This post is part two in a series. Part one is here!

If you’re not reading nonfiction, I hope I can convince you to start. Here are four more books that have made a major difference in my life!

Getting Things Done

Most people feel best about their work the week before their vacation, but it’s not because of the vacation itself. What do you do the last week before you leave on a big trip? You clean up, close up, clarify, and renegotiate all your agreements with yourself and others. I just suggest that you do this weekly instead of yearly. — David Allen

In 2010, I started reading personal development nonfiction, and it transformed every part of my life.

I was in a tough position at the time (trying to finish a Master’s degree in trumpet performance with a severe lip injury, a truckload of self-doubt, and nearly $50,000 in student loan debt). Since I had a lot of time on my hands from being unable to play the trumpet, I started to read.

Two nights ago, I was on a plane returning from a work trip when the pilot’s voice crackled over the intercom:

“Folks, there’s bad weather on the airfield in Kansas City, and we can’t land. It’s moving pretty fast, though, about 40-50 miles an hour. We’re going to circle around and give it a few minutes to move out of the area, and we’ll try again.”

Have you ever looked back on a past accomplishment, a puzzle you worked hard to solve, and thought “I don’t know why it took so much effort to figure this out. It was pretty simple in the end”?

Of course you have, and so have I. We poor humans are snookered by our own brains, in a phenomenon called hindsight bias.

Hindsight bias occurs when people feel that they “knew it all along,” that is, when they believe that an event is more predictable after it becomes known than it was before it became known. — Neil J. Roese and Kathleen D. Vohs

Whether we realize it or not, we each have a personal philosophy, a set of fundamental beliefs about how life works. Our personal philosophy determines what we do and how we interpret what happens to us, and as you might guess, it’s critically important.

We can think of it as a series of answers to important questions:

• How should I spend my time?
• Should I do as much as possible or as little as possible?
• How should I handle problems?
• What is success, exactly, and how do I achieve it?

Our personal philosophy is a lens, a pair of glasses through which we see the world. The problem is, most of us haven’t had our prescription checked in years.