before identifying the next one thing.

A lot of the book covers strategies for helping you focus on the things that really matter. One of these strategies is the focusing question, which is “What is the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

The focusing question can help you determine what task to work on next or answer the biggest questions to help you choose the journey you wish to undertake in your life.

After all, we all have the same destination. What we can look to influence is our journey to that final destination.

Towards the end of the year, I consider how I want to be remembered by my friends and family once my life and journey has come to an end. This helps me to identify what the critical areas of my life are, and I then use the focusing question, “What is the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” to help me identify what steps I should look to take to get there. That helps me to identify a single goal for five years from now and for this year. These goals act as milestones.

This book is only at number three, as it helps to read the 80/20 principle first to lay the groundwork for this book.

4. Chris Bailey, The Productivity Project

The best productivity book I have ever read results from Chris Bailey’s year-long experiment to discover what productivity hacks really work and which don’t in his experience.

My biggest takeaway from the book is that time management isn’t about managing your time. It is about managing your energy and alertness. It seems that time management this was a revelation to me as it backed up my own experiences with productivity at that time. It means we all need rest periods to recharge our batteries, and it doesn’t matter what you do during those periods.

Chris Bailey defines productivity as being intentional about what you do and how you do it. It has nothing to do with producing things quicker, which is, to me, a more appropriate definition for the new digital economy.

5. David Kadavy, Mind management, not Time Management

I love this book because David is a writer. Reading it helped me realise that I was now a writer, not something I ever thought I would be when I first started blogging in October 2020. His perspective of productivity comes from that of a writer. Still, anyone who uses creativity in their lives, from artists to knowledge workers trying to resolve problems, will benefit from reading the book.

As I said in my deep dive into mind management, not time management article. It again hammered home the need for rest to restore your energy and alertness and let your next idea incubate. However, it is important to time your creative work with the right level of energy and alertness to get the best out of a creative endeavour in the hope that I create my best work.

Honourable mentions

I could have easily included books such as David Allen’s Get Things Done, Hal Elrod’s The Miracle Morning, and Grant Sabatier’s Financial Freedom.

What books have had the most significant impact on your life?