A friend and I were talking the other day about formative books, and I thought it might be an interesting topic here — what books were formative to the person you are now? What books made a real impression on you and continues to be a reference point in your life, whether fiction or non-fiction?
For my friend, it was Your Money Or Your Life, which is one of the best financial books we’ve talked about — she was saying that it totally changed her relationship with money and her attitude towards saving.
Formative Books: My Own $.02
For me the answer has to be The 4-Hour Workweek, for better or worse — I read it a year or two after law school, when I was a BigLaw associate and trying to figure out if being a lawyer was for me or not. I, like a lot of lawyers, came from a long background of Type A behavior — pushpushpush, pull the all-nighter, get the A, you can sleep when you’re dead — and at 28 I was trying to figure out if that was the way I wanted to live the rest of my life.
(I think I’ve written before about this — I realized I was really driven by “gold stars,” as in the stickers your elementary teachers put on your work when it’s really good. Being in a situation with lockstep pay and bonuses, with a 7-9 year partner track, was just not motivating to me.)
The 4-Hour Workweek was revelatory for a lot of reasons, one of the biggest being that you could start a business that earned money but left you time to pursue your passions.
One example in the book that I remember is an entrepreneur who essentially created digital stock music for people to use in their own projects — he certainly wasn’t writing concertos or playing sold out stadiums, but he was making a solid living and not putting very much work into the endeavor.
Another example I remember (although I think it was from Tim Ferriss’s blog and not the book), was that the coding program for girls, Goldiblox, had been started for this purpose — and then became the founder’s passion.
My attitude towards email was definitely formed by The 4-Hour Workweek — he noted that he was almost never making money by answering or filing emails, so he wasn’t going to spend a lot of time on it. To this day, I only check my work email a few times a week — I don’t even have access to it on my phone. I’ve also resisted having an assistant sort my email for me. I’ve missed a few important things over the years (including at least two opportunities to be interviewed by The New York Times, oops), but being relatively unstressed about my work emails is, I think, a good thing.
(Of course, I try to check the moderation queue every 20-60 minutes even when I’m on vacation, so there is some stress, but hey.)
It’s interesting, also, how you can read the same books as your friends and they won’t have the same effect — it really depends heavily on where you were in life when you read the book and what other sorts of advice you were getting.
Sometimes a book hits a bit too close to home, also — for example, I should be writing about The Tools because I remember just eating it up when I first read it and thinking it would change my life. But for some reason, its message about pushing through your emotional blocks to complete your creative work hasn’t stuck the same way, although I tell myself almost yearly that I should reread it.
Readers, over to you — what formative books made you the person you are today (fiction or non-fiction)? If you view the book as problematic today, do you still look back on the lessons and impact it had on you in a positive way?
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