EP55 (Gold in this episode) Keith’s Top 12 most Influential Books!

EPISODE 55

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:13] KC: Welcome to the Business of Life Podcast. My name is Keith Callahan, your host and excited to be here. I’m in a really good mood today. I’ve been doing this thing where I get up earlier in the morning before the kids get up, before everybody in my family gets up and I’m able to get about two hours of work in.

So if you don’t really know the back story on what’s going on with my life right now, we just had our fourth child. So we have four kids under six. So it’s a little bit crazy here and I’ve been really trying to find the time to fit in work with just driving the kids back and forth to school, driving them to activities, helping Amy out around the house.

It’s been a really busy time for us so yeah, I’ve been getting up earlier in the morning, cranking up work and yeah, it’s just really been a great time for me. It’s been a great experience to have that “me time” first thing in the morning and I used to have — my morning routine, I used to spend an hour in the morning just doing different things like different types of personal development things between reading, meditation, prayer, visualization, breathing exercises, a little bit of yoga.

So that used to be what my morning routine was but this is the time where I have the most energy, the time where I have the most focus. It’s the time that I’m able to put out and put together the best content. So now, it’s turned into some recording time, some writing time first things in the morning and that’s what I’m doing.

That’s why I’m here, recording today’s episode. Really excited about this episode so today, I want to talk to you about my top 12 most influential books in my life. These are the underlined, dog-eared, highlighted books. These are the books that over and over in my life I have continually gone back to, I’ve continually worked with on an ongoing basis.

Some of these books I’ve been working with for 15 years. Literary for the last 15 years, this book had a special place in my book collection and while we’re on that, I just wanted to bring up, if you think about the most successful people that you know and it’s a little bit different now but prior to everything being on the internet or things being digital, if you think about the most successful people, they all had a library in their house, right?

If you think about any dignitary or any powerful person or any knowledgeable person, they had a library in their house and maybe it didn’t start off as a big library. Maybe it literary started off with one book that really made a big difference in their life and they used to carry that book around and the books collected and it was a corner in a room and then eventually, it took up a wall in the room.

Then eventually, they had an entire room dedicated to reading and study and these 12 books over the last 20 years, I have read an insane amount of books. It’s something that I really believe in and the way that I read books is I skim them for information and then the ones that speak to me, I go in and I actually make it a study. I work with it like a text book.

I work with it, I nurture it, I work to become what the book is about to take on the characteristics that it’s teaching and that’s what these 12 books are. These 12 books are the most influential books in my life and the books that I’ve really worked with over and over and over again and really just bring back that library piece, a portion of my office now has a library.

I don’t have the dedicated room yet. Our house isn’t big enough, but I do, I have a portion of my office and then we’ve got built ins throughout the house in different spots like big, big built ins. We actually could do a library room and believe it or not, when we moved into this house a year ago, there was a library in it but having three kids and now a fourth, we turned the library into a playroom. So it’s not really a library.

All right, so I’m rambling here. Let’s dive into this. Before we get into it, here’s the deal. Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to go through and I’m going to give you three of the 12 books on this list and I’m going to go through and tell you about what these books did for my life, how they influenced me, the inspiration.

The other 12 though, I just don’t have enough time to go into it and I’m trying to build my e-mail list. So whenever I have something of value like I find one of those awesome nuggets, I’m going to send it out to those people who are on my e-mail list. So in order to get the other nine books, I’m going to give you three of them but in order to get the other nine, I put it all together.

I did this big beautiful presentation. It’s a seven page presentation. It’s got all 12 books on it. It’s got an overview of each book. It’s got a description of when I worked with it during my life, what it did for me, the improvements that it made in my life etcetera. It also has for each book a link to a handpicked review. So I was going to write a detailed reviews for this and in all honesty, I’m not the best writer for stuff like that.

I really researched and I was like, “Who said it best? Who said what I’m trying to say about this book best?” And after I went through, I look at everybody’s reviews, I found the one for each book that really gives you a very good description about what the book is about and what it’s going to do for you and your life.

So there’s a link to that and then also a link to purchase the book. In order to get that list, it’s a PDF that you’ll get. It’s directly, it’s set up on my website, in order to get that list there’s two different ways. Say you’re just sitting on your phone right now, you can easily just send a text message to the number 33444 and you could do this right now.

You could do it while you’re listening to the podcast. If your phone’s right there, just type in for who it’s going to, the phone number that’s going to, it’s 33444 and then in the content, in the message that you’re going to write, it’s just “12books”. So the number 1-2 and then b-o-o-k-s, no spaces. If you’re online, you can just go to the website, Keithstopbooks.com.

All right, let’s get into this. So I’m excited to share these first three with you and the first one, I’m curious if anybody is going to ever heard about this author. Her name is Florence Scovel Shinn and actually, this is not one book. This is three books. There’s three books that I really like, there’s three books that I dove into deep with her.

The name of these three books are first, The Game of Life and How To Play It, second, Your Word is Your Wand and then the third one is, The Power of the Spoken Word and man, I loved, loved, loved working with these books. I actually haven’t picked them up in probably five to six years but as I’m going through this and as I was going through and I was really thinking back and I was compiling this list, her books had such an enormous impact on my life.

