Top 5 Books To Help Enhance Your Career
Trying to enhance or grow your career? Improving yourself as a person and employee by reading advice written by career experts is always invaluable. Here are five books we recommend as the top 5 books to help enhance your career!
1. The Third Door: The Wild Quest to Uncover How the World’s Most Successful People Launched Their Careers – Alex Banayan
The larger-than-life journey of an 18-year-old college freshman who set out from his dorm room to track down Bill Gates, Lady Gaga, and dozens more of the world’s most successful people to uncover how they broke through and launched their careers.
“The Third Door” takes readers on an unprecedented adventure—from hacking Warren Buffett’s shareholders meeting to chasing Larry King through a grocery store to celebrating in a nightclub with Lady Gaga—as Alex Banayan travels from icon to icon, decoding their success. After remarkable one-on-one interviews with Bill Gates, Maya Angelou, Steve Wozniak, Jane Goodall, Larry King, Jessica Alba, Pitbull, Tim Ferriss, Quincy Jones, and many more, Alex discovered the one key they have in common: they all took the Third Door.
Life, business, success . . . it’s just like a nightclub. There are always three ways in.
There’s the First Door: the main entrance, where 99 percent of people wait in line, hoping to get in. The Second Door: the VIP entrance, where the billionaires and celebrities slip through. But what no one tells you is that there is always, always . . . the Third Door. It’s the entrance where you have to jump out of line, run down the alley, bang on the door a hundred times, crack open the window, sneak through the kitchen—there’s always a way.
Whether it’s how Bill Gates sold his first piece of software or how Steven Spielberg became the youngest studio director in Hollywood history, they all took the Third Door.
2. Principles: Life and Work – Ray Dalio
Ray Dalio, one of the world’s most successful investors and entrepreneurs, shares the unconventional principles that he’s developed, refined, and used over the past forty years to create unique results in both life and business—and which any person or organization can adopt to help achieve their goals.
In 1975, Ray Dalio founded an investment firm, Bridgewater Associates, out of his two-bedroom apartment in New York City. Forty years later, Bridgewater has made more money for its clients than any other hedge fund in history and grown into the fifth most important private company in the United States, according to Fortune magazine. Dalio himself has been named to Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Along the way, Dalio discovered a set of unique principles that have led to Bridgewater’s exceptionally effective culture, which he describes as “an idea meritocracy that strives to achieve meaningful work and meaningful relationships through radical transparency.” It is these principles, and not anything special about Dalio—who grew up an ordinary kid in a middle-class Long Island neighborhood—that he believes are the reason behind his success.
In Principles, Dalio shares what he’s learned over the course of his remarkable career. He argues that life, management, economics, and investing can all be systemized into rules and understood like machines. The book’s hundreds of practical lessons, which are built around his cornerstones of “radical truth” and “radical transparency,” include Dalio laying out the most effective ways for individuals and organizations to make decisions, approach challenges, and build strong teams. He also describes the innovative tools the firm uses to bring an idea meritocracy to life, such as creating “baseball cards” for all employees that distill their strengths and weaknesses, and employing computerized decision-making systems to make believability-weighted decisions. While the book brims with novel ideas for organizations and institutions, Principles also offers a clear, straightforward approach to decision-making that Dalio believes anyone can apply, no matter what they’re seeking to achieve.
3. Invaluable: Master the 10 Skills You Need to Skyrocket Your Career – Maya Grossman
Do you have audacious career goals and no idea how to take the first step? Despite having earned a degree or two, have you found it hard to transition from theory to practice and make things happen in the “real world”? If so, you are not alone.
You were not provided with the proper skills to reach success―until now.
In this engaging and practical career development book, marketing expert and career coach Maya Grossman uncovers the 10 soft skills that every professional needs to master to evolve from a “typical” to an “invaluable” employee―the top talent every company wants to attract and retain.
You will learn how to develop an owner’s mindset, optimize for impact, become a master influencer, and create your own career opportunities―to skyrocket your career.
This book is a simple, step-by-step career guide, infused with real-life stories and actionable exercises, so you can easily learn and apply the 10 soft skills to grow your career. Maya shares the tried-and-true career advice and the strategies that helped her receive 10 promotions in 15 years, work for companies like Google and Microsoft, and become a VP-level executive.
If you want to accomplish more than you ever thought possible and accelerate your career development, this is the book you’ve been waiting for. It will help you position yourself at the top, deliver staggering results, future-proof your career, and get the job, promotion, or raise you want and deserve.
What you’ll learn in this book:
- How to find a career you love or find passion in your current job
- How to design a career roadmap and find your career path
- Proven actionable steps to develop the soft skills you need to grow your career
- Strategies to accelerate your career development and deliver staggering results
- Practical career advice
4. So Good They Can’t Ignore You – Cal Newport
In this eye-opening account, Cal Newport debunks the long-held belief that “follow your passion” is good advice. Not only is the cliché flawed—preexisting passions are rare and have little to do with how most people end up loving their work—but it can also be dangerous, leading to anxiety and chronic job hopping.
After making his case against passion, Newport sets out on a quest to discover the reality of how people end up loving what they do. Spending time with organic farmers, venture capitalists, screenwriters, freelance computer programmers, and others who admitted to deriving great satisfaction from their work, Newport uncovers the strategies they used and the pitfalls they avoided in developing their compelling careers.
Matching your job to a preexisting passion does not matter, he reveals. Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it.
With a title taken from the comedian Steve Martin, who once said his advice for aspiring entertainers was to “be so good they can’t ignore you,” Cal Newport’s clearly written manifesto is mandatory reading for anyone fretting about what to do with their life, or frustrated by their current job situation and eager to find a fresh new way to take control of their livelihood. He provides an evidence-based blueprint for creating work you love.
So Good They Can’t Ignore You will change the way we think about our careers, happiness, and the crafting of a remarkable life.
5. Moving the Needle: Get Clear, Get Free, and Get Going in Your Career, Business, and Life! – Joe Sweeney & Mike Yorkey
A detailed system that will help you achieve your professional and personal goals.
Moving the Needle provides both the “kick in the pants” and the game plan many of us need to break out of the rut and get moving to achieve our goals. CEOs, vice presidents, professionals, military personnel, and even college students frequently express frustration at the entrenched status quo, in which initiating progress feels like moving mountains. This book lights a path toward continual improvement, helping readers first find a direction, then make the key transitions that jumpstart forward progress. This highly practical guide outlines a change process that can be applied to professional or personal goals, giving readers a concrete plan for making big things happen. Rather than blindly shooting for the moon, readers will formulate a solid, systematic, actionable plan that can only result in progress.
In today’s tenuous business climate, employers and employees alike can be glued to the ground, unsure of the path they should take, or whether they have the freedom to move forward. Moving the Needle helps readers clarify their current position, identify their optimum position, and formulate a workable strategy for getting from here to there.
Key Takeaways:
- Find what “moving forward” means for your career and life
- Shake off the doldrums of routine and establish a culture of innovation
- Improve performance on a consistent basis, at every level
- Break the inertia and get moving in the right direction
Stagnation is diametrically opposed to progress. Moving forward requires a vision, a plan, and the impetus to get things done. Those who sense that big things can happen need to get clear, get free, and start Moving the Needle.
