Read the heroic books. One of the wonderful things that my father shared in our home was many of the great books from the complete works of Shakespeare, to the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments with Truth.
Begin to read the great books of wisdom. You may not want to read the complete works of Shakespeare, but you should want to read Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. What an amazing book. He carried it with him for many years to make sure every word was just perfect. You will want to read As You Think from James Allen, Man’s Search for Meaning written by Viktor Frankl and Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom.
You will also want to read the works of the icons that have graced business, productivity, creativity, and society. That’s the wonderful thing about reading the heroic books- it allows you to get into their minds.
You’ll learn how they dealt with difficulty, how they handled self-doubt, how they rebounded and leveraged heartbreak, how they en joy their times at the top of the mountain, and how they dealt with their times in the valley of darkness. They represent the human journey. One of great values of learning is you can collapse time. You can distill what took an icon 50 years to live and write in just one book.