Best Personal Growth Books of 2008

Wherein favoritest becomes a word, and I share the favoritest per­sonal growth books I read in 2008.

Per­sonal Devel­op­ment for Smart Peo­ple by Steve Pavlina

Sur­prise, sur­prise? Not really, if you’ve read my book review, Per­sonal Atro­phy for Fool­ish Peo­ple anti-theory and Mov­ing Towards Wis­dom, Beauty & Strength appli­ca­tion of the book’s principles.

There’s only one rea­son Per­sonal Devel­op­ment for Smart Peo­ple: The Con­scious Pur­suit of Per­sonal Growth is up here, and that’s because its worked for me. I think Steve nails it when he describes the core prin­ci­ples of all per­sonal growth as truth, love and power. Admit­tedly, it wasn’t such a big rev­e­la­tion to me since my friend Eleuthe­rios had already intro­duced me to the Kab­bal­is­tic equiv­a­lent of wis­dom, beauty and strength, but Steve’s re-introduction was the tip­ping point that came at the right time in my life.

I saw that apply­ing these prin­ci­ples to be more hon­est to myself and oth­ers around me with Life Coaches Blog would make me hap­pier, result in a greater con­nec­tion to my heart and give me the power to get to the next stage in my life. And it has, not just on my blog but in my work­ing and per­sonal life as well.

The real lit­mus test of a book is whether I’d put cash down on it, and even though I’d already had a pre-release ebook review copy, the moment I saw it on the shelves I bought it.

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Cre­ative Bat­tles is the book I want to buy for all my cre­ative friends.

I first heard about The War of Art from The Mann, and had the unex­pected for­tune of find­ing it in a tucked away cor­ner of the book­shop. I decided to buy this slim 165-pager even though, hon­estly, it didn’t look very inter­est­ing. But boy, am I glad I did.

In the book, Steven talks about the work we want to do and what stops us from doing it – a stop­ping force he calls resis­tance which sep­a­rates ‘the life we live, and the unlived life within us.’

It’s a rare and cher­ished book that can make you see the world in a new light, and The War of Art does that for me. It spells out and nails down in a fresh way for me the inter­nal forces that array against me doing my best work, how to beat it in a prac­ti­cal, no-nonsense way and even the spir­i­tual nature of inspi­ra­tion and the muse (which comes, after all, from beat­ing resis­tance in a prac­ti­cal, no-nonsense way – noth­ing more airy-fairy than seat­ing down and doing the work).

The most impor­tant les­son I learned from this book is a phrase that has stuck in my mind from the first day I heard it:

The more scared we are of a work or call­ing, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.

Med­i­ta­tions on Vio­lence by Rory Miller

Med­i­ta­tions on Vio­lence: A Com­par­i­son of Mar­tial Arts Train­ing & Real World Vio­lence is a really good book that I wouldn’t rec­om­mend for every­body. For one, once you open it the first thing that greets you is a photo of a toi­let floor smeared with blood. This is not your grandmother’s self-defense book.

A vet­eran cor­rec­tions offi­cer, Sergeant Rory Miller – a mar­tial artist him­self – talks about the dif­fer­ence between what mar­tial artists train for and the types of vio­lence he’s seen hap­pen in real life, and why study­ing mar­tial arts doesn’t always equal to learn­ing self-defense.

I wish I could tell you more about this thought-provoking and thought­fully writ­ten book, but the truth is that I’ve been loan­ing my copy out to every­one in my dojo the moment I fin­ished it. What I do remem­ber is the book shak­ing up every notion I had about my own train­ing: I haven’t been able to look at mar­tial arts and self-defense the same way since.

It’s a must-read for any mar­tial artist who’s seri­ous about self-defense and highly rec­om­mended also for any­one who wants to learn how to be safe (together with the other highly rec­om­mended book Cheap Shots, Ambushes, And Other Lessons and the ency­clo­pe­dic web­site No Non­sense Self-Defense by Marc ‘Ani­mal’ MacYoung).

Just be warned that the book pulls no punches.

Eat, Pray, Love by Eliz­a­beth Gilbert

Ah, fic­tion! Or semi-autobiography travel/spiritual jour­ney nar­rated like fic­tion in a some­times over­bear­ingly self-centered, but always thought­ful, well-written and sat­is­fy­ingly funny way.

As fun as Med­i­ta­tions on Vio­lence is seri­ous, I read Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Every­thing Across Italy, India and Indone­sia not just once, but twice over because I under­es­ti­mated the amount of time I would spend on the trains in Japan, and because I over­es­ti­mated how easy it’d be to find an Eng­lish book­store in Japan. I enjoyed it tremen­dously both times though.

Eat, Pray, Love is the story of Elizabeth’s year of trav­el­ing through Italy, India and Bali as she indulges in food, med­i­ta­tion and finally, love. It’s her hon­est voice and her obser­va­tions about life as much as any­thing that won me over in this book about self and worldly dis­cov­ery. And yes, I can vouch that time in a med­i­ta­tion retreat can be just as frus­trat­ing as she writes about – you’re wrestling with your inner demons after all and not just Zen-ning out after all.

How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis

Not another how to get rich quick book by a bloke who’s only get­ting rich from teach­ing you how to get rich, you say? Ordi­nar­ily, I’m so jaded by ass­holes like that, that I tend to give books with such a bla­tant title a wide berth. But a friend of mine who runs his own busi­ness and doing rather well rec­om­mended it to me highly, and I’m glad I lis­tened to his advice.

For one, Felix isn’t one of those scammy ass­holes. Accord­ing to his book and Wikipedia entry, Felix Den­nis is a ridicu­lously rich pub­lisher who was ranked joint 95th on the Sun­day Times Rich List 2007 with a for­tune esti­mated at £750 mil­lion. He wrote How to Get Rich: One of the World’s Great­est Entre­pre­neurs Shares His Secrets after review­ing the book Blink by Mal­colm Glad­well, and declared that it was ‘bunkum’ and ‘snake oil’, like every other self-help book he’d seen.

“Not one of those books was writ­ten by any­one who actu­ally got rich – except by writ­ing dri­vel for cretins.”

How to Get Rich is dis­arm­ingly hon­est, clev­erly writ­ten, funny, full of life-lived wis­dom and Felix never gets so full of him­self to declare that he, and only he, has the ulti­mate secrets to mak­ing truck­loads of cash. And sur­pris­ingly for a book that tells you how to get rich, he devotes one entire chap­ter of heart­felt rea­sons not to get rich, warn­ing that the road to riches is often harder than you think.

The Gift of Noth­ing by Patrick McDonnell

I came across The Gift of Noth­ing quite by chance in a local book­store, and fell in love with its sim­ple mes­sage and beau­ti­ful ink illustrations.

Mooch the cat has a prob­lem; what do you get for a friend who has every­thing? He thinks it over before reach­ing the per­fect idea: he’d get his friend Earl the dog the gift of noth­ing. But where can you find nothing?

The 56-page Gift of Noth­ing reads like a child’s book, with a draw­ing and sen­tence or two per page. But I’d highly rec­om­mend it to adults all the same, for its lovely twist and sim­ple way of remind­ing us that the best gifts in life come from the noth­ings we can hold; like friend­ship, love and trust.

Related Posts

1. Per­sonal Growth is a Choice
2. Before Mak­ing Large Bags of Money Online
3. A Mil­lion Miles in a Thou­sand Years by Don­ald Miller