I have always been a reader, but I did not always read the way I read now.. there was a time when I picked up books because someone told me they were important, or because they showed up on a list somewhere, and I would push through them with the same dutiful energy I brought to my chemical engineering textbooks in college, absorbing information without really letting it change anything. That is a very different thing from reading a book at the exact moment your life needs it, when the words land on something raw and unfinished inside you, and you realize the author has been thinking about the same problem you have been losing sleep over. The second kind of reading is the kind that rebuilt me.
I must have been twenty-five or twenty-six when I first read Stephen Covey's "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People," and I remember the phrase "paradigm shift" hitting me like a door opening into a room I did not know existed. Mr. Covey was not telling me to work harder or wake up earlier, he was telling me that the way I SAW the world was itself the thing that needed changing, that my assumptions were the architecture of my results, and that until I examined those assumptions I would keep building the same rooms over and over. I was a young financial adviser at New York Life at the time, trying to figure out why some conversations with clients went nowhere and others turned into something real, and the answer was not technique. The answer was how I saw the person sitting across from me. That book did not teach me a skill. It taught me that I had been looking at the wrong layer of the problem.
Years later, when I was deep into building Golden Pines and everything felt like it was moving too slowly and too fast at the same time, I picked up Carol Dweck's "Mindset" and it gave language to something I had been feeling but could not articulate. Dr. Dweck's distinction between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset seems simple when you first hear it, almost too simple, but the more I sat with it the more I saw fixed-mindset thinking in every corner of my life, in the way I reacted to criticism, in the way I avoided tasks where I might look foolish, in the quiet voice that said maybe you are not the kind of person who builds something like this. Granted, reading a book about growth mindset does not automatically give you one. But it gave me a frame, and frames matter, because once you can NAME the thing that is holding you back it loses some of its power over you.
And so the books kept arriving. Charles Duhigg's "Smarter, Faster, Better" came into my hands during a stretch when I was working constantly but could not figure out why so little of that work translated into progress, and Mr. Duhigg's chapter on focus, on the difference between being busy and being productive, made me uncomfortable in the best possible way. I was checking boxes. I was answering emails. I was filling my days with motion that felt like momentum but was not. Around that same time I found Cal Newport's "Deep Work," and Mr. Newport made the case, with a kind of quiet academic stubbornness I admire, that the ability to concentrate without distraction on a cognitively demanding task is becoming both increasingly rare and increasingly valuable. I looked at my own days and realized I had not done a single hour of deep work in weeks, maybe months. These two books, read within a few months of each other, forced me to rebuild how I structured my mornings, and that restructuring changed more about my business than any strategy meeting ever did.
Ryan Holiday's "The Obstacle Is the Way" found me at a point when I was dealing with a licensing problem at one of our homes that felt like it might end everything, and Mr. Holiday's central argument, drawn from Marcus Aurelius and the Stoic tradition, is that the impediment to action advances action, that what stands in the way becomes the way. I am not going to pretend I read that line and immediately felt calm and strategic. I did not. But I kept the book on my nightstand and reread passages when I could not sleep, and over time something shifted, not in my circumstances but in my relationship to difficulty. I stopped asking "why is this happening to me" and started asking "what is this teaching me." That is not a small change. Tony Robbins once said that the quality of your life is determined by the quality of the questions you ask yourself, and I think about that line more than almost anything else I have read, because the questions you ask set the direction of everything that follows.
In any case, if you asked me which single book changed me the most, I would not name any of these. I would name a thin novel I read in my early thirties, Jose Rizal's "Noli Me Tangere," which I had been assigned in school back in the Philippines and had mostly ignored because I was too young and too distracted to hear what Rizal was actually saying. When I reread it as an adult, as a Filipino man living in America and trying to build something meaningful, the book broke me open in a way no productivity framework ever could. Rizal wrote about love of country, about sacrifice, about the weight of being someone who sees what is wrong and refuses to look away, and I realized that everything I had been reading, all the Covey and the Duhigg and the Newport, was in service of a deeper question that I had not been brave enough to ask directly. What am I building all of this FOR.
I read forty, sometimes fifty books a year now, and I am still not the person those books describe.. I am not the Stoic sage, I am not the deep worker, I am not the man with the perfect growth mindset. I am someone who keeps reading because the distance between who I am and who I want to be is where all the interesting work happens. Mama, who never read business books but who understood more about discipline and love and showing up every single day than any author I have ever encountered, she built her life not from frameworks but from a refusal to quit on the people she loved. And I think, when I am honest with myself, that every book I pick up is my way of trying to become someone WORTHY of the life she made possible, not a better entrepreneur or a sharper thinker, but a better son, a better builder, a better man. The books do not do the building. But they remind me, over and over, what I am building for.
