Books that quietly shaped how I think, feel, and live 📚

As promised, here are a few reads that stayed with me over the years.

Not because they were “nice books”. But because each one left a fingerprint on how I think, feel, and move through life.

Psycho-Cybernetics (Maxwell Maltz)

This one taught me that self image runs everything. If you keep “seeing yourself” as the person who quits, procrastinates, or disappoints, you will keep living that loop. Change the inner picture, and behavior starts to follow.

The Untethered Soul (Michael A. Singer)

Big reminder: you are not the voice in your head. You are the one who hears it. When I really started practicing that, the mental noise lost a lot of power.

The Power of Now (Eckhart Tolle)

I read this while traveling in Thailand and I applied it immediately. It was honestly bizarre how quickly you can feel the difference when you stop living inside “later” or “what if” and return to the present. It was one of the first times I experienced peace as something practical, not philosophical.

The Expectation Effect (David Robson)

This gave me a grounded, research-backed way to understand something we all feel: what you expect shapes what you experience. He uses practical examples and data around placebo and nocebo effects, where positive expectations can improve outcomes and negative expectations can worsen them.

Mastery (Robert Greene)

This book helped me connect the dots back to childhood. Greene argues your “Life’s Task” often leaves clues early on, in what you were naturally drawn to before the world told you what was “useful.” What hit me most is how many masters went through a real shift after years of apprenticeship. A phase where they stopped copying and started experimenting, and something more intuitive and original switched on. He uses biographies of people like Darwin and Einstein to show that pattern.

Reality Transurfing (Vadim Zeland)

This one goes deeper for me than “just think positive.” The idea that stuck is reducing “importance.” The more you overcharge a goal with pressure, identity, or desperation, the more you create inner tension and weird resistance. Another concept is “pendulums,” basically dramas or group energies that try to hook your attention. When you stop feeding them with emotional charge, you get your energy back and you move cleaner.

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