Brutally Honest Advice for Young Men

In The Everyday Hero Manifesto, Robin Sharma promises that each of us has the potential to achieve great things—we don’t need superpowers or incredible natural talents to do so. By following the system laid out in this book, you can unlock your heroic potential, realize your dreams, and become a force for good in the world.

Our guide begins with a brief introduction laying out Sharma’s premise for this book: that you can accomplish great things. We’ll then discuss Sharma’s suggestions for strengthening your mind, body, and heart to fulfill your heroic potential. Finally, we’ll go over the guidelines Sharma lays out for how an everyday hero should act. Our commentary will provide points of view from other self-help books about how to unlock your potential, exploring Sharma’s suggestions more deeply and providing actionable advice on how to get started on your self-improvement journey.

How can you improve your self-esteem? In The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, psychotherapist and self-esteem expert Nathaniel Branden argues that the key lies in your behavior: What you do is the most important factor that determines your self-esteem.

In this guide, you’ll learn exactly how to behave to improve your self-esteem, including by living with awareness and taking responsibility for your life and actions. You’ll also learn why so many techniques people recommend for raising self-esteem just don’t work. Along the way, you’ll discover what self-esteem actually is, why it matters, and how others affect it. Throughout, we’ll examine how modern scientific research supports or weakens Branden’s ideas (originally published in 1994), and we’ll provide practical strategies for implementing those ideas and improving your self-esteem.

In The 10X Rule, entrepreneur and motivational speaker Grant Cardone argues that the key to success is scaling up your thinking and actions by a factor of 10. Under the 10X Rule, set goals 10 times bigger than the average, then work 10 times harder than average to achieve them. It takes extraordinary thinking and effort to achieve extraordinary success. The 10X Rule can be applied to any personal or professional goal, whether it’s having an extraordinary marriage, starting a hugely successful business, or making $10 million.

In The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene asserts that whether you like it or not, you’re part of a never-ending game of power. You’re either striving for and wielding power, or you’re a pawn being played by someone more powerful than you. You choose your role.

This book is for those who prefer to be players rather than pawns. To turn you from an amateur into a master player, Greene has codified 48 laws of power based on historical examples of people who’ve excelled or failed at wielding power, with glorious or bloody results (or both). Some key principles you’ll learn: use your enemies, keep others dependent on you, say as little as possible, take credit for others’ work, and don’t get your hands dirty. You can choose to apply or dismiss these rules - but you can’t escape them.

What is it about successful leaders that lets them solve problems other people find intractable? In The Opposable Mind, Roger L. Martin says the key is integrative thinking—the ability to consider opposing ideas and create a solution from the best parts of both. While other business experts focus on leaders’ ability to execute plans, Martin argues that understanding how successful leaders think is more valuable than simply copying what they do.

In this guide, we’ll examine the beliefs common to top leaders, the way they come up with ideas, and their ability to toggle between creative thinking and falling back on their experience. We’ll show how to apply these skills while also exploring other experts’ ideas about how people think and make decisions. We’ll describe various routes to stronger mental habits that may overlap with Martin’s ideas and some common mental barriers that can make applying Martin’s advice challenging.

Many people assume their ideal life will never be more than fantasy, but in reality, you have the power to create the life you dream about. In this book, life coach and self-help guru Tony Robbins provides insights and strategies to help you take control of every aspect of your life, from your emotions to your focus. In many cases, you can make transformational changes to your life through small adjustments, such as swapping out just one word in your vocabulary.

In this guide you’ll learn how your bad habits are wired in your brain, how to decode your negative emotions to find solutions to them, and how to create your destiny.

This guide compares and contrasts Robbins’s ideas with those of other popular self-help authors, as well as current scientific theories. This will provide you with background and a deeper understanding of the lessons in Awaken the Giant Within, as well as some alternative methods for taking control of your life.

We are surrounded by people who seem more successful than us and who earn more money than we do. We may think, “What do they have that I haven’t got? Are they just smarter?” In The Magic of Thinking Big, author David J. Schwartz says it’s a matter of mindset. Successful people “think bigger” — they believe in themselves, have a grander scale of imagination, and see bigger possibilities. And they behave accordingly — they have magnetic attitudes, prefer action to waiting, and learn from every setback. Learn the strategies and techniques that successful people use.

Do you want to make your life better? Are you struggling in your personal or professional life, your interactions with other people, your life balance, or your life’s purpose?

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People provides an inside-out approach to improving yourself and your life. This method entails examining and adjusting your character, your motives, and how you see the world in order to change how you behave and how you interact with others. Learn how to best focus your time, define your personal mission, and build productive relationships with other people.

Jack Canfield struck gold as a co-author of the best-selling Chicken Soup for the Soul book series, but it took years for him to achieve success. In The Success Principles, he details 67 principles to help anyone achieve their goals and dreams, based on his study and interviews with hundreds of successful people. The basic formula for success is to identify what you want, know that you deserve to have it, and use the book’s principles to get you there.

The book's Principles include taking responsibility for your life, setting goals and visualizing success, facing your fears, forgiving others so you can move forward, asking for and graciously receiving feedback, and appreciating your successes.

To live up to your potential, you need a direction to strive for while honing your abilities and pushing yourself to your limits. In Be Useful, Arnold Schwarzenegger lays out his principles for achieving success and making an impact, first by defining your ambitions and then using your achievements to better the lives of others. He argues that by “being useful” you'll find satisfaction, build strong relationships, and lead a more purposeful life.