The easiest way to describe her books, so she lived in the late 1800’s early 1900’s and she was a very religious woman, a very mystical woman, a very spiritual woman and a very empowered woman and what these books really did for me was they helped me to establish and work with mantras or positive affirmations in my life.

They helped me to really understand in a very simple way that I, through my repeated thoughts, my repeated words, my repeated phrases, I had the ability to reprogram my mind. I had the ability to reprogram my subconscious mind and a lot of the phrases that she uses, I really resonated with and I used a lot of those myself and I remember these books and I’ve had them since my dog’s 12 years old and since he was a puppy.

And two out of the three books are all chewed up and I can still read them but I got the puppy chew marks in the corners of them and as I’m going through and as I’m sharing this with you, the impact that these books had on my life was just so — they had that emotional imprint right there. Snd it was during a time when I was really doing a lot of healing work and I was doing a lot of work on reprogramming the thought patterns on mind.

On reprogramming the imprint that was on my heart, that was on my subconscious, that reprogramming who I believed I could be, who I am, why I was put on this earth. So yeah, that was with Florence’s books and I included a link directly to — her stuff is hard to find. I included a link directly to her website for this one. I recommend just grabbing all of her stuff. They’re tiny, tiny little books, not thick at all and you’re going to enjoy them.

All right, so Florence Scovel Shinn and I mentioned three of her books but she’s got five or six of them. I’m going to grab my sip of coffee because I’m recording early in the morning and then we’re going to jump into the next one.

Okay next, Manifest Your Destiny by Wayne Dyer. The late Wayne Dyer recently past and while I’m on this, this one is not on my list but if you like heavy duty reading — I didn’t put this on my top 12 books because I felt like it was too much for some people. If you like heavy, heavy reading and you’re already a fan of Wayne Dyer, the book, Power Versus Force is awesome.

Anyways, Manifest Your Destiny by Wayne Dyer. Anything by Wayne Dyer. I like his earlier works. Manifest Your Destiny is one of his earlier works and again, this book there were two — you’re getting all kinds of extra freebie bonuses here. So there were two books that really, really, really helped me to start to open my mind and start to understand the power of our thoughts on our human condition.

So the power that our thoughts dictate how happy we are, how healthy we are, how vibrant we are, how much energy we have, how successful we are and it all stems from our thoughts and those two books were Manifest Your Destiny and Louise Hay’s, You Can Heal Your Life and the Louise Hay, You Can Heal Your Life is a beautiful book so check that out. That’s another bonus for you here.

Then Manifest Your Destiny is a road map to using visualization, using manifestation to attract to you, to attract you like a magnet what it is that you want in your life. So if you think about — the way that I always thought about this attraction manifesting, if you think about earth that there’s gravity on earth and Earth attracts and pulls anything that’s within that gravitational field. It gets pulled right to Earth, it sucks it in.

We look at it as, we think it’s just up and down but it’s really, we’re on this circular earth and anything that comes within that gravitational field gets pulled in. Your thoughts and the things that are imprinted on your subconscious mind are the gravitational field for you. So the words you’re using, the thoughts you’re having, the feelings you’re invoking, the beliefs, the amount of faith, all of that is going to attract to you exactly what it is that you’re putting out there.

So whatever you put out there, you attract into your own gravitational field and that’s manifesting your destiny. The reason I really like this book, there are other books that have been written on the subject and it gets a little airy-fairy for me and what I liked about Manifest Your Destiny, it was almost like breaking it down into a science like, “These are the phrases that you use. This is the way that you do it. These are the steps.”

I think it was 13 different things that he had in there and that book is probably the most broken in book in my library because it has. I’ve had that book for 20 years and it’s outlined, highlighted, dog-eared, the cover is worn out and falling off and I worked with it and I was going to say continue to work with it. I haven’t picked it up for a good amount of time. In the beginning though, that was. That was the book that helped me understand and believe.

It helped me get my real estate business started and to get that started, I went from just getting out of college and not knowing what I was going to do, reading that book, understanding that I have the ability to create to manifest whatever it is that I wanted. And three or four years later, a business partner and I were buying and selling about 10 houses a month.

We were buying these houses, fixing them up, reselling them, we had a whole crew and it was because of reading that book that really laid the groundwork. It laid the foundation to A, the faith that I could do it then that faith led to belief. Oh, that’s a good podcast episode, “Faith and belief, how they work together?” I like that.

I’m in a great mood today guys. I’m glad to be here with you. I’m glad to be sharing all of this and yeah, this is what I’m supposed to be doing. This is where I’m supposed to be. All right, so it helped me to establish that belief, the faith but also the how. So, Manifest Your Destiny by the late Wayne Dyer, that’s the second freebie.

Here’s the third freebie, oh I love this one. Hey by the way, I’m going to go into this third one, one more time. It’s like a telephone, right? If you haven’t donated yet — no! So if you haven’t gone ahead and had the list sent to you yet, 33444, send a text message and in the body of the text, “12books” or go to keithstopbooks.com.

