Transcription
Are there books that you can read that will instantly make you smarter? I've read close to 400 books in self-improvement, psychology, behaviorism, philosophy, business, and marketing. Got to be honest, there was only a select few that I would actually say change my perspective long term. And so, in this video, I narrowed it down to five for you that I believe will make you smarter than 98% of people out there. It's not hard in today's world where everyone is sucked into the brain rot short form content. I mean, you read any five non-fiction books, you're probably 70% of the way there. Smash a like button. Link down below to our free newsletter I send out every Saturday. And that is the first link in the description if you want more ideas like this.
Thinking fast and slow by Daniel Conorman. Now, the thing I find most fascinating about this book and how it'll make you smarter is getting objective with your thinking instead of falling into the traps of cognitive biases. I guarantee you've heard of these, but really the guy who put these on the map was Daniel Conaman in this book. What are cognitive biases? Well, here are some of my favorites that he talks about in the book, and let me know if these are true for you and your life. Anchoring bias. We rely heavily on the first piece of information that we hear. So, if someone tells you, "Hey, the price is $6,000," and then later they tell you, "Actually, we're running a special, it's $4,000." In your mind, you associate a $2,000 discount. Availability bias, where we judge things based on how easily and available the information comes to us. Confirmation bias, how we get comforts in hearing what we know to be true and already believe. Loss aversion, that we feel the pain of losing more than the pleasure of gaining. And most people wouldn't take a 50/50 coin flip on betting their life savings because the pain of losing outweighs the pleasure of winning. Sunk cost fallacy where you'll stay at something so long just because you've stayed at it so long. Well, I can't walk away from this relationship. I'm already, you know, 2 years in. Or I've already been here 10 years even though my job's sucking my soul. Or I'm already down a,000 bucks. I got to win it back. Like those are all examples of sunk costs. Every time I hear these, I find it so fascinating that we all share the same hardware and we all fall into the same traps with our thinking. The reason this book will help make you smarter, it is sort of dense. One review I read said it was like eating a giant salad and you're just like getting through it, but it's good for you. Once you're able to see objectively your cognitive biases, you're able to catch them before you make massive decisions that could potentially alter your life for the worse. Thinking fast and slow. It's like watching your brain play magic tricks on you, but knowing how the tricks work, if that makes sense.
Speaking of magic tricks, I want you to pick a card right now. This will be fun. We'll come back to this later. Make sure you got your card. Remember it. Maybe you need to write it down, but uh you got it. All right, cool.
All right, so this next book I'm going to recommend is a little out there, but if you're willing to deep dive, it's like having a hundred books in one. It's a textbook. Psychology the fifth edition. Daniel Gilbert wrote this. I have used so many concepts from this in newsletters or videos like this. Uh my coaching programs. Sometimes information online can turn into a giant game of telephone. You remember that in elementary school where you have something and you pass it to the person to your left and it goes around the circle and then by the end it's always a giant fart joke. That's kind of how information works online where oh I heard this from this person from this person from this person it just goes around and so if you're only getting the thing at the end that's like a fart joke not the greatest way to get information. So going back to the primary source and this uh distills okay what do we know about neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, behaviorism and puts it in here very useful for kind of first principles thinking and going back instead of just hearing it from someone who heard it from someone.
Now I know you're like Clark, what about the magic trick, dude? I've been holding this card in my head for the whole time. Well, let me reveal it to you in 3 2 1. your card disappear. Wow, how how was I able to do that? Is it magic? Well, I actually ripped that from this book, Stumbling on Happiness. Dan Gilbert, he is a legendary psychologist and he talks about how your brain plays tricks on you just like that magic trick. The spoiler here is that I removed all the cards. So, all the cards change no matter which one you initially picked. And if you don't believe me, rewind it and take a look. You likely didn't notice all the cards changed because they were similar enough and your brain fills in information or not objective. You see this in testimonies all the time where eyewitness accounts get thrown out of court because someone just remembered it completely wrong. Their brain filled in information and convinced them it was true. And a lot of psychologists say that your memories are more of a reflection of who you are today than objectively what happened at the time. So, if you feel in a terrible mood today, when you remember your past, you're more likely to color it. Oh, it was so hard. It was terrible. I you know, all these or or maybe the opposite end. Oh, the best days are behind me. I'll never have it as good again. You know, it was better than it probably actually was when reality is more like this. But if you're in a great state, you look back on challenges and you can see, oh yeah, I'm thankful for that. That made me better. Oh, I used that to become the person I am today. So, I find it fascinating how your brain works and how psychology is not absolute. Like, we are not set in stone who we are today. We're way more complex than that. Finding out the complexities of how you operate helps you be more objective. You want to go all out, get the textbook. This thing is awesome. If you want just like a lighter, nuanced view of how your mind works, get this book. But these together, man, you will be smarter because you can see objectively why the why behind most people and why they make decisions.
