How To Get Your Sh*t Together and Take Back Control

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.

The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy offers simple tips on achieving success and living the life of your dreams. The idea is similar to compound interest in finance - small, everyday decisions add up to huge returns over time.

While the concept is simple, that doesn't mean it's easy. Hardy presents six strategies for successfully and carefully directing your choices to shape your destiny in a positive direction and offers a plan of action for improving your results.

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.

In his epic 707-page Tools of Titans, Tim Ferriss shares the habits and beliefs of 101 people at the top of their game, including tech investors like Chris Sacca and Peter Thiel, entrepreneurs like LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Evernote’s Phil Libin, superhuman athletes like Amelia Boone and Wim Hof, media figures like Edward Norton and Whitney Cummings, and more.

These are the principles that successful people use to achieve audacious goals, improve themselves, and be happier. The premise: if you can apply the lessons from this book, you can be more effective.

In The 50th Law, rapper 50 Cent (Curtis Jackson) and author Robert Greene argue that the biggest factor holding us back in life is fear—of what others think of us, what we’ll lose, the future, and so on. This natural fearfulness developed to help us survive in ancient times, but in modern times, we rarely face life-threatening situations where it’s warranted. As a result, our fearfulness only holds us back from gaining power and success. Jackson and Greene argue that you must become fearless to truly thrive.

In this guide, we’ll start by explaining how Jackson’s fearlessness helped him overcome his hardships and achieve power and success. Next, we’ll discuss the rules Jackson and Greene say are necessary to follow to become fearless and principles that’ll help you follow each one. In our commentary, we’ll supplement Jackson and Greene’s advice with recommendations from other experts on success, like Daniel Walter (The Power of Discipline). We’ll also compare the ideas in this book to those in some of Greene’s previous works, including The 48 Laws of Power.

Ray Dalio is the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world. In Principles: Life and Work, he shares the guiding principles powering his success and Bridgewater’s.

Principles is a manual for rational thinking. The main theme is that finding truth is the best way to make decisions, and that ego, emotion, and blind spots prevent you from discovering the truth. Dalio shares his major strategies to circumvent these weaknesses, including total receptivity, extreme honesty and transparency, productive conflict, and credibility-centered decision making.

In our Principles guide, you’ll learn how to get past your ego in pursuit of your goals, why you need other people to improve your probability of being right, and the five-step process for getting what you want out of life.

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 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.

Positive behavior change is one of the most persistent challenges of personal growth—and in How to Change, Katy Milkman draws from the latest research and presents a powerful strategy for creating lasting change. She argues that real behavior change comes from a deliberate, scientific understanding of how human nature gets in our way and how we can leverage it to our advantage.

Milkman, an economist and professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, explains how to tailor solutions to your specific challenges, subvert common human failings, and cement lasting change. In this guide, we’ll detail her evidence-based approach to behavioral change and discuss her “playbook” for overcoming human foibles ranging from a lack of self-confidence to forgetfulness and procrastination. In commentary, we’ll look at adjacent perspectives on behavioral change from books such as Atomic Habits, Nudge, Awaken the Giant Within, and Hooked.

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.

The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy offers simple tips on achieving success and living the life of your dreams. The idea is similar to compound interest in finance - small, everyday decisions add up to huge returns over time.

While the concept is simple, that doesn't mean it's easy. Hardy presents six strategies for successfully and carefully directing your choices to shape your destiny in a positive direction and offers a plan of action for improving your results.

In a world obsessed with quick fixes and life hacks, social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister and science journalist John Tierney’s Willpower discusses our most underutilized mental resource. The authors explain that willpower functions much like a muscle: It can be strengthened through exercise, it fatigues with overuse, and it needs proper nourishment to perform at its best.

This guide will begin by discussing what willpower is and how it works. We’ll then go over some exercises you can use to strengthen your willpower. We’ll conclude by exploring ways to create healthy and positive pressure to keep yourself on track when your willpower is running low.

Our commentary will further explain the science behind Baumeister and Tierney’s principles, including which of their assertions don’t yet have a strong scientific consensus. We’ll also compare and contrast their ideas about willpower with other productivity guides such as Limitless. Finally, we’ll provide tips to help you make the most of your willpower.

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 often don’t know why changes succeed or fail—we just know that they do. As it turns out, successful change follows a pattern that can be applied again and again to help you reach your goals, spark organizational shifts, and get people aligned with your ideas.

In Switch, Chip and Dan Heath dive into the inner workings of change, offering actionable advice for creating changes that not only succeed but stick.

In Discipline Equals Freedom, Jocko Willink argues that the key to mastering your mind, reaching your highest goals, and discovering your full potential is unwavering discipline. Willink is an author, speaker, and podcaster that shares his lessons and philosophy of discipline acquired from 20 years of service as a US Navy SEAL. Through his military and leadership experience, he’s learned that success depends on disciplined, daily decisions like waking up early and putting off your break until tomorrow.

We’ll examine Willink’s principles of discipline, comparing them to a variety of psychological and philosophical perspectives from books like The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday. We’ll also explore what self-improvement experts say to support and challenge Willink’s advice and add effective ways to put his principles into practice.

In Good Vibes, Good Life, Vex King argues that the key to living your dream life is to have good vibrations or “good vibes.” When you put out good vibes like gratitude and joy, you attract good vibes back; however, when you put out bad vibes like resentment, regret, or impatience, you’ll attract bad vibes and consequently experience more hardships. The key to minimizing bad vibes and maximizing good ones, King argues, is self-love and acceptance.

This guide will discuss King’s Law of Vibration, how you can raise your vibrations, the things that negatively impact your vibes, and how to use your good vibes to achieve your ideal life. Throughout the guide, we’ll also relate King's concepts to recent scientific research and the opinions and recommendations of psychologists, other spiritual guides, and life coaches such as Eckhart Tolle and Rhonda Byrne.

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.