Reading has become a huge part of my life. I have always enjoyed learning and reading, and I have a strong inclination for nonfiction books.
My preferred topics include: Personal Development books, I like this category because it encompasses a lot of sub-categories. For example, I put books on stoicism like Letters From a Stoic by Lucius Seneca, and Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday under this category, but I also include productivity books. Productivity books have helped me learn how to manage my time better, how to beat procrastination, and how to create systems that help me get more work done in the same amount of time. Some examples include Essentialism by Greg Mckeown and Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky.
I remember I started reading nutrition books when I was considering pursuing clinical nutrition as a Master’s Degree. It was after I read a quote from Jay Shetty that went something like this
- “Your line of work should be in a field that you would happily read a 500-page book about.”
- “If you could only read books about 1 topic, what topic would that be?”
Of course, this doesn’t fully apply in the literal sense. As much as I love nutrition, I would like to read books on other topics of interest every now and then.
here are my 5 favourite books.
NUTRITION: How Not to Die By Dr. Michael Greger.
This book is a big one, but I think that was the point.
Dr. Michael Greger is a prominent figure in public health and nutrition from the United States. He is renowned for his founding role at NutritionFacts.org, a platform providing evidence-based insights into the health impacts of dietary choices.
Dr. Greger’s influential books, How Not to Die and How to Survive a Pandemic offer guidance on adopting healthier, plant-based lifestyles. His tireless advocacy for preventive nutrition and its ability to reverse chronic diseases are super inspiring.
He has also taken part in the documentary Game Changers and What the Health?.
If you want to start eating more healthy foods, this book will tell you exactly what foods, how much, and why.
Quotes I liked from the book:
“The primary reason diseases tend to run in families may be that diets tend to run in families.”
“More than two thousand years ago, Hippocrates said, “If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health.”
“While the pathology of stroke and Alzheimer’s are different, one key factor unites them: Mounting evidence suggests that a healthy diet may help prevent them both.”
“The best way to minimize your exposure to industrial toxins may be to eat as low as possible on the food chain, a plant-based diet.”
PHILOSOPHY: Letters from a Stoic by Lucius Seneca.
I started reading about stoicism after discovering the work of Ryan Holiday, particularly his book The Obstacle Is The Way. I went a couple years only hearing about stoicism from Ryan’s work, but its impact on me was so profound that I decided to read the work of the ancient stoics myself.
The pursuit of adopting a stoic lifestyle helped me tremendously, it helped me stay focused during times of anxiety and doubt, it helped me set some principles, and in understand the ways of life.
Some of the ideas from the Stoics include:
Memento Mori – Remember you are going to die.
Amor Fati – love your fate. i.e. Love whatever happens to you.
What happens to you is the first part of the equation, but the second part of the equation is how you interpret those events. We can choose how we look at things, we can choose if something is good or bad.
That’s another tremendously powerful teaching I learned from the stoics.
Quotes I liked from the book:
“It is not the man who has too little that is poor, but the one who hankers after more.”
“Withdraw into yourself, as far as you can. Associate with those who will make a better man of you. Welcome those whom you yourself can improve. The process is mutual; for men learn while they teach.”
“Of this one thing make sure against your dying day – that your faults die before you do.”
“What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.”
“There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with”
INVESTING: The Little Book Of Common Sense Investing by John C. Bogle
This book was revolutionary in my life. I can’t remember how many times I’ve recommended it to my friends and family. I am very interested in money and how we can be more in control of our finances. Not to be a millionaire and buy a Lambo, but to have the peace of mind of knowing that the fixed monthly expenses like rent, bills, transport, and food are covered.
We all work for money, we all need to make money, but there are ways in which we can make money work for us. There are tools that allow us to grow our own pot of money. This book taught me the basics of investing, John Bogle is a legend in the world of investing, and he is a big fan of index funds. He and Warren Buffet completely changed my understanding of the stock market.
They helped me realize I can’t save my way to financial freedom, that being a certain amount of money, keeping money in the bank is foolish. Any money for which there is no purpose is just being wasted by staying in a bank account, however, if it is in a brokerage account, it is gaining interest. Even if it is only 4%, it’s still making money.
I started investing shortly after buying this book, I opened my first brokerage account in Hargreaves Lansdown but then transferred to Vanguard. This book teaches you all you need about index investing, you couldn’t have better mentors than Warren Buffet and John C. Bogle to teach you the ways of investing.
Quotes I liked from the book:
“Don’t look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack!”
“When there are multiple solutions to a problem, choose the simplest one.”
“Owning the stock market over the long term is a winner’s game, but attempting to beat the market is a loser’s game.”
“The winning formula for success in investing is owning the entire stock market through an index fund, and then doing nothing. Just stay the course.”
HISTORY: Homo Deus by Yuval Harari
I’ve read 3 of Yuval Harrari’s books, Homo Deus, Sapiens, and 21 Lessons for the 21 Century, and I found his books to be super insightful. I’m not great at history, nor at talking about politics and religion, but Yuval being a historian has the life experience of looking at history, finding patterns, and asking questions about the future based on those patterns.
