All language subtitles for I Read 10 Books That Changed My Life Heres What Will Change Yours

I need to tell you something
about books that no one

really says out loud.

Most books don't
change your life.

Most books give you a little
dopamine hit of feeling smart

for a week, and then you forget
ninety percent of what you

read and go back to operating
exactly the same way you did

before you opened page one.

You've experienced this.

You read a book
everyone raved about.

You nodded the
whole way through.

You told someone it was really
good, and then three months

later, you can't remember
a single idea from it that

actually changed how you live.

That's not your fault.

That's just most books.

They inform you without
transforming you.

They add to your knowledge
without changing your

operating system.

The ten books I'm about to
share with you are different.

Not because they're the most
popular or the most impressive

on a shelf, but because each
one broke something in my brain.

Each one gave me a single idea,
one idea that fundamentally

changed how I make decisions,
how I see other people, how

I understand myself, or how
I move through the world.

And those ideas didn't
stay on the page.

They followed me into my
actual life and rearranged it.

I'm not going to
summarize these books.

Summaries are not that helpful.

I'm going to give you the
one idea from each book

that hit me the hardest,
explain why it matters, and

show you what changes when
you actually absorb it.

Ten books, ten ideas, each
one building on the last.

By the end of this video,
you will have a framework

for thinking, deciding, and
living that took me years and

thousands of pages to assemble.

And I'll tell you now, book
number nine is the one that

ties all the others together.

It's the one that made
every other book on

the list make sense.

It's the oldest book on
the list by about three

thousand years, I'd say.

Stay for it.

Let's go.

The first book on my list is
How to Decide by Annie Duke.

Here's the lesson.

You are confusing the quality
of your decisions with the

quality of your outcomes, and
it's destroying your judgment.

This is the book I wish I'd
read before I made every

major decision in my twenties.

Not because it tells
you what to decide.

Because it exposes the
fundamental error in how you

evaluate your own decisions, an
error you're making every single

day and don't even know it.

Here's the error.

You judge your decisions
by what happened after.

If the outcome was good, you
assume the decision was good.

If the outcome was bad, you
assume the decision was bad.

This feels so obviously
correct that you've never

questioned it But Annie
Duke, a former professional

poker player who went on
to study decision science

dismantles this completely.

She calls it resulting.

Judging a decision by its result
rather than by the quality of

the process that led to it,
and resulting is everywhere.

You took a job and it worked
out, you think, "Great

decision." Your friend took
the same job and it didn't

work out, bad decision.

But the decision was identical.

The information
available was identical.

The reasoning was identical.

The only difference was
what happened next, which in

most real-world situations
involves a massive amount of

luck, timing, and randomness
that had nothing to do with

the quality of the choice.

Here's why this matters so much.

If you judge decisions only by
outcomes, you learn the wrong

lessons from your own life.

You abandon good strategies
because they had bad results.

You double down on
bad strategies because

they happen to work.

You become superstitious
instead of strategic.

You let randomness
rewrite your playbook.

The shift is this.

Start evaluating decisions
at the moment you made them

with the information you had
at the time, not with the

information you have now.

Ask yourself, "Given what I
knew then, was that a reasonable

choice?" If yes, a bad outcome
doesn't make it a bad decision.

I'll give you an example.

Let's say you analyze something
perfectly as an investment.

You got really
strategic about it.

You looked at every part of it.

You finally put some money
in, and it didn't pay off.

You would say it was a bad
decision to invest or that

your process was flawed.

But let's say you just threw
in some money into something

because you felt like it and you
felt some moment that day and

it turned into a great decision.

You'll say, "Hey,
I'm a lucky person.

I'm just gonna do that again."
This distinction, separating

decision quality from outcome
quality will make you a sharper

thinker than ninety-nine
percent of people you know

because almost everyone is
letting hindsight rewrite their

judgment, and hindsight is
a liar dressed as a teacher.

Book number two is Finding
Your Element by Ken Robinson.

Here's the lesson: You were
not designed for one purpose.

You were designed for an
intersection, and you've

probably been looking
in the wrong place.

Everyone wants to
find their passion.

Ken Robinson's work helped
me realize very early in

my life why that search
feels so impossible.

