The Books That Helped Me Stop Proving Myself and Start Living for Real | (#037) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

Okay, this is the recommended readings episode. Really excited to get into this. I have read a lot of books. For the oral exam for my PhD, I had to be examined on a major reading list of over 60 books and two minor reading lists of 30 books each, and over the years, I’ve easily read thousands of books in philosophy, psychology, spirituality, religion, leadership, psychotherapy, personal growth, of course, easily over 1,000. Most of them were interesting, some were inspiring, but only a few, only a handful, really, actually really got to me deeply and have stayed with me over the years. [00:58.8]

These are books that didn’t just changed my thinking, but instead changed how I lived in the world. These are books that inform my thinking and my feelings, like a voice in the background of my mind, asking tougher questions than I was ready to answer when I first read the books. This episode is about the particular books that I think most people wouldn’t have heard of or would overlook, and these are about books that I haven’t covered in previous episodes in any of my podcasts.

This isn’t a top 10 list. This isn’t a bunch of trendy titles or bestseller titles, or clever hacks for morning routines. I’m not handing out dopamine hits or bookshelf porn. I made this list because so many people I work with, high-achievers, smart professionals, people with ambition, keep running into the same walls. On the surface, they’re doing everything right they think. They’re productive. They’re goal-oriented. They’re driven, but underneath the surface, they feel unsettled, a low-grade anxiety and fear or stress that never goes away, a voice that keeps whispering to them, “You’re not enough, not yet.” [02:12.8]

A similar voice drove me over the years. It made me work harder, made me stay up later and study longer for more hours, more intensely. It made me obsessed with getting higher grades and getting those goals earlier and faster, and eventually, it led to my misery and depression. The books I’m about to share in this episode are the ones that I wished I had back then to rescue me earlier or faster from having my face shoved into my lowest moments of my life.

This episode isn’t about the entire reading list, which comes out to over 80 books. This episode, I hope, will be like a map, a path through three questions that most people avoid facing through their entire lives and these questions are: What’s going to happen when I die? What makes a good person? Who am I if I’m not trying to prove anything or to prove myself? [03:14.5]

In case you don’t know who I am, I’m David Tian, and for over the past almost two decades, I’ve been helping hundreds of thousands of people from over 87 countries find fulfillment to success and meaning in the personal and professional lives.

In this new reading list I’ve just compiled, I will put the link to it in the show notes. I put the list of books into categories and the categories are not in any particular order. They’re basically in the order that I thought them up and wrote them down on my Evernote while I was compiling the list. Feel free to start from whichever category you are more interested in. But within the category, I tried to put the books in the order of what I would recommend the general reader begin with, so that the book at the top of each category is the top of class, in my mind, as the one I would recommend to most people in this category to start with, and then I have them roughly in the order that I would recommend the general reader to go through them in. [04:16.5]

Remember, this is aimed at the general reader. You are a specific person and hopefully you know yourself well enough that you know how to adapt any kind of recorded content for your own uses. Even though I’ve numbered the books to make it easier to refer to and to double-check that I’ve got them all in there, the order is not set in stone.

Okay, having gotten that caveat out of the way, let’s dive into the four themes that I want to draw out of the reading list in this episode. The first is on death anxiety. We avoid death, and as a result, end up avoiding life. Most people don’t realize this. I didn’t either for decades of my life. I thought I was living, especially for several years when I was having a lot of pleasure. [05:06.3]

I was experiencing pleasure. I was achieving. I was performing. I was ticking the boxes, collecting milestones, but unconsciously, I was distracting myself from the deeper thing that I and most people don’t want to face—death, not just physical death, although that’s the biggest ending, but I mean also the smaller endings, like the inevitable goodbyes with the deep, quiet truth that all of this, me, you, the people we love and care about, won’t last.

