7 Books EVERYONE in Their 20's Should Read

hey what's going on friends in this video we are going over seven books

that i think everyone should read in their 20s

these are all books that i read when i was in my 20s and

they all had a tremendous

impact on my life and helped me to improve my life in five different

categories that we're breaking this video down into those categories

are relationships productivity personal finance

career success and health so let's get this video started off with the first

book on my list which is stephen covey's

seven habits of highly effective

people this is the book that more than any other book helped me to

improve the way that i both build and deepen relationships

with other people now this isn't entirely

a book about relationships

in fact about half of this book is a book about productivity

the first three habits deal with it like habit number two begin with the

end in mind is all about planning and understanding

your goals and habit number three put first things first is all about prioritization

but it's habit number five that had the greatest

impact on me seek first

to understand then to be understood

see most people listen with what covey calls an autobiographical

point of view you're listening

because you're waiting to respond with something from your own perspective

your own experiences a lot of people don't take the time to really put

themselves in the shoes of the other person consider

their perspective try to see it the way the other person

sees it kevin calls this empathetic

listening and when you can listen empathetically

when you can actually do this perspective

shift you become better able to understand

the meaning and the context

behind what somebody else is telling you about and in doing so you build

much better and deeper relationships

and you're able to make the lives of everyone around you much better so

that is my favorite book in the relationship

category and now we're moving on to the productivity

category now there are a ton of productivity

books out there i've talked about many of them on this channel but if

you were only going to read one

the one that i would recommend is going to be chris bailey's

the productivity project well this and also atomic habits by james clear but i

in fact made two videos

about that book so i'm not gonna include it on this list and the

productivity project is a wonderful

overview of really the entire

field of productivity so if you're looking for

one concentrated book that's gonna teach you all about time management

managing your attention your energy procrastination

all these different topics

this is the book that i would recommend

and the best idea that i want to share from this book

is his breakdown of these six different procrastination

triggers this is pulled from procrastination

research that has been done at several different universities

where they have found that there are indeed six different aspects

or qualities of tasks that we tend to put off of tasks that are

unpleasant so when a task is boring

when it is frustrating

difficult ambiguous lacking and personal meaning or lacking an intrinsic value

i.e it's not fun

we tend to put it off and there are a ton of different strategies

in this book for fighting procrastination

but i want to share this idea because once you know these six different

triggers you can now start to think critically about your own tasks and ask

yourself if i'm procrastinating

which of these triggers

is causing me to procrastinate

on this task and once you know that you can start to figure out

some things you could do

to lessen the influence of those triggers for example

last week i had to go into my accounting software and do a ton

of bookkeeping which is a task that i

absolutely hate so one thing that i've realized is that because this task is

boring one thing i can do to make it a little bit more fun

is to add a bit of a challenge to it so i set a 20-minute

timer and i challenged myself to reconcile as many transactions

as i could within that time period still kind of boring

but a little less boring because i had now set up a challenge and

i also put out some of my favorite music

so overall those two little tweaks made the task just a bit less unpleasant

and a bit less boring and with that we are now moving on from

the productivity category onto the personal

finance category where i have two book recommendations

for you and the first one is your money the missing manual by jd

roth who was one of the og personal finance bloggers that i was reading

back when i was in high school

in college and this book was really my

first introduction to the world of personal finance and it's really just an overview

of a ton of different topics that you need to learn about if you

want to manage your money effectively

talks about debt it talks about budgeting talks about credit cards talks about investing

and the big idea that i would like to share from this book with

you in this video

is the concept of automated

investing this was the book that taught me that i should automate my finances

essentially put them on autopilot

so this means you can put your bills on autopay

but perhaps even more importantly

you can put your investments

on an auto deposit

schedule which is exactly what i did after i read this book now on

my investment platform which at the time was vanguard i have since moved over

to m1 finance works on both of these i have an auto deposit schedule

where every single month money will come out of my bank account

and go into my investment account and be

invested into a set series of etfs

essentially mutual funds that i have set up beforehand

and there are two

huge benefits to automating your investing in this way number one is the consistency

of actually investing because if you have a robot doing your investing for you

you're almost certainly going to invest more over the years than if you were

deliberately making the choice whether or not to invest every single month if you

