12 Books A Year - "4 Books To Change Your Life" (Part 2/4) - 164

The Option Genius Podcast: Options Trading For Income and Growth

Alright, let's get on with this. All right, so this is part two of a four part series. Okay, so part one explained the basics explained why I'm doing this series and explained that you are reading wrong. No, I'm kidding, I don't know how you read, at least for me, the way I was reading was wrong. Now, the point of reading is to learn. But the way I was reading is that I was reading to be done. And I know psychologically, there is this thing in our brains that we have to go to completion, right? So it's like, you watch a movie, but you don't want to stop in the middle because you want to finish it. And you want to feel that you completed something, even though it's a bad movie. So most of us don't get up and leave or turn it off in the middle.

Same with books. For me, it's like I wanted to finish the whole book, even if it was not good or boring, or I don't really know what was talking about, I would go through and read the whole book anyway, and then go to the next one, then go the next one. But I never really learned and I never really sunk in so that it wasn't effective in my life, I never really used it because I was just reading, reading, reading. And so the books that I'm going to share with you are totally different, I read them in a different way. And you can please go to part one of the series, and it'll tell you exactly how and why and the reasoning behind it, and how it works. But in this session, I want to talk about the first four books of the year that I read. Now, these are set in a specific order, because it's the first of the year, right first four months, and I really want to get on a good start. And so these particular books, the ones I'm going to show you are the ones that I read every single year. Now some of the books depending on what I want to learn what I want to accomplish that year, I might not read every single one of them every now and again, they're interchangeable, depending on the topics that you want to excel at. That's the cool thing about this program. So these four books, I would like there for me, they're like long term, you know, and they the issues that they address are long term issues.

And so sometimes these four, sometimes take me longer than one month to implement. Some of them are not and some of them do. So it's really I tried to interspeed them. So one book will be a very highly implemented book. And then the next month, it might be just a thought-provoking book that I don't have to implement, and do and work on that much. And then next month, that again, it'll be another workbook. So all of these books, there are their, you know, best sellers, you can probably still get them. I like to get them in hardcover, because I know I'm gonna be reading them and keeping them for a long time. Even if they go on print. I want the hardcover. So I can keep doing this over and over again.

So with that, let me get into book number one. So this number one is called the "One Thing". Okay, that's the name of the book, the one thing and again, you can see its hard cover, this basically tells you and ask you a simple question. It's like, what's your one thing?

And the idea is very simple. It's, if we focus on too many things, we don't get enough things done. So the idea is to have really close concise goals. And then you work on just one thing to accomplish those goals. And so there's one question that they asked in here, that makes things much simpler. And they call it the, they call it the defining question, or the focusing question, sorry. And the question is, what's the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will become easier or unnecessary? What's the one thing I can do that by doing it, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary? And you might be thinking, well, you know, my problems are really hard. My problems are intense, right? But there's always if you break it down into small steps, those small steps are like dominoes. And the small one knocks over the bigger one, then you can knock over a bigger one, then you cannot go for a bigger one until the goal that you want is accomplished.