Because you're looking
for one thing, a single

calling, one career, one
label, one answer to what

were you put on Earth to do?

And that framing, that framing
of a single discoverable

purpose is why you feel lost.

Because for most people,
the purpose isn't a single

thing It's an intersection.

Robin calls it your element,
the place where natural

aptitude meets personal passion.

Not aptitude alone.

Plenty of people are
good at things they hate.

Not passion alone.

Plenty of people love things
they'll never be good at.

The element is where
the two overlap.

And here's what Robinson
understood that most

career advice ignores.

The element is almost never
found through introspection.

It's found through exposure.

You can't think your
way to your purpose.

You have to collide with it.

You have to try things, fail at
things, stumble into rooms you

didn't plan to enter, and pay
attention to the moments when

time disappears, when the work
stops feeling like work and

starts feeling like breathing.

And those moments will
never happen in the place

you expected them to.

The reason this book changed
my life is that it gave me

permission to stop searching
for one thing and start paying

attention to what was already
happening at the edges.

The skills I was developing
over here, the curiosity I

couldn't explain over there,
the conversations that

energized me that had nothing
to do with my job title.

Robinson showed me that
the element isn't found

by narrowing down.

It's found by paying
attention to where your

different interests, skills,
and fascinations collide.

Mine happened to be monk
teachings with media and

with management, and when
I worked in business.

The intersection is the
purpose, and you've probably

been standing in it for
years without recognizing

it because it doesn't match
the single label format the

world told you to look for.

Book number three is
The Organized Mind

by Daniel Levitin.

Here's the lesson.

Your brain was never designed
to hold the life you're

asking it to hold, and every
ounce of mental clutter is

costing you intelligence.

This is the book that made me
understand why I felt stupid

on my most productive days
and sharp on my laziest ones.

And the reason was
embarrassingly simple.

I was using my brain wrong.

Not metaphorically,
neurologically.

Daniel Levitin is
a neuroscientist at

McGill University, and
his core argument is

devastating in its clarity.

Your brain's processing capacity
is finite and measurable.

Every decision you make, what
to eat, what to wear, whether to

answer that text, where you put
your keys, uses the same neural

resources as your most important
creative and analytical work.

Your brain does not have
separate budgets for

trivial decisions and
important decisions.

It has one budget, and you are
blowing most of it before noon

on things that don't matter.

The research he
cites is staggering.

The average person makes
approximately thirty-five

thousand decisions per day.

Thirty-five thousand!

Most of them are microdecisions
you don't even notice,

but your prefrontal cortex
notices every single one.

And each one drains the same
tank that you need for the

work that actually matters.

Here's the idea that rewired me.

Every piece of information
you're holding in your head

instead of writing down, every
decision you're making in

real time instead of making
in advance, every open loop

you're tracking mentally instead
of externally, all of it is

taxing your working memory and
reducing your available IQ,

literally not figuratively.

You're making yourself
measurably dumber by trying to

keep everything in your head.

The fix is not
productivity hacks.

The fix is externalization.

Get everything out of your head
and into a system, any system.

Write down the decisions,
automate the routines,

put the keys in the
same place every day.

Not because you're type A,
because every micro decision

you eliminate frees up neural
bandwidth for the thinking

that actually matters.

The most organized people in
the world aren't organized

because they love order.

They're organized because they
understand the neurological

cost of disorder, and
they refuse to pay it.

Book number four is The
Courage to Be Disliked.

Here's the lesson.

You're not living your life.

You're living your fear of
other people's judgment, and

it has cost you everything
authentic about you.

This is the book that makes
you angry first and feel free

second because its central
argument attacks the one

thing most of us have built
our entire identity around,

and we don't even realize it.

The book is structured as
a conversation between a

philosopher and a young man.

The philosopher draws on the
work of Alfred Adler, the

third giant of psychology
alongside Freud and Jung,

whose ideas have been largely
overlooked in the West but

are foundational in Japan.

And Adler's central claim
is the one thing that will

make you want to throw this
book across the room before

you realize it's true.

All problems are
interpersonal relationship

problems, every single one.

Not most, all.

Your anxiety about your career,
that's anxiety about how other

people will judge your career.

