I Read 372 Books on Personal Development…Here’s What Stuck

What’s up all you beautiful people? Welcome back to the podcast. So, about twelve years ago, if you know my story, I was in pretty rough shape. I was broke, I was living in a van, things weren’t going how I thought they were gonna go. My fiancee just kicked me to the curb, all that stuff, right? You know, I was like at that rock bottom place. And the thing that first had to change on the path of becoming the person I knew I was capable of was this simple concept that a mentor shared with, which is that you need to treat personal development as your full time job. It is the most important thing that you do. And every waking moment of your life should be spent in pursuit of becoming a slightly ever growing, ever expanding, better version of yourself. The way I like to think about this is this moment right now that you’re listening to this.
If you’re doing it right, this is the worst you will ever be. This moment, if you continue growing, you can see committing to expanding learning. And that is that quest for personal development is truly no form of hyperbole, the thing that led to me transforming my life. Now, when it comes to personal development, there are so many different ways that we can do this. We can get around mentors, we can get around people who are operating at higher levels than us. We can learn and grow from them. We can take courses, we can take classes, we can join, you know, the community college, we can do whatever. Like, there’s so many different ways that we can work on ourselves.
My favorite, my undisputed favorite way is books. Books, I think, are the most information dense resource, given how expensive they are. If you were to do a value two dollar analysis, books are the undisputed winner. They are just jam packed full of so much. And so I’ve read hundreds, hundreds, hundreds of books on personal development, on mindset, on skill acquisition, on learning. And I want to share with you today the ten lessons that I have thought about the most frequently when I sit down to journal every morning. These are the ten that tend to come up in some way, shape or form most frequently. So, number one in the games worth winning in life, you can’t win if you don’t start, and you can’t lose if you don’t quit.
So obviously, not all games work this way, right? There are games that you can lose even if you don’t quit. Those are what we call finite games. But the games worth winning in life, they tend to not be finite games. They tend not to be competitions that have a a strict winner and loser. They tend to be the infinite games. Games like our relationships with our loved ones, games like business, games like personal development. The infinite games. There is no end site, there is no end goal that we’re trying to get to.
It is the goal of the game is to continue playing the game for as long and as well as possible. And in those games, games are relationships, business, personal development. It’s absolutely true that you cannot win until you start. You have to be in the game to have a chance of winning. But as long as you’re in the game, as long as you don’t quit the game, as long as you keep going, you have never lost unless you quit. Lesson number two, our beliefs limit us more than reality. I believe that reality is nothing more than a reflection of the beliefs we hold with the most conviction. And whether those are empowering beliefs or they are limiting beliefs, we will ultimately make them true.
I like this idea that your beliefs are the chisel, your actions are the hammer, and reality is the stone. And when you combine your beliefs with your actions, you can craft practically anything that you want out of this reality. Number three, cheap dopamine is a myth. There are so many ways that we can sate our monkey brain. We can go, we can get in the cupboard and eat all the treats. We can watch Netflix, we can watch porn, we can do videos, video games. We could do all sorts of things that fill our mind with this idea of cheap dopamine. It’s easy to get, but just because it’s cheap doesn’t mean it’s not the most expensive thing in the world.
See, the thing that most people don’t understand is the true price of cheap dopamine can’t be seen in the moment when you are acquiring it. It will only play out over long periods of time. And what you come to realize is that your cheap dopamine, this obsession, this compulsion to go for the easy treats, it’s costing you something. It is costing you the person you could become. That, it turns out, is the most expensive thing of all. Cheap dopamine is the most expensive dopamine of all. Number four, when you begin, matters more than where you begin. A lot of people are born with silver spoons in their mouth, and it’s really easy to look at them and say, hey, you have it made.
You are so lucky. You are starting on the 80 yard line line in this hundred meter dash. Of course you’re going to win. But the truth is, that person cannot win the race unless they actually start running. And truth is, when you start on the 80 meters. Line, like life is pretty good. 80 yard line, like you’re doing pretty good already. There’s not a lot of incentive for that person to get up and start running, and so they usually dump.
