What I learned reading 33 books in 2021

This post contains affiliate links that help supports this blog and cost you the exact same. If you do not wish to use affiliate links, then feel free to google the product.

My most productive use of time this last year was reading, and I read a lot. I listened to most of the books while otherwise occupied by non-mentally consuming tasks, such as cooking, cleaning, driving, and sanding my woodworking projects.

I am entirely astonished at how my thinking has evolved over the year. I feel like a completely different person with an upgraded operating system.

I read books about business, health, happiness, capitalism, breathing, cooking, fitness, habits, money, productivity, and many other topics.

1. How to Win Friends & Influence People – Dale Carnegie

2. The ONE Thing – Gary Keller

3. Atomic Habits – James Clear

4. The Steal Like an Artist Audio Trilogy – Austin Kleon

5. Tribe of Mentors – Tim Ferriss

6. Deep Work – Cal Newport

The Book List: Read or Listened to in 2021

1. The Millionaire Fastlane – MJ DeMarco

2. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

3. The Low-Carb Athlete – Ben Greenfield

4. Awaken the Giant Within – Tony Robbins

5. $100M Offers – Alex Hormozi

6. 2 Second Lean – Paul Akers

7. The Wim Hof Method – Wim Hof

8. Ready to Run – Kelley Starrett

9. Tribe of Mentors – Tim Ferriss

10. Atomic Habits – James Clear

11. Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand

12. The Tao of Seneca – Seneca presented by Tim Ferriss

13. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Sean Covey

14. The 5 Second Rule – Mel Robbins

15. Unleash the Power Within – Tony Robbins

16. Breath – James Nestor

17. The Steal Like an Artist Audio Trilogy – Austin Kleon

18. Start with Why – Simon Sinek

19. How to Win Friends & Influence People – Dale Carnegie

20. Think and Grow Rich – Napoleon Hill

21. Anything You Want – Derek Sivers

22. Critical Chain – Eliyahu M. Goldratt

23. Deep Work – Cal Newport

24. The ONE Thing – Gary Keller

25. I Will Teach You to Be Rich – Ramit Sethi

26. The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster – Darren Hardy

27. Power Moves – Adam Grant

28. Crushing It! – Gary Vaynerchuk

29. The Compound Effect – Darren Hardy

30. Principles – Ray Dalio

31. Zero to One – Peter Thiel

32. Content Inc – Joe Pulizzi

33. The Infinite Game – Simon Sinek

These books were very different, but they all told one unified story. Their story was that there is no one way to succeed but many ways. It taught me that the most important thing in life is finding out your most important thing. These authors were all extremely passionate about their topic for years or decades before writing their book(s). For most of the authors, writing was a way to share what they found to work and not necessarily just a way to make money.

Some became world-class at one thing, but most combined multiple passions that created a category for themselves.

Some of them knew what they wanted to be from day one. However, most of them found their path as life experiences molded them into their future selves.

Please enjoy these key learning points from reading the above books this year.

Build a brand, not a business

Branding is an essential concept today in business and life. The majority of the products on the market are marginally different at best. Shoes, clothes, glasses, cars, TVs are mostly all made in the same factories to the same specifications. The difference between them is the brand. Why will you spend $200 on a pair of NoBull shoes when Reeboks will do the same for $80? It is the same reason you spent $200 on the Reebok’s five years ago when a pair of NewBalance would do the same thing. It’s the brand. The brand is why you will pay more for one item than another of the same attributes. You value their brand and what they stand for. So focus your efforts on building a brand and not just a business.

Fast beats free

In a world of next-day shipping, black Friday deals that last two weeks, and an endless sea of “free” Youtube education, we are a society that loves deals. For 90% of the population, there is no better deal than free.

What the other 10% knows is a complete game-changer. It is that fast beats free every single time. Essentially all of the information you could ever need is available for free on the internet. Ask yourself, when was the last time you searched and couldn’t find a solution to your problem? My guess, not for a very long time. Instead, what happened was you found ten solutions to your problem, which is almost worse than not having any. So even though all of this information is free, you need to filter through mountains of information and spend significant time throwing out the completely insane solutions and then test the remaining to find out which one works for you.

What is the alternative to this, you may ask? Fast and not free.

• How much would you pay to get Abs in a year?

• How much would you pay to get Abs in 2 weeks?

My guess is you would pay more for the faster results.

• How can Grant Cardone charge $25K for an hour of consulting?

• How can Tony Robbins sell-out events at $1000+ per ticket?

They can do this because they have a track record of delivering results fast.

