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Books You Should Read to Advance Your Career

Kicking off a career is no easy business and neither is stepping up the career ladder. Check out these books you should read to advance your career and gain new skills in the process.

By Patty RamsenPublished 6 years ago 6 min read
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If you feel stagnant in your career path, take the time to read this article before you decide to give up on your current dreams.

If you're looking for a miracle, sometimes what you really need is the strength to push forward and stay strong in the process. Truthfully, the best career advice you will ever get is to keep on keeping on and to improve your skills and knowledge in any way you can.

After all, there are hundreds of successful, wealthy individuals who have got off on the wrong foot more than once in their career.

Walt Disney was told he wasn't creative, Bill Gates attempted a business that failed before founding Microsoft, and Albert Einstein was considered "slow" and "unintelligent" early in life.

But did you know that there are many books out there that can provide you what you need to cognitively, mentally, emotionally, psychologically, and physically improve within your career? It's absolutely true.

To learn how to bring your current career to its best potential, reading Kerry Hannon's Love Your Job: The New Rules for Career Happiness can teach you how to be content with what you do, even when you have doubts.

You may frequently hear people tell others that they should pick career paths that make them happy. While that is great career advice, don't think that's the only way to go about it. One can take any job on Earth and turn it into something they love if they set their mind to it.

In Hannon's book, you will learn how to create new habits and destroy toxic habits within your career. There really is a light at the end of the tunnel.

If you're hoping to come across great business books, this Megan McArdle creation is a must-read as a majority of businesses come across some sort of setback or failure at some point in time. In fact, many have learned how hitting rock bottom may be the best thing that has ever happened to you.

The whole idea behind this book is that instead of throwing away a business or career that you currently have, you can reinvent yourself. You can better yourself and see your job in a new light. In fact, McArdle discusses why failure can actually be essential for your path to success.

Even for those who are in the middle of switching careers, McArdle's The Up Side of Down is a powerful, enlightening read that will increase your self-esteem as a professional, potentially allowing you to grow rich.

Now What? Revised Edition: 90 Days to a New Life Direction bylife and career coach Laura Berman Fortgang is another one of the top books you should read to advance your career.

Fortgang's outing is more of a general book, allowing individuals of all seasons of life fix where they went wrong in life and discover what they are meant to do. She includes modern, realistic dilemmas to easily connect with her readers.

Overall, opting for Fortgang's book is a must if you're sensing you need some change in your life whether that be fixing a broken business, changing your career path, or improving yourself in your current job.

If you want to be successful and potentially grow rich in the world of business as a female, #GIRLBOSS is an empowering book. In fact, you may have heard of the title from its Netflix series.

In the book, Amoruso discusses how she turned her poor lifestyle into a booming business quickly. Learning from her past and how she miraculously transformed it proves that we too can make a dramatic change if we put the effort into reaching our full potential. Pair with inspiring feminist quotes and you've got a recipe for success!

Before I start on this next book, realize that this isn't a book specifically geared toward business and career development. It's also about parenting, education, and relationships. Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D. covers an integral aspect of being successful in all realms of life: the right mindset.

Dweck's book is designed to give readers the confidence, positivity, motivation, leadership skills, and try-again attitude highly effective people possess in order to psychologically boost them up the career ladder.

She discusses the differences between a "growth mindset" that seeks to learn from criticism, grow from mistakes, and take on challenges versus a "fixed mindset," which is stagnant, fearful, and only wants to do what is easy.

Dweck even touches upon mental illness, one major setback people have when it comes to doing well within their career, and how to mentally strengthen yourself to achieve success.

The next book on our list of books you should read to advance your career is by Malcolm Gladwell. If you consider yourself an "outlier" or an outcast who doesn't belong in uniform society, this book will give you an interesting, new perspective.

Gladwell discusses that to grow rich in a career is not an innate ability; it's something that can be learned based on one's background, how they were raised, what their culture is like, and so on.

Apart from the latter, Gladwell also mentions how we often categorize successful people into groups based on stereotypes (e.g., Asians are smart) and how we can disconnect what we think success is versus what it truly is.

Are you struggling between happiness and the desire for more wealth? Maybe you're tired of putting in long hours and essentially living to work rather than working to live.

Maybe you have the misconception that success is about having big bucks brought on by little sleep and an impossible work ethic, slowly killing us in the process.

Unlike many books pertaining to career advancement, Huffington emphasizes the importance of memories, acts of kindness, and making connections with what really matters: neither money nor power.

Her book is very raw, real, and grounded. It allows us to remember what we're really here for and how to be grateful, letting success come to us.

Next up on our list of books you should read to advance your career is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey. If you've ever wondered what makes highly effective people so successful, the answers are in this incredible book. This tome is as effective as the best motivational soccer quotes to remember before a game.

Sometimes we think success is all about luck or having the right connections, but it's not. Covey provides excellent career advice to help readers be more proactive, gaining leadership skills and the self-renewal they need to reach their full potential.

If you want to grow rich, you have to think rich. That's what Napoleon Hill thinks. Through this workbook, readers will quickly learn what it takes to advance in business and life on a broad scale.

To teach individuals how to think, Hill offers 13 key principles to achieving your financial, relationship, and career dreams, all proven to work if one makes use of them.

Composed of different questions, exercises, and thought-provoking text, Napoleon Hill's book will allow you to imagine, dream, and achieve to motivate you to do what you want in life and actually get it done.

Last but not least on our list is this book by Frederick T.L. Leong that's one of the first and most developed informative guides to career development for minorities.

Even if you're on the fence about getting a career development book for boosting your full potential, this is an intriguing book for those who are interested in knowing more about racial and ethnic minorities and their history in establishing a career based on what makes them unique.

This is mostly an informative book one may be able to personally relate to and, hopefully, use to find potential career strategies as a minority rather than as a book for advancing a career on a general level.

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About the Creator

Patty Ramsen

Just another 20 something trying to break the glass ceiling one blazer at a time. Get your own coffee...

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