5 best motivational books to achieve financial independence (Part 2)

In part two of our 15  16 best books to achieve financial independence blog series, we are reviewing the 5 best motivational book that will change your life.

• Part 1- best personal finance books
• Part 2 – best motivational books
• Part 3 – best entrepreneurship books

The 4-Hour Workweek By: Timothy Ferriss

It’s a must-read for someone who want to learn actual tips about what you can do right now to get out of the 40-hour-a-week (or more!) rat race and ease into a shorter workweek – and earn even more money while you work less. Timothy Ferriss achieved what most of us only dream about: he drastically decreased the hours he works each while greatly increasing the income he collects. He wrote the book to share the secrets of his success with his readers. The principle that the book is based on is that we waste a lot of our time doing things that aren’t giving us any financial benefit. We need to find a way to eliminate those things that needlessly take up our valuable time and instead focus solely on the things that bring in money. Ferriss offers practical tips on how to become a “New Rich,” his name for someone who has learned how to maximize their time and minimize their effort so that they can live the life they want now instead of deferring their dreams until retirement.

The original was a runaway bestseller and when Ferris revised it with an update, offering an additional goldmine of more than 50 bonus tips (backed up by personal stories from readers) about how you can reshape your life. Tips include:

• Hiring a virtual assistant from overseas to do your menial work for you
• How to automate your business so it works for you even when you’re not working
• Why you should consider creating a product to sell online for additional passive income

This book is not a get-rich-quick scheme; you should look elsewhere if that’s your goal. If you want to learn how to change your habits, how to work better so that you can work less and enjoy your life more, than this is the book for you.

How the book helped to achieve financial independence:

I first read The 4-Hour Workweek a couple of years ago. It’s a game changer. It taught me that I need to be invest in other people to handle some of the more menial tasks I had so that my valuable time was freed up to be able to work on projects with more earning potential.

This book also opened my eyes to the concept of working from anywhere in the world. As long as I had a computer and an internet connection, I could make a living from literally anywhere. That’s huge. Between that and hiring a virtual assistant, this book made a huge difference in my professional life.

The 10X Rule: The Only Difference between Success and Failure By: Grant Cardone

If you want to be successful in life, you need to learn to work differently so that you separate yourself from the pack and learn to work at the highest level of action to achieve the most profitable results. Grant Cardone has a theory that you need to know. He believes that as a society, our aim is off. Cardone writes that if we want to be successful in all areas of our lives, we need to stop working just to meet our basic needs and instead learn how to aim for abundance in all areas. Shifting that aim will change the way we work and the way we live, and how successful we are in life.

Cardone’s position is that we are not thinking correctly when it comes to achieving the success that we want. It’s not enough to set goals. We need to be setting the right goals. And then, just as important, we need to have a thorough understanding of just how much effort will be needed to meet those goals. Once we’ve understood how much energy we need to put into a project in order to get the maximum results, it’s time to ramp up our efforts and work hard at the right level of consistent effort to achieve our goals.

There are plenty of helpful tips in these pages. Here are several that Cardone expands on throughout the book.

• How to meet goals that you never thought you could reach
• What the four degrees of action are so you know what degree you need to work at in order to achieve those goals
• There are 32 traits of highly accomplished people who have broken the mold and worked hard – and right – to achieve the highest levels of success

If you are not willing to work hard for what you want in life or you are content with only putting in minimal effort to your work, than this is not the book for you. If, however, you are interested in learning how to set the right goals, establish what it will take to meet those goals, and then work really hard the right way in order to achieve them, than this is definitely the book for you.

How the book helped to achieve financial independence:

I discovered The 10X Rule last year through the “Bigger Pockets” – one of the many real estate podcast I have subscribed to . I had already learned how to determine my goals to earn a certain amount of money in a certain number of years. But this book changed everything about the way I thought about myself. It taught me that I should think BIG. Huge, in fact – 10X. If I was capable of making a certain amount of money each month, why wasn’t I capable of earning ten times that? Why shouldn’t that be my goal? The more I thought about it, the more I began to believe in myself and the more I began to believe that I could one day attain. Rethinking my goals and learning to have more faith in myself changed my earning income. This book will indeed expedite the time it takes to achieve financial independence.

The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change By: Stephen R. Covey

This book was first published in 1990. It is one of the rare books that has stood the test of time and is still remarkably relevant today as it was 28 years ago. This book has become the bible for everyone who wants to understand how the most successful people in our society got to be where they are and how you can emulate their success. This book is not just for business people looking to get ahead in the business world. This book is for everyone who wants to change the way they live so that they are the most successful people they can be.

A generation ago, Stephen Covey took readers on a journey about how to achieve personal and professional success by studying your character and reforming how we think and act. He walks readers deliberately and thoroughly through the seven habits he has documented that exist in all successful people. His book – this book – has sold ten million copies and changes the lives of many of those people. These are principles that can be applied to help you be more successful in business for sure. But it’s important to note that Covey’s habits are meant to help bring about success in every area of your life – relationships, parenting, community leadership, etc. This book is about holistic success, and it won’t let you down.