There’s an amazing book by Irvin Yalom called Staring at the Sun. I recommend everybody read this. I used to recommend The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, which I still recommend, but The Denial of Death is written at a graduate-level comprehension. Staring at the Sun is written very well and understandably and clear by an amazing writer and a renowned psychotherapist. He is like a pioneer in many ways, Irvin Yalom. [06:11.0]

I have, over the past few years, become a huge fan of Irvin Yalom and his writing. He has written almost a dozen books, or maybe more than that. I own all of them and I’ve read all of them, including his giant textbooks, which sometimes come out to 800 pages, and have read them multiple times. I recommend everything by Irvin Yalom. I’ve chosen a few titles to include in the reading list that everyone should read.

One of the main themes in his book Staring at the Sun is that the fear of death, the fear of confronting death, isn’t just about death itself. It’s the background hum that drives so much of our anxiety in life, our need to prove ourselves, our obsession with trying to be successful. When we don’t face it, when we push it away or distract ourselves or numb ourselves, we end up living a life shaped by fear, anxiety, guilt, pressure and shame. [07:14.8]

But the moment we actually turn and face death, when we stop running and start looking directly into that terrifying truth, then something really powerful can happen. We get calm, and it might not make logical sense at first, but Yalom writes that when people begin to accept their mortality, they start to feel more alive, more present, more clear. They make decisions from a different place, not from fear or anxiety anymore, but from value. [07:51.1]

In another book, one of the final books he has written, A Matter of Death and Life, which he wrote with his wife, Marilyn, as she was dying from cancer, he shares that same clarity, but with even more rawness, and this book made me cry in a few different places—and here in this book, death anxiety is not abstract anymore. Instead, it’s two people beautifully grieving together. They write chapters alternately, and you see them loving each other and saying goodbye in the book itself, and what comes through again and again isn’t despair. It’s honesty. It’s love and connection. It’s gratitude.

That book might be hard to read for some, not because it’s complex, but because it’s too real, too true, too authentic, too honest. But that’s also why I recommend this book as well to everyone, , A Matter of Death and Life, because, hopefully, once you’ve read it, you will be forced to stop assuming that you have so much time. That illusion will die, and when the illusion is dispelled, what’s left is something more beautiful, more powerful, the chance to actually live. [09:10.5]

Now, if Yalom’s writing in these two books feels or sounds too heavy, you can start with something gentler, a really easy-to-read book and a New York Times bestseller, Tuesdays with Morrie. It starts off really lighthearted, but it’s also very deep, and this one’s a modern classic. Morrie is a retired professor dying of ALS, and by the way, this is a true story. This is not fiction. His former student, Mitch, visits him every Tuesday and they have a deep conversation about love, regret, death, forgiveness, everything we usually put off until it’s too late. [09:54.5]

There’s a moment in that book that stayed with me where Morrie says, “Everyone knows they’re going to die, but nobody believes it. If we did, we’d live and do things differently.” We go through life acting like we’re building something permanent. We save up. We plan five years out, 1015, 20, in my case, 30 years out. We stress over things that won’t matter really in four or five weeks, and meanwhile, life is happening right under our noses, right now, but we’re missing it.

This is one of the achievers’ downfalls that the achiever, in order to plan further out and be prepared, is always living in the future, which never comes. The future is never the present by definition, and so they miss life. It’s like that Ferris Bueller famous quote, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it.” Okay, that was kind of cheesy, but I love it. [10:53.6]

If you’ve been stuck in overdrive, always pushing, always climbing, then you should also read this New York Times bestselling book, Four Thousand Weeks by an excellent writer named Oliver Burkeman. The title refers to the average human lifespan, which is 4,000 weeks. Four thousand weeks, that’s it. Most of us burn through the first 1,000 without even realizing they’re gone. By the time you read the book, you’re going to be some 1,000 weeks in.

What Burkeman points out isn’t new, but the way he says it cuts through the noise. Our obsession with productivity is a defense mechanism. We think if we just manage our time better, we’ll finally feel okay, secure, certain, and can finally take a deep breath and be calm. You can finally feel in control, and when that happens, then everything is going to be okay. [11:51.0]

But the truth is, control over life is an illusion. It’s a dangerous illusion, because if we give into the illusion, we lose our lives. We’re trying to engineer peace and happiness through scheduling apps or through time-management systems, and in the long run, it just doesn’t work. That’s not what leads to fulfillment, happiness and love.