were doing it that way there are inevitably

going to be months when you decide that i'd rather buy a jet ski

or i don't feel like i have enough money but if it's on a

schedule it just comes out and you don't think about it until 10 or

20 or 30 years later when you have a ton

of money invested you will thank yourself for enabling

this robot secondly doing this helps you to avoid what jd roth calls the

behavior gap which is the difference between what the stock market would have made

if you just left it on autopilot

and what the average investor makes because

of their decisions and the example that it gives is at a 20-year period

between 1988 and 2008

where the s p 500 which is essentially an index that tracks the entire

u.s stock market made a little bit less than eight and a half percent

return but the average investor made only about 1.8

a huge gap and actually less than the rate of inflation

now some of that gap is due to a lot of investors diversifying

their investments which makes them a bit more secure

a bit more hardened against losses and volatility

but a lot of that gap is due to bad decisions

that were fueled by greed or by fear

or by stupidity and when you automate your investments

you don't think about the market all the time and you don't even give

yourself the opportunity to make these dumb decisions

our second book in the personal finance category

is one where i regrettably

lost the book jacket at some point so tony can you please vfx

the image on here for me this is a random walk down wall street

by burton g mulkel

and if you're interested in investing

at all i highly recommend reading

this book now if you're somebody who just wants

a good investment setup you don't want to think about it i think the

general tips that are in your money and missing manual

and the videos that i am planning for this channel are going to be

quite adequate but if you want to understand

investing this is the number one book that i would recommend

he goes into a lot of detail

on how a lot of people even very smart people

often make a lot of mistakes in the market that will cause them to

lose out on potential

gains but the big idea from this book that i want to share with

you it was actually kind of mind-blowing

to me is just how valuable

retirement accounts can be for growing your money in the book he sets up

a hypothetical example where 5 000 is invested every single year for 30

years and after that period the money that was invested in a retirement

account in either an ira

or 401k or another tax advantaged

account grew to 1.4

million dollars whereas the money that was not invested in a retirement account was

put into a regular old taxable

account only grew to about 900 thousand dollars so there's a five hundred thousand

dollar potential earnings gap that is realized

simply by utilizing these retirement

vehicles and that is why personally

i do my best to max out my ira my 401k

every single year and then and only then put money into taxable investments and

why i would highly recommend you do the exact same thing unless maybe you're

saving for a short-term big purchase like a down payment for a house

all right now that i have damaged my walls from that last book we

are now moving on to the career category

and this is yet another category where i have two different recommendations

for you and i have a very good reason for adding two different books

into this category because they are very different and very useful

for uh independent reasons so the first one that i'm gonna recommend is pivot

by jenny blake and this is a fantastic

book for anybody who wants to potentially

move or change their careers

and this is a super common thing a lot of people especially after they've

been in their career for three to five years start to realize

hey i would like to do something different i kind of don't like what

i'm doing right now and there's these creeping feelings of guilt right you're like

well i spent all this money and all this time in college and i'm

moving down this career path i don't want to lose all this career capital

and everything that i've gained

but you have to realize that wanting to change wanting to move up in

the world is actually a very healthy thing it means that you have this

drive to learn and to adapt

and to grow but doing so is a strategic

endeavor and this book has a lot of strategy to offer

for that a lot of case studies

and my favorite uh concept

in this book is her idea of doing pilot tests

so in the tv industry executives

will order a pilot episode of a show if they're not quite sure it's

going to do really well so they're going to get the pilot episode see

how it does and if the audiences

like it then they order an entire season

piloting is essentially a strategy to invest a little bit of time money of

resources into a potential direction before going

all in on it and the problem with careers is a lot of people

get fed up with where they are and then they quit their job

and then they don't really know where to go so instead

ask yourself and jenny talks about this in the book

can i do some little pilot tests are there little experiments

that i could run in my free time without giving up everything i have

right now that would allow me to test out a possible different career shift

and see if it's for me see if i can do it for example

i really like doing stuff in notion i like teaching people how to use

notion i like to build notion templates like my task manager template but

i'm not just gonna move on for being a youtuber

number one because i like being a youtuber but number two because i'm not

sure if making stuff for notion is a viable career path or for my

particular purposes a viable addition

to my business so i tried some pilot projects

first did a couple of videos on this channel teaching notion doing some stuff

and those did well and then i started my second channel thomasfrank explains that's

