14 Books (Not Self-Help) That Will Change Your Life

One of the most impactful books I've ever read was about mosquitoes. Another one was about a pedophile. Actually, let me explain that one. Look, we've all read all the classic self-help books, but I've actually found some of the most impactful books in my life were not trying to give me advice. In fact, they weren't trying to change me at all. Here are 15 of them. Mosquito by Timothy Weingart. It's a book about bugs. That's what we're starting with. Just hang in there with me. Timothy Weingart's mosquito makes the case that the single deadliest killer in human history is not war, not famine, not any human dictator. It's the mosquito. Mosquito-borne diseases have killed more people than every war combined in human history. We're talking nearly half of all human deaths were caused by a mosquito. But here's where it really gets wild. Because mosquitoes didn't just kill lots of people. They decided who won. They steered wars. They crippled armies. They toppled empires. Entire military campaigns were designed around mosquito seasons. International trade emerged to trade mosquito repellents. The coffee and tea you drink every day and the fact that it came from the other side of the world, it was largely shaped by the mosquito. And nobody talks about this. Nobody thinks about it. We walk around assuming history is shaped by great leaders and bold ideas. And meanwhile, a tiny insect that you can crush between your fingers was pulling the strings the entire time. It made me realize how much of life is dictated by forces that we never really think about and that we can hardly even see. And that often the most complicated philosophical and social questions can actually be answered with something as simple and as small as a bug. The Art of War by Sun Tzu. the most famous book about war ever written is funny enough hardly about war you pick this up expecting a playbook for utter domination of your foes strategies tactics how to crush your enemies under the heel of your boots yet Most of the book, the vast majority of the book, is actually how to avoid fighting in the first place. How to position yourself so that conflict is unnecessary or doesn't even make sense. How to win the fight before the fight even begins. Sun Tzu's most famous idea is that the greatest victory is the one that requires no battle at all. If you're actually fighting, then something has already gone wrong. And look, this is a 2,500 year old military text. I didn't pick it up exactly expecting life advice. But once you see it, you can't unsee it. That is some wisdom that applies to almost every area of life. The best way to handle conflict in your relationships, in your career, with anybody, isn't to get better at fighting them. It's to get better at making those fights unnecessary. The people who win the most are the ones who rarely have to fight at all. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. This is a novel about a pedophile. And it made me a better person. Hear me out. Lolita is probably the most beautiful prose I've ever read. The narrator, he's charming, witty, deeply intelligent, devastatingly romantic. And as you're reading along, you get swept up in this absolutely gorgeous language. It's almost enchanting. And then you remember what this motherfucker is doing. He is destroying a child's life. Honestly, you kind of forget as you go. That's the whole trick of the book. That's the whole point. Nabokov wrote the most seductive narrator in literary history and then made him an absolute monster because that's how monsters work. They don't show up looking like monsters. They show up charming. eloquent, making you feel like you're the only person in the room. And here's the other thing that haunts me about this book. The book is called Lolita. It's entirely about her, yet you barely hear her utter a single word throughout the entire novel. Her voice is completely swallowed up by his, and that absence is the entire point. This book completely rewired how I see manipulation, and it taught me that the most dangerous people in the world aren't the ones who scare you. They're the ones who dazzle you. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. Siddhartha is the story of a man who tries everything. He tries religion. He tries luxury and wealth. He tries parties, women, drugs. And then he flips the script and he tries all the opposite things. He tries starving himself. He tries meditating for days and days on end. He tries renouncing all possessions and worldly pleasures. He gorges himself on every experience that life can offer, taking each one to its absolute extreme. And none of it works. not the spiritual extreme, not the material extreme, definitely not the sexual extreme. Every pursuit taken to its logical conclusion collapses under the weight of its own obsession. The realization that Siddhartha arrives at, and the one that is the basis of all Buddhism, is that the ultimate pursuit is to become pursuitless, to stop chasing. Not because ambition is bad or desire is evil, but because the act of desperately grasping for meaning is the very thing that prevents meaning in the first place. Deep Survival by Lawrence Gonzalez. Why do experienced hikers die on trails that beginners survive? Why do elite climbers make fatal mistakes that amateurs avoid? Why do Navy SEALs sometimes drown while ordinary people make it out alive? He studies hundreds of survival situations, plane crashes, shipwrecks, people lost in the wilderness, trying to figure out who lives and who dies and why. And the answer