Books that will pay off HUGE dividends in your 20s and 30s

hey guys how's it going welcome back to another video before we get started i just wanted to let you guys know that i recently started a newsletter called boop's keyboard do check it out if you're interested in books summaries of books insights from books anime productivity and learning tips as well as coding in this video we're going to talk about the best books to read in your 20s and your 30s which is a very crucial time because many of us are in the beginning stages and the intermediate stages of both our careers and our life we're transitioning from school learning to lifelong learning and books are a really key component of that you also be at a huge advantage if you can understand how life works how to set goals for yourself and how to achieve these goals because at this time and health is on your side so without further ado let's jump into it the first book on the list is so good they can't

ignore you by cal newport it's the best book i've read that aggressively rejects the passion hypothesis with clear evidence and rationale and the passion hypothesis states that you should figure out what you want to do by figuring out what it is that you're passionate about and then finding a job that fits that passion and seriously the sooner it is that you can convince yourself out of this out of believing this passion hypothesis this passion myth the earlier it is that you can actually start working towards an amazing career i've embarrassingly done personality tests that are supposed to tell me what it is i should be working on um i've read books like mastery that tell you to like introspect into your childhood and try to figure out what it is that you're passionate about as a child and i'm just like i don't even know what i was passionate about as a child basically just got me really anxious and i still couldn't figure out what it is i was passionate about and i know that i'm not alone at this because i've heard many people who say they've also struggled with this even if they're in their mid-20s to late 20s to their 30s and i noticed that they usually fall into two categories people who just kind of do random jobs here and there hoping that they'll one day just figure out what it is that they're passionate about or people who jump from like job to job industry to industry career to a career which was me so this book so good they can't ignore you completely turns this paradigm around instead of trying to find a job that matches your passion it completely rejects that by introducing something called the self-determination theory which states that the real ingredient for motivation and ultimately career happiness is not based upon passion it's based upon three other things the first one is independence and autonomy having control of what your responsibilities are the second one is capability feeling like you're capable and good at your job and the third one is connection how much you like your co-workers so instead of choosing something that you want to feel passionate about you should be instead choosing something that is priced and valuable towards society and then just be like laser focused and you should grind it out until you become so good they can't ignore you and then you can start trading that for autonomy it completely shifts the way that you perceive a career and how to choose a career which i think a lot of people would benefit from so with that being all said i highly recommend this book for anybody in their 20s and their 30s where you're still trying to figure things out and you don't really know what it is that you should be doing with your life second book that i think you

should definitely read if you're in your 20s and your 30s is the productivity project by chris bailey basically this guy chris he took an entire year off to experiment and try out all the different productivity tips and strategies and hacks out there um and he tries all of them and sees which one actually works this includes waking up at 5 30 a. m also having like really weird sleep schedule where you're barely sleeping and things like cutting out sugar entirely cutting out caffeine things like that this book is a summary of all his experiences what he learned from it as well as recommendations for people who are looking to become more productive let me share with you guys some of the most useful things that i've implemented from this book the first one is the idea of managing your energy and your attention as opposed to just your time which many people focus on you know you're like time blocking your entire day you're like i'm gonna do this at this time i'm gonna do that at that time but what happens oftentimes like maybe you do like one of those tasks or two of those tasks and then you kind of just fall off track right what i started doing is that i do the things that are most difficult for me the earliest in the morning because that's when my energy levels are the highest and the second productivity strategy i want to share with you guys is the idea of a maintenance day so he recommends doing this thing we're out of your entire week take one day and call it maintenance day you do your groceries your meal prep and you start planning your week and for me that's sundays because it also helps me get over my monday dreads this has also been a really big game changer because by bundling everything together into that day i end up like actually doing it but it also saves me a lot of time instead of just like doing things throughout the week when i remember to do them because i'm chunking everything together and the third really useful thing that i got from this book is a brain dump which is something i also do on my maintenance day as the name suggests you basically dump everything in your brain onto a piece of paper and then when you can see things like physically it becomes a lot easier for you to organize things and do things that matter and things that don't matter and then for the things that matter organize them based upon priorities and then when it is that you're going to be doing certain things which by the way if you want to see my entire like weekly planning system you can check out the video over here really great book and i think a really good compliment to this book as well is a book called atomic habits by james clear i won't go into too much detail about it because i already talked about it in this video over here so you can check that out but the reason why i recommend these books as a package is because the productivity project tells you these things that you should be implementing into your life that could be useful to your life but it doesn't tell you how to implement these things so if you read atomic habits it helps you understand how to implement these things in your life and build them into habits the third book on our list today is a book called never split the difference it is