Burkeman encourages us to drop the fantasy of getting it all done, to stop optimizing, to stop treating time like a resource to be conquered. Instead treat time like a relationship, something to be respected, something finite and therefore sacred. Even multibillionaires have the same amount of time as we do, and that massively important shift on its own, if you take it seriously, can save your life.

Now, once you’ve sat with death and time, and real limits, then you’re ready to start doing something with the life that you’ve got left—and then when you’re there, I recommend you pick up Die With Zero by Bill Perkins. This one comes from the opposite end of the spectrum, more finance and definitely a lot more practical, but it connects with these deeper themes perfectly. [13:13.3]

Perkins argues that most people are saving their best experiences for “someday.” They don’t understand how aging works, or energy or opportunity. We are not evolved to understand a longer life, a life this long. There’s a window when travel feels exciting, a window when deep friendships can form, a window when your parents are still around and your kids still want your attention, and those windows close—and his message is simple: stop hoarding your life. Use it. Live it on purpose. [13:53.2]

This isn’t about reckless spending or impulsive travel. It’s about timing your fulfillment, spending your time and money and energy when they’ll actually bring joy, not when you’re too old or too tired ,or too bitter or too demented to care. Put together in this way, these books don’t just offer answers. They offer questions, better, powerful questions, like, “What would I do differently if I knew I was already dying?” because I am and so are you. We all are. This isn’t meant to scare you. It’s meant to free you, and this is where the real journey begins, not with hacks or with vision boards, but with death, because once you stop running from death, you finally start living fully.

Okay, now onto the second related theme, which is on moral philosophy. Now, most people I talk to have this vague idea that morality is something old-fashioned, like something you’re supposed to care about when you’re a kid or when you’re religious, or when you’ve run out of ambition or when you’re retired. But morality isn’t abstract. It isn’t just philosophical fluff. It’s not just about being nice or well-behaved. It’s not about following rules or obeying some external code. [15:17.7]

Morality is actually about happiness, and not just the temporary kind, like the pleasure kind. I mean lasting happiness, like fulfillment, meaning, the kind that shows up when the high wears off, when the pressure drops, when you’re finally alone with yourself. That kind of happiness only happens when there’s goodness, not because someone tells you to be good, but because your nervous system literally requires it in order to feel safe.

Jonathan Haidt wrote this incredible chapter in his book The Happiness Hypothesis, which, by the way, I did include in the first version of this book list, but I added it in just today because I didn’t realize how much of Haidt’s ideas in The Happiness Hypothesis have penetrated into the background of my thinking to the point where I’ve forgotten that I got some of these ideas originally from The Happiness Hypothesis, so I’ve added it back into the list. [16:15.4]

In that chapter I’m referring to, he called it The Felicity of Virtue—it’s the title of that chapter—in it, Haidt argues that a virtuous life doesn’t feel like restriction. It feels like freedom, because when you’re aligned, when your actions match your values, you stop second-guessing yourself. You stop hiding. You stop performing, and that creates this quiet confidence that doesn’t need to be loud.

The irony is, most high-achievers are chasing a feeling of worth by acting in ways that erode that very feeling. They cut corners. They talk down to people. They fake it, pretending they’re someone they’re not, and then wondering why they still feel hollow even when or if they hit that goal. It’s because their nervous systems know the truth. [17:07.4]

Haidt points out that ancient philosophers didn’t separate ethics from happiness. This goes as far back as Aristotle and as early as Confucius, and their earliest writings in Buddhism. These ancient philosophers believed the good life wasn’t just a pleasant one; it was a morally good one, because only then could we be at peace, calm, content and rest. Haidt doesn’t mean perfect. He doesn’t mean rule following. What he’s getting at is virtue in the sense of integrity, wholeness, and this connects directly to how we connect with others.

