The 3 Best Books on Goals

I’m an avid reader. I have been since I read my favorite book “How to Win Friends and Influence people” by Dale Carnegie.

It was the first book that I allowed to change my life. Since then I have been some what obsessed with self-help books. I recently had to change the vernacular of “reading” to “consuming” books; because I listen to more books than I read; thanks to habit stacking! (A concept from Atomic Habits)

I consume an average of 12 books a year, one a month as one would assume. However, this year I decided to consume 30 books.

What a challenge it has been. I finish a book every one to two weeks and I hope to continue this habit throughout my lifetime. It’s been very rewarding and it’s changed me in ways I didn’t expect.

I’ve now consumed over 100 books on improving one’s position in life and I thought it would be helpful to share my top 3 books on Goals. Not everyone is a reader but everyone needs to have Goals!

I’ve made significant changes in my life thanks to these three books and I hope they can help you overcome obstacles and obtain your wildest set goals.

For those who are looking for good books on goals, here is my list in the order I suggest to read them:

The Slight Edge — Jeff Olson

This book is foundational to how to get more wins out of every goal and is a great concept builder for Atomic Habits. The Slight Edge continues to make the largest impact on my life because it makes every goal simpler to execute than my instinctive strategy.

Jeff Olson explains how profound the compounding effect can have on the accomplishment of your goals. Breaking each goal into bite size chunks that can be consumed daily.

For instance, breaking a large goal in to 20 or even 50 smaller goals leading to the same outcome provides up to 49 more opportunities for success.

Using reading as an analogy, if your goal is to read 12 books a year you may set your goal to be 1 book a month, which is logical. This gives you a feeling of success or failure once a month. If you are like most people, you start out with a few months of success followed by catastrophic failure with the only success to show for your effort found in the first Qtr of the year.

Instead, Jeff suggests you break this goal into 10 pages a day and read no more. Ten pages a day is easy to fit in any time box and leads to nearly 31 successes each month. This consistent feeling of success helps build momentum and before you know it you’re halfway to your goal before the Qtr ends. Ten pages a day is 3,650 total pages for the year if you bat 1000; that is well over 12 books.

This is a must read!

Atomic Habits — James Clear

The book Atomic Habits provides ways to take short and long term goals and create long term habits that lead to a successful life. James Clear builds on the concept Jeff Olson talks about: small incremental improvements lead to big results.

However, James takes a much more strategic and long-lasting approach to goal accomplishment with a few other concepts that help with those who are less motivated or just having trouble executing at their best.

James introduces the concept of a habit loop; cue, craving, response and reward. This is the basis behind creating a habit, good or bad, and knowing this can help you strategize on how to create the habits that support your purpose and seize those that don’t.

Identity based goals is another concept introduced by James clear, where he explains that aligning your goals to your identity or even allowing yourself to change your identity to map more intently to your purpose or goals will help create lasting change.

The last two concepts James dives into have had the most profound impact on me: Environment Matters and Habit stacking.

While I didn’t get the idea from this book, environment is everything to me. I’ve worked from home for the majority of my career and to keep me focused I built myself a command center; see below. This environment encourages me to stay working; I actually want to be at my desk…um ..I mean my command center.

Habit Stacking is why I listen to books instead of read them now. To read 30 books this year I had to find ways to read more with out spending any more time, which felt impossible.

Audible has been a life safer to this end. I listen to books while doing any chore around the house; from dishes to laundry to trips at grocery store.

The 7 habits of Highly Effective People — Stephen Covey

Building on these two books is how to integrate habits into your life. Now that you know how to set and accomplish goals it’s time to align them to your life. The 7 habits will make you a better leader, follower and help you accomplish any goal to which you set your mind.

1. Be Proactive (Habit 1): Take responsibility for your life. Proactive individuals have the power to control their responses to circumstances.
2. Begin with the End in Mind (Habit 2):Start with a clear understanding of what you want to achieve in the long run, and use this as a map to guide your decisions.
3. Put First Things First (Habit 3): Prioritize and focus on what matters most.
4. Think Win-Win (Habit 4): Seek mutual benefit in all interactions. Stephen Covey encourages us to strive for solutions that benefit all parties involved, fostering positive relationships.
5. Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood (Habit 5): Practice empathetic listening.
6. Synergize (Habit 6): Synergy is working collaboratively and valuing diversity to arrive at solutions that are more effective than what individuals could achieve alone.
7. Sharpen the Saw (Habit 7): Continuously improve. Renew and maintain yourself in four key areas: physical, social/emotional, mental, and spiritual.

It’s hard to pick which habits are the most important. I will say that Habit 2, Start with the End in Mind, and Habit 7, Sharpen the Saw, are two that I utilize daily and have served me the most in my career.

Which of these habits speak to you most?

Conclusion

As we celebrate the end of the year, take a different approach to your goals and New Years resolutions. If you don’t read any of these books take these 6 concepts with you; it will change your life.

1. Think with the end in Mind
2. Break your goals into bite-sized chunks
3. Align your goals to your identity or begin to change your identity to align to your future self.
4. Synergize with those who can help you achieve your goals and earnestly try to help them do the same.
5. Find areas in your life where you can stack current habits with new ones you want to adapt.
6. Focus on being better than yesterday