I’m often asked if I have a mentor.
Well…do I?
Not really, I suppose – at least not in any significant or traditional sense of the word. Sure, I’ve had plenty of wise people over the years who have graciously shared their advice with me from time to time, but I’ve never really had that one person, or two, or three, who I would consider to be Obi-Wan Kenobi, my Socrates or my Morpheus, so to speak – that person I call on the phone at midnight with my most pressing of life’s questions and conundrums.
Unless, that is, you count the thousands upon thousands of *literary* mentors found upon the bookshelves crowded tightly throughout my house, or digitally lurking within my Kindle, Audible player, and electronic devices.
As a matter of fact, I would estimate – especially because I was homeschooled with a relatively “free-learning” style approach – that approximately 80% of what I know about business, health, personal productivity, adventuring, investing, education, parenting, fitness and the like – has been derived from simply reading books. Every day. For most of my life, or at least since I was around four years old.
In many cases, I accomplish near-manic digestion of information, including books, through the use of services, websites, journals, newsletters, and digests that disseminate information into readily accessible bite-size pieces that allow me to cut through the clutter and quickly get to the main summaries, takeaways, and actionable items from all the content. Lately, I’ve even been using ChatGPT to summarize books for me (e.g. with a prompt such as “You are a book summarizer. For the book [insert title and author here], you will create a one-paragraph summary of each chapter followed by a bulleted list of the key points in each chapter. When summarizing, do not elaborate further than the single paragraph and bulleted list for each chapter. If you understand, please respond with yes without elaborating.”).
Regarding “digests” I’m a huge fan of these types of quick-to-digest book reviews produced by guys such as Derek Sivers and James Clear. Another great resource for getting through the world’s best books f-a-s-t is the fantastic app/website called “Optimize”, which focuses specifically on improvement-based genres like health, wealth, spirituality, and philosophy. I’ve also discovered great utility with the service Scribd (for audiobooks and book summaries alike) the plug-in Eightify (for Youtube summaries) and the website Blinkist (for quick 15-minute insights).
But there is ONE shelf in my office and ONE saved library on my Kindle for books I want to come back to over and over again, usually to read in full. These are books with folded-over, tattered pages, heavily underlined sections, and oodles of highlights because I often read them each year.
These are books that have changed my life.
These are books that have shaped who I am.
These are books I will gift to my sons.
These are books you need to read, and not simply read a summary of.
So I now introduce to you…
…my mentors: the top 25 books I think everyone should read before they die.
Continue reading: https://bengreenfieldlife.com/article/bens-favorite-books/
