10 Books To Gift Your Newlywed Power Couple Friends
10 Books Every Power Couple Needs To Read
For The High-Achievers Who Support Their Family
Written in: Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Message: My top 10 books for couples
Table of Contents:
INTRODUCTION:
What makes a tribe strong is their culture.
Their shared traditions and morals, and their mutual understanding.
When one member explains something, all members comprehend the meaning. If you see a tiger in the jungle, all members pack up right away. If you see food by the river, your tribe members all help to collect their evening meal. There is no need to further explain what to do next.
The same goes for the power couple.
For you and your boyfriend / girlfriend / fiancé / fiancée / wife / husband. When you understand each other on as many levels as you can, the quicker and smoother your reactions will be when needed. No need to explain.
Power couples understand each other.
An example of not understanding is this:
A man receives the daily mail. He notices coupons for a new restaurant downtown and thinks it would make a wonderful date night. When he shows the coupons to his fiancee, she says "oh, that's nice dear, but I was really hoping to spend a little more for that other restaurant I was craving."
This is miscommunication and misunderstanding. For four main reasons:
The man places value on saving money, his fiancee doesn't.
The man places value on trying new things, his fiancee doesn't.
The fiancee places value on indulging her cravings, the man doesn't.
The fiancee places value on using money where she knows what to expect, the man doesn't.
Neither of them are "wrong".
There is no right or wrong answer when it comes to a power couple's culture. Although it is a culture of just two, that two will be the start of a family culture of many. The traditions and morals must be concise and deeply understood for them to be worth anything in action.
Couples achieve this by having the same understanding of the world.
They stay informed and they create their inferences based on what they learn. And the quickest way to do this is through books.
Power couples read together.
When they read the same books and authors and blogs and writers, they become aligned in the way they think. The ideas from the books all come together like a smoothie – different fruits of ideas that mix into one shared blender of a power couple's tradition.
I guarantee that if you read three of the same books, you will begin to start speaking like a mix of the three authors, using their vocabulary, slang, grammar, and style. Then, as you continue to read more together, you'll begin to think like a mix of all five authors. And as you reach 10 books, your actions will start blending together as if those 10 authors were your closest friends.
And the best books that I believe every power couple needs to read together are the following:
Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller is one of the most eye-opening books I've read – both in terms of understanding myself, but also understanding couples on their wedding day. It's really a book on Attachment Theory – a psychotherapist's outlook on how your childhood caregivers/parents imprinted the way you react to love. In a nutshell, depending on how much and how frequently you received attention as a baby and toddler, you are likely to have one of these three types of attachment styles: secure attachment, anxious/ambivalent attachment, or avoidant attachment. In The Power of Attachment (a very well-written supplemental read to Attached, by Diane Poole Heller), there is a fourth attachment style, disorganized attachment. You can read my synopsis here.
For you, Attached helps you understand how your childhood affects the way you react to your partner's actions. If you feel betrayed somehow, you can either start acting emotionally secure, overly anxious, avoidantly cold, or dangerously disorganized. This book goes in depth about what you can do to become more secure in your relationship if you aren't already, as well as what you can do if your partner isn't so secure.
At the end of the day, this book will help you understand what things you might be doing that unknowingly upset your partner. And as a power couple, upsetting each other should not be frequent.
The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman was the very first research-based book I read on marriage. Marriage isn't a one-time celebration at your wedding, it is a lifelong commitment that must be cultivated every day. That's the biggest lesson I learned from Gary Chapman, and what he says we should do about it is rightly popular with relationship experts. He argues that we each have a love language.
The five love languages are the ways we can feel love from our partners, but it is one of these five that makes us feel the most loved. They are: quality time, physical touch, receiving gifts, words of affirmation, or acts of service. You can read my in-depth guide on these five love languages here.
For the power couple, I can't stress how important it is to know your partner's, as well as your own, love language. This book will help you determine which love language is yours, and what your partner can do to help you feel that love language. Likewise, this book helps you understand your partner's love language and what you can do to minimize any misunderstanding.
When anyone asks about starting a business, myself and many esteemed CEO's and business leaders will recommend this book. Go to an entrepreneurial conference and I know that at least 9 out of 10 people have this book on their desk. Think and Grow Rich is a mid 1900's book written by Napoleon Hill, written for the high-achieving producer. And that high-achieving producer is you.
Napoleon Hill was a student of Andrew Carnegie, one of America's richest and well-established business moguls. Hill wrote about what he learned from Carnegie and published Think and Grow Rich. It includes many lessons about commerce, but more importantly lessons about being of service to humanity.