I’m quite interested in human biology and optimizing our bodies/health to live longer and free of disease. I wouldn’t say I am a hypochondriac, but on a spectrum of 1-10, 10 being someone who is super interested/worried about disease and 1 being someone who doesn’t care, I’d be a solid 8. That’s one of the reasons I’m so interested in nutrition, it’s because it has a real impact on the diseases we develop.
Like Yuval says, the human body is very similar to a machine and a system, it has chemicals and signals that are interpreted by the body and produce subsequent reactions. If we can manipulate the signals, we can manipulate the reactions. This book goes into the discussion of us becoming superhumans with the help of technology, and crossing the barrier between mere animals of flesh, into superhumans.
Today, in 2023, we can literally measure our sleep quality, we can measure our blood pressure, we can measure blood sugar levels, we have devices that help us regulate diabetes, we have nicotine patches, we have all these devices and technology that help us measure out biological markers.
We have technology that helps us assess our risk of developing certain cancers, we can manipulate our genetic code and choose what colour we want our babies’ eyes to be. We have revealed the whole human genome and we know exactly what gene does what.
Quotes I liked from the book:
“The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more.”
“People are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes.”
“In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. […] In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore.”
“Every day millions of people decide to grant their smartphone a bit more control over their lives or try a new and more effective antidepressant drug. In pursuit of health, happiness and power, humans will gradually change first one of their features and then another, and another, until they will no longer be human.”
“You want to know how super-intelligent cyborgs might treat ordinary flesh-and-blood humans? Better start by investigating how humans treat their less intelligent animal cousins. It’s not a perfect analogy, of course, but it is the best archetype we can actually observe rather than just imagine.”
PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT: 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson
I had been a fan of Jordan Peterson’s work for a long time before buying his book. If you don’t know who he is he is a clinical psychologist, author, and media commentator, and he taught and did research at Harvard University for many years. His work and vocations include the book Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules For Life, and Beyond Order. He is now (2023) part of The Daily Wire team, and has his own website where you can take some very interesting personality courses to find out more about yourself.
I bought this book for the same reasons I actively sought to learn more about psychology and philosophy (stoicism). Life was looking messy and I was looking to make sense of it, finding some principles to live by. I needed a consistent framework to live by. I needed a list of principles and values to always go back to when pondering about life decisions and how to act in the world.
This is exactly what this book provided me with. 12 rules for life. These are universal and quite foundational rules that I found super insightful.
Quote from the book:
“And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.”
“Perhaps you are overvaluing what you don’t have and undervaluing what you do.”
“You must determine where you are going in your life, because you cannot get there unless you move in that direction. Random wandering will not move you forward. It will instead disappoint and frustrate you and make you anxious and unhappy and hard to get along with (and then resentful, and then vengeful, and then worse).”
“We are always and simultaneously at point a (which is less desirable than it could be), moving towards point b (which we deem better, in accordance with our explicit and implicit values). We always encounter the world in a state of insufficiency and seek its correction. We can imagine new ways that things could be set right and improved, even if we have everything we thought we needed. Even if satisfied, temporarily, we remain curious. We live within a framework that defines the present as eternally lacking and the future as eternally better. If we did not see things this way we would not act at all. We wouldn’t even be able to see because to see we must focus, and to focus we must pick one thing above all else on which to focus.”
It’s really hard to choose your favourite books since there are books I haven’t mentioned that have played a huge role in the trajectory of my life. Maybe I’ll cover them in another post. Some that come to mind are Ikigai by Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles, Show Your Work by Austin Kleon, The Millionaire Next Door by Dr. Thomas Stanley and Dr. William Danko, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, and The Dip by Seth Godin.
If you’ve read any of these books, feel free to leave a comment and let me know how they’ve helped you, changed your perspective, and improved your way of living.
BONUS book:
MARKETING: Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller
This one is for people who are starting their business/personal brand and need some help with marketing.
When I started thinking about the idea of offering nutrition coaching services I was super confused about how to get clients, how to build trust with my audience, how to build my website, etcetera. I am a big fan of Gary Vee’s work, and he is the one who pushed me to get started, do the work, and put myself out there. He and Ali Abdaal might have been my biggest influences in starting my personal brand and creating content.
However, Donald Miller and his work offered me the framework I needed to take the theory into practice. I found The StoryBrand Framework tremendously useful and it has helped me immensely in building my website and creating a sales funnel (even though the latter isn’t going too well but I’m working on it). I think that’s on me because I like to see myself more as a personal brand and documenting my journey than to see myself as a business first. I think that presenting myself as a business kind of limits my content creation because I only want to post about things directly related to the business niche.
However, if I see myself as a personal brand I feel like I have the space to talk about all my interests and not really having a niche. I.e. I can make a post about how to strengthen your immune system with diet, and 2 days later make a post about a book I read on personal development and philosophy.
Regardless, this framework introduced me to the foundations of marketing and clarified a lot of ideas for me, mainly building the website you are reading this on, creating a lead generator, an email campaign, and referral systems.
I hope at least one of these has spiked an interest in you and that you consider reading them, they are well worth it.
Have a great day!
Martim
