With this article, I bring you a list of 20 best books to help you grow. Why now? And why books? Well, with all this free time on our hands, it’s an ideal time for us to work on ourselves, and books are mostly one of the best ways for us to do that. We take our time, and we grow with every page, we work and learn at our own pace and in our comfort – It’s the perfect answer.
They say that a book will be your best friend. It’s true. Books will help you get through some of your darkest times, they’ll provide you with comfort, they’ll teach you new things, tell you about happy experiences but most of all they’ll help you grow.
Books help us grow in multiple ways. As people, help us improve our minds, help us grow healthy, grow mature, and grow into beautiful, brave, and brilliant people. And these days books have become so accessible too.
You can get them in stores, libraries, order them online, get digital versions on your kindles or phones, or even pdfs for your electronic devices, and you can even get some in audio files so you can listen to them instead of having to read.
But where do you think people get these crazy ideas from? What inspires them to explore and innovate? The answer – books. There is no epitome of success. There is no epitome to perfection. Whoever you are and whatever you do, you will always have room for more and more improvement.
And it’s about time you join the book club. So, to help you, here is a short-curated list of 20 Best Books to Help You Grow.
20 Best Books to Help You Grow
1. The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari – Robin S. Sharma
This book is a fable about fulfilling your dreams and reaching your destiny. It follows a step by step approach to living a life with more enormous courage, balance, abundance, and joy.
It’s an inspiring story that will motivate and energize you to go out there and get answers to the many questions that you have in your mind. It lifts the weight of those questions off of you. Many would even categorize this novel as ‘life-changing’.
The book itself was a merger between fiction and instruction on techniques to perfect your life experience. This book is one of the best books to help you grow as It’s a book full of wisdom.
2. Rich Dad Poor Dad – Robert T. Kiyosaki
Image sourced from Bing
This book is the story of how the author grew up with two fathers – his own and his father’s best friend. It talks about how both his fathers, the ‘rich’ and the ‘poor’ shaped his life and the way he makes decisions when it comes to money and investments.
The book is one of the best books to help you grow explodes the myth that you need to earn a high income to be productive and explains the difference between working for money and having your money work for you.
3. Ikigai – by Hector Garcia Puigcerver, Francesc Miralles
Image sourced from Bing
Pronounced – Ick-ee-guy; The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life Might Just Help You Live a More Fulfilling Life. Is one of the best books to help you grow
The book is often deemed “magnificent” or is said to have left people “spellbound”. It is a book that urges people to simplify their lives by pursuing what sparks joy for them. It talks about how purpose plays a vital role in a man’s life and the different ways in which it manifests itself.
4. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck – Mark Manson
Image sourced from Bing
In this counterintuitive approach to living a good life, the author is backed both by academic research and well-timed poop jokes, that improving our lives hinges not on our ability to turn lemons into lemonade, but on learning to stomach lemons better. This is one of the best books to help you grow.
Manson gives you the blueprints to get your head out of your behind, (or out of your phone) take a hard look at yourself and the real world around you and shed many of the illusions you’ve been slowly poisoning your life with. If you’re a millennial or even a disenchanted X-gen, pick up this book. It will give you at least a more healthy point of view. But, if you’re over 50, you’re not going to find anything new here except entertainment.
5. Homos Deus: A history of tomorrow – Yuval Noah Harari
Image sourced from Bing
Yet another original, compelling and provocative book, which is also one of the best books to help you grow, is by the author of Sapiens. The text on the list of one of the best books to help you grow. It is ostensibly about the future of humanity. Still, it is a means of highlighting how current trends in science, technology, humanity, etc, may progress and asks if that’s really how we want things to go. It’s philosophy.
6. The Secret – Rhonda Bryne
Image sourced from Bing
This book is on the list of the best books to help you grow. It is based on the belief of the law of attraction, which claims that thoughts can change a person’s life directly. Here, Byrne illuminates’ facets of the law of attraction that lead to more joy, abundance, and blessings—every single day of the year.
7. The Leader Who Had No Title – Robin S. Sharma
This fable on Real success and business in life not only amuses you with a great story but also gives a fascinating way of truly living a life of leading without a title. It is one of the best books to help you grow.
8. The Obstacle is The Way – Ryan Holiday
Image sourced from Bing
About the timeless act of turning adversity into advantage. There is a formula for success that’s been followed by the icons of history—from John D. Rockefeller to Amelia Earhart to Ulysses S. Grant to Steve Jobs—a method that lets them turn obstacles into opportunities. Faced with impossible situations, they found the astounding triumphs we all seek.
This book is one of the best books to help you grow because it reveals that formula for the first time—and shows us how we can turn our adversity into advantage.