The greatest thing a couple can do in the world is to make it better. And commerce grants us the best way to do so. With business, you are expected to help others, you are expected to scale your influence, and you are expected to do so in the best possible way you can. And ironically, when couples focus their attention to helping others as a team, their love for each other becomes even more focused and stronger.
When you read Think and Grow Rich together, you will strike the little match that ignites an ordinary couple into the ambitious power couple.
Principles is the leader's bible. Ray Dalio does a phenomenal job of outlining the major organizational problems and solutions that his investment firm, Bridgewater Associates, deals with. I constantly come back to this book, which is really a reference textbook for the everyday person with high aspirations. It's split into 2 sections (3 if you count his history) that talk about the steps to take when dealing with 1) Life problems, and 2) Work problems.
The Life section and Work section are broken down into subcategories, which are broken down into even more sub-subcategories. Each section guiding you to a solution and answer. This makes reading the book very easy because you know exactly what you'll learn and in what context based on the placement in the book. The illustrations throughout are a big help in digesting his big ideas, as well.
Picture a table of contents with questions that you might have in life, and when you go to the right page, it will give you the answer right away. Flip to any page, and you'll be reminded of what it takes to keep pushing for your goals.
Setting goals and acting on them is the big theme within the 592 pages. This is especially important for you as a couple. Do you want to know why? Because being on the same page with your goals is the best way to grow together. If you don't know where you're going, or even why you're going, you will only hit roadblocks. And in your relationship, your roadblocks are arguments, conflict, and misunderstanding.
I cannot recommend this book enough. Principles is the definitive guide to leading an organization, and the only meaningful organization in your life is you, your partner, and your family. Without a secure homelife, everything else crashes.
I first read this book at the age of 21. At the time, it was just a bunch of historical stories on people I had no affiliation with. To be honest, I thought the claims in the book were a little pretentious – making statements based off people who have no relevance to my life. Then, when I picked this book back up at the age of 25, it all clicked.
The stories and the lessons all made sense to me because I experienced life more fully. Now, Robert Greene is my favourite author. Mastery is a book of masterful panelists you can refer back to time and time again, with Greene as your mediator. Mastery shows you what it takes to go from an ignorant 21-year-old to a thriving 25, 27, 30+ year-old.
The book goes through the process of finding the specific things you should master, based on your interests as a child. Then it teaches you how to hone your interests, the mentors to learn from, and then what you can do to outshine your mentors.
“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. When the student is really really ready, the teacher will disappear”
As a couple, this book will be the stepping stone to a life of shared growth towards mastery. The power couple knows that the refinement of their craft (or their office work, or their labour, or their knowledge) is what helps them bring value to the world – and Mastery provides the outline. Pair this one book with any of the other books on this list, and you and your partner will know what it takes to become the highest-achievers in your industry.
This is a book intended for speakers and entrepreneurs looking to market themselves. But at it’s core, Stories That Stick is a book about sharing your ideas. Granted, there are many books on communication, but Kindra Hall really makes the storytelling process easy to understand.
I actually didn’t read this book – I listened to the audiobook. Kindra Hall narrates her own audiobook, so her written words are perfectly articulated through her vocal intonations. This makes her ideas even more understandable. I really suggest listening to this audiobook multiple times. It was so good that I had to get the ebook copy as well so I could refer back to specific sections again and again.
Stories That Stick teaches you the importance of anecdotes – which is something I never really understood. I grew up under science professors and lab researchers, and the art of sharing compelling ideas wasn’t particularly important. But when you read Kindra Hall’s book, you will see just how much more persuasive anecdotes and illustrative examples and stories really are in your life. Compared to strict scientific date, it is the story that will make a difference in people’s lives.
Power couples know that their stories are important, so they learn how to best tell them. Stories That Stick teaches you how to tell your stories. How to tell your meaningful stories in meaningful ways. Whether you are influencers, YouTubers, content creators, or business owners, Stories That Stick will teach you how to share your knowledge with the world in order to make a meaningful difference. Power couples know how to communicate their experiences and knowledge, and this is the perfect book to teach you how.
Yuval Noah Harari is a man that gets invited to many talks about human society. And for good reason. Sapiens was the first of his trilogy set of books about human history and evolution. When it comes to a general awareness of human privilege, pain, and ego, Sapiens is the book I recommend all the time.
Harari’s words are so easy to follow that it almost feels like you’re just going on a fairytale adventure through time. Except it’s not a fairytale, but a factual history on how humans became the humans we are today. From foragers to domesticated agriculturalists, and bartering to physical currencies. When you read this book, you get a real sense of how privileged and cushy our lives are today. It really puts you in your place to really appreciate all the incredible things that our ancestors had to go through.