Now I’m going to bring in the author, Frans de Waal. He’s written a lot of books. I haven’t read all of them, but I have read several, and they’ve all been excellent. I’ve chosen two to highlight in my booklist. Frans de Waal is one of the world’s and history’s foremost primatologists. This is the study of apes. [18:06.2]

His most popular book, I think, is the one that I recommend and it’s one of the first books I think everyone, every adult, should read on moral philosophy, which is an unusual recommendation in moral philosophy, by the way, and the book is The Age of Empathy, and this can completely reframe the way we understand morality and moral philosophy.

Normally, if you were to take a primer in ethics or moral philosophy, you would start with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Then go to J. S. Mill’s Utilitarianism, and then go to David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, and then make your way up to Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, something like that, and those are all incredible, great books. I recommend everyone read those eventually. But I think by the time you’re an adult, you have some notion of good and evil, right and wrong, that you would have just imbibed from your environment or from your schooling, and The Age Of Empathy is the thing that you need to go to before you get into the deeper philosophy, because this connects with science. [19:11.8]

De Waal shows that our sense of fairness and justice and compassion aren’t modern inventions. They’re ancient, built into us, hardwired through the evolutionary process, because in tribal life, survival required cooperation and alliances. It required needing to know who you could trust. You needed to know who had your back, who could be trusted, who would share and who would cheat. You need to be able to sleep at night without having one eye open, in case your neighbor that so far you have an alliance with decides to sneak in, kill you, kill your family and steal all of your stuff. [19:51.3]

The apes who evolved better moral radars were the ones who bonded, thrived and reproduced the most right. Our moral sense is evolutionary technology for trust, and trust is the foundation for love. Without trust, we stay with our guards up, which is incredibly taxing, exhausting. It’s living in constant anxiety, never being able to drop your guard, and we posture. We analyze. We stay up in our heads and create lots of cortisol in our systems. That’s why so many smart people actually struggle with intimacy and with sleep and with relaxation.

But the moment we judge someone as good through their track record and through our moral sense that we have developed over the years in ourselves—hopefully, through the practice of virtue and the practice of trying to be morally good, and to live up to what we believe is good and to do the right thing—then our whole body can relax, because you can trust your judgment and you can let your guard down around good people. [21:00.7]

That’s why it’s so important for us to send signals of being good and trustworthy, and being able to tell when other people are trustworthy. It depends on goodness. That’s why the moral goodness is there. The evolution of morality is such a huge and deep and important topic that could easily devote an entire podcast to, and definitely a book or books on, and I hope to do that someday.

But, hopefully, the overarching point is clear that we evolved a moral sense in order to know who we could trust, so that we wouldn’t be overwhelmed by anxiety and stress, and wear down our bodies decades early, but that instead, we could know who we can open up to and open up with, and then put our armor down and our shields down and open our hearts to. [21:54.1]

This is what people mean when they say, “It’s safe to be myself.” They don’t mean safe from disagreement. They mean “I believe this person is kind and is morally good, and is therefore trustworthy. I believe they’ll take care of what’s vulnerable, and that they will lead with compassion, so I can stop overly protecting myself and causing all of this continuous stress and anxiety in my life and in my body.”

That’s how love became possible. These are the preconditions for real love, not attraction, not sexual attraction, not just romance, but real, unconditional love—and here’s what most achievers get stuck on. They want the rewards of love, like good feelings, connection, acceptance, devotion, significance, but without the precondition, which is being a trustworthy, morally good, compassionate person, not as a kind of persona or performance, not because it’s strategic or a good tactic, but because they value goodness for its own sake. That means being honest when it’s inconvenient, listening to your moral conscience, prioritizing compassion over gain. [23:10.1]

We evolved to recognize these traits in others. Our unconscious mind reads them before we do consciously. That’s why certain people make us feel relaxed around them and others send our spidey senses tingling. Even if they say all the right things, our bodies feel that they’re not safe, just like it’s a red flag if a girlfriend or boyfriend constantly accuses you of cheating or is suspicious that you’re cheating. That should be a red flag because this is very likely a projection, because they can’t trust you because they don’t trust themselves. This is probably a sign of a guilty conscience in them. The same thing applies to being good overall, not just cheating or lying. [23:53.0]

Many high-achievers struggle when it comes to managing their emotions or navigating their relationships, and they hit a wall when it comes to emotional mastery. Maybe you’ve noticed that stress, frustration or anger is seeping into your personal or professional life, or you feel disconnected from those you care about.

