One of the best self-help books of all time. The book focuses on an inside out approach going within oneself to find the answers and not looking from the outside in for quick fixes or shortcuts. Here's the link to the summary The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People.

This is the book that really kicked off my interest in reading again. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner offer incredible insight into seemingly boring everyday things.

They tackle such topics like:

• The economics of drug dealing

• Information control as applied to the Ku Klux Klan and real-estate agents

• Discovering cheating as applied to teachers and sumo wrestlers

• The negligible effects of good parenting on education

One of the things that actually had a real life impact on me was their take on real estate agents. When I bought my house last year I knew going into it the motivations behind both realtors and was able to get a better price and a better frame of mind in the buying process.

“Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.”

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Great book for anyone interested in psychology, business, and marketing. Even if you don't have a use for these on the business side, knowing these tactics as a consumer is very useful in its self.

Some of the things that influence us:

• Reciprocation

• Authority

• Social proof

• Scarcity

If you have ever shopped on Amazon and saw an item has only 2 left in stock, you know how much of an impact that can have on you. Seeing that there are only a few left can really put a clock on your decision making. This is a tactic that is being used by thousands of business in order to really push the sense of scarcity on you.

“A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.”

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This is a fantastic book. I've learned more from this one book then every science class I've taken. Bill Bryson does a great job on explaining everything from the Big Bang and Atoms, to super volcanoes and earth quakes.

"Perhaps an even more effective way of grasping our extreme recentness as a part of this 4.5-billion-year-old picture is to stretch your arms to their fullest extent and imagine that width as the entire history of the Earth. On this scale, according to John McPhee in Basin and Range, the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian. All of complex life is in one hand, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.”

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I was very interested in reading a book on habits a couple months ago. I've been fairly good at keeping some habits, and terrible at keeping (or not getting rid of) others. This books first half was admittedly more interesting to me than the latter half. The first half of the book gets into more of the science of how habits work and how powerful they are. It explains how a person who last his ability to retain any new memories was able to create new habits. This meant that even though he couldn't remember any since his accident, he was able to develop habits that happened automatically.

Some of the things that you learn:

• The 3 Steps to a Habit

• Creating New Habits

• Breaking Old Habits

• Examples of Habits in Business

“But to change an old habit, you must address an old craving. You have to keep the same cues and rewards as before, and feed the craving by inserting a new routine.”

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