Your dissatisfaction with your
body, that's dissatisfaction

filtered through how you believe
others perceive your body.

Your reluctance to pursue the
thing you actually want, that's

calculation, unconscious,
instant, and devastating about

what pursuing it would cost
you in other people's eyes.

Adler called this separation
of tasks, and it's the single

most liberating framework
I've ever encountered.

The idea is this.

In any situation, there
are your tasks and there

are other people's tasks.

Your task is to live according
to your values, to do your best

work, to be honest, to act with
integrity Other people's task is

to have their opinion about it.

Their judgment is
their task, not yours.

And the moment you start doing
your tasks while also trying

to manage their tasks, their
perceptions, their expectations,

their approval, you lose the
ability to do either one well.

Here's what makes
this so difficult.

Dr. Naomi Eisenberger's fMRI
research at UCLA, the same

research that showed social
rejection activates the

brain's physical pain matrix,
explains why we're so enslaved

to the opinions of others.

Disapproval doesn't
feel like an option.

It feels like a threat.

Your nervous system
processes the possibility

of being disliked using
the same neural hardware it

uses for physical danger.

So when I tell you to stop
caring what people think, your

brain hears, "Stop protecting
yourself from harm." No

wonder it sounds impossible.

But here's what the book showed
me that changed everything.

The freedom you're looking
for, the freedom to pursue

what matters to you, to be
who you actually are, to stop

performing and start living,
that freedom has a price, and

the price is being disliked, not
by everyone, but by some people.

The people who preferred the
performing version of you,

the people whose expectations
you were carrying, the

people whose approval was
running your life without

your conscious permission.

You cannot be free and
universally approved

of at the same time.

Those two things are
mutually exclusive.

Every authentic life in
human history has been

built on the willingness
to disappoint someone.

And the person you're most
afraid of disappointing is

almost certainly the person
whose approval has been costing

you the most, controlling you
the most The courage to be

disliked is not arrogance,
it's not selfishness, it's the

prerequisite for an honest life.

An honest life, Adler would
argue, and I now believe, is

the only life that doesn't
eventually collapse under the

weight of its own performance.

Mother's Day is a moment
to pause and really think

about the woman who shaped
so much of who we are.

The one who dreamed before we
knew how to dream for ourselves.

The one who kept going
even when things were hard.

The one who showed up again
and again, often without

needing recognition.

This Mother's Day, celebrate
her with something that

reflects not just what
she's done, but who she is.

With Pandora jewelry, you
can choose a piece that

holds meaning, something
that represents your

relationship, your memories,
your journey together.

And what I love is how
you can make it personal.

You can engrave something in
your own handwriting, a date,

a name, a phrase that only
the two of you understand.

Because sometimes the
smallest details carry

the deepest meaning.

Because the best Mother's Day
gift doesn't just say, "I love

you." It says, "I see you."
Find the perfect Mother's Day

gift at your local Pandora
store or online at pandora.net.

Book number five, Thinking, Fast
and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

The lesson, you have two brains
and they're lying to each other,

and the one you trust most is
the one that's wrong most often.

This book showed me that the
machine I was using to navigate

the world, my own brain, is far
less reliable than I believed.

Kahneman, who won the Nobel
Prize in Economics despite

being a psychologist, which
would tell you something

about the importance of his
work, spent decades with

his research partner Amos
Tversky, mapping the systematic

errors in human judgment.

Not random errors, systematic
ones, predictable ones.

Errors that repeat across
every culture, every education

level, every IQ bracket.

His framework is
deceptively simple.

You have two cognitive systems.

System one is fast, automatic,
intuitive, and effortless.

It's the system that reads
facial expressions, finishes

sentences, and makes snap
judgments in milliseconds.

System two is slow, deliberate,
analytical, and effortful.

It's the system that does
math, evaluates evidence,

and makes complex decisions.

Here's the problem.

System one runs the show
approximately 95% of the

time, and system one, for
all its speed and efficiency,

is riddled with biases.

It uses mental shortcuts,
heuristics that are often

useful but frequently
catastrophically wrong.

It anchors to
irrelevant numbers.

It confuses how easily it
can recall something with

how likely that thing is.

