Select Books for the Road to Success

by Case Lane

You have probably read that many successful people read. The world’s movers and shakers, billionaires and influencers read books (and magazines and newspapers). They read to stay informed, learn practices and strategies for success, and to continuously improve their minds.

Part of your success strategy for transitioning your life to entrepreneurship, should include reading.

But where do you start?

There are hundreds (probably thousands) of “best book” lists that you can Google and reference. But how do you even choose which books to read from that list?

Okay let’s get that booklist going…

One way to start is to think first about what you want to get out of the books. What do you want books to teach you? You want to be reading for implementable action, things you can do to improve yourself as you build your business.

Here are five categories of books to begin with:

The Definition of an Entrepreneur: Read biographies, autobiographies, and books about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship to learn who entrepreneurs are, what they do and how they are formed.

Skills of Successful people: Read personal development books to learn how to improve your success skills and yourself, so you can move more efficiently in the entrepreneurial world.

General business environment: Read books about the business of business, the histories of specific industries and companies to learn how the broader global economy functions.

Think like a Billionaire: Read books about investing, the road to super-wealth to understand how markets work, and how entrepreneurs access private funds to fuel growth.

Life in Action: Read fiction about successful people, business people and business-related ideas to see the big picture, and get background and inside information about how people function in a success-driven life.

Here are suggestions in each of these categories. There are dozens of books in every category considered “the best” or “must-haves,” below are only some initial suggestions. You can start in any order.

If you find you would prefer to read books about your specific product or industry, of course add those ones as well. The key is you want to understand which books to read, and why. You want to be able to implement the learnings from the book into your lifestyle

DEFINITION OF AN ENTREPRENEUR

When you are starting out as an aspiring entrepreneur, and the only idea you have in your head the concept of starting a business, you might not be confident about what your vision will really mean.

To develop a more specific idea of how entrepreneurs are formed and what entrepreneurs do, you can read biographies and autobiographies, and books about entrepreneurial ideas. People often wonder: how did so-and-so get rich? One of the best ways to find out is to read the biographies about rich people, and learn the facts for yourself.

You are looking for an in-depth accounting of the entrepreneur’s story – what were the actual steps this person took to become successful. The best biographies tend to be those thick ones that take you back not only to the entrepreneur’s childhood, but also through his or her parents, or other significant influences. This additional insight will help you realize the most successful entrepreneurs come from a wide variety of backgrounds, and have had an even wider variety of experiences on the road to success.

While industry and technology do change our economic landscape, the day-to-day realities of humans rarely change. Everyone still must secure food, clothes and shelter to have a civilized life. The actions taken by John D. Rockefeller in the 1800s – walking up and down the street to ask for a job – are still relevant today. Despite all the online employment services, in the 21st century people still often find work by word-of-mouth.

Use biographies and autobiographies to help you understand how you can write your own story as you transition to entrepreneurship. Look for the lessons that explain the idea of an entrepreneur.

Books in this category include: Biographies and Autobiographies

Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way by Richard Branson

The Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow

Shark Tales: How I Turned $1000 into a Billion Dollar Business by Barbara Corcoran

Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw

Morgan, American Financier by Jean Strouse

Entrepreneurship:

The Four-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-to-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss

The Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness by Jeffery Gitomer

Zero to One: Notes on Start-ups or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel

SKILLS OF SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE

Most of us are not born ready to take on the world with our entrepreneurial ideas. In fact, when you realize how big the personal development book market is, you realize that being an organized, attentive, polished, successful person takes information – ideas and strategies that you can learn and implement for yourself.

Successful people have a mix of skills, but they are not always the same. If you learn some of the basic, timeless behaviors, you can use those attributes anywhere. Personal development must be taught and practiced. It is not enough to read the books, you also have to implement the ideas from the book. And you must be consistent in applying the changes to your life.

Perennial sellers like Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich have been around for decades, yet the number of people who stick to the advice is certainly not visible in today’s economy. If everyone who had bought or read Think and Grow Rich had applied all the activities, average incomes would probably higher.

You can be an exception. You can use personal development books to actually make changes to the way you behave. The advice exists (and continues to sell) because it works. And it works because people like you make it happen.

Books in this category include: Personal Development:

Choose Yourself by James Altucher

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

GLOBAL BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT

As an entrepreneur, you want to be thinking about the global economy in which you run your business. Even if you have a small enterprise, you are affected by global economic changes in the price of oil or the value of the dollar. Having a more knowledgeable background on these issues can help you manage your business rationally.

