I Read These 5 Books And My Life Changed

My life is substantially different from what it was a couple of years ago. I went from being out of shape, procrastinating and scrolling all the time feeling like i’d never be able to accomplish anything to building my physique, being disciplined, taking care of my health.

I have to be honest though, this has not been an overnight process, it took me years of progress but through reading dozens and dozens of books about self-improvement, I’ve been able to compress the time that it took me.

That’s the reason why I want to give you a curated list of the 5 books that most profoundly changed the way I see the world and helped me reinvent my life.

For it to be holistic, I’ve chosen a different topic for each one of those books

Dopamine Nation (Dopamine)

Dopamine Nation is the first book on our list. It will help you understand how dopamine works and how to fix your dopamine levels.

This book, written by Anna Lembke, is worth more than all the videos about dopamine you could find on YouTube. It’s easy to read and enjoyable because of its storytelling and it provides a complete understanding of how addiction forms in the lives of regular people, and how it shapes their world.

And the first step to this whole process is to stop chasing things that don’t matter and start focusing on what actually does. Getting rid of the things that are ruining your life has to be the first step because it’s the only way there is to make enough space for you to truly change.

I thought I understood how dopamine worked before reading this book, but it proved me wrong. It helped me grasp the complexity of dopamine and its relationship to the pain and pleasure balance, which is to me the most important concept in the book.

Ultimately, it will help you understand why you’re chasing things that don’t matter, like junk food, social media, alcohol, or even toxic relationships, and will equip you with tools to understand what’s happening in your brain.

Dopamine Nation taught me that pain and pleasure come from the same place; they’re very close in our brain, and that’s the key to understanding how to regulate it.

Pain is experienced as a feeling of depletion, a sense of want and need, a craving that pushes you toward what you desire.

Pleasure is sought when pain arises and pain will be triggered when too much pleasure is experienced. It works as a balance and there can’t be one without the other.

That’s the addiction mechanism, that’s the reason why addicts are miserable because in seeking pleasure all the time, all they bring is pain to their lives.

The most common example of this is food. I have clients who crave chocolate so intensely that they struggle to work or focus whenever the thought enters their mind.

They experience this pain, this lack but when they satisfy the desire and indulge, they feel worst than they were before the episode as the pleasure wasn’t at all as intense as expected and the sense of guilt was even worst than that.

Dopamine is tricky because it’s much more about the quest than the destination. When you experience a dopamine releases, it feel good but it only does so that you move closer to the thing that you're supposed to get.

Dopamine is all about drive and motivation—getting you to act. That’s the biggest issue: once you achieve your goal, dopamine fades away because its job was only to make you want the thing and take action to get it.

Another important point to understand is that dopamine is like a battery. You have a limited amount that can be released before it needs to recharge and cannot deliver anymore.

The sad truth is that most people are so scared of boredom and pain that they fill their lives with dopaminergic distractions, preventing them from ever feeling content and satisfied because it drains them of all their dopamine.

While reading this book, I began to look at my life from a different perspective. I started to see all the behaviours that were depleting my dopamine reserve and keeping me locked in a perpetual state of shallowness and feeling of lack.

I realized that if I wanted to profoundly change my actions, stop being a slave to dopamine and cravings, and start controlling my motivation the way I wanted, I’d have to go through a phase where it feels worse before it gets better.

Because the reality is that as long as you're not in control over your dopamine, it will control you and lead you to live a life of excess and poor judgment.

This phase is inevitable if you want your life to improve. That’s why this book is first on our list and why you should read it—it will give you the strength necessary to start your journey and stop wasting your dopamine on stuff that doesn’t even matter to you.

Grit (Passion & Perseverance)

The next book by Angela Duckworth is the best guide to setting meaningful goals for your life and achieving them through perseverance. It explains the fundamental difference between people who achieve great things and those who don’t.

One of its most important ideas is the lesser importance of talent and how effort prevails over it. This means it’s okay if you weren’t a child prodigy or aren’t currently the best at what you’re doing—you can still become great.

