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Best Classic Books to Read. Reading classic books can boost your learning experience.

Best Classic Books to Read

There are some reasons why classic books can do that: they have stood the test of time, they give you different “lenses” to look through, and they will most likely be relevant even to the far future. Reading the classics is an excellent intellectual exercise which will arm you with a lot of powerful intellectual tools. To find good classic books, there are trusted recommendations that can help us. The recommendations are found in the books How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren, and The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer, both of which I believe are high-quality books. While I believe a book which is recommended by any of them is good, I think it’s safe to say that a book which is recommended by both of them is great.

So without further ado, here are the recommended classic books along with the Amazon and free download links (if any): Novel Autobiography and Memoir History Drama Poet. How to Be Well Liked. Books - 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Habit 4: Think Win-Win. Think Win-Win isn't about being nice, nor is it a quick-fix technique.

Books - 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Habit 4: Think Win-Win

It is a character-based code for human interaction and collaboration. Most of us learn to base our self-worth on comparisons and competition. We think about succeeding in terms of someone else failing--that is, if I win, you lose; or if you win, I lose. Life becomes a zero-sum game. There is only so much pie to go around, and if you get a big piece, there is less for me; it's not fair, and I'm going to make sure you don't get anymore.

Win-win sees life as a cooperative arena, not a competitive one. A person or organization that approaches conflicts with a win-win attitude possesses three vital character traits: Life Map: Tool to Examine Your Life. To get the most of your life, it is important to see how your life is doing.

Life Map: Tool to Examine Your Life

While you can do it at the micro level by looking at your single day or week, it is even more important to see it at the macro level. As I’ve written in Vision – The First Step of Life Optimization, all of us should have a vision, a life purpose, that will guide our whole life and provide measurement of our productivity. The macro level view will allow us to see how our life is doing to meet that vision.

Have we done good enough? Or years just pass by without anything significant? To answer these questions myself, I create “life map” which shows how my life is doing at years level. So here’s what I do: I write down several recent years in my life and simply divide each year into two parts, semester 1 and 2 (you can use any other kind of division if you like). Here is an example: 2005 Semester 1 Passing Microsoft Certified Professional exam. It’s simple, right? 37 Lessons to Help You Live a Life that Matters.

How to Focus: Five Levels of Mental Focus. A few weeks ago I wrote about the danger of being obsessed.

How to Focus: Five Levels of Mental Focus

There I wrote that there are three states we can possibly be in: lacking focus, being focused, and being obsessed. 15 Tips to Stay Positive. There are times when we must go through negative situations.

15 Tips to Stay Positive

Maybe people say something negative about us, or they show rejection or even resentment against us. In such situations, it may be difficult to stay positive. Effective Time Management = Automatic Workflow. I Just want to share a short thought about time management. I think . This way, we can concentrate on doing valuable things at hand without the need of remembering anything. Our system will run in autopilot and present us with the right thing at the right place and the right time.

This is the idea behind Getting Things Done (GTD) with tools like , , , etc. On the other side, this is also the idea we can use to extend our system beyond GTD or even create our own system. How to Read Online Articles Effectively. There are so many information and knowledge you can get from the Internet.

How to Read Online Articles Effectively

Most of them are in the form of articles. Whether from blogs, newspapers, or portals, there are a lot of information and knowledge available as articles. 14 Awfully Simple Things to Be Grateful for in Your Daily Life. Most people agree that being grateful is important if we are to have a positive life.

14 Awfully Simple Things to Be Grateful for in Your Daily Life

Being grateful makes we see the bright side of life that turns us into positive people. Unfortunately, we often look at what we don’t have instead of what we have, and we end up complaining instead of being grateful. 22 Things You Can Do Daily to Improve Your Life. There is no such thing as instant improvement in life.

22 Things You Can Do Daily to Improve Your Life

Instead, you can only grow yourself. And as you know in agriculture, growth can only happen little by little over time. Bare eyes won’t be able to see the growth of a tree daily, but over the years it will grow to a big tree. Similarly, you grow yourself little by little everyday. The things that you do daily may seem small and insignificant, but overtime people will be surprised to learn how much you have growth in life. Therefore, to improve your life, the focus should be on the small things you do daily.