You can muse about inflation or trade like the average person, or you can read books that explain current economic development and trends. These books will provide you with an insight that you can use to develop your own business. They tend to be interesting histories giving you the information you did not know, and helping to dispel certain fallacies about business, trade and investment.

Although these reads can often be dense, they are well worth the effort to give you a broader grounding and overview of the business world that you now occupy.

Books in this category include: Business of Business:

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World by William J. Bernstein

Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras

Guns, Germs, Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best Run Companies by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power by Daniel Yergin

THINK LIKE A BILLIONAIRE

As you read the biographies of entrepreneurs, you may notice a pattern – the big money, mega wealth, came from the stock market. Either the entrepreneur became an investor or was invested in, when the company was taken public. The real jump to billionaire wealth, comes from owning the factors of production, from owning capital.

You can begin to build your billionaire mindset by reading books about investing. These are books that help you develop a money consciousness, to see money not just as the tool that pays the bills, but as a factor that can be transformed into changing your life for the long run.

Many people have a poor financial management and investing education. Without these types of books, the situation would be even worse since this information is not taught in schools. In fact, good investment advice is passed on from one generation to the next within the same family, but not transferred horizontally through a society. This is information you are unlikely to hear.

So your best bet for putting yourself in line to understand the business of money is through an investment in time spent learning more about how investment works in the global economy. Educate yourself before you become an investor.

Books in this category include: Investing and Financial Management:

The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing by Benjamin Graham

Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham and David L. Dodd

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids about Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! by Robert Kiyosaki

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy by Thomas J. Stanley

LIFE IN ACTION

As a bonus, fiction books featuring characters in business can give you a broader overview of the world you are entering. By reading about fiction characters, you have a sense of day-to-day life, as well as the road to wealth.

Unlike a biographer, a fiction writer can tell you everything. You get inside the character’s head, and maybe even read words that resonate with you, and your entrepreneurial vision for yourself. You may even decide to emulate the behaviors and practices of business or success-oriented fiction characters who you feel connected to through the story.

Books in this category include: Fiction

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The High Flyer by Susan Howatch

The Financier by Theodore Dreiser

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

If you are starting out as an aspiring entrepreneur and looking for guidance on how to face the entrepreneurial world, start by reading. When you set aside, 15 minutes a day to work on your business, your time can be focused on reading, your research for creating the life you really want.

Many of the classic books now have e-reader versions and you can upload copies to your phone or tablet to read when you are standing in line or commuting on public transit.

If you have no idea where you want to start, begin with a few books. You will likely find yourself inspired to keep going until you have your business up and running, and you can begin to live your life on your terms.

NOTE: In future blogs, I will follow-up on each of these books and provide more detail about what you may be able to learn from each (especially the fiction) as you move forward on your entrepreneurial journey.

Disclosure: book links are affiliate links to which if used may result in compensation to the author to help support this business and future posts

100 Best Success Books of All Time (Updated for 2021)

"Emotional Intelligence 2.0 succinctly explains how to deal with emotions creatively and employ our intelligence in a beneficial way."

--THE DALAI LAMA

For the first time ever in a book, TalentSmart's revolutionary program helps people identify their EQ skills, build these skills into strengths, and enjoy consistent performance in the pursuit of important life objectives. The book contains proven strategies from a decade-long effort to accurately measure and increase emotional intelligence. Trusted by upper-echelon leaders inside companies worldwide, these strategies will enable you to capitalize on the skills responsible for 58% of performance in all types of jobs.

Includes a passcode for online access to the world's bestselling emotional intelligence test, the Emotional Intelligence Appraisal®, which will show you where your EQ stands today and what you can do to begin maximizing it immediately.

Rooted in sound research involving more than 500,000 responses, this new edition of the test will:

--Pinpoint which of the book's 66 emotional intelligence strategies will increase your EQ the most.

--Reveal the specific behaviors responsible for your EQ scores.

--Allow you to test yourself a second time to measure how much your EQ has increased from your efforts.

The book's smooth narrative style turns rigorous research into memorable stories and practical strategies that anyone can use to his or her advantage.

With 90% of top performers high in EQ, and EQ twice as important as IQ in getting where you want to go in life, who can afford to ignore it?

What people are saying about it:

"Emotional Intelligence 2.0 is a fast read with compelling anecdotes and good context in which to understand and improve your score."

--Newsweek

"Surveys of 500,000 people on the role of emotions in daily life have enabled the authors to hone EQ assessment to a 28-question online survey that can be completed in seven minutes."

--The Washington Post

"Read worthy strategies for improving emotional intelligence skills make this our how-to book of the week. It's nice to know that average IQ doesn't limit a person to average performance. And who can resist an online quiz with instant feedback?"