The path is to find something that interests you enough to pour your energy into, and with time, you may develop a passion for it.

The equation looks something like : Interest + Effort x Time = Potential Passion.

Now you have to be careful because passion isn’t some perfect thing just waiting for you. The perfect job designed just for you probably doesn’t exist, at least not in the way you’re conceptualizing it right now.

Passion is a construct, and it’s more important to set a clear trajectory based on your life’s mission than to aim for some grandiose goal just because it sounds impressive.

Before reading this book, I thought I had to “find my passion” and the reason I wasn’t fulfilled was that I hadn’t found it. It felt like something was wrong with me on a fundamental level.

But halfway through the book, I realized something crucial: I could choose what my passion would be. I just had to take something I was genuinely interested in and give it a shot to see if I could develop a passion for it.

Of course, there are conditions for this to work—you have to commit to doing this thing long enough and follow through on your promise.

That said, it felt liberating. The idea that you have the power to build your passion gives you a sense of control that you don’t feel when you’re simply looking for the perfect fit.

More than that, when you look at highly successful people, they might seem like superhumans—always working, always perfecting their craft every hour of the day.

But if you read Grit, you quickly understand that it’s not that inaccessible. There is nothing “superhuman” about the actions that lead to success and passion. It’s about the quality and consistency of small, repeated key behaviours.

The main issue is probably your timeline. You probably have a biased idea of how long it will take to form a passion. Thanks to the Internet we all want to have everything right away, but the process taking years is the only real way to achieve it.

First, you have to go through trial and error: invest a year in trying something, find it doesn’t work, and move on to the next thing. You need to be mentally resilient, gritty and find comfort in the idea that you’re building skills that will help you along the way.

Something I quickly understood that was life-changing is that you don’t have to rush. In fact, you shouldn’t rush, and this book is an excellent way to start cultivating the right mindset and avoid wasting time “finding your passion.”

Slow Productivity (Productivity & Work)

Slow productivity is more than a book - it’s a philosophy and a way to think about work and its place in your life.

In it, Cal Newport’s thesis is that by working slower, more consistently, and more deliberately, you’ll achieve better results in the long run than by adopting the hustle or workaholic mindset.

Most people are not truly productive. Instead, they’re involved in what he calls pseudo-productivity, a form of busyness with a poor return on investment. It’s essentially the act of appearing busy without using your brain to its full capacity to produce meaningful work.

This book, along with another one on the same topic called Do Nothing - those two books, have completely changed how I view work and its role in my life.

The culture in North America often promotes non-stop work, with the goal of becoming hyper-successful as quickly as possible and earning as much money as possible. But many people don’t realize that this mindset can lead to wasting a significant portion of life chasing the wrong things and degrading their health faster than expected.

You’d be better off working in a way that aligns more closely with your goals, aspirations, and vision. Hustle culture may not be the right way to live your life - and that’s okay. I found out that it wasn't the right way to live mine and I’m better off without this obsession for success in my mind.

At one point, I felt bad because I was only working 30 hours a week and earning little money. But then I realized I don’t want to work 80 hours a week, spend my life stuck in traffic, or endure a toxic work environment. I don’t want to live in an office where someone tells me what to do everyday and has the power to fire me at every moment.

One thing is certain: the stress of modern life and the pressure of this culture are not compatible with good health. Just look at the statistics - it’s no surprise that obesity, anxiety disorders, and depression have never been higher.

I’m convinced that our current notions of work have a tremendous and negative impact on health. While Cal doesn’t explicitly discuss this relationship in his book, it’s an underlying theme.

I’m a big fan of the second rule of the book, which is to work at a natural pace as this aligns with prioritizing your health.

I find it fascinating that people are willing to sacrifice their health and shorten their lives by working more and enduring greater stress just for money and social recognition.

You’d be better off doing less but focusing on what truly matters to you. Work at a pace that allows you to take care of the other areas of your life and focus on the quality of your output rather than merely showing others how much you work or how much money you make.

Another key concept in his philosophy is what Cal calls career capital. This ties back to Grit. It’s the idea that you should focus on building skills in your domain of expertise, which will give you more leverage, control, and opportunities.

