The Art of Exceptional Living (2003, audiobook) by Jim Rohn, Simple Review

I think I've listened to this audiobook more than four times already. I can finish most of the late Jim Rohn's famous sentences because they are very profound and memorable. He is a good storyteller and each story is filled with life lessons. His emphasis on personal philosophy is very important. To him, it means to use one's mind in all aspects of life. Refining one's mind or philosophy can change everything and it doesn't have to be very big at the beginning. It's about implementing simple, good, and positive disciplines daily. For example, if every day for an hour or two I decided to study the Scripture instead of playing online games, full-time ministry-wise, I have begun to turn my life around. By simply changing my philosophy, I can overcome ignorance, laziness, and unproductivity.

Here are my Top 5 favorite quotes - and they have become my personal philosophies - by Jim Rohn from this audiobook:

1. "Learn to work harder on yourself than you do on your job."
2. "Don't wish it was easier, wish you are better. Don't wish for less problems, wish for more skills. Don't wish for less challenges, wish for more wisdom."
3. "The major value of life is not what you get. The major value of life is what you become."
4. "Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune."
5. "If you don't like how things are, change it! You're not a tree!"

A few things that you should keep in mind when reading books and/or hearing audiobooks on personal development (which also can fall into the category of self-help), especially as a Christ follower: #1 Develop and strengthen your Biblical worldview; #2 Apply the spiritual gift of discernment and critical thinking; #3 Learn and read widely but stand on the foundations of the Word of God deeply; #4 Don't believe someone who says, "I read my Bible ONLY." He or she is either delusional or impractical. Avoid at all costs; #5 Have a balanced perspective of human depravity and human potential; and last but not the least, #6 Don't read too many self-development or self-help books. Read the best of the best and leave most of them behind. In fact, most of them I wouldn't recommend at all because they can expose you to new-age teachings and the like. Ask me if you want to know more.

#ServeToLead #JimRohn #TheArtOfExceptionalLiving #SelfDevelopment #LeadersAreReaders #LetsMakeReadingCoolAgain

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Unleash the Power Within: Personal Coaching to Transform Your Life! (2020 edition, audiobook) by Anthony Robbins, Book Review

My main problem with Joel Osteen is that he says that he is a pastor but he didn't preach the Gospel - and thus, a false teacher. If only he quit being a pastor and become a motivational speaker full-time instead, I think I'm going to like him. Anthony Jay Robbins is a motivational speaker and although he at times called himself a Christian (most probably a cultural Christian or pluralistic one and definitely New Age), he never claims to teach Christian motivational talks. With a little effort, Google his name, and you can find many controversial issues surrounding the man, his personal life, methods, and teachings. But I love Tony Robbins. Why?

About a decade ago, I read his book Awaken the Giant Within (1991), and in the chapter about goals, there are exercises that you need to write your goal for each critical area such as relationships, finance, and contribution. On personal development goals, I wrote about reading one book per month and especially the Bible in one year. These commitments (or "massive actions"), especially on the latter goal are what God uses to continue to inspire me to read my Bible consistently. The goal becomes a habit. Habit becomes a lifestyle. Tony Robbins famously said, "It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped." This audiobook is a good reminder for me and it solidified some of the best lessons that I learned from him. The 6 hours 20+ minutes of listening while walking is what I call The Hour of Power.

Read and listen to Tony Robbins with caution, applied critical thinking, and filtered everything through a Biblical worldview (As children of God, the Holy Spirit is the power within us!). If you can do that - by grace, prayer, and humility - you can get the best from any informed books that you read or audiobook that you listen to. You can read books by atheists like Richard Dawkins and be amazed by biology; you can read books by agnostics like Carl Sagan and wonder like a child at the cosmos, and you can read books by Muslims like Imam Al-Ghazali and be inspired by the practicality of philosophy and intellectual life. Beware of reading Christian books ONLY!

#ServeToLead #LeadersAreReaders #AnthonyRobbins #TheHourOfPower

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Don't Give Up, Don't Give In: Lessons from An Extraordinary Life (2014) by Louis Zamperini & David Rensin, Book Review

Have you watched the movie Unbroken (2014) directed by Angelina Jolie? If not, then you should watch it. Now! If yes, then you will know who is the late Louis "Louie" Zamperini (1917 - 2014). A remarkable man. An athlete in the field and life. A survivor. I love to read stories from people who endure hardship and yet do not come out as bitter but inspirational. Read autobiographies of those like Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning (1946), Elie Wiesel's Night (1956), Richard Wurmbrand's Tortured for Christ (1967), Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl (1947), Zamperini's Devil at My Heels (2003) and see if you still can complain about the little things in life. They show us how we can find hope amid suffering, love amid hatred, and radical forgiveness amid evil acts. They are not perfect, and that's good because we can relate. When a graduate from the school of hard knocks like Zamperini gives advice, I think and take notes.