That’s where David Tian’s “Emotional Mastery” program comes in. It’s based on peer-reviewed, evidence-backed therapeutic methods to help you find happiness, love and real fulfillment. Learn how to break free from the emotional roller-coaster and start thriving in every area of your life. You can find out more at DavidTianPhD.com/EmotionalMastery. That’s D-A-V-I-D-T-I-A-N-P-H-D [dot] com [slash] emotional mastery.

There’s a great illustration of this in a story of a little boy and a little girl playing on the playground, and they’re young kids, and she had a bag full of beautiful marbles and he had all these really cool jacks. I don’t know if people still play with jacks, so just imagine she’s got her toys and he’s got his toys, but I’ll just use marbles and jacks. [25:05.2]

They had been playing with their own toys, their own marbles and his own jacks, for a long time, and then they got kind of bored and they wanted to try something new and they saw each other playing with their own respective toys. The little boy goes over and says to the little girl, “I’ll trade you all my jacks for all of your marbles,” and she looked at her marbles, and she thought to herself, I’ve been playing with these marbles for a long time, so, yeah, let’s switch it up. She says to him, “Sure, I’ll trade you all my marbles for all your jacks,” and they did a switch.

They traded, and when they switched, the little boy held back some of his jacks. He gave her five, six of what he had, and he held back a little store of jacks in his pocket, which she didn’t see, and he’s like, Yes, I can play both now, and she’ll never find out. [25:53.5]

That night, the little girl went home and she was getting into bed and starting to dream about all the wonderful games she’s going to now be able to play with all of her new jacks and she slept very soundly. The little boy that night, though, could not sleep a wink because he was wondering the whole night, Did she give me all the marbles?

So, if you’re walking around wondering why your relationships don’t feel deep or why no one seems to really trust you, or why you still feel fake, even when you’re doing all the work, look here, not at your tactics, not at your image or persona. Look at your actual moral compass, because here’s the truth a lot of people won’t say out loud—you don’t get to feel truly morally good, truly at peace or calm, if you’re not living in a way that your deeper, Higher Self respects. [26:52.6]

Now, the good news is you can always start. You don’t need to be perfect, but you do need to stop bullshitting yourself and that’s the beginning of becoming someone your soul can trust again. Now, these two books, The Happiness Hypothesis and The Age of Empathy, are together really powerful because they reconnect us to the core in us that already knows, because, as you know from IFS therapy, there are no evil parts in anyone. All parts started off with positive intention and our systems want to be morally good, not to get applause, not to check a box, but because that’s the only way we get to feel fully alive with others and with ourselves.

Okay, now let’s move to the third topic here or third theme and I’m going to introduce this with telling you a book I wish I had read when it first came out many years ago and this is The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel. If you haven’t heard of Michael Sandel, he is a superstar in philosophy. He’s a Harvard professor of philosophy and of law, and his introductory course was the most popular course at Harvard for many years. He’s got recordings of the lectures up on YouTube, so if you go looking for Michael Sandel and justice, they’re great lectures. He’s a wonderful speaker. [28:13.4]

If you’ve ever felt like you had to constantly earn your place in the world, then this book will really shake you up. In this book, Sandel unpacks this lie that modern society runs on, the idea that if you succeed, it’s because you deserved it because you worked harder or were smarter or had better habits, and that’s all on you; and if you didn’t succeed, then that’s also on you.

But what we call merit is mostly luck dressed up in hustle culture, being born to a certain set of parents or being brought up in a certain environment when you were just learning how to walk and talk only, or getting access to rare educational opportunities before you even understood anything about like finance, even things like your personality traits, how hard-working you are or how ambitious you are, or whether you enjoy abstract thinking. [29:08.7]

These are mostly determined by your genetics and brain chemistry than by anything you did, and we act like we built those from scratch or earned those on a completely level playing field. Once you dig deeper into the science, you discover that meritocracy is just a myth. Why is this so dangerous? What happens to us when we buy into the myth of meritocracy?