Simply put, do hard things that are interesting to you and do it for long enough so that you become successful.

By doing this, you move away from external rewards and focus instead on your craft, developing interests that might evolve into passions over time and stay with you for a lifetime.

Remember, modern productivity can become a trap, one that robs you of your time and attention in the relentless pursuit of more: more optimization, more tasks, more money.

Adopting a slower, more human approach will enable you to achieve great things in the long run without sacrificing your health and sanity in the process.

When Breath Becomes Air (Purpose)

This book is a little different from the others on this list. While the previous books were self-help guides based on facts, this one is an autobiography of a neurosurgeon diagnosed with cancer.

In When Breath Becomes Air, Paul shares his journey and how it shaped his understanding of life, death, and time.

I added this book to the list because it profoundly changed the way I appreciate life and my perception of time. By default, unless you go through a relatively traumatic experience, it’s hard to fully put your life into perspective and truly understand that you’re going to stop existing at some point.

Reading this book felt like entering the mind of someone actively going through this realization and describing it to you. Vicariously, you start to be more conscious of these concepts, identify with the narrator and this can support some pretty powerful insights.

This process and this book will guide you toward understanding what is most important to you. As you read, you’ll naturally begin reflecting on your own life to define what a life well-lived means to you with the time you have.

It blends beautifully with the last two books on this list. The author, Paul Kalanithi, dedicated a significant part of his life to becoming a neurosurgeon, which most likely contributed to his early diagnosis of such an aggressive cancer.

The impossible hours, years of sleep debt, and constant stress of the profession likely accelerated his aging and deteriorated his health at twice the normal rate.

In his book, there is a profound quest for meaning that overrides everything else: societal pressures, money, and social recognition. That’s why I believe anyone seeking self-improvement should read it.

It takes you out of what you think is important in your life and puts you right in front of death and the lack of time.

Because we all know that life is finite and that we cannot buy more time. Yet, this knowledge doesn’t stop us from wasting so much of it on things that don’t matter—like social media, gossip or shallow work.

The very fear of dying often leads us to avoid truly living. Instead, we find refuge in addictive behaviours that steal our awareness of time passing.

While all other animals live in the present moment, humans are the only species that sacrifice sleep, health, and time with loved ones for TV shows and Kardashian drama.

The Power Of Now (Spirituality)

I’m not really big into spirituality, and I was hesitant to put this last book on the list because to be honest, I don’t even think I’ve quite understood it in its entirety.

That being said, I think that The Power of Now holds a lot of keys to happiness, stillness, and ultimately, enlightenment.

The premise of the book is that you’re stuck in your own reality, a shallow projection of your life, because you identify with it instead of living in the present moment.

You’re there physically, but spiritually, your soul is trapped in the busyness of the modern world and that’s all you’re experiencing. This is why life is uneasy, painful and can even feel empty.

I really enjoyed the idea that time doesn’t really matter because, first, it’s your perception of time as a human being that matters, not an absolute value of time. And second, because the only time that matters is the present moment.

Yet, every day we trap ourselves in our minds by jumping from sad thoughts about the past to anxious thoughts about the future. And in doing so, we fail to focus on the only thing that truly matters: living in the present.

The problem is, most people will live their whole lives without ever understanding what’s happening in their lives or why they behave a certain way. They’ll keep dodging the present, living in a constant state of fear of the future and sadness about the past.

The main objective of the book is not to get you to change your entire life. Instead, the goal is to make you understand that there is a way toward enlightenment. But to start on that journey, you have to be willing to live in the present and change your way of thinking.

Whether you’re someone who’s spiritual or not, you can’t dismiss the fact that you probably live most of your life on autopilot mode. You use your phone while watching a movie, call a friend while driving, or listen to Netflix shows when you’re alone.

You fill your mind with distractions, scared of what might happen if you didn’t. But in doing so, you deny yourself the experience of the present moment, which, again, is the only moment you can truly experience.

And if you don't understand that fundamental concept concept then you may die even before you start living.