9. Reasons to stay alive – Matt Haig
Image sourced from Bing
This book is about how the author suffers from depression. Reasons to Stay Alive is Matt’s inspiring account of how, minute by minute and day by day, he overcame the disease with the help of reading, writing, and the love of his parents and his girlfriend (and now-wife), Andrea.
And eventually, he learned to appreciate life all the more for it.
To read more about the importance of mental health, click here.
10. My heart & other black holes – Jasmine Warga
Image sourced from Bing
It’s a smart, addicting, sensitive, honest, and insightful story about depression. It is a contemporary novel, about Aysel and Roman who are different by personality but have the same goal, to commit suicide, and they decide to do it together.
It is one of the best books to help you grow your mental health.
11. Unf#ck Your Brain – Faith G Harper
Unf#ck your Brain, one of the best books to help you grow, is about using science to get over Anxiety, Depression, Anger, Freak-outs, and Triggers. With humor, patience, science, and lots of good-ole swearing, Dr. Faith explains what’s going on in your skull, and talks you through the process of retraining your brain to respond appropriately to the non-emergencies of everyday life, and to deal effectively with old, or newly acquired, traumas.
12. The Art of Thinking Clearly – Rolf Dobelli
In engaging prose and with practical examples and anecdotes, an eye-opening look at human reasoning and essential reading for anyone with important decisions to make. This book is a list of 99 common thinking errors and cognitive biases.
13. The Willpower Instinct – Kelly McGonigal
Image sourced from Bing
How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It. This is one of the best books to help you grow because it is the first book to explain the new science of self-control and how it can be harnessed to improve our health, happiness, and productivity.
It combines life-changing prescriptive advice and complementary exercises to help readers with goals ranging from a healthier life to more patient parenting, from higher productivity at work to finally finishing the basement.
Click here to read more about ways to improve your self-control.
14. The Paradox of Choice – Barry Schwartz
Image sourced from Bing
Why More Is Less, the author argues that eliminating consumer choices can significantly reduce anxiety for shoppers. Autonomy and Freedom of choice are critical to our well-being, and the decision is crucial to freedom and independence.
15. Essentialism – Greg McKeown
Image sourced from Bing
The disciplined pursuit of less. Essentialism, one of the best books to help you grow, helps the readers in adopting this disciplined way of thinking, which can be practiced and applied in real-life scenarios to achieve lasting success. It is an approach taken by successful people of top-notch companies, which can now be used by any common man.
16. The Alchemist – Paul Coelho
Image sourced from Bing
Coelho’s message- is this is a book with a message–is that each of us has his own Personal Legend and that if we recognize that legend and pursue it sincerely, everything in the Universe (which is after all made upwind, stone, trees–of the same stuff we are) will conspire to help us achieve it.
17. I have a dream – Rashmi Bansal
I have a Dream is the story of 20 idealists who think and act like entrepreneurs. They are committed to different causes, but they have one thing in common: a belief that principles of management can and must be used to achieve a greater common good. These stories say one thing loud, and apparent change starts with one person, and that person could be someone next door.
Inspiration comes from every page of the book, and that is why it is on the list of the best books to help you grow. It takes a lot of courage to break out of the conventional path & do what people normally term ‘eccentric’ or ‘foolish.’
18. Who will cry when you die – Robin S. Sharma
Live your life such a way that when you die the world cries and you rejoice”. This is the crux of the book written by the author of the bestseller ‘The Monk who sold his Ferrari’ who tells one how to lead a prosperous life in a simple, direct, and easy-to-read way.
This book is one of the best books to help you grow because it is full of preachings about “the right way to lead a good life” presented in a list like a manner rather than the thoughts weaved in a storyline or put philosophically to make an exciting read.
19. Dream with your eyes open – Ronnie Screwvala
In this book on the list of best books to help you grow, a first-generation entrepreneur and UTV-founder Ronnie Screwvala detail his vast experiences and the myriad lessons learned from more than two decades of building some successful (and some not-so-successful) businesses, bringing clarity to a quickly changing business landscape and making a passionate case for the role of entrepreneurship in India’s future.
20. Stay hungry, stay foolish – Rashmi Bhansal
Image sourced from Bing
The inspiring stories of 25 IIM Ahmedabad graduates who chose the rough road of entrepreneurship. They are diverse in age, in outlook, and the industries they made a mark in. But they have one thing in common: they believed in the power of their dreams.
This book seeks to inspire young graduates to look beyond placements and salaries. To believe in their dreams.
These are only a few of the many brilliant best books to help you grow out there. If you have read any of the best books to help you grow on our list, or have any additions of your own, do share them with us, we’d love to hear what you have to say!