This month, take a look at these 5 Must-Read Books that will have you leveling up and digging deeper, as The Sandton Times picks out a few hot read recommendations.

• There’s also some creativity, cryptocurrency, and character-building content.
• From the professor behind Yale School of Management’s most popular class to the “urban philosophy” approach that represents a new wave of personal empowerment, there’s something for everyone this month.
• Check-in on a monthly basis for some of the hottest titles fresh of the press.
• Visit www.sandtontimes.co.za for more stories.

Just when we thought the world had lost its mind and had become a weird place, 2022 rolled in with even more surprises and madness in-store that requires everyone to relax, rethink, and re-strategise. The Sandton Times has set out to bring you a mixed selection of interesting reads for you to consider each month, to make 2022 not just a better but wiser year too:

Influence Is Your Superpower – The Science of Winning Hearts, Sparking Change, and Making Good Things Happen
You were born influential. But then you were taught to suppress that power, to follow the rules, to wait your turn, to not make waves. Award-winning Yale professor Zoe Chance will show you how to rediscover the superpower that brings great ideas to life.

Influence doesn’t work the way you think because you don’t think the way you think. Move past common misconceptions—such as the idea that asking for more will make people dislike you—and understand why your go-to negotiation strategies are probably making you less influential. Discover the one thing that influences behavior more than anything else. Learn to cultivate charisma, negotiate comfortably and creatively, and spot manipulators before it’s too late. Along the way, you’ll meet alligators, skydivers, a mind reader in a gorilla costume, Jennifer Lawrence, Genghis Khan, and the man who saved the world by saying no.

Influence Is Your Superpower will teach you how to transform your life, your organization, and perhaps even the course of history. It’s an ethical approach to influence that will make life better for everyone, starting with you.

Beyond Bitcoin – Decentralised Finance and the End of Banks
After over a decade of Bitcoin, which has now moved beyond lore and hype into an increasingly robust star in the firmament of global assets, a new and more important question has arisen. What happens beyond Bitcoin? The answer is decentralised finance – ‘DeFi’.

Tech and finance experts Steven Boykey Sidley and Simon Dingle argue that DeFi – which enables all manner of financial transactions to take place directly, person to person, without the involvement of financial institutions – will redesign the cogs and wheels in the engines of trust, and make the remarkable rise of Bitcoin look quaint by comparison. It will disrupt and displace fine and respectable companies, if not entire industries. Sidley and Dingle explain how DeFi works, introduce the organisations and individuals that comprise the new industry, and identify the likely winners and losers in the coming revolution.

Mindwandering – How It Can Improve Your Mood and Boost Your Creativity
Our brains are noisy. Certain regions are always grinding away at involuntary activities like daydreaming, worrying about the future, and self-chatter, taking up to forty-seven percent of our waking time. This is MINDWANDERING – and while it can tug your attention away from the present and contribute to anxiety, cognitive neuroscientist Moshe Bar reveals that there is a method behind this apparent madness.

MINDWANDERING is the first popular book to explore the multi-faceted phenomenon of our wandering minds and the cutting-edge new research behind it. Bar combines his decades of research to explain the benefits and the possible cost of MINDWANDERING within the broader context of psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy, providing us with practical knowledge that can help you:

• Develop your sense of self, better relate to others, and make associations that help you understand the world around you
• Increase your ability to focus by understanding when to wander – and when not to
• Magnify and enrich your experiences by learning about full immersion
• Stimulate your creativity by combing through the past and making predictions about the future
• Boost your mood by unleashing your mind.

Mavericks – How Bold Leadership Changes the World
How many of our business leaders truly embody the change needed in the world of work and beyond? Not nearly enough. This book shows you how to reclaim your power to make a difference, by unleashing your inner maverick.

Organizations are where the world’s most innovative and impactful talents lie; we have the ingenuity, the technology, and the resources to change the world for the better. Discover how to awaken the maverick mindset in you; one that will question, debate, and enhance. MAVERICKS are the key to answering some of the world’ most pressing challenges; they don’t settle for anything less, and neither should you. MAVERICKS shows you how being a maverick isn’t about shooting from the hip and rocking the boat for the sake of it, it’s about demanding better of yourself and your organization for the wider good.

In MAVERICKS, business consultants, London Business School faculty members, and authors David Lewis and Jules Goddard guide you through the five characteristics that you can develop to become a maverick leader. From passionate belief, an undeterred attitude, being resourceful, being directional, and finally experimenting, these characteristics are the blueprint for you to grow into an iconic and positive change maker. The focus is not on what becoming a leader can do for you, but on what you can do to make the world a better place.

Wise as F*ck
When facts, figures, knowledge, and everything you think you know is turned on its head, where do you turn to? How does one cope? Gary John Bishop has taught thousands of people how to unf*ck themselves and now he’s going to show how to get WISE AS F*CK – so we can sail through the sh*tstorms of life. His answer to this is wisdom.

Gary believes that in order to live a powerful, meaningful existence that carries you beyond adversity, you need something that lives outside of your everyday responses, a voice that’s independent, reliable, and brings you back to a settled place. Wisdom gets your sh*t together, through the sh*tstorms – it will give provide you with pause, perspective, and actionable insight aside from the rollercoaster of feelings brought about by unexpected circumstances.

WISE AS F*CK is the essential lifejacket to ensure you sail to the shore across the morass of waves. The show must and always does go on, whether you’re ready or not. And after reading and engaging with Gary’s latest lessons, you will be better equipped to face anything and rise up once more.

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