Books That Will Change Your Life in 2026

About this video

Kegley tours the roughly 302 books spread across his floor — he owns no bookshelves — and recommends titles across non-fiction categories, noting he has read some cover-to-cover multiple times and abandoned others he was not feeling. For self-improvement he highlights Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz (a plastic surgeon who found fixing patients’ faces did not fix their self-image), The Happiness Hypothesis, and The Courage to Be Disliked, which presents Alfred Adler’s view that people are drawn toward goals they set rather than determined by past causes. For relationships he recommends The Way of the Superior Man, The Five Love Languages and John Gottman’s work on marriage, and warns against inflammatory online relationship advice. For philosophy he urges reading primary sources: Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, Emerson’s Self-Reliance (which he says he listens to every year), Freud, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Nietzsche. The spirituality section spans the Bible, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammapada, Osho on maturity, and alternative-history writers like Graham Hancock. He praises biographies — especially the Steve Jobs biography and Leonardo da Vinci — because stories are how people remember lessons, and for money he recommends The Psychology of Money, Tony Robbins’s Unshakeable, I Will Teach You to Be Rich, The Science of Getting Rich and The Richest Man in Babylon, stressing that what you keep matters more than what you make.

Key takeaways

• Psycho-Cybernetics’ core lesson, as Kegley tells it: confidence comes from the self-image you hold in your mind, not from what you see in the mirror.
• Prefer primary sources over modern summaries for philosophy — Kegley recommends Meditations and Emerson’s Self-Reliance, which he revisits yearly.
• Learn relationships from people who studied happy, successful couples (such as Gottman), not from inflammatory online sound bites.
• Read biographies to retain lessons, because the brain is wired for stories rather than memorized facts; he singles out the Steve Jobs biography.
• For money, his picks stress behaviour over spreadsheets — The Psychology of Money, I Will Teach You to Be Rich, and The Richest Man in Babylon’s ‘pay yourself first’ rule.

Episode details: published April 17, 2023 · 17:49 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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