So many good lessons I've learned from this book. It's not that these lessons are new and revolutionary (self-help books, for example, are saying the same things only with different packages) but because Zamperini's life and integrity back up most of his words, I find that they are refreshing... and real. Everyone can say something profound about forgiveness but when Zamperini - who was captured, tortured, and abused both physically and psychologically by the Japanese soldiers during World War II for more than 2 years - say it, the lesson goes from my head to heart. After his conversion under Billy Graham's preaching, Zamperini writes: "My faith grew. A year later I returned to Japan. I asked to meet my prison guards - now incarcerated as war criminals - determined to forgive them all in person. The hardest thing in life is to forgive. But hate is self-destructive. If you hate somebody you're not hurting the person you hate, you're hurting yourself. Forgiveness is healing." His wife, Cynthia Applewhite, agreed. She said, "Louie truly became a different person, able to forget the bitterness and sincerely forgive."

This and many more. Other of my favorite lessons is commitment and perseverance. Very uplifting! It's a short book, only 238 pages. I bought it cheap only RM19.90 from Popular Bookstore.

#ServeToLead #LeadersAreReaders #LouisZamperini #Unbroken #DontGiveUpDontGiveIn #LetsMakeReadingCoolAgain

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The Royal Path of Reading #LeadersAreReaders March 2022

In the late 1800s, a six hundred pages book entitled, The Royal Path of Life, written by T. L. Haines and L. W. Yaggy, M.S became popular both in the refined East and in the pioneer West (Thank you Pustaka Library for making this book available). It is filled with great maxims, observations, and homespun wisdom. Here are some parts from the chapter entitled Reading:

"There are four classes of readers. The first is like the hourglass; and its reading being on the sand, it runs in and runs out and leaves no vestige behind. A second is like a sponge, which imbibes everything, and returns it in the same state, only a little dirtier. A third is like a jelly bag, allowing all that is pure to pass away, and retaining only the refuse and dregs. The fourth is like the slaves in the diamond mines of Golconda, who, casting aside all that is worthless, obtain only pure gems.

"One's reading is, usually, a fair index of his character... 'A man is known,' it is said, 'by the company he keeps.' It is equally true that a man's character may be, to a great extent, be ascertained by knowing what books he reads.

"Master your reading, and let it never master you. Then it will serve you with ever-increasing fidelity. Only read books aright, and they will charge your mind with the true electric fire. Take them up as among your best friends; and every volume you peruse will join the great company of joyous servitors who will wait around your immortal intellect. Then, too, your daily character will bear the signatures of the great minds you commune with in secret. And, as the years pass on, you will walk in the light of an ever-enlarging multitude of well-chosen, silent, but never-erring guides.

"To read with profit, the books must be of a kind calculated to inform the mind, correct the head, and better the heart. These books should be read with attention, understood, remembered, and their precepts put into practice. It depends less on number than quality. One good book, well understood and remembered, is of more use than to have a superficial knowledge of fifty, equally sound. Books of the right character produce reflection and induce investigation. They are a mirror of the mind, for the mind to look in. Of all the books ever written, no one contains so instructive, so sublime, and so great a variety as the Bible. Resolve to read three chapters each day, for one year, and you will find realities there, more wonderful than any pictures of fiction that have been drawn by the penciling of the most practiced novel writer in the dazzling galaxy of ancient or modern literature."

Here are my sort-of book reviews for this month:

1) The Spirit-Filled Life: Restoring A Biblical Understanding and Experience of the Holy Spirit (1895, 2019) by John MacNeil, CLICK HERE

2) Leadership Language: Using Authentic Communication To Drive Results (2018) by Chris Westfall, CLICK HERE

3) Jesus the Messiah: A Survey of the Life of Christ (1996) by Robert H. Stein, CLICK HERE

#ServeToLead #LeadersAreReaders #TheRoyalPathOfLife #LetsMakeReadingCoolAgain

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How to Stay Motivated: Developing the Qualities of Success (2008) by Zig Ziglar, Audiobook Review

How to Stay Motivated: Developing the Qualities of Success (2008) by Zig Ziglar, Audiobook

