5 life-changing books you must read in 2026

About this video

Kegley recommends five books for the year from over 300 nonfiction titles read. Dan Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness opens with a selective-focus word test and argues humans uniquely imagine the future, spending, he cites, about 12 percent of thoughts there, yet predict badly what will make them happy due to bias and overconfidence. Michael Singer’s The Surrender Experiment follows a hippie who wanted only to meditate yet, by letting go instead of forcing, ended up CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company in his telling; Kegley says it balanced his own force-based twenties and recommends the audiobook. David Deida’s The Way of the Superior Man reframes relationships through masculine and feminine energies everyone carries, and Kegley repeats his advice to list what you want in a partner and become it. Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money, though not named in his spoken summary, is represented by the janitor Ronald Read, who died worth over $8 million from boring blue-chip investing and behavior, not income. Finally, Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score argues trauma is stored in the body, ‘issues in the tissues’, answered partly through movement and dynamic meditation.

Key takeaways

• We predict future happiness badly; bias and overconfidence humble the forecast
• Surrender is a strategy too: balance forcing with letting go, per Singer’s story
• Understand masculine and feminine energies; become the partner list yourself
• Money outcomes are behavior: Read’s $8 million came from patience, not pay
• Trauma lives in the body; movement and expression help discharge it

Episode details: published January 2, 2023 · 15:38 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Clark Kegley’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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