Fast Beats Free.

The craziest thing is, depending on how much your time is worth, buying back time can save you money (or, more appropriately, make you more money) in the long run.

It’s not a zero-sum game

Growing up, I often believed many aspects of life were a zero-sum game. Wherein reality, it is almost never a zero-sum game.

For example, if by sharing everything I have learned, someone else can take the principles and use them to double their income, does that come at my expense? The answer is no; in reality, they now have more intelligence and more money which means they could turn around and share their insights or decide to purchase 1-on-1 coaching, and if they do not, I at least have improved my communication skills.

If my competitor is growing their yearly sales, does that mean I am shrinking? No, it could just mean that the entire market is growing.

The overnight success

We have all heard the tales of overnight success, but who is that? Every person I thought was an overnight success turned out to be someone putting in the work, day in and day out, someone who was publishing two articles a week for years until success finally appeared. The overnight success is the person who put the work in and got better at their craft until someone noticed them. The overnight success is not the person with ideas; they are the person who took action with their ideas. And not just overnight.

The three currencies of life

In life, you have three currencies, and how you spend them will shape the person you become and what level of impact you have on the world. The three currencies are:

Time | Money | Knowledge

Most people I know spend their time at a direct exchange rate for money. They get paid $20/hr to sell the widget. Every year they have a review with their boss, and the script goes, “Boss, I sold 15,000 widgets. I know more about selling these widgets now than I did a year ago; therefore, I would like $21/hr”.

They have increased their exchange rate by having more knowledge. However, this is still a fool’s errand because they made an incremental increase but are still trading their time.

Option 2 would be having a conversation that goes, “Boss, I would like to make a commission of $0.10 for every widget sold.” The person can now get paid for their results instead of their time. This is huge, as the exchange rate is no longer linear for their time, but it could be exponential.

The next question is, how do you spend your money? Most people I know spend it on their expenses (house, gas, car, food) and then reward themselves with consumer goods. But, they don’t reinvest it to increase their knowledge which would make them more valuable and able to command a higher wage (like learning these 5 high income skills). They also don’t invest in systems to buy back their time.

The most critical resource

For so much of my life, I thought that I did not have enough time in the day. I always told myself that I could have everything done if only I had more hours in the day. The not-so-secret secret I learned this year is that time is not a variable. Time is a constant. This idea is so important that I will restate it, time is not a variable, time is a constant. We all have 24 hours in a day, and we all should be sleeping at least 8 hours a night. This leaves every single person with 16 hours a day of choices.

We cannot manipulate ourselves to have more time in the day. What we can manipulate is our focus. A great analogy I got from MJ DeMarco is thinking of your time like casino chips. You have 16 chips to spend each day. At the end of the day, they must all be spent. They cannot be saved. What you can choose is what you spend those chips on.

Are you spending it on activities that compound and work in synergy to give you the life you continue to tell yourself that you want? Or do you spend it all on the immediate payoffs and give up the long-term benefits.

Are you reading, learning, laughing, loving, and playing, or are you consuming and unhappy?

Synergy

There is a saying that you can have anything you want as long as you want that one thing more than anything else—however, we humans are not that easily convinced. We seldom want just one thing. For my own example, I want to be an engineer, be athletic (an athlete would be a stretch), have a woodworking business, and help others through this blog. I know I could have much more impact if I just picked one, but as soon as I put all of my energy into only one endeavor, I start missing the others.

There is a way to have almost everything, and that is synergy. Synergy is when many things work together, it is when the whole is greater than the sum of their parts; 1 + 1 = 3. Synergy works with many aspects of life, but it takes careful planning. An example is I want to have more friendships and more community. By choosing to workout out at Crossfit instead of at home, I get both of those, plus it helps me be more athletic. Another example is my woodworking business. Even though it is not profitable (it’s by choice because I have a habit of spending all profits on new tools), the skills I learn help my day job and improve other people’s lives.

So, if you are looking to have many things in life, find a way to tie them together so that you are killing two birds with one stone.

The first draft always sucks

No matter what product, process, or art you see in the world, it is not the first draft if it is any good. It takes many steps and iterations for something to be good, continuously getting better with each release. This fact can be freeing and crippling. It is crippling because when we look at our role models and our goals, we see what appears to be perfection. It isn’t easy to see a way that we could ever be that good. But more optimistically, it is freeing because it shows that no one started world-class. With proper practice, most people can get outstanding at almost anything.

PS: I wrote about this in more detail in the post Iterate.

Thank you for reading. Let me know in the comments below what your favorite book of 2021 was.