One measure of intelligence is emotional intelligence. Most people are on autopilot. I call this sleepwalking through life where they don't know why they're making decisions. They don't know if they've even made the choices they made, why they're working the job. Did they choose the job? Did they choose the relationship they're in? Do they choose who they are? It's just autopilot. We get like 4,000 weeks on this earth and by the time you're 18, you've already lived a thousand of them. Well, the next 39,000, they just go through in this translike state. And the way you wake up from this and choose for yourself is really developing a lot more self-awareness and becoming aware of the thinking behind your thinking. And that is the principle of this book, Untethered Soul, Michael Singer. This guy's also total badass. I mean, his story is nuts if you read his surrender experiment. Was it WebMD? He started and uh just wanted to be this hippie in the woods, but kept getting all these opportunities presented to him and eventually found himself running, you know, what became WebMD. So, pretty nuts. The big idea from this book is that you are not your thoughts. You're the one who hears them. So, all those little blurts that say you're going to fail. Oh, remember they laughed at you last time? Um, they're going to reject you, too. That's cr like all that. That's not actually you. So, when you say, "Oh, I'm so negative." No, you're not. The voice in your head is negative. You're the one who hears them. Like, that's your true essence. Your true consciousness is not hyper judgmental, critical, self-hating. We're not talking about like a split personality or schizophrenia. Some people say this is just all the learned ick that we pick up through life. And so the analogy I want to give you that's really useful. You take a bucket of swamp water, right? And you shake that thing up. Well, all the gunk in there looks like the water, doesn't it? You can't tell the difference. What's water? What's the particles floating around? But you just leave that thing alone and you let it settle down and all of a sudden all that gunk, that sediment floats to the bottom. or the top. There's separation between the thing and what it is. And the essence in the middle, that water, that's what it truly is. That's the real water with you. All this gunk floating around up here, all these ideas of what people have told you who to be and what to do and what to believe, that's not actually you. That's just the gunk that's been floating around and conditioned. So, how do you get back to what is called your essence, the core of who you really are? You start observing that voice and he calls it the inner roommate, this chatter that's just going on like you're living with a roommate. How do you make peace with that roommate? So it's not just like on your deal on your back 24/7. Dude, you pay rent. Dude, you're going to clean the house. Dude, you're going to do not caring so much, detaching from things. That that is another word for it is surrendering and letting go. And the books like this have totally changed my view on that and have been massively impactful. Quick example here, the YouTube channel. Uh, dude, I I mean, it has not been an easy couple years for me creatively. Um, the numbers are all up and down. They're over the place. I know it's not just me, it's other people, too. But I've had a ton of changes behind the scenes, you know, shut down a whole business, let go of a whole team of people, was really trying to like get back creatively. And old Clark would have been freaking out. I'd say, "Dude, the numbers are down. That means I am down. That means me as a person is failing if my business is going down. But New Clark just surrenders to it. And I'm like, you know what? They're going to do what they they're going to do what they do. And it's only when I stop caring so much about the performance or the numbers. Ironically, that's when we get breakthrough videos or that's when we create something really cool. But it's when I care so much and I'm gripping so tightly to it has to follow the script and it has to follow the format and the thumbnail and this this like that not only does that suck the fun out of it, I think that creates like this soulless AI style content that I just don't want to do. And so going back to like first principles of like surrendering helps me create and if I don't surrender I get sucked into the seriousness of it. And so that's just one way this book has helped me and I would strongly recommend it for you if you're someone who feels like you care too much about everything. Um you feel like everything matters and you know like you want to loosen up more and have more playfulness with life and just be yeah looser and on your side. Books like the books like this books like this unted soul Michael Singer immensely beneficial.