What happens is we start assigning moral worth to success. We assume the people who win deserved to win and the ones who struggle must be fundamentally flawed, and that’s where the toxic shame comes in, that quiet shame that says, “If I’m not performing at a high level, then that means I’m not valuable.” It’s subtle, but it’s brutal, because even when you are doing well, you can’t stop. There’s always someone doing more, someone younger or faster, or richer or more ripped, or more brilliant, and the achiever’s curse tells you that until you catch up, then you are not enough again. [30:16.0]

That pressure isn’t just internal. Our whole culture is addicted to this cycle. We worship achievement and status and wealth and hustle. We post wins and optimize everything. But what happens when you want something that money can’t buy? That’s where Sandel’s other book that I’m recommending and have included in the list comes in, What Money Can’t Buy.

Sandel points out how market values have leaked into our moral values, how market values have bled into areas they don’t belong in, like friendship or love or parenting, or health or education, and what used to be sacred or meaningful has turned into a transaction. We start measuring the wrong things. We confuse status with substance, metrics with meaning, and then we wonder why we feel so empty, why we can’t relax, why we feel so much anxiety, why we don’t trust the people that are closest to us, and why it all feels like a performance. [31:25.1]

The achiever’s curse trains us to perform so well that we forget who we were before the performance started. These are the core wounds, not that you worked hard, not that you’re ambitious, but that somewhere along the way, you started believing that love, acceptance, approval and peace had to be earned, and that insidious, limiting belief poisons everything in your life, because as long as you’re chasing your worth, you will never catch it. [31:58.0]

Now, it’s important to give these parts of you who have bought into this belief, this myth, credit, because this belief had probably helped you survive back then. It might have driven your biggest accomplishments. It probably got you where you are in material wealth, but it’s not going to get you where you want to go next. These books helped me step off that treadmill, step out of the rat race.

Haidt and de Waal helped me understand why we evolved the need for morality, for trust, for goodness, for community, and Sandel helped me understand how that morality got hijacked by performance culture and how to reclaim it. They reminded me that I don’t need to win some imaginary competition to matter. I don’t need to outperform the room to be enough for connection. I don’t need to be extraordinary in the eyes of society to be worthy of love or rest. [32:58.2]

So, if you’ve been running hard and something inside you is asking, “Why does none of this feel like enough?” then pause here with me. These aren’t just books. They’re like a mirror, and if you’re ready to look into the mirror, you might finally see who you were before the rat race began.

Now we move to the fourth and final point, and this is about one of the most misunderstood words out there, which is “creativity”. A lot of people think creativity means painting or writing songs, or wearing weird glasses and sitting in coffee shops all day, journaling in a moleskin. That’s not necessarily creativity. That’s really branding. Real creativity is what happens when the mind is completely free—and I don’t just mean artistic expression. I’m talking about creative insight, the kind that can rewrite an entire field or reframe a relationship, or open up a path where before there was just a wall. Every major leap in science, in tech, in business or psychology, came from someone who was willing to let go of the obvious. [34:06.4]

Einstein had a thought experiment, a daydream, really, about traveling at the speed of light while holding a mirror, and that led to his theory of relativity. This wasn’t a math problem. It was imagination. It was play. Steve Jobs took a dying company and stripped the entire product line down to just four things, not because the data said so, but because he had a creative hunch, a design instinct, and it worked.

In Silicon Valley, the most successful multi-billion-dollar startups don’t come from copying what works. They come from spotting something that no one else has seen yet, a unique insight, a contrarian edge, and that insight doesn’t come from stress. It doesn’t come from grinding. It comes from being open, and you can’t do any of that when you’re clenching for survival. You can’t be original when your nervous system is in fight or flight, when you’re constantly asking, “What will they think of me? Will this work? Am I good enough?” That’s not a creative space. That’s a trauma loop. [35:12.3]

If your self-worth is tied to the outcome, your work becomes tight, controlled, limited, self-conscious and boring, but when you finally feel secure enough, when your worth is no longer being negotiated every time you show up, then a powerful shift happens. You loosen your grip. You start to hear your real voice. You stop looking for permission, and that’s when creativity can happen.