So there's an example of losing weight, right? I want to lose weight. Okay, what do I do? Well, I gotta hit the gym. Well, what's the best time to go to the gym first thing in the morning? Okay, well, I don't do that because I don't like getting up early. Or I get lazy in the morning. So I don't go to the gym in the morning. I don't work out in the morning. So if I can just get myself up early in the morning, then I'll do that. Well, what's the best way to do that? Oh, no, set my alarm. Okay, is that the one thing that I can do? No, the one thing I can do is workout, right? That's it? No, no, no, we gotta go smaller, smaller, smaller. So if the the goal is to lose weight, then one step removed from that is I need to work out, I don't know, five days a week, okay, then one step removed from that smaller than that is I need to get to the gym, right? Five times a week. And then once that smaller than that is a I need to wake up on time so I can get to the gym. And then once that, below that, and then that and then that. So what we realized is this was an example that you know, so it's not just getting to the gym, I'm you know, I'm gonna put my snooze button on and I'm gonna go back to sleep. So how do I get to the gym on time? Well, one thing I want to do is that you can swim you can sleep in your gym clothes, and then you just get up alarm rings, you get up and you go to the gym. Okay, that's fine. But I still don't get up. Right? I'm so groggy in the morning. Why? Well, in the example it was because the person would drink alcohol at night to help them go to sleep, or to unwind, and they would sleep late. So, obviously, you got to cut out your alcohol, and then you have to go to bed on time. Okay, so is that my one thing go to bed on time? No. Because you don't know what on time it so you have to set your schedule, and you have to be in bed before it's sleep time. So when do you want to sleep? Well, okay, if I want to go to sleep, if I want to be asleep at nine, or sorry, at 10. Right? Because I can get up early, then you should probably be in bed by like, 930? Well, at 930, you know, I'm still doing stuff. So I don't, I can't just like snap my fingers and go to bed. So I gotta start getting ready. Okay, so I need like half an hour to get ready, right? Pull my stuff away, put the kids to bed, blah, blah, blah, and then be in bed. So nine o'clock is when I have to start getting ready. So is that my one thing? No, the one thing would be even smaller, it would be to set an alarm for nine o'clock. So you set an alarm for nine o'clock, that, hey, it's time for me to start getting ready, I got half an hour to be in bed, so that I can fall asleep in half an hour so that I could wake up early in the morning. And not drink, obviously. And so I can get up early in the morning so that I can go to the gym so that I could work out so that I could lose weight. So that's how it breaks down. So that one thing you could do the one small thing that you could do right now, that makes everything easy is to set your alarm for nine o'clock at night and make a goal. And the goal is to lose weight, but you break it down. So that's one example. The book has a lot more examples, the book is really good, they wouldn't have sold millions of copies otherwise. And I read it every year because it keeps bringing me back to Hey, what's the one thing? What's the one thing we just did one thing right now, I had a problem that I've been working on for months, literally months and asked the question, and the answer just came with, oh, wow, if I did this one small change, it just makes everything so much simpler. And it makes all this extra work that I was thinking of doing completely unnecessary. Like I already have to do it anymore. Because of this one small change. And it was one thing that I didn't want to do. But when he asked a question, it's like the answer is like it's pointing the answer, like this is the thing you have to do this is going to make everything easier or unnecessary. So in my case, definitely gonna be easier, it's going to be faster, and it's going to be make a lot of things unnecessary. So that's how you that's the one question. That's just one thing in that book, right? So that's, that's the one thing that's a great book, I start off every January with that book. All right, February is this book, The Power of full engagement, making energy, not time is the key to high performance and personal renewal. Okay, so the power of full engagement. Now, this is something that is really, really good about energy, about health, about stamina, about exercise. And it's not just talking about health, it's not just talking about one type exercise, it's, it's about your mind as well sleep, fitness, Health, or nutrition, all that stuff, it combines all of it. That's why I put it in in February, so that it can retrain my brain and get me on the right path. If I fallen off, which I usually do, I'm not the most active person, alright, so it helps you figure out and it reinforces all the different reasons why you need to eat better, why you need to sleep well, why you need to, you know, exercise on a daily basis, and all that. And so, this one, if you're dealing with, you know, overweight or high cholesterol or whatever problems, which almost everybody nowadays has some type of health problem, right? If you're dealing with that, you can use this one, or you can use some other one, that similar vein, you know, and that really helps you to remember and get you back on track and back on focus for your health. Now, this is not particularly a health book, it's more about energy, and how to have more energy to have a more productive and more happy life. That's the point of it's not health and nutrition is part of it. But it's just it's more than that. It's more about energy, how you think how you act, how you work, all that sort of thing. So that's why I like this one. It's not just about oh, this is your diet, you know, it's not a cookbook or whatever. So that's when I really liked that one again. And now when I put in February, so this one is a you know, the February is a smaller month, and sometimes this one can be a little bit heavy and so sometimes it overlaps in February and March. So it takes February and March because it's really, really important, right? The concepts are really important and you want to if your health is no good, that doesn't matter how much money you have, doesn't matter how much time you have, you can't do anything, you're pretty much screwed. So that's why your health and your energy are really really important concepts. Next, we have one that I have spent a lot of time working on. And it's basically happiness. It's like how do you, you know, how do you be more happy? We, a lot of us are suffering, anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, all kinds of crazy stuff and mental health is, is getting worse and worse, even though, you know, we have everything we need, we have everything we want. Basically, you snap your fingers, and you know, your food comes, groceries come to your door, people take you anywhere you want, anything you want is available. It's incredible. You know, Amazon used to be like, Oh my god, next two day delivery was amazing. Now, it's one day delivery. Now it's like same day delivery, you press a button and thing shows up before you get home. It's like, what I just ordered, they gotta get here. So why are we so sad? What's the problem? I don't know, I guess a difference for it's different for everybody. So for me, I spent a lot of time, you know, I went through some depression issues. We had people in our family that passed away unexpectedly, they were murdered.