is not what you would expect. It's not the fittest. It's not the most skilled. It's not the person with the best gear or the most experience. In fact, it's experience and expertise that... sometimes gets people killed because it makes them rigid. What Gonzalez discovers is that the people who survive are the ones who are best able to let go of a plan. They can look at a situation, accept that everything they assumed is now wrong or fucked up, and make a new decision based on what's actually happening in front of them, not what was supposed to happen. And that's not just the survival skill. That is... a life skill. How many people are drowning right now in a career, a relationship, or a belief system because they refuse to accept that the map no longer matches the territory? Endurance by Alfred Lansing. Ernest Shackleton's ship gets trapped in Antarctic ice and it gets crushed. He and his crew are stranded on frozen pack ice in the middle of nowhere with no way to communicate with the outside world. Yet, somehow, They survive for two years. Shackleton kept his men sane and surviving with something almost stupidly simple. Routines, daily tasks, meal schedules, chores. He even enforced a policy of mandatory cheerfulness. I'm not joking. He called it enforced cheerfulness. So if you're moping around on the Antarctic ice feeling sorry for yourself. You were told to knock it off. In a survival situation, despair is contagious and it can kill you faster than the cold. And that's the thing that stuck with me long after I put the book down. That what separates people who fall apart from the people who hold it together maybe is not mental toughness or some heroic inner strength. It's actually just having something to do every day. It's the routine. It's the structure. Take that away. And maybe you lose everything. But before we get to the next book, this video is brought to you by Built. And I'm actually very excited about this sponsor because I fucking hate paying rent. And if I had Built back when I lived in New York City, holy shit, it would have changed my entire life. Here's the thing. 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But rent is just like lighting money on fire. forever but what if you could make your rent work for you that's what built does it's the membership for where you live where you can earn points in your neighborhood and on your rent or mortgage the one expense that until now nobody was getting anything back on built allows you to take that money that was already leaving your account and point it towards things that you actually care about like that 40 pilates class that you've been eyeing but couldn't justify or the taco place that landed on the best hidden gyms list in 2019 but you somehow still haven't tried or Let's be honest, probably your future rent payment. Look, you're going to pay rent no matter what, so you might as well get something back for it. Check out the link in the description and start earning built points today. The Master in the Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Bulgakov wrote this novel in secret in Stalin's Soviet Union, knowing that it would never be published in his lifetime. And he was right. It wasn't released until 26 years after his death. And when you read it, you quickly understand why. The devil shows up in Moscow. And what does he do? He doesn't tempt anyone. He doesn't corrupt anyone. He doesn't hurt anyone. He simply tells the truth. That's it. He walks into a room full of Soviet bureaucrats and intellectuals, and he says the thing that everyone already knows, but nobody is willing to say out loud. And it slowly destroys them. Not because the truth is shocking, but because the entire system, their careers, their relationships, their identities, it's all built on a collective agreement to never say what it is. And that's what wrecked me about this book is that So much evil is it's not about trying to hurt people. It's actually just cowardice. It made me think about how much suffering exists in the world because people know what's wrong, but they're just not willing to say anything because they've all kind of silently agreed to just accept that this is the way things are. And then you read this thinking it's Soviet Russia and communism and censorship, but then you put the book down and you look around at your own life, your job and your friendships and your family, and you realize that this is happening everywhere all the time. The truth is sitting there in the room. Everybody can see it, but nobody's willing to say it. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Everybody compares this book to 1984, Orwell's dystopia versus Huxley's dystopia. And for decades, George Orwell's dystopia seemed like the more prophetic one. Surveillance states, authoritarian governments, censorship, thought police. But as the years go on, I think Huxley's vision is the one that is actually coming true. In Brave New World, nobody is oppressed. Nobody is tortured. Nobody's rights are taken away from them. Instead, everyone is given exactly what they want. Endless entertainment, effortless sex, a drug called Soma that makes you feel blissful anytime you want. People are not controlled through fear. They are actually controlled through pleasure. And they love it. They don't resist because... There is nothing to resist. Why would you fight a system that keeps you comfortable and happy every second of every day? And that is actually the horror of the book. And it doesn't feel like horror when you're reading it. It feels fine. Like nice, actually. But then