Two books help me reconnect with this aspect of myself—actually, many help me with creativity. I’m just choosing the top two to include in the list—and the first is The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I resisted this book at first. I thought it was for hippies or something, but inside it is a process that I regularly go to and that I now give to my clients who have burned out, especially the ones who feel like they’ve lost touch with their inner core or their inspiration, or feel blocked or just plain empty. [36:16.0]

One of the tools Julie Cameron shares is called morning pages. It sounds simple, just three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing every morning, but what it does is it helps you clear the mental junk, the inner critic, the pressure, the clutter, and it helps you hear what’s underneath the noise. It helps you get clarity and also helps you to tune in to those parts of you that are noisy, and if you stick with it, it starts to bring your system back into harmony.

Another one that I recommend is The Creative Act by Rick Rubin and co-written with Neil Strauss, and this book isn’t a manual. It doesn’t have steps or hacks. It’s more like sitting next to a calm, wise person who has been making meaningful things for most of his life and who is finally relaxed enough to just speak freely. [37:05.5]

Rick Rubin says the work isn’t to try harder. It’s to listen better, to notice what’s already here, to make space for the whisper behind the performance. He reminds us that the creative impulse is natural. You don’t need to force it. You just need to get out of its way, and what keeps most people in its way is fear—the fear of judgment, negative judgment, the fear of rejection, the fear of wasting time, the fear of being seen as irrelevant, and as well as the fear of being seen. But those fears are all tied to the same lie that your worth depends on what you produce, and that lie is the straitjacket around your creativity. [37:54.0]

Let that straitjacket go and, suddenly, you’re back in the flow. You’re playing again. You’re experimenting. You’re surprising yourself, and that’s the point of this section, not just to build a business or write a boo, or launch something brilliant, but to get back in touch with the parts of you and the core of you that used to explore for no reason at all, just for its own sake, before the pressure, before the metrics, before life got to you, before you thought you had to earn love by being impressive.

Creativity isn’t a luxury. It’s a sign that your nervous system is finally secure enough to dream again. No, this isn’t just for artists. It’s for anyone who’s tired of hiding, tired of numbing and tired of proving. When your worth is no longer on the line, your authentic self finally comes out to play.

This is long enough already. Let’s wrap this up. If you’ve ever sat there wondering why it still doesn’t feel like enough, even after hitting the goals, checking the boxes, doing everything you were supposed to do, then, hopefully, now you know why. It’s not that something’s wrong with you. It’s that you’ve been asking the wrong questions. [39:09.8]

The world taught you to chase performance, not presence; status, not substance. But the body doesn’t lie, and eventually, it’ll start pulling you back toward what actually matters. These books aren’t like surface-level hacks. They won’t tell you to wake up at 5:00 a.m. every day or drink more water or color-code your calendar. They’ll take you much deeper into your fear of death, into the parts of yourself you’ve hidden, into the stories that you’ve been using to earn love instead of receive it. They’ll show you why success without goodness is hollow, why creativity without security is blocked, why love without trust simply doesn’t work. [39:53.8]

This isn’t just a reading list. It’s a journey back to your true self—and if any part of this hit home for you, even just one line, then don’t just let it pass. Follow it. Get the full curated list at the link in the show notes. It’s all there, organized by theme, category, with the exact titles and hyperlinks to the books on Amazon, all the ones that I walked you through today, and a lot more, over 80 books there.

Send this episode to anyone that you care about who has been stuck in overdrive, and if there’s a book in here you’ve read before or one that you’re curious about, send me a message. Leave a comment. Email me your favorite insight. This podcast is a conversation, and this list is the beginning, hopefully, of a much deeper one.Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Until then, David Tian, signing out. [40:43.8]