Author: Allen Cheng

At times, most of us have felt unmotivated, discouraged, and as though things were falling apart. In this short parable, _The Energy Bus_, author and motivational speaker Jon Gordon explains how to turn things around when this happens. The allegory about a middle manager hitting rock bottom takes place on a bus, where the driver and passengers share with him 10 rules for reenergizing his life through positive thinking. Practicing these simple principles can help you build successful teams at work and improve your relationships. Like the story’s main character, George, you can learn to enjoy life’s ride.

Many people dream of quitting a job and becoming their own boss by starting a business. A million new businesses are started each year, but 40 percent fail within the first year and 80 percent fail within five years. Underlying the high failure rate are persistent romantic notions about how businesses are born and what it takes to succeed.

In _The E-Myth Revisited_, Michael E. Gerber explains how focusing solely on the product undermines new businesses and just trying to work harder undermines new businesses. **The right approach is to view your business like a franchise—to systematize operations so that it no longer relies on you.** This thirty-year-old classic is a part-practical and part-philosophical guide to conceptualizing and starting a business.

_The Compound Effect_ by Darren Hardy offers simple tips on achieving success and living the life of your dreams. The idea is similar to compound interest in finance – small, everyday decisions add up to huge returns over time.

While the concept is simple, that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Hardy presents six strategies for successfully and carefully directing your choices to shape your destiny in a positive direction and offers a plan of action for improving your results.

_The Challenger Sale_ upends the conventional wisdom that building relationships with customers is the key to sales success. Instead, they contend, **the best salespeople take control of the sale by challenging customers’ thinking with new insights and pushing back** instead of giving in to customer demands. While there are five distinct types of sales reps, it’s these so-called Challengers who consistently excel in selling the complex business-to-business solutions required in today’s business world. Based on a massive study of thousands of sales reps worldwide, the authors uncover the skills and behaviors that drive Challengers’ performance and explain how to replicate them in any sales force.

_The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine _takes us inside the madness, corruption, and greed at the heart of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. It tells the story of an eccentric collection of investors who saw the folly of the subprime mortgage-backed securities market—and found a way to bet against it. By focusing on individuals who saw these worthless securities for what they truly were, _The Big Short _explores the complexities and irrationalities of modern capitalism and forces us to seriously question the wisdom (and motivations) of the financial elites who wield so much power over our economy, society, and politics.

Do you want to make your life better? Are you struggling in your personal or professional life, your interactions with other people, your life balance, or your life’s purpose?

_The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People_ provides an inside-out approach to improving yourself and your life. This method entails with examining and adjusting your character, your motives, and how you see the world in order to change how you behave and how you interact with others. Learn how to best focus your time, define your personal mission, and build productive relationships with other people.

Maintaining emotional love and connection in a relationship can be hard. Often, the problem is in the way you are communicating love to your partner, and vice versa. Have you ever demonstrated a gesture of affection, only to not have it appreciated? Does your partner ever say they don’t feel loved enough?

These conflicts happen because every person receives and experiences love differently. **The way you experience love dictates your love language**. There are 5 love languages: Word of Affirmation, Quality Time, Receiving Gifts, Acts of Service, and Physical Touch. Learning to speak your partner’s love language can help you understand how to make them feel loved. And learning your own love language helps you understand what makes you fulfilled in a relationship.

_Talking to Strangers_ is a book about the impossibility of truly understanding a stranger. By breaking down some of the most famous events in recent human history, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell shows us the strategies we often use when dealing with people we don’t know—and how deeply flawed those strategies are.

In this book, you’ll learn:
* How Hitler fooled so many prominent world leaders
* Why the financial industry failed to stop Bernie Madoff for so long
* What really happened to Sandra Bland

_SPIN Selling_ by professor and consultant Neil Rackham is a practical how-to guide for making big sales. First published over 30 years ago, the book has become a sales classic. Based on pioneering research, Rackham’s sales method of questioning customers about their needs challenged 60 years of traditional sales training in hard-sell techniques. SPIN selling—asking a series of questions about the Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-Payoff—has proven to be a durable, effective process any sales rep can learn in order to boost sales success.

A third to a half of Americans are introverts, according to author Susan Cain, but they’re often marginalized. In _Quiet_, Cain contends that Western society is designed around an “extrovert ideal” that celebrates those who are bold and charismatic. However, unbridled extroversion can lead to disasters, such as the fall of Enron and the 2008 financial crisis.

By overvaluing extroverts and treating introverts as misfits, society loses out on introverts’ unique strengths—for instance, they’re highly creative, astute observers, and adept at solving complex problems. Cain argues for a balance in society, school, and work that lets introverts be true to themselves and where the two personality types complement each other.