It substitutes easy questions
for hard ones without

telling you it made the swap.

But the real
devastation is this.

System one doesn't
just make errors.

It makes errors and then
delivers the answer to system

two with absolute confidence You
don't feel the bias operating,

you feel the certainty.

The intuition arrives,
and it feels right.

It feels like truth.

And System 2, which is supposed
to be the fact checker, is lazy.

It mostly rubber-stamps
whatever System 1 delivers

because engaging System 2
is metabolically expensive.

Your brain would rather
be wrong effortlessly

than right effortfully.

The single idea that changed my
life, the feeling of certainty

is not evidence of accuracy.

The strength of your intuition
about something, how right it

feels, how obvious it seems,
how confident you are, has

almost no correlation with
whether you're actually correct.

Kahneman proved this
across hundreds of studies.

Confidence is not
a signal of truth.

It is a signal of
cognitive fluency.

It means the thought
was easy to produce.

That's it.

After this book, I started
treating my strongest intuitions

with the most suspicion, not
the least, because the moments

when I feel most certain are
precisely the moments when

System 1 is most likely to
have hijacked the process.

And the question I now ask
myself before every important

decision, "Am I sure about
this because I've thought it

through, or am I sure about
this because it feels easy?"

has saved me from more
bad calls than any

other mental tool I own.

Book number six is called Flow
by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Here's the lesson: Happiness is
not a destination or an emotion.

It's a state of absorption
that you can engineer.

This is the book that solved
the happiness question for me,

not by answering it, by making
me realize I'd been asking

the wrong question entirely.

Most people spend their twenties
chasing happiness as if it were

a place they could arrive at.

If they got the right job,
the right relationship, the

right body, the right bank
balance, they'd arrived.

They'd feel it.

The pursuit would be over.

Flow takes it differently.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a
psychologist whose name I

practiced pronouncing for
longer than I'd like to admit,

studied happiness for decades,
not by asking people if they

were happy, by interrupting
people throughout their day and

asking what they were doing and
how they felt in that moment.

Thousands of people,
hundreds of thousands of

data points across cultures,
demographics, and income levels.

What he found destroyed
the conventional model.

The moments when people
reported the highest levels

of fulfillment, joy, and
aliveness were not moments of

relaxation, leisure, or reward.

They were moments of deep
absorption in a challenging

task, moments where their
skill level was perfectly

matched to the difficulty
of what they were doing.

Not too easy, not too
hard, but right at the

edge of their ability.

Let me explain this.

If you're doing something
where your skills are above the

challenge, you'll feel bored.

If you do something where your
challenge is above your skills,

you'll feel lost and confused.

But if you have your challenge
and your skills match,

you will experience flow.

So in any given situation,
you either have to

increase your skills or
increase your challenge.

Mihaly called this flow state.

The people who experienced the
most flow, and therefore the

most moment-to-moment happiness,
were not the wealthiest,

not the most successful,
or the most celebrated.

They were the ones who had
structured their lives around

activities that demanded their
full attention and pushed

the edge of their capability.

This means happiness is
not something you achieve

after the work is done.

It's something you experience
during the work if the

work is the right challenge
and the right skill.

Book number seven is The
Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

Here's the lesson.

You don't fail because
you built the wrong thing.

You fail because you built
the perfect version of

something nobody asked for.

This is the book that cured
me of the most dangerous

mindset you can develop in
your twenties, perfectionism

disguised as preparation.

Here's what I used to do.

I'd have an idea for a project,
a business, a piece of content,

a life change, whatever.

And for weeks, sometimes months,
I'd be perfecting, refining,

trying to figure it out, making
sure it was exactly right

before I showed it to anyone.

And then when I finally revealed
this polished, meticulously

crafted thing to the world, the
world would shrug, not because

the execution was bad, but
because the premise was wrong.

I'd spent months building
a beautiful answer to a

question nobody was asking.

Eric Ries calls this
the fundamental startup

fallacy, and it applies
to far more than startups.

It applies to careers, creative
work, to relationships, to

every domain where you're
building something you hope

other people will value.

The fallacy is this.

You assume you know
what people want.

You build the complete
version in isolation, and you

treat the launch as a single
high-stakes pass or fail moment.

