How to Unf*ck Your Life - 8 Habits to Fix 98% of Your Problems

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.

What if you were just one step away from the life of your dreams? In The Power of One More, entrepreneur Ed Mylett argues that putting a little extra effort into anything you do can completely transform your life. Whether it’s doing one more set at the gym, waking up an hour earlier, or connecting with one new person, these small efforts add up over time to create big results. Mylett provides a guide for developing the mindset and habits to consistently go the extra mile and find greater success in all areas of life.

In this guide, we’ll lay out Mylett’s advice for adopting an extra-mile mindset, setting inspiring goals, mastering focus and time management, cultivating high-quality relationships, and overcoming obstacles. Along the way, we’ll compare Mylett’s tips with those of other personal development authors and suggest additional actionable strategies for going the extra mile.

Do you constantly start ambitious projects only to run out of steam halfway through? You’re not alone. Although it’s easy to be enthusiastic about your goals while setting them, many people find that this motivation fades quickly. But it doesn’t have to—in Finish What You Start, psychology expert Peter Hollins explains how to develop mindsets and habits that will empower you to follow through on your life goals.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to spur yourself into action by identifying your existing sources of motivation and designing an environment that constantly reminds you of them. You’ll also discover valuable tips for resisting distractions and defeating procrastination. In our commentary, we’ll add to Hollins’s advice for maximizing your motivation with tips from books like Drive and High Performance Habits. We’ll also draw on books like Atomic Habits and The Willpower Instinct to explain some of the neurobiology behind sustained motivation.

Running a successful business requires a lot of time and effort, but it doesn’t have to take over your life. In Buy Back Your Time, veteran entrepreneur Dan Martell says you can run a profitable business and make time for the things you love without having to work yourself to the bone. Simply buy back your time: Hire others to take over some of your work, and then invest your reclaimed time in activities that replenish your energy and advance your business. Martell shares practical strategies for managing your time better, including how to identify a task’s value, waste less time at work, and create optimized schedules for achieving your personal and professional goals.

In this guide, we’ll discuss how to prioritize and delegate tasks, run your business more efficiently, and create weekly and yearly plans to optimize your time. Along the way, we’ll supplement Martell’s strategies with advice from other self-improvement experts and provide additional practical tips for taking control of your time.

Whether you're a student, professional, or lifelong learner, Learn Like a Pro by Barbara Oakley and Olav Schewe can help you become a more effective learner. Drawing on the latest research in cognitive psychology and education, they provide proven techniques for mastering new skills and knowledge quickly and efficiently. With practical strategies for improving your memory, increasing your focus, and managing your time, this comprehensive guide will help you unlock your full learning potential.

Oakley and Schewe are experienced educators and learning experts who struggled to learn in the past. In this guide, we’ll outline many of the author’s learning techniques and explore some of the cognitive psychology and neuroscience of learning so that you can understand why these techniques work. We’ll also explore how you can boost your motivation to learn, and we’ll provide practical tips for excelling in academic settings so you can become a better learner for life.

In Discipline Is Destiny, Ryan Holiday examines the power of discipline through the lens of the ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism. Holiday argues that your ability to practice discipline—one of the four cardinal virtues of Stoicism—determines how successful you are (aka your destiny). This is because discipline dictates whether you work consistently and avoid the temptations that prevent you from attaining or maintaining success.

Holiday is a modern-day Stoic philosopher who’s written or co-written several best-selling books on Stoicism, including The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego Is the Enemy, and The Daily Stoic. Published in 2022, Discipline Is Destiny is the second book in his four-part series highlighting each of the four cardinal virtues of Stoicism. (Courage Is Calling was the first.)

In this guide, we’ll explain what discipline is and why it matters. Then, we’ll describe how to practice discipline throughout various stages of your life. Along the way, we’ll compare Holiday’s ideas with those of other self-help experts.

Everyone dreams of achieving extraordinary things. However, Matthew Dicks argues that most of us end up being mediocre because we see our goals as abstract and distant—things we might be able to achieve at some point, but not right now. This mindset makes us delay taking action toward our goals, and consequently, we never reach them. In Someday Is Today, Dicks argues that achieving your dreams and overcoming mediocrity is possible, but only if you start acting now.

This guide will explore Dicks’s tips for accomplishing extraordinary things. We’ll discuss how to maximize your time, efficiency, productivity, and creative potential so you can make the most of your life and become as successful as possible, as soon as possible. In our commentary, we’ll supplement Dicks’s recommendations with input from other productivity and creativity experts like Brené Brown (Daring Greatly) and Tiago Forte (Building a Second Brain).

We feel constantly pressed for time. We try to do too much, yet when someone makes a request, we say yes without thinking. We feel we have to do it all. But because we’re going in so many directions, we make little progress in any of them. Yet most of these activities are trivial. As Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism puts it, we’re majoring in minor activities.

The way out of this trap is to practice essentialism: “do less but better.” McKeown explains how you can distinguish the vital few from the trivial, then eliminate the nonessentials and make your optimum contribution in your life and work.

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.