And so I did go through depression, take the pills and all that. And then I was like, No, I don't want to take pills, I want to do it myself. And so this book is The Happiness Project. It's a really cool book. And the reason it's good is because there are a lot of books on happiness. I mean, there's a lot of trainings, a lot of things that happiness, most of the things, they all say the same thing, right, they all use the same studies, they all say the same things. So what this woman did was, she took a year out of her life, and he probably, you know, I'm gonna write a book about it. But she looked at all the studies, and all of the different techniques that they tell you to do. And she actually did them. And she recorded, which ones made her happier, which ones worked, which ones didn't, which ones, you know, are like a waste of time, which ones are amazing. And she records them in her own voice, which it's pretty funny, you know. And so I like that one a lot, because she has all the research, but then she also has how she applied it. And so it's a bit of a story, you know, it's not all dry and scientific, even though she explains everything very nicely. So that one is the Happiness Project. That one is really good. I love that one. I read it ever again, these these four, these first four, I do read every single year, because to me, they're they're that important. And the happiness book, you know, even if you're not suffering from depression, or whatnot, it does tell you how to it gives you ideas, and he gives you a lot of tips and a lot of tricks. You don't have to use all of them, you can use some of them, you know, you don't have to do it like she did, where you have to try every single method. And I don't, you know, I might take one, maybe two out of the book every year and be like, You know what, I'm gonna try this. You know, one of the simple idea would be like, I've started doing this with my kids, you know, so every night when I'm putting into bed, I asked them, hey, tell me three things that went well today, you know, tell me three things that weren't good today. And so you end the day thinking about positives. Most of us think about, oh, man, this happened wrong, that happened wrong. I do this tomorrow to that tomorrow. But I'm so tired, but I'm so exhausted. But we don't think about all the stuff that went right. So this was one technique that you just think about three things every day, that went right. And it could be something really simple. You know, for me making this video is going to be one of those things for me, like, hey, you know, I've finished part two of the four part series, Yay, I'm gonna celebrate that, you know, might have had a trade that went well, today. Yay, I'm gonna celebrate that because we don't celebrate enough. And this is the reason that we also have an option genius. We have all the bells, you know, we ring bells, every time. Every time we have a positive trade, we ring a bell because we went on a lot of trades. And so it becomes common common to just when it's like, Oh, hey, made money today? What do you do that? No, you got to celebrate it, you got to make it exciting, right? Otherwise, it just gets boring. So we ring the bell every time we have a positive trade, and it's a bit of a celebration. Same thing with the three things that happened today, you're celebrating every single day, because these days don't come back. There was another another technique I talked about in a different episode, where you find out how many days supposedly, or average you have left in life, you know, based on how old you are now, and when you're going to die, which is probably around around 80 years old. So how many days you have left, you write that on the mirror with a dry erase marker. So when you're brushing your teeth in the morning, you got to change the number every day. So it's like, you know, like yesterday was 12,700. Today, it's 12,006 99. You know, you got to change the number every day. And you give yourself that mental remembrance that oh my god, I got one day left. Today's god, oh, man, the days gone. So at night, you know, when I see that number of washing my teeth, I'm like, man, what did I do today? Was it worth it? You know, and then you change your patterns. So it's not immediate, but it does gradually help and gradually remind yourself and gradually you spend more and more time doing the things that you enjoy. So then you at the end of the day, you're like yeah, you know, today was a good day. Today was a good day. Yeah, maybe I'll do more of that tomorrow. All right now, this book number four is for me, it was a very deep book. It's called a million miles. No, sorry. Yeah, it's called a million miles in a thousand years by Donald Miller, how I learned to live a better story, not a better life, but a better story. A million miles in 1000 years. Now, I was lucky that I found this book. I don't know how I found it. But why picked it up? But I did. And so for me, I've been told, and so have you to find your purpose, to find your passion to find the thing that really makes you alive, you know, and then if you can find that one thing and do that for a living, then you never have to work a day in your life. That's great. And I spent years trying to find my purpose, like, what is it? Do I want to help people? Do I want to make a lot of money? Do I want to build a building? Do I want to build a big company? Do I want to travel the world? What is the purpose? What is the point of my life? And I realized that there's a lot of things I want to do. Right, but there's no just one overarching purpose. Like, was I put on this earth to trade options? Was I put on this Earth to teach people how to trade options? Not necessarily, I don't think so. I mean, I enjoy it. But I want to do that for the rest of my life.