--Newsday

"Gives abundant, practical findings and insights with emphasis on how to develop EQ. Research shows convincingly that EQ is more important than IQ."

--Stephen R. Covey, author, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

"This book can drastically change the way you think about it twice."

--Patrick Lencioni, author, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

"At last a book that gives how to's rather than just what to's. We need no more convincing that emotional intelligence is at the core of life success. What we need are practical ways of improving it. Bradberry and Greaves brilliant new book is a godsend. It will change your life."

--Joseph Grenny, New York Times bestselling coauthor of Crucial Conversations

"Emotional intelligence is an extremely important skill for personal and professional success. This book is excellent and the learning included in the free online test is cutting-edge. I strongly recommend it."

--Ken Blanchard, bestselling business book author of all time; coauthor The One Minute Manager®

"I distributed the book to my entire team. We found it very helpful in our dealings with each other and our internal customers. With all the new buzzwords over the past few years, the heart and soul of a company's culture is how they support and promote emotional intelligence. Those with foresight see that emotional intelligence will separate the good companies from the great ones. This book is a wonderful tool for a grass roots approach. If your desire is to be a truly resonate leader that people will trust and follow, this is an opportunity that cannot only change your professional career, but also your personal relationships."

--Regina Sacha, vice president, human resources, FedEx Custom Critical

"In the fast lane of business life today, people spend more time on computer keyboards, blackberries and conference calls than they do in face-to-face communication. We're expected to piece together broken conversations, cryptic voicemails, and abbreviated text messages to figure out how to proceed. In this increasingly complex web, emotional intelligence is more important than ever before. This book is filled with invaluable insights and information that no one can afford to ignore."

--Rajeev Peshawaria, executive director, Goldman Sachs International

less

Adopt Reading Habits of Successful People: Be an Achiever

If you want to be an achiever, you’ll need to be a good reader. The most successful people have the reading habits in common and they credit their books as a key factor behind their success.

According to a survey by the National Endowment for the Arts, only 43% of U.S. adults have the habits of reading any type of literature not needed for work or school. This percentage is a three-decade low.

However, this survey doesn’t display the reading habits of successful people. Successful people tend to read to attain their goals. If you want to become a gainer like Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Elon Musk, or Mark Zuckerberg, you’ll need to read a lot.

They have the passion to know more from books. There are many catalysts to reach their position where reading habit is one of those. So, to adopt successful people’s reading habits around the world, you require investing time to read in a scrutinized way.

This is important to learn how to read like achievers. Now let’s dive into 5 reading habits of successful people around the world, and try to become a profound reader like them.

5 Reading Habits of Successful People that You Can Learn from Them

Below you can learn about a few of the people who appreciate reading as a huge part of their success.

Warren Buffett

When Warren Buffett started his career in investment, he used to read 600 to 1000 pages of newspapers, corporate reports, and magazines every day.

Still, he reads at least 500 pages a day. Buffett thinks this is the standard way how knowledge works and builds up, like compound interest.

Yes, many of you can read 600-1000 pages per day, but would you actually do it?

However, let’s try these 3 things to read like Buffett.

Schedule Your Time

Scheduling time isn’t a tough task to do. But managing time effectively to become natural in adopting reading habits of successful people is quite hard.

It could be tougher for you to invest time at the very outset of daily life. But, still, you can schedule 30 minutes per day when none would disturb you there.

Think for Yourself

We may have a tendency to copy the reading style of a successful person like Buffett. Means, many of us can be a reader with daily practice.

But do we try to impose the gathered knowledge in our real life? To become a reader like Buffett, you’ll need to read and think about reading for yourself to progress more in life.

Invest in You

Investing in yourself is the best investment in the entire world. According to Warren Buffett, you can invest in yourself through reading.

This practice is the best investment. So, to change your present life, you have to frame productive habits and be eager to learn each day.

Bill Gates

According to Bill Gates, he reads 50 books per year. Or, he weekly goes through a book roughly.

Father of Bill Gates told that Gates had an intensive habit of reading books in his childhood. There was a rule for not reading books on the dining table.

Books on public health, disease, engineering, business, and science are his favorite kind of books.

However, let’s try these 4 things to read like Bill Gates

Take Notes While Reading

Practice of taking notes can help you to re-read books. By just having a glance may make you understand the whole thing.

In non-fictional ones, Bill takes notes with the help of margins. Thus, he can make sure to himself that he really read the book with total attention.

Start That You Can Finish

The general people tend to start anything, but cannot reach the finishing line because we don’t have the capability to project anything. But great people are different here.