you put it down and you look at your phone and you look at your streaming queue and three hours go by and you start thinking, oh shit. I think I'm one of them. Now, to be clear, I have not read this book since high school, but it was one of the few books I read in school that has always stuck with me and I consistently think about. Because what if the world doesn't end with a boot on your face? What if it ends with you smiling, scrolling, perfectly happy and content and never once asking if this is all there is? Open by Andre Agassi. This is probably the best memoir. I've ever read. And I say that as somebody who is not even a tennis fan and didn't even know anything about Andre Agassi when I read it. It grabs you from the very first sentence. You would expect that one of the greatest tennis players who ever lived would not start their autobiography with the sentence, I hate tennis. But Agassi is very open. He goes on and shares stories from his life in such a candid and honest way that it really disarms you as a reader. And what it showed me is that We tend to have this concept of greatness, that it is some joyous, euphoric achievement. You know, if you become world-class at something, if you dedicate your entire life to something, that there must be this like cathartic release that happens when you get to the top of the mountain. And what Agassi's story showed me is that you can actually have a very complicated relationship with something that you're great at. You can actually hate. the thing that you're great at. And the fact that you're great at it just makes you resent it even more, that it can become a type of prison or cage to your identity. I ended up relating to this a lot because in many ways, I feel similarly about being an author. I think it's the thing that I'm probably best at and I'm best known for, but it's not the thing I enjoy doing the most. So I've struggled throughout my life resolving that tension within myself. And it was fascinating to read Andre's story of how he resolved that. in his own life. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. This is, in my opinion, the greatest book ever written. I know that's a big claim and I don't care. I will die on that fucking hill. War and Peace is a tapestry. It's dozens of characters from every level of Russian society. Peasants, soldiers, aristocrats, socialites, generals, kings. And Tolstoy does something that no other author I've ever read has pulled off. He makes every single one of them fully, completely Human, not good or bad, not heroes or villains, just people fumbling through life with their petty jealousies and quiet hopes and confused hearts and secret ambitions. The entire novel centers around perhaps the most consequential event in modern Russian history. Napoleon's invasion of Russia, armies of hundreds of thousands of men, the fate of a civilization at stake. And yet. In each chapter, you only see what each character sees. A soldier sees the field out in front of him. A socialite sees the party that she's attending and who she's trying to impress. A general sees a piece of the map. Even Napoleon himself, the man supposedly orchestrating the entire thing, is shown to be almost comically limited in his understanding of what is actually happening. And that is Tolstoy's gut punch. Nobody knows what's actually going on. Not the peasant and not the emperor. Everyone is trapped inside their own narrow window while history rolls over them like a wave that none of them can totally see or grasp. The lesson of war and peace is ignorance, our own. And once you accept that, you have no idea what the events of your life actually mean and what the consequences of your choices are going to be. It makes you a hell of a lot more humble and a hell of a lot more forgiving. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell. Everybody knows Orwell as the guy who wrote 1984 in Animal Farm, as the great literary critic of totalitarianism and dictatorship around the world. What most people don't know is that before he wrote any of his novels, he actually went and volunteered in a war, and it wasn't even his own country. In 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and Orwell didn't just write an op-ed about it. He actually got on a train, went to Spain, and joined the fight against fascism. Now, give the man some credit. He had the balls to put his body where his beliefs were. But... In the process of participating in the war, his beliefs slowly got shattered. What Orwell found on the ground looked nothing like the noble struggle that he had imagined. The leftist factions fighting Franco spent as much time fighting each other as they did fighting the fascist. Political allies were backstabbing each other. Propaganda was rewriting events he witnessed with his own eyes. The cause that he had risked his life for was eating itself from the inside out. I think the powerful takeaway of Homage of Catalonia is that our ideals... no matter how well intended, will never match reality. And Orwell had to find that out the hard way. And that's the thing about this book. It's easy to believe in something from a distance. It's easy to have principles when they're never tested. It's easy to believe in something when the only thing you're putting on the line is a comment on Instagram. But Orwell actually tested his beliefs. He actually went there. He actually joined the fight. And when he did, his beliefs crumbled. And on top of all that, he had the honesty to write about it. That kind of disillusionment, told honestly, is worth more than a thousand books