The Surprising Benefits of Working Weird and Awful Jobs (ft. Derek Sivers)

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 Anything You Want, CD Baby founder Derek Sivers shares the lessons he learned from being an accidental entrepreneur whose hobby turned into a $22 million business. Sivers’s non-traditional approach to business ownership—centering on honesty, creativity, and humanity—is a model for burgeoning entrepreneurs who want to stay true to themselves and do right by others while building their dream.

A professional musician, Sivers founded CD Baby in 1998 to sell his CDs online when major music companies wouldn’t. What began as an endeavor to address his own unmet need quickly led to Sivers helping friends and other independent musicians sell their CDs online. Sivers sold the successful company in 2008 and put the proceeds into a trust dedicated to music education. These are the lessons he learned along the way.

In this guide, we’ll look at Sivers’s recommendations for building a business that meets customers’ needs while still fulfilling your passions. We’ll also provide strategies from other business experts to help you apply Sivers’s aspirational vision in your own business.

If you want to know how to live your life, who better to ask than people who’ve lived life to its fullest? Tribe of Mentors is distilled life advice from more than 130 world-class experts in a wide variety of fields, such as actor Ben Stiller, entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, and media mogul Ariana Huffington. Author Tim Ferriss reached out to these experts and compiled their advice after a mild existential crisis left him seeking direction.

In this guide, you’ll learn the experts’ advice on how to identify what matters most to you, how to navigate non-traditional career paths, how to appreciate failure, and more. In our commentary, we’ll supplement Ferriss’s advice with tips for success from other top-performing experts and authors, including Cal Newport, Ryan Holiday, and Laura Vanderkam.

In the modern world, how can a heterosexual man successfully attract women? In Models, self-help guru Mark Manson argues that the key lies in “non-neediness,” or inner confidence: Women desire a man whose sense of self-worth depends on how he judges himself rather than how others judge him.

In this guide, you’ll discover why traditional dating advice or pickup techniques don’t work for you—and what to do instead to form meaningful connections with women. You’ll learn why inner confidence is essential to attracting women and how to develop it via three main keys: cultivating a satisfying life, overcoming your worries, and being vulnerable. Along the way, you’ll discover how Manson’s recommendations compare to advice from other dating experts.

Do you pride yourself on being the nicest guy in the world? Does your fear of disapproval lead you to people-please, avoid conflict, and repress parts of yourself? If this sounds like you, you might be what Dr. Robert Glover calls a Nice Guy. No More Mr. Nice Guy, by marriage and family psychotherapist Dr. Robert Glover, helps you understand and conquer the frustrating—and often manipulative—Nice Guy mindset so that you can become a fully realized and self-accepting “Ideal Man.”

This guide will explore the “Nice Guy” and the origins of his mindset, as well as the roadblocks that perpetuate his unproductive life approach and specific strategies to overcome them. We’ll also compare Glover’s work to various texts on masculinity and self-acceptance while integrating both scientific and historical research to support (or refute) his anecdotal findings.

In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson argues that we are frustrated in life and feel like failures because we value and prioritize the wrong things, thanks in part to society’s emphasis on positive thinking, over-involved parents, and our susceptibility to superficial social media messages. This leads us to pursue emotional highs that don’t lead to lasting happiness.

The solutions are counterintuitive and include: be wrong, fail, tolerate feeling bad, accept pain, practice rejection. Because we can’t care equally about everything, we need to prioritize and focus on what brings us happiness and meaning. In other words, we need to carefully choose what we give our f*cks about.

The book draws from several established philosophies (Stoicism, Existentialism, and Buddhism), and we’ll expand and clarify the book’s messages by tracing their origins to these schools of thought. We’ll also explore some of the psychology behind what motivates people’s decisions, and why we’re driven to give so many f*cks about so many unimportant things.