Third book, drum roll, here we go — it is Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. This is the bible for entrepreneurship. If you are an entrepreneur, if you’re thinking about being an entrepreneur, even if you’re not looking to get into business, Think and Grow Rich is not about making money. It’s about growing a certain mentality.

It’s about growing a winner’s mentality. It’s about growing a mentality that you can start from nothing and build something over and over and over again in your life. It’s not about the, “If you go into this industry and you do this and you do that and you do this,” it’s not about any of that. It’s about developing the mindset, developing the philosophies that are needed to achieve success at the highest levels in your life.

So the way that this book was written, Napoleon Hill was hired by Andrew Carnegie to basically study the world’s elite and the world’s elite in all different arenas but the main arena was the financial elite and he studied them for 20 years. He studied them for 20 years unpaid and full time. Andrew Carnegie gave him the keys to the kingdom.

He opened up all these doorways for Napoleon Hill to interview anyone he wanted, anyone. And Andrew Carnegie set this up, he made the connections for Napoleon Hill. So for 20 years, Napoleon Hill was interviewing, studying, learning the philosophies, following people around, spending time I their homes, getting to know them, their husbands, their wives, their children, their work associates.

Getting to know anything and everything about them for 20 years and what he put together was Think and Grow Rich was a philosophy on creating the highest level of success for you. It talks about so many amazing things in there and it talks about building a mastermind group and people have heard that phrase thrown around but this is the real deal.

It talks about exactly how to do it. It talks about what you’re looking to get out of it. It talks about the importance of focusing single-mindedly on what you’re going for. I can’t even really do this book justice by describing it but for a business mindset book, for a life mindset book, this book opened my eyes to be able to learn all the other things that I’ve learned.

To be able to live a spiritually based life. To be able to — if I could sum it up, that’s what it is. It’s a spiritually based book. So Think and Grow Rich, doesn’t sound like that at all, but that’s what it is. It’s about invoking the human spirit to learn how to attract to it exactly what it wants.

Crazy, the three books that I picked out to share with you, is all about manifestation, attraction and that’s what it’s all about in life. So I really believe that. I believe that we have the ability to attract to us, its energy, it’s energetic and we have the ability to attract to us whatever we want in life. Here’s the important piece: The only way we can do that though is if we know how to do it.

So I just shared with you three of the 12 books, the other nine are just as good, just as powerful, I had so much of it — these are, these are the books that I think I’ve made a life study of this. My life if I could sum it up to this point, is about learning how to become the happiest, healthiest person I could be. It really is, and then how to pass that on. Happiest and healthiest in the simplest, simplest way. I love business, I love entrepreneurship, I love really developing myself and improving myself and that’s what these books are about.

So one final time, I’m excited to hear all the things that change for you as you’re going through this list and picking the ones that you want to read right away. Putting something aside but again, one more time, 33444, this is your telephone, send that text message. 33444, “12books” is the subject or the content and if you’re on the inter webs just go to keithstopbooks.com.

All right guys, have a beautiful, beautiful day and enjoy that list.

[SPONSOR MESSAGE]

[0:22:56] KC: Today’s episode is brought to you by our sister podcast, All About Beachbody Coaching. So All About Beachbody Coaching really allows us to do this podcast without having all those annoying commercials in the beginning for you. So All About Beachbody Coaching, the Beachbody business that Amy and I run, actually funds this podcast.

So yes, it does cost money to run this podcast, we do not charge you anything, we don’t throw in commercials or anything like that, it really is, it’s funded by our business and by our other podcast, All About Beachbody Coaching. And for me, I’m just eternally grateful for this opportunity because it’s allowed me to really create the life that I love to live.

It’s given me the opportunity to do what I want, when I want, with who I want, and even deeper than that, it’s allowed me to help others to create the same for themselves. It’s allowed me to help hundreds of other people become part time or full time Beachbody coaches, to leave that corporate 9 to 5 job and create passive income in their lives.

And really there’s nothing like that. It’s cool when you have success, it’s so much more rewarding when you help others. So I mention this or a few reasons, the first reason is, that’s actually the way that I work with people and mentor people. I don’t do anything outside of Beachbody coaching because I know that it’s such a powerful life changing tool.

So if you’re curious about working with me, interested in working one-on-one, interested in creating the type of life that you wanna live, I suggest swinging over there. The other reason is, even if somebody’s just curious, like you’ve heard about Beachbody, you know there’s a lot of Beachbody coaches out there. Maybe some of them you get a little annoyed with.

It really dives into what this business is really about, which is life transformation. So if you’re just curious, swing over there. And then the other piece is, if you’re really considering becoming a Beachbody coach, I highly, highly recommend you listen to that first.

Alright, much love guys. Again, that is the All About Beachbody Coaching Podcast, our sister podcast.

[FINAL MESSAGE]

[0:25:22] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to the Business of Life Podcast. Apply what you learned today and you’ll be one step closer to creating the life you love to live.

[END]