a book about negotiations from this guy called chris voss who was a formal international hostage negotiator for the fbi okay so you might be thinking at this point tina what why are you recommending a negotiations book hear me out i have a good reason to let me tell you about an experience that happened very recently in my life i have a friend who's a software engineer and he was interviewing for another job as a software engineer he went through the entire grueling process of the seven rounds of interviews and then landed an offer when you're going through this process though it's not just about interviewing and landing a job the negotiation process actually starts before you even finish the final interviews like from the very beginning you already start that process of gauging how much it is that you would be paid as well as the perks and like stocks and things like that so i happen to be reading this book at that time chris does a really good job of explaining his philosophy and distilling it and applying it to real world applications for example like celery negotiation i try my best to follow the philosophy and then use these strategies that he suggested adapted to a specific situation and by using a combination of these strategies i am very proud to say that we managed to increase the base salary by 10 as well as more stock units and more perks in case you're interested and like a sneak peek into the book there are three main strategies that i coach my friend into doing the first one is the strategic usage of this word fair the second strategy is the use of ranges and the third one is gently saying no until you get what you want i just want to say like throughout this process he was like completely freaking out saying no to people feels really scary but like for some reason he listened to me and he actually did those things and that's why we got to where we are now so yeah from this experience i really began to appreciate how important being able to negotiate is on our everyday lives so learning how to do this properly when you're young that is gonna like stack up so much and make a really big difference when you get older highly recommend this book super interesting um if you're also interested in human psychology and very applicable as evidenced by my example all right fourth book on this list is a book called the defining

decade why are 20s matter and how to make the most of them those of you in your 30s don't like rage quit where i guess make rage click off see if there's a certain category that you may be behind in and you know get you that asap because you know as they say the best time to plan a trade was 10 years ago but the second best time to plant a tree is now the major premise of this book is that people are living longer and because of that we end up doing things later for example we do more school so we end up starting our careers later we also marry later so we start having this misconception that your 20s are just like you know your teens again and your life doesn't actually have to start until your 30s but this is not true because your 20s are when you should be establishing the baseline like the ground of what you want your life to be like when in your 30s and your 40s both from a like timing perspective as well as from a biological perspective this book is divided into three categories the first one is finding work the second one is finding love and the third one is called understanding brain and body my biggest takeaway from this book is the concept of identity capital which is defined as a collection of things you've done long enough or well enough that you become part of who you are or your identity and it's the currency you use to get a job and be in relationships the reason that people don't do this is because they feel like if they choose something they're kind of stuck in that path so they're not able to explore other things anymore it's like you know you choose one thing and all the other options just go away but that's just like simply not true like for example i started off in pharmacology like i chose pre-med and that didn't work out but through that degree and the research jobs that i took i built up this identity capital of how to use the scientific method how to be hypothesis-driven how to deal with data then i was able to move on to data science and i think the reason why i was able to do this because i had the identity capital of how to work with data and then from a computer science part i also had the identity capital of doing computer science of coding and now with youtube i'm developing another set of identity capital which is in content creation and in video and things like that all these different things are going to come into use and eventually it will make you more valuable as a person what it is that action spurs opportunity and you shouldn't not start something just because you don't have like a super clear idea of what the end result is going to be you should have these goals and as you work through it that picture in the end is also going to come more into focus in the finding love section of this book she talks about what it is that you actually want in a relationship like you should be spending your 20s figuring that out and you should be not dating down which is something that a lot of people do a really good accompanying book to this by the way is a book called um how to not die alone so it goes into a lot more detail about the what you should be doing to find love part and i highly recommend you check that out if you're interested it's really shifted the way that i perceive relationships and dating like a lot and the third component is understanding the body in the brain where she talks more mostly about like developmentally what's happening and then fertility as well which is very important for women the next book on our list is a book called the millionaire