Schwarzenegger brings a unique perspective from his career as a world-renowned bodybuilder, movie star, and politician. In this guide, we’ll lay out Schwarzenegger’s advice for finding your purpose, adopting a positive mindset, and fully committing to your work. We’ll also compare Schwarzenegger’s ideas with those of other motivational writers and experts on lifelong personal development. Lastly, we’ll explore how Schwarzenegger’s experiences propelled him toward achieving his dreams and led him to value a life of public service.

In Who Will Cry When You Die?, self-help guru Robin Sharma wants to know if you’ll feel happy with the life you’ve led when you’re on your deathbed. Sharma thinks that most people lead lives they’ll regret because they focus on the wrong things—success, money, fame—and none of the right things—family, community, love. If you think you might have end-of-life regrets, Sharma provides a collection of pithy life lessons and advice to help you seize control of your life and turn it into one you’ll look back on fondly.

We’ve grouped those lessons into eight broader tactics that will help you cope with adversity, build self-discipline, spread kindness, and more. You’ll come away with actionables you can implement daily to make your life better and background on the philosophies, ideologies, and science on which Sharma draws.

In Mastery, writer and educator George Leonard describes in detail how you can walk the path of the master—the life lived in disciplined dedication to your chosen skill, craft, or art. He explains that mastery isn’t an end goal so much as a continual process of learning, discovery, and exploration of that skill, whether it’s taekwondo, oil painting, marathon running, chess, or something else.

Further, Leonard argues that the master’s path is the only guaranteed way to live a fulfilling life. Whereas modern culture conditions us on instant gratification that can never provide real meaning or satisfaction, pursuing mastery can yield a lifetime of rich experiences and personal growth.

Our guide will detail Leonard’s perspective on the path of mastery, including how you can get on the master’s path today, overcome its obstacles, and immerse yourself in learning. In commentary, we’ll compare his ideas to those of other books on mastery, including Robert Greene’s Mastery, Josh Waitzkin’s The Art of Learning, and Anders Ericsson’s Peak.

How do figures such as Albert Einstein and Marie Curie do their greatest work? And can we follow in their footsteps? In Mastery, Robert Greene, famous for The 48 Laws of Power, argues that there is a clear path anyone can follow to achieve mastery, the highest level of creative excellence. He explains the three stages of mastery, and he argues that pursuing it yields a fulfilling life and great creative power.

Our guide explains Mastery in four parts, breaking down how Greene defines mastery and how to pursue it. You’ll learn how to develop new skills, discover why social know-how is crucial to rising in your field, and gain strategies for performing high-level creative work.

We’ll expand and scrutinize Greene’s ideas with perspectives from other prominent guides to high-level skillfulness—including The Art of Learning, Peak, and George Leonard’s Mastery. We’ll also examine where Greene appears to contradict himself, and whether you can achieve mastery at any age.

If you’ve ever asked yourself why you aren’t making as much progress in your business career as you’d like, business and marketing expert Donald Miller says he knows the answer: You’re not adding enough value to your company. Businesses always have the bottom line in mind, and they’re much more likely to notice and promote people who quantifiably bring more money into the company than people who simply do what’s in their job description and nothing more. Therefore, Miller argues that you should see yourself not as a mere employee, but as an investment of your organization, and he provides 11 steps that can help you become an investment that provides an excellent return.

We’ll examine these steps, and we’ll also supplement Miller’s recommendations with advice from other business thinkers, psychological background on some of his ideas, and ideas from his other works.

In Happy Sexy Millionaire, Steven Bartlett calls out the myth that you can find happiness, love, and wealth if you just follow three simple steps and a hack or two. Bartlett says the internet, social media, and algorithms have dazzled us into believing that we can have the perfect life if we just chase the “right” dreams—a lie that pulls us off the path of genuine contentment, meaning, and fulfillment.

Bartlett, a social media mogul and public speaker, was born in Botswana to a Nigerian mother and British father and raised in a predominantly white area in England. A university dropout, once so poor that he scavenged for food, Bartlett founded the successful internet company Social Chain at age 21 and was by all objective accounts “living the dream.” But when wealth and fame didn’t bring him happiness, Bartlett reevaluated his priorities. He wrote Happy Sexy Millionaire to warn against chasing false idols and encourage others to find contentment and success by being themselves and doing what has meaning to them.

In this follow-up to Girl, Wash Your Face, blogger, motivational speaker, and author Rachel Hollis writes that she’s fed up with seeing women ignore their own dreams because of self-doubt, guilt, and society’s expectation that women put others first. Hollis offers the lessons she learned in growing from humble beginnings to becoming the founder of a multimillion-dollar media company to help her readers shed the weight of expectation and achieve their dreams.

Hollis’s advice consists of excuses to let go of, behaviors to adopt, and skills to acquire. In addition, she provides a step-by-step blueprint to take your dream from fantasy to realization. In this guide, we’ll compare Hollis’s advice to that of other popular self-help authors and expand on her messages through practical exercises.

The way we think about toughness, according to Steve Magness, is all wrong. We traditionally define toughness as a combination of machismo, lack of emotion, and outward displays of dominance and control. But Magness claims that this “old-school” definition of toughness is harmful and that real toughness is defined by confronting reality, acknowledging your thoughts, feelings, and emotions, and using a multitude of strategies to cope with discomfort or adversity. In Do Hard Things, Magness provides a new, more accurate, and more effective way of thinking about toughness, which will help you overcome challenges and make better, more thoughtful decisions.

In this guide, we’ll explore why traditional ideas around toughness are not only ineffective but harmful. Then, we’ll look at Magness’ ideas on what it really means to be resilient, and we’ll provide strategies on how to overcome discomfort and adversity. Throughout the guide, we’ll compare Magness’s ideas and strategies with those of other self-help and psychological experts, helping you become a more thoughtful, versatile, and thus tougher person.