about what you should believe without doing anything. George Washington by Ron Chernow. There are two competing theories about how history works. The first is the great forces theory. The idea that history is shaped by massive impersonal forces like economics, technology, geography, and disease. Individuals are just along for the ride. And anybody who appears great on the surface They just happen to be the individual who is surfing the wave. Ironically, the great forces theory of history was largely invented and popularized by Tolstoy in War and Peace. But the second theory is the great man theory of history, that singular individuals of incredible talent through sheer force of character and will can bend the arc of history in an entirely new direction. Now, personally, I always tended to believe in the great forces theory. I thought individuals were a little bit overrated and that. we have a bias towards celebrating individuals as heroes. Until I read this book, Chernell's biography of George Washington is not a patriotic fairy tale. It's a portrait of a complicated man who, at every critical turning point in his life, did the thing that few expected and almost no one else would have had the courage to do. He held together a starving, freezing army through pure will. He was handed near dictatorial power and gave it back. voluntarily not once but twice and he did this in an era where every revolutionary leader in history had crowned themselves king and you realize that this was not inevitable that this was not a great force of history if washington had been a slightly different man with slightly different values and principles america would have been a monarchy or a military dictatorship or hell probably like seven different countries dealing with each other's But I think he might be right. I finished this book and thought this might be the greatest man who ever lived. And amazingly, somehow, despite having cities and states and universities named after him, despite being called the father of our country and being on the fucking one dollar bill, I think George Washington is kind of underrated. The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menard. In 1872, a handful of young men started meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts. and they wanted to argue about ideas. They'd get together in the evening, probably with a bottle of rum, and debate the meaning of life. The group lasted for about nine months, and no records were kept. Those men ended up being some of the most important American intellectuals of the 19th century. One was Oliver Wendell Holmes, who would go on to become one of the most influential Supreme Court justices ever. One was William James, who essentially invented modern psychology. One was Charles Sanders Pierce, the father of semiotics. And later, there was John Dewey, who reshaped the entire American education system. They each became legendary independently, but what brought them together at that time was a shared conviction that beliefs are dangerous. Not wrong beliefs, but just beliefs, period. They just lived through the American Civil War, which was essentially what happens when two sides are so certain they're right that they're willing to kill each other over it. And these men looked at all of the carnage, everything that them and their friends and family had been through. And they said, we don't need new ideas. We need to have a different relationship with ideas. And what they invented would later become known as pragmatism. The radical notion that ideas are not sacred truths to be defended, but they are tools to be tested on reality. If an idea works, then use it. If it stops working, drop it. A group of friends sitting around talking decided that certainty itself was actually the problem. And then they each went out and independently changed the world. The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. Most people have heard of the image of Sisyphus without knowing much about it. It's basically a Greek tragedy where a man was condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, only to watch it roll back down every single time. In one way, this sounds like the most depressing story ever told. In another, it hits a little bit too close to home sometimes, depending on how repetitive your life is. But Camus' famous conclusion was that one must find a way to imagine Sisyphus happy. The insight isn't that suffering is noble or that persistence pays off. It's that the ability to find meaning or even joy inside a situation that will never improve is not delusional. It's actually the highest way of affirming life. All right, guys. So those are some of the books that I've read that have had a profound impact on me. I'm curious what's had a profound impact on you. So leave some of your most powerful books in the comments, but there's a rule. No self-help books, no life advice, no self-improvement, no productivity hacks, none of that shit. We're talking novels, literature, plays, poetry. What has had the biggest effect on you? Put it down in the comments below. Explain what it was. Explain what the best takeaway was and why we should read it. See you in the next video.

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We've all read the self-help books that make us better people, but what about the non-self-help books? Here are 14 incredible books that I took life-changing lessons from and didn't expect to change how I see the world. 

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What books changed how you see things without you expecting them to?