I'm sorry, but this, this show is not gonna it's gonna end one day. So I don't know, like, What is my purpose? You know, what do I really want out of life? Like I have everything I want? What is it that makes me keep going? And maybe that's, maybe it was one of the reasons I get depressed. It's like, I already have what I want. Where's the challenge? You know, what's the next steps? But in this book, he talks about, it's basically a story of his life. And he's going through and he has this crisis. And what he realizes is that maybe we don't have to have a purpose in life. Maybe everybody doesn't have a purpose, or you do, maybe you don't know what it is. But instead of looking for a purpose, how about, we look at it in a different way? Right, we look at our lives in a different context. And we say that, you know, my life is my story. And I get to tell, and I get to write the story, however I want. So what is the story that I want to write? Well, I want to be a teacher, I want to be rich, I want to be a father, and it'd be XYZ a sailor, you know, I want to be a famous type fisherman. fisherman, I don't know what whatever. You know, I'll be famous at doing this one thing, those are all things that you can put as part of your story. And so there's one story in there, he was talking to a friend of his, and they had, the guy had a daughter, teenage daughter, and he couldn't get through her. And so the daughter was actually her, she, she got a boyfriend, the boyfriend was many years older than her. And they were doing drugs, and they were in a gang and, and all this bad stuff was, you know, and the guy listened to the author, about this realization about, you know, the story that we tell with our lives. And that guy realized that the story that the daughter was telling herself about herself, was not a good story. So he said, You know what I want her to be I want her to live a good story. So that she gets out of all this bad stuff. And she feels good about herself. And so he went home, and he said, Hey, you know what, we are going to build a school in Mexico. And they didn't know anything about building schools. They didn't have any extra money, they didn't have nothing. He just went to his wife and his daughter and said, We're going to build a school in Mexico. Because for some reason, he came up with that. And that was the story he wanted to be able to tell. And so the daughter actually got really excited. At first the wife got mad, she's like, Well, you didn't tell me about this. We didn't talk about this. How do you you know, how do you just spend all this money building a school, blah, blah, blah. But the daughter got really excited. And she did research on it, she found you know, how much stuff is going to cost you found where she could put the school, how they're going to approach it. And that family actually ended up building a school in Mexico.

And that was the story that the daughter was able to tell about herself. And that increased her self confidence and increase her self worth self esteem. And that was just one story that she was able to tell about herself, then you talk you know, then you go on further and you say okay, if I'm a person who builds schools, right, what else can I accomplish? I'm not gonna go being a king. Hey, I'm gonna I'm gonna do drugs. I'm I'm I'm a school builder. Right. So your your perspective changes on you And so you don't have to have a purpose, you just have to be able to tell a good story about yourself, and you get to write your own story. So it could be that I am a successful trader. That's part of my story. But that's not the only story I have in my life. Right? I'm also a good father. That's another story. How do I tell that story? And then it's up to me to come up with the reason and the way to be able to know that I'm leaving a good story. And then you have different stories, and you pile them on top of each other. So that was a really good book, you reminds me of that every year. And so nowadays, whenever I hear, you know, there's articles and videos and podcasts and everything about oh, how do you find your purpose? How do you find your purpose? I just now, nevermind, I spent so much time trying to figure out my purpose, listening to this taking courses on how do you find your purpose? And I'm like, Man, I still can't find my purpose. I don't know what to do. You know, it's like, what's the one thing it's like? There's not just one thing, there are many things and it's okay, if there are many things. So if you haven't found your purpose yet, no worries. You know, there's another way to look at it. It's like, hey, just tell a story about your life. What story do you want to tell? You know, so it's like, if it's your funeral, what do you want them to be talking about? That's your story. That's how they're going to be telling the story from their perspective. But you get to write your story now, so that when you die, and they they talk about you, they'll be telling your story the way you want it to be told, right? So these are the first four books. Alright, so this is part two, part three, I'm gonna go in for more books. And then part four, they do form our books. So we finish out the whole the whole year. These are the way these are the books that are read every year to make myself better, more successful, more appreciative, have a happier life. So these four books are really good. The next four ones are going to be amazing. They're knock your socks off in the four after that are maybe even the best ones. So that said, I'll see you in part number three.