What makes a perfect summer read? The author has a strong voice while offering an extraordinary insights. The book should be a quick read that allows you to easily make changes in your life or work to support your career goals. Below are Smart Lemming recommendations for this week’s summer reading list.

The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential in Business and in Lifeby Leo Babauta

I aspire to live with limitations. I never thought I’d say that, but if I want to live without chaos, then Babauta recommends that I stop multitasking on several things at once, limit my email habits, stay in the moment on routine tasks. I’ve decluttered my workspace, but what else can I do limit distractions, becoming more focuses and productive? Babauta offers six principles of simple productivity:

1. Set limitations
2. Choose the essentials in principles, objectives, priorities, consequences, and wishes versus requirements
3. Simplify
4. Focus
5. Create habits
6. Start small

Not only will you learn how to become more productive, but also how to live in a peaceful state and stay motivated by going slowly through life, focusing on the positive, seeking inspiration, and giving yourself credit.

White Collar Zen: Using Zen Principles to Overcome Obstacles and Achieve Your Career Goalsby Steven Heine

Want to learn more about Zen at work? Heine’s book teaches how to apply Zen techniques to business situations, practice bounce back from setbacks, and solve conflicts by having Zen Encounters, not confrontations. Zen teachings emphasize impartial clarity of thought and intuitive awareness. In life and work, Heine teaches us to have encounters, not confrontations by using four steps: feel, speak, think, and know. Zen urges you to concentrate on positive deeds, minimize your flaws, and turn obstacles into opportunities.

Life is uncertainty. Anxiety can be caused by what is absent or what is present. At work, if you’re waiting for a promotion that hasn’t come through yet, you must learn to trust yourself and your own evaluation of any given circumstance. You cause your own suffering, as well as your own liberation.

Power of An Hour: Business and Life Mastery in One Hour A Weekby Dave Lakhani

Learn the seven steps to take to create change in just one hour by entering a state of “Fearsome Focus” that allows you to get the most out of an hour. Lakhani offers 18 tips on how to tackle personal and business challenges in one hour each. Lakhani’s book is one of the best productivity and time management books on the market. He teaches how to create lasting changes in just an hour by eliminating distractions, creating, and following an action plan. He recommends constantly check to measure your progress, and recognize when you are finished.

When you schedule a Critical Power Hour to address a desired change, your first task in each focused hour is to define what you want. The next step is to critically thinking skills to examine your problem and solution logically, as you think creatively to examine all your options. Lakhani believes that once you know your goal, it’s easy to create a roadmap of action steps. Your focused hour often will end with the first action step on your roadmap. Sustain your motivation by constantly referring to your action plan, acknowledging each success, and rewarding yourself when you complete the plan.

The Highest Goal: The Secret That Sustains You in Every Momentby Michael Ray

What the highest goal? It is your life’s deepest purpose. By reading this book, you’ll learn how to discover your highest goal by identifying what obstacles stand between you and your goal. Ray teaches you the steps to take to live your highest goal. Why execute someone else’s plan for your life, when you can follow your heart. Living your highest goal enables you to be happy, personally and professionally. When you live your highest goal, problems, obstacles, and fears become opportunities for growth and learning. Surviving a crisis can be the catalyst that leads you to live your highest goal. Ray teaches you how to identify “live-withs,” or affirming mottos, to help you on your journey.

The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander

The Zanders teach you twelve practices to expand the possibilities in your life to reach for your dreams and achieve more fulfillment by following these steps:

• Identify and change the habits, assumptions, perceptions, and attitudes that support the life that you are currently living.
• Think abundance rather than limitations and scarcity.
• Assume that you contribute to the world and live accordingly.
• Lead from where you are. Imagine that you can enroll people and change the world from any position you occupy.
• Learn to take yourself less seriously.
• Don’t replicate “business as usual.” Consider new ways and approaches.
• Be passionate about what you do.
• Become the spark that lights the fire of those around you.
• Be curious about how it is that you yourself are the one constant when unwanted things happen in your life, and play the game of taking responsibility for everything.
• You can become open to infinite possibilities.
• Put yourself into the mind-set of the group – think “we,” not “I.” Leave room for everyone‘s contribution.

Whether  you’re going to the beach or hibernating in your home this weekend, check out these summer reads to living a minimalist life, practicing zen at work, leveraging one hour to become more productive, finding your passion in work, and learning the art of possibility.

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