So don’t fixate on the person who’s starting off in life further ahead of you. Don’t fixate on the fact that you don’t have all the skills, all the resources yet. The most important thing is when you start get compounding interest on your side. Let time do the heavy lifting. Start now. The person who starts now in ten years will be further along than the person, even if they started at the 80 yard line, who only starts at the 9th inning. So get going right now. Number five, you don’t need more time.
You need more focus. You need more focus. Focus, I believe, is one of your most valuable assets. It’s not the most valuable. Underlying your ability to focus is your ability to expend energy. So I actually believe energy is your most valuable asset. But time, or your focus is what you direct your energy towards. And the results that you achieve in life is the direct result of what you focus on, the quantity and the quality of your focus, not your time.
Time isn’t the constraint here. It’s actually your ability to stay focused and to move the priorities forward. That is actually the thing that we lack, not for time. Number six, the universe doesn’t care how you feel. It only cares what you do. Your emotions are irrelevant to the objective reality of the universe. It doesn’t care if you want something to happen in your life. You can’t just want it badly enough.
You can’t just, you know, try to feel it into existence. You have to act it into existence. You are the catalyst for change, but only if you do something. Number seven, you can’t slay the dragons that you refuse to knowledge. If you’re unhappy with your body, you need to go stare at yourself in the mirror for five minutes every single day. If you are unhappy with your finances, you need to go stare at your bank account five minutes every single day. You must first seek out the dragon before you can even fight it, before you can even slay it, you have to acknowledge it. Number eight, you are the only person standing in your way.
You. It’s it. You are the gatekeeper. It’s very easy. If you’re listening to this right now. You have access to the Internet. You have access to devices that allow you to stream podcasts and videos into your eyeballs and into your ear balls. You have no excuse.
The world I know it’s a hard place, but it’s hard for everybody. And the only person who’s going to stop you from becoming the person of your dreams, the person that you know you’re capable of becoming, that is you. Nobody is coming to your home to say, sit down, don’t better yourself. Don’t read that book, don’t do this. Of course there are people in your life that will try to, but they can’t stop you. Only you can stop you if you let their words you into an action. Number nine, your opinion of yourself is the only opinion that matters. Often this is piggybacking off the previous one.
You are the only person standing in your way. But people, the opinions of others we allow to stop us from taking the actions because we hold their opinion in higher regard than we hold our own. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what they think of you. It doesn’t matter if they think you’re an idiot or a fool for going after your dreams and trying this thing that statistically speaking shouldn’t work out. It doesn’t matter what they think. All that matters is what you think in your mind about yourself in those quiet moments when nobody else is around and you have nothing else to turn to except for just being with yourself. If you don’t like that person, if you don’t like the decisions, the choices that you’re making because you’re living in alignment and trying to please everybody else, well then you my friend, making a catastrophic mistake that you will grow one day to look back and regret. Promise number ten, the people you look up to are only above you because they’re standing atop a larger pile of failures than you.

That’s it. We fail our way to success. We fail our way forward. So the faster we can fail, the quicker we can iterate, the more failures we can stack up underneath of us, the higher we will ultimately be able to reach. And that’s going to do it for me. Beautiful people. All ten of the most valuable personal development lessons that I’ve learned over the years. After reading hundred like off, it’s, it’s ridiculous.

I went on Goodreads and looked at my reading list. If you’re curious what those books were that have had the biggest impact in my life, go to the YouTube channel. Anthony Vicino. We’ve done a number of videos where I lay out. Here’s the twelve most impactful books. Here are the 16 books that will make you the most money that a bunch of those types of videos. So go watch those if you want to dive deeper into which books have actually had the most profound effect on my life. Otherwise, just take these lessons and write them down.

Write them down. Because we don’t remember that which we don’t write down. Write them down and then review them every day and ask yourself, how can I live in alignment with this? How can I implement this idea into my life? And that will do it for me. I’ll catch you guys in the next episode.