fastlane um as his name suggests it's about wealth as well as business so if that is something that you're interested in then highly recommend that you read this in your 20s and your 30s i already covered a fundamental concept of this book in my newsletter but just to reiterate a little bit here um there's three different components the first one is the sidewalk which is basically people who are just like yay yolo like i'm gonna just do whatever and like not think about wealth for money or anything like that the second one is the slow lane and this is people who are doing a nine-to-five job you know they're saving up diligently and they're investing into their 401k or like your tfsa if you're canadian and by doing this at the age of 65 you're able to become wealthy to become a millionaire and then start enjoying your life and the third one is what he calls the fast lane and these are people who create a business and like skyrocket their wealth and become a millionaire fast when they're still young and just by the way like fast here he doesn't mean you know like the scammy get rich quick kind of like scheme when he says quick he means like 10 years of figuring out this entire process this book is super dense and really full of useful information insights as well as like practical applications mj says in a book if you want to be wealthy millionaire the issue with like the 9 to 5 stolen approach is the fact that your time is tied to your money so no matter how much you can increase your hourly wage your hourly value you still are constrained and maxed out at 24 hours and like assuming that you have to sleep and stuff you're maxed out like well like 16 hours something like that so how much you make not including investments which we'll talk about later is the equation of the number of hours that you work times the amount of money that you make per hour so unless you're really talented we're really famous and you can like max out that hourly wage part of the equation it's very difficult for you to become very wealthy because you just simply don't have that leverage also for investments your time is still attached to money say that you start with an investment of five thousand dollars and then we can assume like a 10 year on your return on this 5 000 and you diligently put in 500 per month if you did this it would take you 30 years for you to become a millionaire so as you can see both the salary component and the investment component are dependent on time now to become wealthy quickly like in the span of maybe 10 years what is really important is to decouple this concept of time and money the best way to do this is by starting a business then your equation um becomes the amount of things that you sell times the price in this way you have a lot more control leverage of course it's still going to be really difficult like you have to start a good business and stuff but you are removing that time cap from yourself highly recommend this book for people who are interested in business and for people who want to become wealthy through business this made me like see this whole like youtube thing that i do and the surrounding community as more of a business um like a content focused business and it's helped a lot in reshaping the way that i am working on this now like i said earlier this is a really dense book i know i'll be rereading this book and also reviewing it and referencing it multiple times which i use short form for who are kindly sponsoring today's video short form is a platform that publishes super detailed book guides that cover a variety of non-fiction genres especially for books like the millionaire fast lane short film is really useful because it's able to distill down that information and also organize that information so you can quickly reference back to specific concepts that you want to review again like for example when i want to talk about the idea of time and money i reference back to that section over the span of many years i've developed an entire system of reading a book taking notes from a book and like revisiting books and applying the stuff that i learned from the books and after i found out about short form it's been especially helpful in the reviewing process and the application process of the things that i read some of my favorite genres that short film covers are in psychology business and productivity as you can tell my interest based upon this list of books short film also drops new book guides and articles every week and subscribers get to vote on what books to cover next which by the way if you join short form can we please vote for the productivity project to be covered soon for the first 1000 people you can get a five day free trial if you go to this link over here and also linked in description thanks again to short form for sponsoring today's video great that's all i have for you guys today do comment below what you think about the selection of books and also other books that you would recommend i am always looking for more books to read alright i will see you guys in the next video where livestream