What You Will Learn

A Guide To The Good Life - by William B Irvine "The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy"   This book is a really good, simple, easy-to-understand summary of all of the not-so-easy-to-understand Stoic texts. It gives you a good break down of the philosophy of stoicism. Some of our favourite principles and techniques included negative visualisation, the trichotomy of control and self denial, and how you apply...

Our interview with Amy Morin, the author of the book '13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do'. When Amy was 23 years old, she went to a basketball game with her mother. Within twenty-four hours, her happy, healthy, vibrant mother died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. After years of sorrow and grief, on the third anniversary of her mother's passing, she took her new husband to the same basketball s...

13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do - by Amy Morin 'Take back power, embrace change, face your fears & train your brain for happiness & success' This book initially started as a blog post that went viral. Now, Amy Morin has fleshed out this list with stories, checklists, and practical strategies that everyone can use to assess their lives and improve their mental strength. It's a very tactic...

Epic Measures - by Jeremy N Smith 'One Doctor. Seven Billion Patients.'   Epic Measures is the true story of the largest study of human health ever undertaken. It's crazy to learn that before this study, no one actually knew what was killing people or how many people were affected by each disease. By determining what is killing people, we can begin to identify our biggest risks, and work out what...

Our interview with Timber Hawkeye, author of  Buddhist Boot Camp  and  Faithfully Religionless . Timber was working at a law firm in corporate America, but eventually realised that it wasn't a life he wanted to live. He decided to work part time so that he could live full time. He sold all of his material possessions and even lived in a monastery, and now he's sharing the lessons he learned with t...

Buddhist Boot Camp - by Timber Hawkeye This is a great little book. Timber was working in corporate America, until one day he realised it wasn't the life he was meant to be living. He decided to work part time in order to live full time. He sold all of his material possessions, reduced his expenses as much as possible, and moved to Hawaii. This book is the collection of emails he sent back to his...

Choose Yourself - by James Altucher "Be Happy, Make Millions, Live The Dream"   The world has changed. Full time work is paying less and less, we're starting to see more part time and temporary work arrangements, inflation keeps going up, retirement will soon be dead... It's time to Choose Yourself. No one else is going to do it for you.  James talks about his daily practice to improve his physica...

"The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists" - by Neil Strauss Neil Strauss had only ever had one girlfriend and slept with six girls. He rated himself physically as a 5/10 at best. He thought that some guys had it, and some guys just didn't. Until he stumbled across the underground sub-culture of Pickup Artists. He learned the techniques, grew in confidence, and got to the point w...

We thought we'd take the time to reflect on the year and remind ourselves of our favourite bits from our favourite books. In June this year, we started our podcast ' What You Will Learn ' where we talk about the best bits from the best books. We read a book each week and discussed our favourite parts and the biggest lessons. It initially began as a way for us to read more books and extract more le...

Who Moved My Cheese? - by Dr Spencer Johnson 'An A-maze-ing way to deal with change in your work and your life'   This book was awarded Amazon's best selling book of all time and has sold over 26 million copies worldwide. It's a parable about two mice and two people searching for Cheese in a Maze. 'Cheese' represents the things we want in life and the things that make us happy, and the 'Maze' is w...

Matthew Michalewicz is the author of one of our favourite books, Life in Half A Second. The book lays out the 5 steps to achieve success before it's too late: Clarity, Desire, Belief, Knowledge and Action. Matthew has shared some freebies with us: the first two chapters of his book are available here , and he has a free video series outlining the 5 steps at www.lifeinhalfasecond.com/challenge Matt...

"Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us" - by Seth Godin Grab a copy here:  http://www.bookdepository.com/Tribes/9780749939755/?a_aid=adamsbooks   The first author to get a second episode on the What You Will Learn podcast, and there's no one more deserving than Seth Godin. 'Tribes' is a completely different way of looking at leadership. It's about finding or creating tribes to lead rather than employees...

