The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success by Darren Hardy (Amazon.com book link or Amazon.co.uk book link)

This book is a great read and a great gift to anyone who wants to keep balance in life. I have purchased it four times (one audio CD and three hard copies). It will help you start working on important things in your life without neglecting anything. To achieve big goals, you have to do small steps daily, and over time you will see excellent results. From there comes the name “The Compound Effect.” Darren Hardy has led three successful television networks, producing over 1,000 TV shows featuring most every influential thought leader of our times. And for eight years he led the rebirth of SUCCESS Magazine as its publisher and founding editor.

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success – How we can learn to fulfill our potential by Carol S. Dweck 

This book is a mandatory read for everyone. It should be on the top of the list for parents, teachers, or anyone working with kids and young people to help them build the self-confidence they need to reach their full potential in life. This book will break a lot of prejudices and change your view of the world. The author, world-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D., discovered a simple but groundbreaking idea: the power of mindset. In this book, she shows how success in school, work, sports, the arts, and almost every area of human endeavor can be dramatically influenced by how we think about our talents and abilities. If you decide to read this book, you will not be disappointed, I promise.

The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results  by Gary W. Keller and Jay Papasan 

Multitasking is a myth. Our brain can work only on one thing at a time effectively. A lot of people spread themselves too thin and never reach their goals. If you have trouble setting your priorities, this book will help you with that. Gary Keller is an entrepreneur and best-selling author. He is the founder of Keller Williams, which is the largest real estate company in the world by agent count, closed sales volume, and units sold.

Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek 

This book will help you think in a different way and find out why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others. Knowing why you do something -instead of how and what- is the essential thing in life and in business. It gives you a reason to get out of bed every morning. “Why?” is the endless source of strength that you need to make a difference. Simon Sinek teaches leaders and organizations how to inspire people. From members of Congress to foreign ambassadors, from small businesses to corporations like Microsoft and 3M, from Hollywood to the Pentagon, he has presented his ideas about the power of why. 

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear 

This book is a life-changer. If you have trouble changing your habits or building good ones, you have to find the right system. This is the book that gives you tangible results as soon as you start using the described techniques. Everything written in the book has already been tested and proven. All that remains if for you to put the theory into practice. James Clear, one of the world’s leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results.

The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life  by Hal Elrod 

If you want to wake up each day with more energy, motivation, and focus to take your life to the next level, this is the right book for you. What’s incredible is that Hal literally died at age twenty. His car was hit head-on by a drunk driver at 70 miles per hour, his heart stopped beating for six minutes, he broke eleven bones, and woke up after being in a coma for six days to be told by his doctors that he would probably never walk again. Not only did Hal walk, but he also ran a fifty-two-mile ultra-marathon and went on to became a Hall of Fame business achiever, international keynote speaker, author, and grateful husband and father—all before he turned thirty.

The power of your subconscious mind by Joseph Murphy 

This book is the missing link between what you want and what you really get out of your life. If you neglect your subconscious mind and use only the conscious part of your mind there is no chance that you will ever live the life you really want. A conscious mind can focus only on a small part of the world around you, while your subconscious mind is doing everything else. It makes something useful out of the information you feed it with, directs your focus on the things important to you, and much more. If you are not aware of the power of your subconscious mind, this book will help you learn how to use it in the right way. Dr. Joseph Murphy has been acclaimed as a major figure in the human potential movement and one of the best-selling authors in the mid-twentieth century. 

Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing  by Bronnie Ware 

Excellent and definitely one-of-a-kind book. Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last twelve weeks of their lives. The true stories in the book will make you realize that you do not want to waste your life on the wrong things. This eye-opening book will make you rethink the way you want to live your life.

Leave the Grind Behind: Rocket Fuel to Live Life on Your Terms, Make More Money, Build Your Legacy, and Quit Your Job  by Justin Gesso 

If you are looking for ways to leave your day job and follow your own dream, this is the book for you. Jobs in the corporate world are becoming more and more demanding. Working more for less, no job satisfaction, and not enough time with your family makes more and more people turn to self-employment. This book will help you make your move and give you some concrete guidelines on what to do. Justin Gesso is a best-selling author, MBA, and accomplished entrepreneur. He thrives on helping others achieve their own personal freedom through the creation of simple money machines, side hustles, and small businesses.

Be Obsessed or Be Average  by Grant Cardone 

If you want to succeed as an entrepreneur, you have to work on it with all you’ve got. This book will help you adjust your mindset for success. Before Grant Cardone built five successful companies and wrote a few best-selling books, he was broke, jobless, and drug-addicted. According to Inc. Magazine, this was one of the seven best motivational books of 2016.

A few more great books:

Greenlights: Raucous stories and outlaw wisdom from the Academy Award-winning actor by Matthew McConaughy 

I really enjoyed and had a few really good laughs going through this great book written by a famous actor. He describes his successes and failures, together with joys and sorrows through life. He also shares his ideas on how to be fair, how to have less stress, how to hurt people less, how to get hurt less, how to have meaning in life, and a lot more. If you like this actor, you will love his book.

The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less by Richard Koch 

Have you ever, after reading a book, asked yourself how it is possible to get so much useful information from only one book? This is one of those books. It explains how to effectively apply the Pareto principle (80/20) to get the most out of your life. The Pareto principle (discovered by Italian economist Wilfredo Pareto) says that 80 percent of our success comes from only 20 percent of our actions. Richard Koch is the author, successful entrepreneur, and investor whose ventures have included Filofax, Plymouth Gin, Belgo restaurants, and Betfair, the world’s largest betting exchange. He was formerly a partner of Bain & Company and co-founder of LEK Consulting. He has written more than twenty acclaimed books on business and ideas.

Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence-and How You Can, Too  by Gary Vaynerchuk 

In this book, Gary Waynerchuk interviews different entrepreneurs who started from scratch and made their way to the top. The true stories in this book will boost your motivation and give you a lot of new ideas. Gary Vaynerchuk builds businesses. Fresh out of college, he took his family’s wine business and grew it from a $3M to a $60M business in just five years. Now he runs VaynerMedia, one of the world’s hottest digital agencies.

The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich  by Tim Ferris 

This famous book from Tim Ferris will help you start thinking in a different way about your time and your income. Forget the old concepts of retirement and the rest of the deferred-life plan—there is no need to wait and every reason not to, especially in unpredictable economic times. Whether your dream is escaping the rat race, experiencing high-end world travel, earning a monthly five-figure income with zero management, or just living more and working less, here you will find a lot of useful ideas. Timothy Ferriss is a serial entrepreneur, #1 New York Times best-selling author, and angel investor/advisor (Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Uber, and 20+ more).

(If you are not sure where to begin,  start with my free audiobook, Fulfilling Life: A Matter of Personal Choice. It will help you to take the first step and start making changes in your life.)