Bill never starts any book that he cannot finish. You can learn from this and start reading that you can finish it properly.

Read at least for One Hour

Everyone has the same amount of time in a day. How many of us utilize it properly?

Bill Gates gives one hour per day especially at night before going to sleep. Try to manage at least one hour a day to be a reader like Bill.

Read Bill’s Choice

Every success has a secret. A few people reveal their success recipe to mass people. Bill is one of them.

Gatesnotes is Bill’s personal blog where he provided his 150 book’s list. You can get an idea there to follow his choice.

Oprah Winfrey

Have you ever watched the “Oprah Winfrey Show”? This woman is a great cognitive person, right?

Her reading habit makes a difference from any other woman in the world. Eventually, she is one of the most influential women in the world.

However, let’s try these 3 things to read like Oprah Winfrey

Add Reading to Your Bedroom Routine

Reading is a habit where passion plays a key role. Everyone has an issue with the timing of reading. You may have a lot of daily tasks to do. Being busy is very common but consistency in your priority is crucial.

Before sleeping, you may attempt to sleep for a long duration. What do you usually do that time? Surfing the internet? Chatting with your friends?

Even though Winfrey has a very busy schedule, she manages time to read every evening before bed. Exclude unproductive tasks and include the habit of reading before sleeping.

Read with Your Friends

Winfrey has a habit to discuss the topics of the books that she read. This is a great idea for you to enhance your inner gestures by discussing with your friends, that would help you to dig deeper into your thoughts.

Read What Oprah Reads

Winfrey usually continues her sharing of knowledge with her fans and followers around the world. She provides a book to discuss weekly in her blog. You can follow to read and discuss with your true idol on her blog.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk credits his sci-fi and non-fiction books to learn about rockets. He used to spend 10 hours a day reading novels on science.

The costs to make a rocket were high, so Musk concluded he could do it himself after reading about it. He was entirely guided by a specific destination, and wanted to achieve specific knowledge.

He didn’t pull up until he learned what he desired to learn. This habit paid him back and learned from where he wanted to gather knowledge.

However, let’s try these 2 things to read like Elon Musk

Find that You Makes Curious

You’ll not only follow the mechanism of reading habits of successful people, but you have to be curious about things you tend to read.

Then if you have any interest, start digging about that from books. There are a plethora of books out there to satisfy your thirst for your interest. The great thing is you’ll start reading regularly if you have an interest in any topic and read intensively like Musk.

Prioritize Your Learning

Reading habits are the fundamental skills in a human life. But priority is a key to learning anything from a book.

You’ll need to prioritize your learning like Musk to read like Musk. All his life he wanted to learn where he had an interest. Thus, prioritize your time according to your learning priority.

Mark Zuckerberg

According to Mark Zuckerberg, books are valuable for how they allow you to explore a topic, and immerse yourself in a deeper way than most media today.

This is how Zuckerberg credits books to learn deeply about anything. He thinks his success came because of reading books.

However, let’s try these 2 things to read like Mark Zuckerberg

Find a Balance

You have many things to do in your entire daily life. But without balancing, can you ever reach any goal?

Yes, he checks social media at first in his daily routine. Instead, he can balance and read regularly to enrich him from inside. So, you need to try finding the right balance in your daily routine as well.

Set Goals While Reading

What do you desire to learn? Firstly, you’ll need to set your goals. Zuckerberg, in his free time, started to learn the Mandarin language from books.

So, try to set your goals of learning first, then begin working on it.

Quick Tips and Tricks to Adopt Reading Habits of Successful People

Read every day as consistency is the key to conquer anything.

Try to balance. But don’t let your adequate level of reading habit be lessened.

To become an expert, try non-fiction ones which will give more constructive knowledge.

After reading a book, you’ll need to summarize the book.

Read with your friends. Maybe, organizing reading competitions can help you to improve.

Try to discuss what you’ve learned so far from reading.

Without a goal, you cannot achieve anything. So set your goal of reading.

Adopt Reading Habits of Successful People: Final Words

It is true that becoming a successful person is not an easy task, or by copying them will not ensure you to become like them. But you’ll get wealthier inside by adopting the reading habits of successful people. Moreover, if you want to prepare for the corporate field, reading habits will help you.

Reading has many positive outcomes like it is a good exercise of the brain, reduces loneliness, enhances your technical abilities and most importantly it will keep you updated.

Successful people tend to be updated and enhance their analytical power through their regular reading habits. Who knows? Might be you are the next successful person in the world and we’ll have to write about your reading habit to enlighten others.