On the other end, it also talks about the darker sides of humans and what we currently do today to fix these past mistakes. This is extremely important for you, the high-achieving couple. When you can understand where our economy and societies came from, you see the bright light towards a better future. And this better future can be found with your guidance and your help.
This is the second book by Robert Greene on this list. The Laws of Human Nature is much like Greene’s Mastery, in that it explains the lives of historical figures to teach you lessons. But instead of showing you the path to mastery in your craft, The Laws of Human Nature exposes and explains the 18 laws of human nature. The 18 things that every human has in their character trait to varying degrees.
One law of human nature that I always think back to is the law of grandiosity. The law of grandiosity basically states that every human is susceptible to overvaluing and exaggerating his or her own image. We think too highly of ourselves and of our opinions, and this leads us to an almost pompous behaviour at the wrong times. This law (the 11th law in the book) is very prominent in today’s society of instant social communication and instant gratification. When you read this chapter, you will see just how big everyone’s heads are, including yours.
When you think this book is describing your worst enemies, Robert Greene slowly starts to make it apparent that you are just as likely to be like your enemies. Or your competition. Or your colleagues. As you read The Laws of Human Nature, you will start to see just how predictable we truly are as a species of set behaviours. And once you can understand people, you can understand yourself and your partner even more – thus being even more in tune with one another.
There is so much I’d like to say about this book, like how much it opened my eyes to reality, and how much more I understand the way people think and act. If you want to get at the souls of people’s minds and bodies, read this book. Then re-read this book. And then keep it on your desk whenever you’re dealing with someone problematic, because this book will teach you how to deal with this person.
Eckhart Tolle is a man with many followers, and for good reason. He is the author of both A New Earth and The Power of Now (the perfect supplemental read to this book), pivotal mainstream books on spirituality. Oprah had him on her show and actively went through his teachings with her audience. I believe you can listen to their chat together somewhere online. If spirituality is something you are familiar with, I’m sure you’ve already come into contact with Tolle’s work. But if spirituality is something you aren’t familiar with in today’s world, I urge you to start here.
A New Earth revolves around Eckhart Tolle’s one big message, and that message is to live in the present moment. Live in the now. His first book, The Power of Now, explains what the present moment does for us, but it’s the second book, A New Earth, that really explains why and how to best use the present moment.
In a nutshell, if you can keep your conscious awareness on the things you are presently doing and what you are currently around, then you are in tune with the universe. If you aren’t focused on the present, that means your conscious is focused on the past or some imaginary future – this is not the present, and thus not the true universe. I know this might sound a little woo-woo, but as you read this book, all your curiosities will start to shine. You will be so engaged with Tolle’s teachings because they will all make sense to you as you read them.
I highly suggest you read this book in a space that allows your mind to focus as well as explore. Don’t sit near any distractions so you can allow your inner spirituality to come out. I guarantee that as soon as you let yourself examine the ideas in this book, your mind will be exposed to so many creative ideas. And as a power couple, creativity in what you do together comes from this inner spirituality. Let it build your relationship with each other.
This book is almost a cliché on everyone’s recommended list, but for good reason. It is a phenomenal story. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho is the only fiction book on this list. I’m not the biggest fiction-book reader, but when I hear so many positive reviews and suggestions to read a book, I will eventually succumb to reading it. I’m glad it was The Alchemist.
It’s a story of a boy on a mission to find a treasure he keeps seeing in his dreams. He goes through many hurdles, but the overarching theme in this book is that there is a universal language among people, animals, and the nature of the world. It’s a parable to bring out the best in us, as humans for other humans, but also as humans for the entire planet.
I think back to this story every so often, and I always ponder what the true message of this book really is. I haven’t done any background research on it, and might not ever do any because the open interpretation is what makes this artistic piece of literature so relatable. As a power couple, this is the ultimate gateway into each other’s creative minds. I really do believe that the way you interpret and explain this book will subconsciously show you your values. The adventurous story is a truly epic way to share this.
In Conclusion:
And that’s the end of this list. If I had room for only 10 books on my bookshelf, these would be on it. If you’ve read any of these, please leave a comment below – I’d love to hear the biggest message you got from these books. And please share any of your recommendable books to me and any future readers!
The 10 Books for Power Couples:
1. Attached
2. The 5 Love Languages
3. Think and Grow Rich
4. Principles
5. Mastery
6. Stories That Stick
7. Sapiens
8. The Laws of Human Nature
9. A New Earth
10. The Alchemist
Until next time,
Aaron Daniel
