I read The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz while I was going through the beginning of the end. My marriage of 15-years had ended and as usual I found solace in the pages of a book. So far, literature had helped me give up smoking, drinking, get out of debt, quit my job and so why wouldn’t it also help me get through the toughest test in my life so far.

The book is a very small one and I read it in one sitting, something I had never done before. I was flying to Vienna to work at a poker tournament when I started reading it, and the person seated next to me must have thought I was mad as I cried several times throughout.

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You will find that the greatest authors of literature only recommend truly great pieces of literature. Take Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki as a nice example. I purchased this book on the bequest of my Success Principles coach Michelle O’Connell. The railway life had given me a nice living; I earned a good salary, had fantastic death in service benefits and a great retirement plan. Yet for the large majority of my life I had been in debt. Over the years I had developed an uncanny knack of spending more than I earned and it had reached its breaking point.

What I loved about Kiyosaki was his belief that the school education system was flawed. It was something that I strongly agreed with and so I jumped on every word that Kiyosaki printed in his book. Just like The Goal there was also a story interwoven with his education, which led to an improved learning process.

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In my previous blog post I wrote about the impact that The Success Principles by Jack Canfield had on my life. When I wrote Lean Thinking I also talked about the way that people move through author’s book collections because they like what they read and want to read more. Canfield has an extensive book collection but there is one particular book (and more importantly a film) that has made it onto my list of top ten most influential books.

As I ploughed through the pages of The Success Principles there were a lot of teachings that went down like ice cream and a few that went down like soggy sprouts. A few things I had a problem digesting were affirmations and the principles behind The Law of Attraction. I have never been a spiritual or religious man, and for some reason I coupled the philosophy of the Law of Attraction with these two spheres of influence. In short I thought it was all gobbledygook.

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I received The Success Principles by Jack Canfield as a Christmas present. The first time I tried to get friendly with this great white book we just didn’t seem to get along. I was very sceptical, had a closed mind and thought that Canfield’s belief that you could achieve almost anything was too lofty an assertion. So I stowed the book away underneath my bed to gather dust and blindly went about life.

The Easy Way to Control Alcohol by Allen Carr was written to help people quit the booze. Despite buying it in an attempt to try to control my drinking I never believed abstaining from alcohol would be possible. After the book had been put to bed, and I had conquered the booze, I was a new man full of potential with an open mind to fill. It was time to see how far I could push things; it was time for Canfield to shine as bright as Carr had done. I picked up the book for the second time and this time my mind was ready.

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When I decided to write the top ten most influential books in my life, I considered writing them in an order of least influential to most. I thought that it would be interesting for the reader to read each one while creating a sense of anticipation of what would come next. In the end I decided that a more educational method would be to write them in chronological order. That way not only could you learn from the inspiration behind why the book had such a profound effect on me but also learn the journey of life itself. If I were to have placed them in order of least to most influential, then the number one most influential book in my life would have been Easy Way to Control Alcohol by Allen Carr.

I mentioned in my coverage of The Easy Way to Stop Smoking that Allen Carr should have been knighted because of the number of lives he has saved with his techniques on giving up smoking. To many in the world, smoking is a destroyer of lives, but in my view nothing comes close to destroying life more than alcohol. Pitching smoking in a battle with alcohol would be like throwing me in the ring with Mike Tyson. Alcohol is the silent killer, the destroyer of families, the creator of lies and deceit and it has created such a powerful illusion that nobody even sees it.

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If you really want to wind me up to the point of explosion, then just give me a lot of excuses for choosing to procrastinate. You heard me correctly I used the word CHOOSE. Sleepwalkers find it really difficult to understand that the reason they never achieve a lot is because they don’t do a lot. They don’t do a lot because they CHOOSE not to. Everything else is just an excuse.

After reading The Goal, The Machine That Changed The World and Lean Thinking I was on fire. I was like a Duracell Bunny on roller skates. I was all wound up and skating everywhere without having much of a clue of where I was heading, or even where I wanted to go. I was crying out for help in the guise of a mentor but I did not possess the skills to find one. In my time of need I turned, once more, to literature and I bought the most incredible book called Time Power by Brian Tracy.

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In my previous blog post The Machine That Changed The World by James P. Womack, Daniel T.Jones and Daniel Roos I wrote about the virtues of Lean Principles and how I started to implement that way of thinking in my business and personal life. As a voracious reader of books I have a very healthy habit. People often ask me how I choose my books and it is simple. I read what I enjoy and this means I faithfully pursue books from the same author, or books that particular author has recommended.

Lean Thinking by James P.Womack and Daniel T.Roos was purchased right after I had finished The Machine That Changed The World. What I loved about Lean Thinking was the way Womack and Roos had taken the information cluttered in their first book and laid it out in a step-by-step guide for Lean Thinkers.

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A few years back when I was working in the rail logistics business my main customer was Tata Steel, formerly known as Corus and formerly known as British Steel. Back in those days I knew them as Corus and so that is the name I will refer to during this post. I was always envious of Corus as an organisation and would have gladly exchanged companies. I worked in a shit hole and didn’t have a pot to piss in and these guys all seemed to have nice offices and even a canteen! Much more than that they seemed to have an organisation where the man at the top understood that people were key to the success of the business. The man at the top of my company was similar, so why then were things so different at the bottom of the heap?

The main difference between Corus and my own company was Corus were much better at pushing the untouched message from the CEO to the man at the coalface. Both leaders of the separate businesses believed in the same ideology but ours had more blockages in the pipe work. In my organisation, influential people put their own personal needs ahead of the business – a group of senior managers who all told greater fairytales, to their CEO, than they told their own children at bedtime.

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I despised my school years and when I think back to those times, I cannot think of anything positive in my life that I can connect with it. It should be a wondrous period in your life where you get to learn so many wonderful things while becoming a more rounded and intellectual person. Instead it just becomes a prison to house children while their parents go to work and earn money to pay the bills.

I believe that one of the reasons I hated school was because the theory and practice of education was so boring. I remember sitting in lecture halls while teachers stalked the room talking nonsense as I tried in vain to stay awake. I remember reading books like Inspector Calls and Of Mice and Men. Books that I felt no connection with and couldn’t understand what value I was supposed to gain from them.

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I grew up with a hatred of smoking. I was never was of those children who used to sneak behind the bike shed and have a crafty puff. I was more of a bike-shed snogger than a puffer. I think I felt this way because of my parent’s behaviour. I always suffered from acute travel sickness when I was a child. I had to carry plastic bags with me whenever I made a car journey to carry my vomit. Despite feeling this way my parents would always smoke in the car, and I have always associated the smell of smoke with the act of vomiting.

Many smokers believe they enjoy the taste and smell of the tobacco. This is an illusion – Allen Carr

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