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All right. So, this next book, if you've ever wondered why smart people believe really stupid things or maybe you have a brilliant friend and you guys just for whatever reason, you know, you're like this politically and you know they're smart, but you're like, why could they believe that? This book is the righteous mind. Jonathan height uh one of my favorite authors wrote the happiness hypothesis. Recommended that a bunch of times on this channel, but why good people are divided by politics and religion. Moral reasoning is mostly just a post hawk justification. Rationalization, right? So we judge something instantly and then we convince oursel why that was correct instead of seeing something objectively and making a decision. And oh, isn't that exactly the system one Daniel Conorman spoke about? Absolutely. So it works with judgments and morals too. Now, just like you have taste buds that give you flavor to foods, Jonathan Height argues there's the taste buds of your morals, why things feel right and wrong and why you believe what you do deep down. There's care, liberty, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. He says that liberals often use the first couple while conservatives use all six, and that's why they often see past each other. If you're prioritizing a few of these, then you're going to base every decision on that versus if they're spread out, you know, equally, you can see a bigger picture and you'll view the other person as bad. But that person will view you as bad because they have a hierarchy of no, these are most important as a human. One interesting note on morality, while we're here, I've been rereading this book, Mere Christianity by CS Lewis, and he gives a strong argument that morality is actually proof of God. Not necessarily a Christian God, but why there is a God is because we have these morals of what is right and wrong. Like you shouldn't kill people. It's bad to be selfish, right? Uh don't mess with other people's property. Treat people the way you want to be treated. How would you like it if someone did that to you? We say these things that are deeply ingrained in us. And no matter what culture has existed, they've had some version of this. And even though culturally our culture is way different than the Babylonians, you know, the Egyptians, the Incas, all that, morally more or less the same, we haven't had much variation. He says the why is because we know that there's justice deep down inside. We have a need for it. And that the morals come from a higher power that were given to us, this moral code. We even have guilt when we break the moral law. And that's us saying we know deep down inside that we should feel guilty over this. So anyway, Righteous Mind. Loved this book. Fascinating. And if you're looking for why people these days are so charged up by religion and politics, can't see eye to eye, it's because they have different moral values. And if you want to know why and watch the show, you know, from a third party perspective instead of always feeling sucked into it, uh, this book will open your eyes and, you know, make you smarter than 98% of people who just get sucked into the show.
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The Lessons of History by William and Ariel Durant. Some people call them the two greatest historians of our time. They've run Psler Prize. I got to be honest, I don't even know what the Psler Prize is. That's the journalism one, right? They're such William and Errol Durant. In a 100 pages, you get 5,000 years of history lessons. I think that's a pretty good bargain of your time. And so, what what are some of the trends here? They say the only thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from history. that every civilization thinks they're unique or special or have different problems, but these same problems we're having today existed in previous civilizations. Fascinating perspective that civilization is humanity's greatest achievement. That if you removed all law and order and food, within 3 days, we revert back to tribalism and chaos. That's how fragile civilization is in the modern world is like, I mean, we've all seen apocalyptic movies. Pretty true. In a week without food or security or law and order, yeah, everything goes to hell in a hand basket. So what is keeping it together? Law, order, civilization, our rules. Uh that is a huge achievement that should get a lot of credit. They mention one trend in every civilization are periods of cooperation versus competition. Competition is what drives innovation, right? Businesses are trying to make the best phone or we're trying to build the most valuable real estate. But if you have too much of this then you get inequality where you know wealth uh concentrates at extreme levels and people become poor ultimately conflict from that but then cooperation cycles yeah everyone gets along claps hand and sings kumbaya but it stagnates and there's no new innovations nothing gets done and people get restless you don't progress technologies in the world forward so these cooperation versus competition cycles I find interesting on that point they say that war is the norm and peace is the exception. So, every single civilization, you know, there's intense times of conflict and war and that there's brief moments of peace that are the exception and not the norm. I think a meta lesson I took from reading this is with all those cycles, we have it really good today in the modern world.
Now, if you want more big ideas and deep dives that'll help change the way you think, I'll link up right here our book breakdown series. This is where I take a book and I give you the 10 big ideas from all 200 pages into just 10 points that'll change your life. So, there's the next episode. Go watch it now. I'll see you there. Thanks for stopping by. Stop settling. Start living. Peace.