That model fails at a
staggering rate, not because

of bad execution, but because
of untested assumptions.

Ries's solution is the minimum
viable product, the MVP.

And the MVP is not, as
most people think, a worse

version of your idea.

It's the smallest possible
version that lets you test

whether your core assumption is
correct before you invest months

or years building on top of it.

It's not about lowering
your standards.

It's about learning before
you build rather than

building and hoping you learn.

Here's the idea that rewired me.

The fastest path to something
great is not perfecting.

It's exposing your imperfect
thing to reality as early

as possible, listening to
what reality says back and

iterating Ship it ugly.

Ship it incomplete.

Ship it scared.

Because a mediocre thing that
has been tested against the real

world will evolve into something
greater faster than a perfect

thing that has only been tested
against your own assumptions.

This applies to everything,
businesses for sure,

but not just products.

That conversation you've
been rehearsing in your

head for weeks, have
the messy version now.

That career change you've
been planning in a spreadsheet

for six months, run a
small experiment this week.

That creative project you keep
perfecting in private, publish

the rough draft, the video, the
podcast, whatever it may be.

Let reality be your editor.

It's better at the
job than you are.

Book number eight is
The Righteous Mind

by Jonathan Haidt.

You can tell I've read
this one a few times.

I've lost the cover.

Here's the lesson: you don't
use reason to form your beliefs.

You use your beliefs to
select your reasons, and

everyone you disagree with
is doing the same thing.

This is the book that changed
how I debate and discuss

things, how I listen, and how
I think about every person

I've ever dismissed as wrong.

Jonathan Haidt is a social
psychologist at NYU, and his

central argument is one of
the most humbling findings

in modern psychology.

Moral reasoning is not
what you think it is.

You think you arrive at
your moral and political

beliefs through careful
thought, evidence evaluation,

and logical analysis.

You don't.

You arrive at them through
intuition, a fast, automatic

emotional response, and then
you construct rational-sounding

arguments after the fact to
justify what you already feel.

Haidt's metaphor is devastating.

Reason is not the driver,
it's the press secretary.

The driver is intuition.

The press secretary's
job is not to seek truth.

It's to defend the position
the driver already took,

and the press secretary
is brilliant at its job.

It can find evidence
for anything.

It can construct a compelling
case for any position, not

because the position is
correct, because that's

what press secretaries do.

This means that when you're
in an argument with someone

about values, about any charged
topic, you're not watching

two rational minds clash.

You're watching two press
secretaries perform.

Neither one is seeking truth.

Both are defending the intuition
that was already there before

the first word was spoken.

But here's the part that should
change how you engage with

everyone you disagree with.

Haidt identifies six moral
foundations: care, fairness,

liberty, loyalty, authority,
and sanctity that function like

taste buds for moral judgment.

Different people in different
cultures weigh these

foundations differently.

Liberals tend to weight
care and fairness heavily

and discount loyalty,
authority, and sanctity.

Conservatives tend to
weight all six more equally.

Neither configuration is wrong.

They're different moral
palettes, and the person you

think is insane, the person
whose views make no sense to

you, whose positions seem cruel
or naive or backwards, is not

operating without morality.

They're operating on a
different combination of the

same moral ingredients you use.

They're tasting the same
meal with a different tongue.

After this book, I stopped
trying to win arguments

because winning an
argument means convincing

someone's press secretary,
which changes nothing.

Instead, I started trying
to understand which moral

foundations the other person
was weighing most heavily.

What are they
actually protecting?

What value are they
afraid of losing?

What do they care about
that I'm not seeing?

The moment you understand
someone's moral foundation,

even if you disagree with their
conclusion, something shifts.

They stop seeming
like an idiot to you.

They become a person
navigating the same complex

world with a different
moral instrument panel.

And that shift from dismissal to
understanding is not weakness.

It's the beginning
of actual wisdom.

Book number nine is
the Bhagavad Gita.

Here's the lesson: You have
the right to the work, but

never to the fruit of the work.

And this single idea
makes every other book

on this list make sense.

I told you at the beginning
to stay for this one.

It's a conversation between
a warrior named Arjun and

his charioteer, Krishna,
who also happens to be God.