The title of the book is clear and exactly right. What you will learn is those seven habits, three of which are:

• Be proactive
• Put first things first
• Seek first to understand and then to be understood

Simply put, by reading this book, you’ll learn from some of the most highly successful people in the world today about how they achieved this great success and how you can too – in every area of your life. This book has been around for a long time and its principles are ones that are going to continue to last far into the future. If you’re not already on the Covey bandwagon, hop on now to get the insight you need into becoming the successful person that you want to become.

How the book helped to achieve financial independence:

The lessons I learned from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People have resonated in every area of my life, but most of all in my professional relationships. I had so many concepts and business ideal reinforced to me in reading this book, things that are really important for every successful business person to know: Give people the benefit of the doubt. Treat everyone at every level of a business with respect. Seek to understand even before you yourself are understood. On their own, they sound like just good principles of living. And they are. But when I applied them to my professional life and the way that I interact with people as a businessman, it made a world of difference in the way that I was received. This book will teach you really good life habits to help you become a really successful person.

Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment By: Tal Ben-Shahar

Are some people just born happy and the rest of us not? Or is happiness a learned trait that anyone can master? The answer according to this book is most definitely yes, you can learn to be happy. And all you need to know to make that transition – or learn strategies to stay happy – is found in the pages of this book.
Tal Ben-Shahar is a Harvard professor and teaches one of the most popular courses on campus called Positive Psychology, also known as the “scientific field of optimal human functioning.”

The unique message of his book is that happiness is a combination of the pleasure, which is a short-term feeling or response, and meaning, which is long-term. It’s only when you have the combination of the two that you find true happiness and balance in your life. What does happiness have to do with business and being successful? A lot, it turns out. You can’t be successful in business or in life unless you are self-aware, have control of your emotions, and an understanding of where and how they originate. Do you have negative thoughts about yourself and your abilities? Why? How can you get rid of them to be a happier person? Finding the answer to those questions may prove to be the key you need to unlock your real earning potential.

Ben-Shahar breaks his book down into three sections:

• What is happiness
• Happiness applied
• Meditations on happiness

There is a connection between happiness, motivation, and goals, says Ben-Shahar, and once you know what it is and fully understand it, it will change your life. On the surface, this doesn’t seem like it would be the first choice to read to be successful in your business life. But once you read it, you’ll see just how much of a difference it can make in every area of your life, including your business.

How the book helped to achieve financial independence:

Believe it or not, I actually heard about Happier when I borrowed a DVD from the library. It was a presentation that Tal Ben-Shahar was giving and he talked about this concept of being happier. This book helped me to realize more about myself. I realized that I am a pretty happy person by default; it’s just in my DNA. Ben-Shahar taught me that I can harness that happiness and apply it to my professional life in addition to my personal life. His concept of how being a happy person can have a direct correlation to the success you experience in business was revolutionary to me. I know that you’ll find it life-changing too. This book will either teach you to be happy or harness the happiness you already have so that your life – your whole life – is a better and more productive one.

Secrets of the Millionaire Mind By: T. Harv Eker

This is the ultimate resource for understanding why your mindset matters as much as your financial understanding when it comes to achieving financial independence. In this book, Eker tackles the question of why some people are able to achieve financial prosperity and others, though similarly qualified, never make that goal. The difference between the two groups? How their minds work.

There are two parts to this revolutionary book that will guide you in learning how you can harness the power of your mind to make your financial dreams come true.

• Part One: Eker walks you through a discovery of your money blueprint. A “money blueprint” is the subconscious way that we view money, created by things we learned from our parents, things we were taught in school, and observations we made of people we knew who were either very rich or very poor. Understanding all of these influences helps you generate your personal money blueprint. This is critical in terms of your understanding of how you view money and your potential for success today.
  In Part One, you’ll also learn the formula to change from a negative mindset to a positive mindset. Eker writes in length about Thoughts->Feelings->Actions=Results, and how understanding that, along with the importance of personal declarations, can make all the difference in harnessing the power of your mind.
• Part Two: In the second part of his book, Eker writes about the 17 “wealth files.” These are the things that wealthy people know and practice that others don’t seem to grasp. For instance, when confronted with a hardship, people who struggle financially often see obstacles that are keeping them from their goals. Wealthier people, when confronted with that same hardship, are able to see it as an opportunity.

How is it that two people can look at the same hardship and have two such different responses to it? Eker shows you how to think like a wealthy person so you too can become wealthy.

Among the top things that the book teaches how to:

• Break through outdated ideas like “money doesn’t buy happiness.” The two are not mutually exclusive. You can be rich and
• Train your mind to overcome struggles and instead see them as opportunities. This gives you a huge advantage on the path to financial independence.

If you want to get ahead, not just with your finances but also in your life, this is the first book you should read.

How the book helped to achieve financial independence:

This book changed my life because it literally changed the way that I think. It taught me the basic foundation of how to think positively, and that has changed everything. Because of the Thoughts-Feelings-Actions=Results formula, I now understand that through my positive mindset, I deserve to be wealthy and happy and healthy – I no longer have to choose between the three. This book helped me see my potential and teach me to reach it.