"The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Business Don't Work and What To Do About It" - by Michael E. Gerber Grab a copy here: http://www.bookdepository.com/The-E-Myth-Revisited/9780887307287/?a_aid=adamsbooks   Referred to as 'The World's #1 Small Business Guru', Michael Gerber takes us through the 'Entrepreneurial Myth', or 'E Myth'. He says it's a myth that most people who start small business are...

The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work and Sexual Desire - by David Deida Grab a copy here:  http://www.bookdepository.com/Way-of-the-Superior-Man-David-Deid/9781591792574/?a_aid=adamasbooks This was certainly an interesting read. The contention of the book is that everyone is made up of both masculine and feminine qualities, but most of us lean t...

"You have the power to change stuff" Three 19 year old kids dreamt big. They realised that 1 billion were living in poverty and decided to do something about it. It's only the beginning of their mission, it's only 'chapter one', but they are on their way to changing the world. Thankyou Water took on the big corporates like Coca Cola and worked their way into big retailers like 7/11, Coles and Wool...

Trump: The Art of the Deal Donald Trump is a pretty topical character right now, so this week we've reviewed his book from 1987. We loved the insight into a life in the week of Donald Trump, and love, love, loved the 'Elements of the Deal' chapter. There's no denying it - Trump is a serious deal maker and has achieved some serious success in his life. His 'Trump Cards' can be applied to any negoti...

"Human Beings and the Natural World are on a collision course" With rapid, exponential growth and delays in our responses, we may overshoot the Earth's limits. There are limits in the world's sources of production and sinks for pollution, so we need to be vigilant in monitoring our growth and react quickly and efficiently if we go beyond our limits. If we overshoot too far or for too long, the wor...

"An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance" Josh Waitzkin was World Champion in Chess and then became a World Champion in Thai Chi push hands competition. A super interesting life journey and this book is ultimately his autobiography. We were expecting a little more 'how to' tips for learning, but there were a few gems hidden within the anecdotes that we've extracted to share with you. Want our note...

"Understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future" The last 30 years have served as a good platform, but the next 30 years is where shit gets real. Today, in 2016, we are in the best possible time to start something or invent something. The opportunities open to us now are enormous, and most of us don't even realise it. Kevin Kelly outlines the 12 biggest ways that the world is...

"The surprising truth about what motivates us" Human were initially motivated biologically by hunger, thirst and sex. Next, we realised we can influence people by rewarding the behaviours we want more of and punishing the behaviours we want less of. This 'carrot and stick' mentality is what Dan Pink calls 'Motivation 2.0' and it worked for a while throughout the industrial age, but it's becoming l...

Tony Robbins - Unleash the Power Within This was a 4 day, 50 hour immersion. Words seriously can't describe this live event. We did a whole bunch of crazy things and learnt so much. Things we talk about include the 6 humans needs, the 3 elements for lasting change, the 7 areas of constant growth for an extraordinary life, some major life decisions we made and of course, how we walked on fire.  We'...

"The proven way to beat the 'Pros' and take control of your financial future" It's a cheeky book title that definitely grabbed our attention. In essence, the author has renamed Active investing as "Hyperactive investing" which sounds pretty bad, and renamed Passive investing as "Smart investing". Passive makes it sound like you have no control or influence over the outcome, but Smart makes it feel...

"Why NOW is the time to cash in on your passion" For the first time, we disagreed on this one. Ashton loved it, Jones hated it.  This book is all about building your personal brand, building an audience and a community by pumping out content about things you love to talk about. By putting out videos, podcasts and blog posts, you can eventually build enough of an audience that you can monetise. You...

Elon Musk - by Ashlee Vance 'How the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is shaping our future'   What a character. After creating Zip2 and selling it for around $20m, he pumped that all into X.com which became PayPal. After selling that to eBay, he received about $180m after tax. He pumped ALL of that into creating three new companies; SpaceX, Tesla and Solar City. After being literally hour...

"The Compound Effect is the principle of reaping huge rewards from a series of small, smart choices". It's not the big things that set us apart, it's the tiny choices that we make repeatedly and consistently over decades that make radical differences. Darren Hardy steps us through his process of Choices, Habits, Momentum, Influences and Acceleration to help us make small, regular, positive changes...