From organizational psychology to help achieve your goals and avoid mental pitfalls to leveraging your mistakes, here are a few book suggestions for this week.
How Successful People Think by John C. Maxwell
Looking to achieve personal success and your full potential? This book helped me understand the key areas of successful thinking to change my life including big-picture, focused, creative, shared and reflective thinking, amongst others.
Big-Picture Thinking
John C. Maxwell suggests, big picture thinkers always look for opportunities to learn and grow. Being a student of life helps you adopt a growth mindset, improve your relationships and career. For personal development, Maxwell starts the day by asking himself what can I learn today. It can be from reading a new book, visiting new places, meeting new people and developing new skills.
Realist vs Optimist
Most of us have hopes, dreams and a positive attitude. It’s great yet realistic thinking helps to take in the facts, have a plan to achieve your goals and consider all the potential pitfalls and obstacles that will be in the way. The best way is to learn what people have done in the same situation and how they got to where you want to be.
Imagination is Gold
As Albert Einstein said “imagination is more important than knowledge.” Once we explore a range of options, ideas and possibilities, we can fuel our creative juices and spark our imagination.
Help Others
Collaboration and serving others increase our chances of success whilst making us happier. Once we realise being part of something great rather than being great alone, we can make bigger impacts.
Collaboration
Learning from someone who has more experience and working with other talented people can result in fantastic achievements. As we learn to collaborate rather than compete we can create better ideas and boost our thought process.
In conclusion, Maxwell explains to lead a happier and fulfilled life we need to quit the race against each other, collaborate, plan long-term and think what we can do for and with others.
Read more on Amazon or Blinkst.
Failing Foward by John C. Maxwell
By embracing failure in all areas of our life, we can turn our mistakes into stepping stones to success. This book challenged me to think about my own failures and how I can use the lessons to improve my work, relationships, and other goals.
John C. Maxwell states “It takes entrepreneurs an average of 3.8 failed ventures before they manage to start a successful business.” Failure is powerful when we use the negative experiences to work harder and see it as an opportunity to create something new. The setbacks can motivate us to find better ways to improve life personally and professionally.
Failure is inevitable at times. However, when we take responsibility for our future and learn from our mistakes we are more likely to succeed. The setbacks can be hard and can defeat our self-esteem, but it can offer us opportunities for personal growth. The more we practice a task, the higher quality of work we can produce as we learn from each mistake. As Maxwell suggests, imagine failures as red lights, they can stop us temporarily but it shouldn’t be a reason to give up on our goals.
Maxwell explores three key areas to use failure as an opportunity: goal-setting, people skills and a positive mindset. When we set well-defined goals we are able to work towards creating the life we want. As we are living our life day to day, its easy to get distracted but once we make active choices on where we want to reach we can be focused. Then there is people skills and learning to work with people is a valuable skillset. I ask myself how can I improve my communication, negotiation and conversational skills. What can I learn from the job? Does this job provide me the chance to develop new skills? Lastly, keeping a positive attitude can help us see the opportunity and preserve.
Read more on Amazon or Blinkst.
Happy by Derren Brown
What makes you happy? More importantly, how can you lead a happy life? Derren Brown gallops through a range of topics including epicureanism, cultivating inner tranquillity, and self-awareness. The book explores what the ancient world’s most zen philosophers – the Stoics – and thinkers like Epicurus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius can teach us about happiness.
Epicurus states happiness isn’t dependent on material items – it’s about how we feel about possessing and lacking certain things. True happiness comes from accepting and being content with what we have rather than chasing new pleasures. Whilst stoics such as the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius believe external events and people don’t control our emotional reactions – we do. As they say, its how we react to life that matters.
That brings us to how unpredictable life is. Learning to control our thoughts and actions can help us navigate the challenges that will come our way. However, we have little control over the outcomes. For example, working hard, producing quality work and putting in effort doesn’t guarantee success. It could be your manager’s preference, other candidates and luck that affects your chances of climbing the ladder. Therefore focusing on what we can control in life helps us manage our expectations and emotions.
Read more on Amazon or Blinkst.
How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Whether you are trying to win a new job, get a new promotion or make good friends in a new city, learning to deal and manage people is essential. Dale Carnegie states key ways to influence people – praise rather than criticize, make everyone you meet feel interesting and important, encourage others to talk and listen, avoid an argument and disagree gently, get others to agree with you from the start, empathize with others and set high standards through praise.
Sonia Majumder 
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