Toward a Greater Greet:
How to Make People Like You in 90 Seconds or Less By Nicholas Boothman
A guide to making a lasting good impression, from teeth to breath to handshake to small talk.

Lessons:
• After greeting someone, immediately clap your hands, then raise your handshake hand toward their heart.

• Take deep, lingering breaths when nervous. Imagine your nostrils are below your navel and the breaths are beginning from there.

• Find moments during a conversation to say “Me, too” or to otherwise establish common interests.

• The next time you’re talking to someone, synchronize your body language with the other person for 30 seconds.

• Practice saying the word great in the mirror using various inflections until you’ve made yourself laugh.

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Make a Difference in Under a Minute:
59 Seconds: Change Your Life in Under a Minute By Richard Wiseman
Provides behavioral tweaks based on psychological research in an amount of time anyone can spare.

Lessons:
• During a date, bond over what you dislike.

• Let a smile slowly spread across your face and tilt your head toward the person you’re speaking to. It’ll make you appear more attractive.

• If you’re male, arrange to have a female friend accompany you on a night out to purposely laugh at your jokes.

• To be more creative at meetings, lean forward, grip the table, and pull against it. When your creativity is blocked, cross your arms.

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Forget About It:
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business By Charles Duhigg
The secret of success may very well be mindless repetition.

Lessons:
• Make your bed every morning; other good habits may take hold.

• To start a new habit, pick a specific cue and a clear reward.

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Do It the Hard Way:
Mastery By Robert Greene
Drawing on the lives and works of historical geniuses, Greene ­preaches nose-to-the-grindstone apprenticeship and mastery.

Lessons:
• Embrace tedium.

• Mastery is not genius; it is a function of concentration and time.

• Focus on five to ten years down the road, when benefits are truly reaped.

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Succeed by Sitting Around in Your Underwear:
The 4-Hour Workweek By Timothy Ferriss
Self-help’s current version of “get rich quick.”

Lessons:
• To avoid wasting time, check e-mail twice a day: first at noon, and again at 4 p.m., the two busiest times for bingeing on e-mail.

• Instead of responding to voice-mail by phone, go through e-mail instead. This teaches you, and your contacts, to be concise.

• Eliminate reading magazines, newspapers, audiobooks, nonfiction books (except for his). TV is out of the question, as well as web surfing (unless it’s for work). And stop browsing Facebook.

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Copy to Create:
Steal Like an Artist By Austin Kleon
Originality is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Lessons:
• Start copying. Copy your favorite writer, musician, painter. You’ll get a better sense of how they think and create.

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Be Your Own CEO:
The Start-Up of You By Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha
Live as if you were a tech start-up, by LinkedIn’s founder.

Lessons:
• Create an “interesting-people fund.” Use it to pay for coffee or ­lunches with people you find interesting.

• Who are the ten people you’d reach out to if you ever got laid off? Reach out to them now, when you don’t need anything from them.

• Set aside a full day to be a “yes day.” Say yes to everything all day.

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Perfect the Ask:
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion By Robert B. Cialdini, Ph.D.
Business- and science-tested strategies for bending others to your will.

Lessons:
• Prepare the ground for making a request of someone by doing him a small favor.

• Ask for more than you want; once you’re turned down, ask for what you want.

• Before asking someone to give you something, ask them how they are feeling.

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Get In Touch With Your Choices:
The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It By Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D.
Stanford professor McGonigal makes self-control a science.

Lessons:
• Exercise your willpower brain muscles by planting temptations throughout the house—hiding candy bars in plain sight, etc.—then don’t have them.

• Chart your willpower for a week. Then plan your schedule strategically and limit temptation when you know your willpower will be at a low.

• Imagine your future self by, for example, writing a letter to that future you.

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Embrace Your Urges:
How to Think More About Sex By Alain de Botton
Getting clean about dirty.

Lessons:
• See bad dates the way you see bad weather. Natural parts of life that can’t be prevented or controlled.

• Reframe your view on impotence—not as a sign of inability, but instead as a sign of evolved compassion and kindness.