Would you say if I told you a book that teaches skills for selling real estate can be applied in all areas of your life? As shocking as that may sound, it’s true.

Ninja Selling: Subtle Skills, Big Results by Larry Kendall is a blueprint for what has made Larry and his associates at The Group, Inc. in Fort Collins, CO, one of the most successful real estate companies in the country. In the book, he offers up the principles and techniques that he has used to build a successful and lasting career in real estate. What’s most interesting is that the information he presents is not specific to real estate. It can be applied by sales professionals in any industry. Furthermore, a lot of the teachings will help to one to become a better person and simply live a better, more fulfilling life.

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It’s been over three years since I read One Second After by William Forstchen. In the book, the United States is struck by an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) generated by a high altitude nuclear explosion. Forstchen details how such an event would cripple all the daily items we have come to depend on such as computers, phones, cars, and most importantly, the infrastructure that delivers electricity and clean, running water. Society rapidly devolves into chaos destroying the fabric of the United States from within. Sure, it’s a fictional book, but given today’s situation with North Korea, it’s not an outside the realm of possibility.

One Year After is the sequel that, as you can rightly guess from the title, picks up the story one year later. The small North Carolina towns of Black Mountain and Montreat are still in disarray but doing their best to return to some sense of normalcy. The United States as a whole is struggling to get back on its feet and slowly trying to rebuild itself, which leads to the main premise of the story – the conflict between the goals of the local communities and the federal government, both of which who are trying to rebuild.

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After reading The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson last year, I decided to make a change in my reading habits this year. Instead of reading one book at a time, I decided to read two books at once. I split my reading list into two pieces – learning books and recreational books. I decided to read the recreational books at night and the learning books in the morning. As Olson said in The Slight Edge, if you read about 10 pages/day from a learning book, you’ll finish it in a month. It went well with Psycho-Cybernetics, so I decided to continue the morning reading with 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey.

To be honest, I’m not sure how or why I hadn’t read 7 Habits already. I’d heard about it and had it recommended to me numerous times, but I never got around to reading it. I finally decided it was time to push it toward the top of my reading list after seeing this post on the Learning A Day blog that I follow. The blog’s author, Rohan, wrote in that post that 7 Habits was the one book that had deepest impact on how he approached life. With a recommendation like that, I wanted to read it to see if it would be just as inspirational for me.

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