 
Hilary Hinton "Zig" Ziglar (1926-2012), hands down, is one of my favorite personal development and motivational speakers of all time. There were several periods in my life where I did nothing (not literally) but listened to motivational talks for hours, day after day while I'm riding, cycling, walking, hiking, and cooking. I listened to Anthony Robbins, Brian Tracy, Les Brown, Jim Rohn, and other old-school speakers. I always get valuable lessons and inspirational boosts from them but some of their teachings are questionable and straight out New Age. This requires discernment. But two speakers that I can listen to over and over again with confidence are John C. Maxwell and Zig Ziglar. Zig doesn't hide the fact that he is a committed Christian. He, from time to time, inserted Biblical principles in his talks (He is not a Christian speaker but a speaker who is a Christ-follower). At first, I cannot bear his Southern accent but after I'm getting used to his deep and raspy voice, his sense of humor, his storyteller skill, his vast knowledge, and wisdom, I started to like him and his teachings. I can complete his sentences because they are memorable and applicable.

This 7 hours 48 minutes audiobook of How to Stay Motivated (Volume 1) is a collection of Zig Ziglar's recorded live studio audience. I love it! You can hear his passion, audience interactions and imagine as if you're there in the seminars. To be honest, some of the lessons are repetitive but like Ziglar himself said: "Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment." The audiobook includes how to achieve goals, enhance relationships, improve self-image, have a winning mindset, the power of leadership, purpose, attitude, and vision, the joy of service (one of his famous quotes say it all: “You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want"), and more. When asked why we need to stay motivated, his classic response was: “People often say motivation doesn’t last. Neither does bathing - that’s why we recommend it daily.”

I don't listen and read self-help books that much anymore. If I do, I usually go for the classics. The modern-day self-help books can be very shallow, cringe (like TikTok 'preachers'), hype, similar contents, and sometimes give bad and harmful advice. There are some good ones though. Again, this requires discernment. Too much self-help can be self-harm. As you can guess, I recommend Zig Ziglar's books especially See You At The Top, Over The Top, Better Than Good and God's Way Is Still the Best Way :) #ServeToLead #LeadersAreReaders #ZigZiglar #LetsMakeReadingCoolAgain

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Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations (2016) by Dan Ariely, Book Review

Dan Ariely is one of my favorite authors and speakers on behavioral economics, namely, someone who studies the combination of economics and psychology to understand how people decide and why they behave the way they do. I’m an observer. I love to predict people’s behavior and so, this is a fascinating subject to me. I’ve read Predictably Irrational and listened to The Upside of Irrationality and (Dis)Honesty audiobooks - I recommend it all. This short book (just 103 pages) is part of the TED Books series which is a compliment and extension of Ariely’s TED Talks on this subject.

“Human motivation is not simple,” writes Ariely, “but as we understand it more, we’ll better be able to handle ourselves, our work, our relationships, our employers, and our employees. Knowing what drives us and others is an essential step toward enhancing the inherent joy - and minimizing confusion - in our lives.” Every day we try to motivate ourselves. How to create meaning in my current work now? Why I should or shouldn’t quit? What is my end goal? If you’re in the people business or any kind of relationship, surely you spend lots of time trying to motivate others too. How to makes this partnership works? Why does this or that person enjoy life more than others? What are the determining factors of our organization's productivity? These questions and more - if you care enough - are part of our everyday life. As the author puts it: “We are all part-time motivators.” But the problem is that motivations for each person are complex, variant, and subjective. Some are driven by money or achievement or happiness or purpose or a sense of progress or as often the case, a mix of all of these and more. Plus, although Ariely shares valuable insights from the psychological experiments (Bionicles, Origami, and Intel experiments are particularly interesting) that he outlines in the book, we need to keep in mind that real life is not like a lab that we can easily predict but it is both an ugly and beautiful, messy and orderly world. Ariely can be too general and simplistic in his assessments. Keep this in mind as you explore the subject.

Having said that, there are universal and essential motivations that drive human behaviors. For example, a sense of meaning, connection, identity, and individuality. Something simple like giving a compliment or acknowledgment for a job well done can be a strong drive of motivation for most people (on the other hand, it takes a little thing like negative-aggressive feedback can kill even the tiniest motivation!). Some of our conventional wisdom about motivation are also challenged in this book. For example, the idea that giving a large amount of money or bonuses as an incentive, in the long-term, “can backfire and make people less driven.” To know more, read the book or/and watch his TED Talks on YouTube. I also recommend listening to his podcast interviews on Spotify.

#ServeToLead #LeadersAreReaders #GrowingLeaders #MotivationMatters #DanAriely #Psychology #TEDBooks #LetsMakeReadingCoolAgain

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