Arjun is standing on a
battlefield about to enter a

war, and he's paralyzed, not
by fear, but by overthinking.

He's calculating outcomes,
weighing consequences,

trapped in the infinite
loop of what if I'm wrong.

Sound familiar?

Krishna's instruction to
Arjun, the central teaching

of the entire text, is
contained in one verse,

chapter two, verse forty-seven.

And it is, without exaggeration,
the single most powerful

operating instruction I
have ever encountered.

"You have the right to
your work, but never to

the fruit of the work.

Let not the fruit of action
be your motive, nor let your

attachment be to inaction."
Now, think about that again

slowly, and let me explain it.

You have the right to the work.

You control the work.

You control the process.

You don't control the result.

The work is where all your
focus should be because

the result is something you
don't have full control over.

Here's what this looks
like in practice.

It doesn't mean you
don't care about results.

It doesn't mean you
don't have goals.

It means you do the work
with everything you have,

full effort, full presence,
full integrity, and then

you open your hands Whatever
comes back, comes back.

If the result is what
you hoped for, good.

If it isn't, also good
because your self-worth

was never attached to it.

Your identity was
never riding on it.

You did the work.

That's the only thing
that was ever yours.

Most of us can't do this.

Most of us need the result
to validate the effort.

I worked so hard, so
I deserve the outcome.

But when we work that way,
we often get depleted if

we don't get the outcome.

The Gita doesn't
say stop wanting.

It says stop needing the result
to be the way you want it to be.

Work toward it, but
don't need it to be the

way you want it to be.

Because the moment you need
it to be a certain way,

you've handed your peace to
a variable you don't control.

Book number ten is
Breath by James Nestor.

Here's the lesson.

The most powerful tool you
have for changing your mental

state is not in your mind.

It's the thing you've
been doing wrong forty

thousand times a day.

I'm ending with this book
because after nine books

about the mind, how it
thinks, how it decides, how

it deceives, how it suffers,
this book lands you back in

the body, and that's exactly
where you need to end up.

James Nestor is a journalist
who spent years investigating

something so basic, so
overlooked, so absurdly

fundamental that the fact we
ignore it should embarrass us.

Breathing.

The thing you do approximately
twenty thousand times a

day, the thing you've never
been taught to do correctly.

The thing that is, according to
the research Nestor compiles,

the single most direct lever you
have for altering your nervous

system, your cognitive function,
your stress response, your

sleep, and your emotional state.

Here's the finding from
the book that I think

about every single day.

Nestor participated in a study
at Stanford where participants

had their noses completely
blocked for ten days, forcing

them to breathe exclusively
through their mouths.

Within days, not weeks, their
blood pressure increased,

their heart rate variably
tanked, their stress hormones

spiked, their sleep quality
collapsed, their cognitive

performance measurably declined.

They experienced anxiety,
brain fog, and exhaustion from

changing nothing in their lives
except the pathway through

which air entered their body.

Then they switched back to
nasal breathing, and every

single metric reversed.

This should stop
you in your tracks.

Nasal breathing versus
mouth breathing.

That was the variable,
and it shifted everything.

The science is extensive.

Nasal breathing filters and
humidifies air, increases

nitric oxide production, which
dilates blood vessels and

improves oxygen absorption,
activates the parasympathetic

nervous system, and engages
the diaphragm in a way that

mouth breathing does not.

The body is the foundation,
and the single fastest way

to change the state of your
body is the thing you're doing

right now as you watch this
without thinking about it.

The breath.

Slow it down.

Breathe through your nose.

Extend the exhale.

Five seconds in,
seven seconds out.

The way you breathe while you
work, while you drive, while

you speak, while you work
out will change your life.

I'm so glad you
watched this video.

I hope that you'll take
a moment to dive into one

of these books this month.

Let me know in the
comments which one

you're excited to read.

I can't wait to
see what you learn.

Thank you for being here.

Remember, I'm forever
in your corner, and I'm

always rooting for you.

If you loved this episode,
you'll enjoy my interview

with Dr. Daniel Amen on
how to change your life

by changing your brain.

They don't do things
until someone's mad at

them to get it done.

They need stress in order to get
stuff done, and that just makes

everybody around them stressed