While we enjoy the LIFE Intelligence app, there are times when we prefer to study the old-fashioned way – through books. There are numerous possibilities available, should you want to integrate in your life the so-called personal development books. This can be daunting for some, so here are our top recommendations.

James Clear – Atomic Habits

This is a new best-seller that has received merited praise. Atomic Habits takes pride in its pragmatism by investigating tried-and-true methods for breaking bad habits and forming new ones. There are a lot of people who feel that motivation willpower constitutes the success keys. Nevertheless, this book shows, it is our circumstances and behaviors that have a greater impact on our achievement. By concentrating on improving our habits rather than subjective levels of motivation, these everyday, repetitive behavior patterns can be adjusted to improve your life. When you remove the pressure to reach your full potential, you have the opportunity to bring purpose and worth to your daily life.

Atomic Habits investigates how we make decisions using the concepts of hyperbolic discounting and immediate reward. This novel questions your life philosophy, proposing that we should construct our lives so that the easiest option is a good habit and the toughest option is a poor habit. In the end, these minor adjustments will add up to be truly life-changing. “Tiny modifications, remarkable outcomes,” writes the author.

Michael Neill – Supercoach

When most people look for good personal development books, they discover that they all appear to go no further than surface-level knowledge that they might probably find in some inspirational Instagram quote. That’s where Michael Neill’s Supercoach tries to stand apart. Neill proposes the concept of an insight transformation, arguing that we should strive to have more aha – moments about ourselves in which our perception of ourselves fundamentally changes. He maintains that our complete potential lies in these discoveries from our thoughts.

Supercoach is structured into 10 coaching sessions, similar to how the LIFE Intelligence app is divided into 9 missions. Each coaching session is centered on one transformative principle designed to create massive personal change and growth. Rather than merely telling you what to do, Neill provides recommendations and understandings so that you can learn what works for bettering your life. This minimizes the need for continual reference and self-help jargon.

Neill also pitches his system on the premise of easy success. Insight shifts occur from within, so once you learn how to bring them about, you should experience a renewed feeling of self-awareness. The majority of our troubles in life are caused by ourselves and our thinking, rather than by conditions or events. Controlling our minds is the most effective technique to improve ourselves and our life.

Brené Brown – Daring Greatly

Another reason people read self-help books is to form long-lasting relationships. Brené Brown, a researcher and lecturer, insists in this book that owning our flaws and vulnerabilities is the key to good partnerships. You may frequently discover that your own mental barriers are preventing you from experiencing truly meaningful connections. Insecurity, such as not being enough for your relationship, keeps us from successfully bonding with others. Brown blends her research on shame, vulnerability, worthiness, and courage into a single discovery of what works for those suffering with love. She discovered that persons who have deep feelings of love and belonging simply believe they are deserving of love and belonging. In fact, this was the only feature that distinguished these two groups. It made no difference whether they had more money, struggled with addiction, or had more breakups. When faced with all of these challenges, they devised rituals that helped them to sustain the sense that they were deserving of love.

The key to all of this is having practices since it implies that consistency is required in maintaining healthy relationships. Brown contends that in order to be fulfilled wherever you are, regardless of your challenges, we must accept our vulnerability and see it as a strength. We cease distancing ourselves from new experiences that provide meaning and purpose into our lives by showing our actual selves despite our flaws.

Daniel Kahneman – Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman, the man every psychology student knows from their textbooks, and the Nobel Prize laureate for the extraordinary research he undertook on decision making alone and with Amos Tversky, is known as the pioneer of a new discipline: the behavioral economics. He devoted his life to researching how our psychology and cognition influence our decision-making processes.

His research is well-known in the scientific world since it spawned a slew of subsequent tests and analyses of human cognition. What distinguishes this individual is his effort to communicate cognitive science to all of us by utilizing language and stories that everyone can grasp.

Thinking Rapid and Slow is a prose book in which Kahneman discusses how human thinking is divided into two systems: fast and slow. The quick one is actually our inbuilt impulses, which are left behind from our evolutionary background. We wouldn’t be able to take our hand from a hot stove or run away if we didn’t have them. It’s like our subconscious, irrational, yet effective machine.

Our evolutionary advantage is the other. The road of self-reflection, logic, and planning. We have a lot of influence over the conscious path, but it also requires a lot of effort and concentration (which is why we tend to use it less often).

In his book, Kahneman explains in simple terms how these two systems work, why and how the slow system occasionally fails us, and why we frequently fail to use the slow system appropriately.

He backs up his arguments with mind-boggling experiment findings, teaching us how to make sensible, logic-based decisions and get the most out of both systems.

Viktor E. Frankl – Man’s Search for Meaning

This is the book that everyone should read in their lives, in our opinion. We previously complimented this book in our post Finding Your Purpose in Life, underlining its significance for personal development and growth.

After three years in Nazi concentration camps, thinking that every day could be his last, neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl argues in simple, at times even funny language that the search for meaning is at the heart of every human being.

This book is more than a memoir about surviving the Holocaust because of his professional expertise. It is also a psychological research and the foundation for the development of a new school of thinking and therapy: logotherapy.

The book’s conclusion is that if we can find meaning in our lives, we will be able to move forward even after facing the worst traumas imaginable to the human mind. This is an inspiring, life-changing, and eye-opening book.

Emily Esfahani Smith – The Power of Meaning

What is the significance of purpose? According to research, even if we have all we desire, if we lack purpose in our life, we will never be completely happy. Smith argues in her book that in order to develop our lives, we must seek significance rather than happiness.

So, what exactly does that mean? Finding our purpose appears to be a vague concept with little substance behind it. Smith, on the other hand, uses recent research in positive psychology to demonstrate that meaning may be found on four pillars: belonging, purpose, storytelling, and transcendence.

According to belonging, we must locate our people and cultivate connections in which we feel recognized, understood, and cherished. According to purpose, we require a long-term aim to encourage and guide us in contributing to the world. According to storytelling, we should organize our own experiences into a narrative to help us make sense of ourselves and our surroundings. Finally, transcendence suggests that we seek for experiences that allow us to feel linked to something larger than ourselves.

Smith demystifies and makes more reachable the concept of living a meaningful life by re-evaluating what it means to live a meaningful existence. This book will help you improve yourself by focusing on things that will contribute to your entire fulfillment rather than just your happiness.