where i create notion tutorials

and template tutorials and that is now a little bit of a side business

where i've invested a bit more than i originally did but i've still not

completely shifted over so if you have something that you want to do or

if you're fed up with where you currently are in your job ask yourself

how could i pilot

a small change our second book in this career category is josh kaufman's

the personal mba and i truly do believe that everyone

in their 20s should read this book because this is a high level overview

of many of the different concepts

in business of sales of marketing

a value creation of how to work with others

and when you understand

the fundamental concepts of business

you understand the goals and motivations

of your employer better and that makes you a higher value employee

so if you want to get a raise if you want to get a

promotion if you want to get new and more exciting duties at your job

and take on leadership roles reading a book like this and understanding

the fundamentals of business can be a very useful thing to do now the

big idea that i want to share in this video from this book is

the different types of value creation that he goes through in the book this

was sort of a mind-opening

read for me when i went through this section because

a lot of people

don't really understand value creation if you ask the average person what are the

different methods of creating value in business

they're gonna answer with two different categories

products and services but as josh explains in the book there are actually quite

a few more different types of value creation and if you're somebody who wants

to maybe start a business one day understanding

these and knowing what they are can be very useful to you so i'm

not going to list all these i'm going to put them up on the screen

here so you can screenshot them if you want but i do want to

highlight just a few of them a product is a very obvious one this

book is a product my notion templates are a product

service is also pretty useful a barber

is offering a service

but what about a shared resource

something like disneyland that is something that people can come and enjoy but they

don't buy it and it's not really a service in itself

also option was a very interesting one for me and here's an interesting question

what is the value

that a place like planet fitness

gym is offering to its patrons we might automatically say it's a service

and that is true but i think that the main value that a planet

fitness especially a big box gym like that is offering

is an option you are getting the option to do something but you don't

necessarily have to exercise

it so really they're paying for the optionality

not necessarily the service or the shared resource

and that brings us to the health category

where my one book recommendation

for you is dr john ratey's spark the revolutionary

new science of exercise

and the brain and i'm recommending this book

literally for everyone because this book

hammered into my brain

the need for exercise

not just for my body

but for my mind as this book explains an excruciating

detail exercise benefits your focus

your creativity it helps with anxiety

it lessens adhd symptoms if you can believe that it lessens stress and depression

it in almost every way fathomable

helps you regulate your mental health and this was very important for me because

as an ambitious entrepreneur

with a pretty computer-based

career it has always been very easy for me to justify

skipping workouts because going to the gym for an hour or two

makes me feel like i'm putting off the things that i need to get

done but as this book makes abundantly

clear exercising isn't a waste of time it isn't taking my work time away

from me it's actually a force multiplier

for my work time think about it i can either choose to work 10

or 12 hours a day skipping all my workouts

probably not sleeping well probably not eating well and in that case each hour

that i put into my work is probably only worth about 20 minutes because

i'm spending a lot of it groggy

or procrastinating because i just don't feel very focused

or i can actually get my workout in i can actually sleep eight hours

i can actually eat a good diet and if i do that maybe i

only have time for six hours of good work in a day but

every single one of those hours truly is worth an hour so if i'm

taking my health seriously in general

and making sure to exercise every day specifically

the value of my time the effectiveness

of it has essentially

doubled and i don't have to work as many hours to get the same

amount done and spark is really the book that helped me to

really take that seriously

now if there's one more piece of advice i can give you here it's

that not all these books may be ones that you need to read right

now even if you are in your 20s

really the main thing that you and pretty much everything else should be prioritizing

above all other skills

is thinking critically especially with respect to your goals so if you have a

goal that is aligned with one of these five categories we just went through

then maybe it is worth picking up one of these books

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if you're looking for something else to watch i've got a video right there

on james clare's atomic habits another amazing book and that video goes through three

of the biggest lessons in it or perhaps you're curious about how i actually

make my videos well i've got a full breakdown on my second channel which

you can watch right there beyond that hit the like button for the algorithm

follow me on twitter for bite size content and i want to know in

the comments down below what is the number one book that you recommend

for people in their 20s or for people in general thanks for watching and

i will see you in the next one