Courage gives you the strength to take a bold step, it helps you overcome your fears. The fear of failure, fear of looking silly, fear of making mistakes. Things might not always work out the way we want, but you’ll never know what you’re capable of if you don’t try.
Courage can be a fickle thing so sometimes we all need a little extra push to get us to take the next step and be brave. I’ve compiled these 5 Books to build your courage and any one of these books will give you fuel to go after your dreams, ask for that promotion or raise, believe in your ideas, and put yourself out there more.
1. The War of Art
Notable Quote from the book:
“Are you paralyzed with fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember one rule of thumb: the more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.”
2. Bird by Bird
Notable Quote from the book:
“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said. ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'”
3. Daring Greatly by Brené Brown
“Researcher and thought leader Dr. Brené Brown offers a powerful new vision that encourages us to dare greatly: to embrace vulnerability and imperfection, to live wholeheartedly, and to courageously engage in our lives.”
Notable Quote from the book:
“For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is “I don’t have enough time.” Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of… Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack… This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life…”
4. The Subtle of Not Giving a F*uck
A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
Review:
“The subtle art of not giving a f*ck is the perfect book for randomness and laughs while you learn a lot about yourself. Yeah, this s a self-help book, but the examples used and the tone in which is written makes it incredibly different than other self-help books. If you are giving too many fucks on what other people are thinking or if you want to shake your daily habits a lot, this book is for you. I do have to accept that this book is extremely fun to read but not necessarily deep. This makes it the perfect introduction to the whole genre of self-improvement.” – Andres Piñeiro
Notable Quote from the book:
. “Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.”
5. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
Review:
“After I read this book, which I finished many, many years ago, I had become self-critical of any future endeavors which would take up a lot of my time. I would ask myself “is this or will this be meaningful to me?”, and if the answer was “no”, I wouldn’t do it. It was this book that influenced me to consciously live as meaningful a life as possible, to place a great value on the journey and not just the destination, while knowing that “meaningful” doesn’t always mean “enjoyable”. “Meaningful” should be equated with “fulfilling”.
Notable Quote from the book:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
