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The Best Self-Help Books To Keep You Motivated Until 2020 (And Beyond)

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Are you hoping to get on the track to self-improvement? Whether you’re a seasoned business executive, recent graduate or newlywed, there’s a book that can help you become your best self in every aspect of life.

Here are the best new self-help books on the market to inspire and inform your efforts, plus a perennial title you won’t want to miss.

The Morning Mind: Use Your Brain to Master Your Day and Supercharge Your Life by DrRob Carter III

The best way to have a great life, says author Rob Carter III, is to start every day off right. The author, who has a Ph.D. in biomedical sciences as well as stints under his belt as a Gates Scholar and postdoc research fellow at Harvard, shares insights and opinions on the best way to accomplish this. He provides scientific backing for how these morning habits can be transformational when it comes to mood and productivity.

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Girl, Stop Apologizing: A Shame-Free Plan for Embracing and Achieving Your Goals by Rachel Hollis

Girl, Stop Apologizing is the follow-up to Hollis’s runaway bestseller, Girl, Wash Your Face. Like its predecessor, it’s written in Rachel Hollis’ youthfully engaging, informal style and is dedicated to a serious goal: to convince and enable women to build their self-esteem and achieve their goals, large and small. In the new book, in particular, Hollis encourages women to stop defining themselves only in terms of others and illustrates how to accomplish this shift in mentality. (But there’s plenty for men to learn here as well.)

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The Right—and Wrong—Stuff: How Brilliant Careers Are Made and Unmade by Carter Cast

Self-help books tend to stress how everything can go right and gloss over how things can go catastrophically wrong. Carter Cast, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management and a venture capital advisor at Pritzker Group Venture Capital, bravely addresses both possibilities in The Right—and Wrong—Stuff. Thus, the reader gets both a dose of encouragement and a series of cautionary tales showing how the career bus can sometimes jump the guardrails and plunge over the cliff—and how to avoid that fate.

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Networking for People Who Hate Networking: A Field Guide for Introverts, the Overwhelmed, and the Underconnected by Devora Zack

Sometimes the world seems divided into people who love networking (natural-born schmoozers, in other words) and those who dislike it so much they’d rather brush their teeth with glue-flavored toothpaste. While reality may be (a bit) more nuanced, Devora Zack has wisely aimed Networking for People Who Hate Networking at those who fall in or near that second category, to help them make and nurture connections in spite of their dislike for and apprehension of the task.

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The Book of Mistakes: 9 Secrets to Creating a Successful Future by Skip Prichard

Some authors find that the best way to teach self-help is to be expansive rather than explicit. In The Book of Mistakes, Skip Prichard applies the tools of fiction to involve the reader and to attach his lessons to the reader’s imagination. The result is a powerful book of inspiration and advice on how to create a successful future.

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Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone by Mark Goulston

In this recent classic, psychiatrist and business consultant Mark Goulston shares his techniques for breaking through the habitual and emotional barriers in people that may be blocking the reader from delivering their message successfully, even when it most needs to be heard. Whether you want to improve relationships with co-workers or relatives, Just Listen will help you press pause on always trying to get your point across and to instead open your ears first.

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