6 Business Books Worth Your Time (And Why We Love Them)

Let's talk about business books. Not the ones collecting dust on your shelf or the ones everyone says you should read. We're talking about the books that actually made a difference in how we run our wellness businesses.

Here's the thing about business book recommendations: they change as you grow. The books that helped us figure out email sequences and profit margins five years ago? Most of them went straight to the donation box a few weeks ago. What we need now looks completely different.

We thought it would be helpful to share our current favorites, the ones we keep coming back to, and why they've earned a permanent spot on our shelves. Some focus on strategy, others on mindset, and a few will challenge everything you think you know about building a business.

The Strategy Books That Actually Deliver

$100 Million Offers by Alex Hormozi

Let's start with a confession: Alex Hormozi kind of irritates us as a person. He's a gym bro through and through, complete with that nose opener thing he wears (we still don't understand why). You've probably seen him on Instagram.

But here's the deal. This book is incredibly useful, especially if you lean toward the more feminine, manifestation-focused side of business. Sometimes we need that balancing force, that more strategic, thinking-focused approach to complement our intuitive side.

The book is full of little doodles and sketches, which makes complex concepts easier to grasp. Hormozi breaks down exactly how to build your offer and, more importantly, how to establish its value. He's got this equation that changed how we think about pricing and positioning. We even taught an entire workshop on it back in our coaching days.

This book answers the questions that keep people stuck: How should we price this? What should we include? How do we talk about it? How do we create urgency without feeling gross?

If you know what you want to sell and you understand your market, but you're confused about how to bring it all together cohesively, this book will help. It covers bonuses, urgency, and marketing in a way that feels systematic rather than overwhelming.

Is it for absolute beginners? Maybe. If you're brand new and completely unclear on your niche or market, you might want to wait. But if pricing is what's holding you back (and it holds a lot of people back), this could be exactly what you need.

Profit First by Mike Michalowicz

We've coached so many people who take money in and immediately spend it on business expenses without paying themselves a real salary. If that's you, this book needs to move to the top of your reading list.

Here's something that gets forgotten surprisingly often: the point of having a business is to make profit. Not just to earn a salary. You're not doing all this work just to pay yourself what you could make working for someone else. The goal is to end the year with actual profit, with dividends, with more than you'd make in a traditional job.

Profit First walks you through how to organize your money from the moment it comes in. It's about controlling expenses and knowing whether you can actually afford something or not. The book is underlined everywhere in our copy because it explains the numbers in a way that's easy to understand without being boring.

Michalowicz recommends setting up different bank accounts for different purposes. We'll be honest: you don't actually need to do that to make the system work. You can manage it theoretically with different buckets. But the core concept matters, being strategic and responsible with your resources from day one.

If you're struggling with money, not taking a salary, or failing to generate actual profit, you need this book. It doesn't matter if you're in year one or year ten. If the money side isn't working, this will help.

There are also plenty of VAs and consultants trained in the Profit First methodology now, so you can hire someone to implement it for you. But understanding the system yourself is valuable regardless.

The Mindset Shifts That Change Everything

The Benjamin Hardy Collection

We're not picking just one book here because honestly, all of Benjamin Hardy's work is worth your time. If we had to choose the most inspiring from a mindset perspective, it would be 10X is Easier Than 2X.

The core idea sounds radical at first: going much bigger than you think is possible is actually easier than incremental growth. That concept alone is worth sitting with for a while.

Hardy co-wrote this book with Dan Sullivan, who's been coaching business since the 1980s. Sullivan's Strategic Coach program costs tens of thousands of dollars, and you typically need to be at a certain revenue milestone to even join. These books give you access to that wisdom for the cost of a paperback.

Here's a tip: get the audiobooks. Hardy narrates his own work, and he's genuinely engaging. These are the kind of books you want to listen to multiple times. At the end of each audiobook, Hardy and Sullivan have a conversation that doesn't appear in the print version. They discuss different concepts, share stories, and provide examples. That conversation alone is worth the cost.

Hardy has a background in organizational design and was in a PhD program when he started working with Sullivan. He's exceptionally skilled at taking complex theoretical ideas and grounding them in practical, applicable language. It's rare to find someone who can think in complex ways and then simplify those ideas without dumbing them down.

What makes his work even more compelling is that he lives it. He's applied these concepts to his own business and life. He has a large family, he was building a business while in a PhD program, writing multiple books, collaborating with established thought leaders. You read his work and wonder how there are that many hours in the day. Some of his books actually address how he manages it all.

If you're feeling stuck, ready to level up, or looking for a genuine mindset refresh with inspiring content, start with 10X is Easier Than 2X and then explore the rest of his collection. His YouTube channel is worth following too, where he shares his current thinking and expands on these concepts.

The Mountain is You by Brianna Wiest

This one might surprise you. It's not a traditional business book, but so much of success in business comes down to mindset.

The Mountain is You is a collection of short vignettes, tiny two or three page essays that cut straight to the point. If you find yourself stuck in circular logic around certain business decisions, this book offers a way out.

There's one section in particular about how instinct and fear can feel similar. This is so relevant for business owners. We often think that when something feels off, our intuition is telling us no. But that's not always the case.

Wiest does a brilliant job distinguishing between intuition and fear. Just because something doesn't feel good doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. Your instinct, your real intuition, is a response to physical danger. As an animal, as a living creature, you can sense when you're actually unsafe.

But when you're thinking through problems in your head, problems about your business, and you think it doesn't feel good so you shouldn't do it? That's not intuition. That's fear talking you out of something.

We hold ourselves back this way all the time (guilty as charged). We convince ourselves our intuition is speaking when really we're just scared.

If you struggle with this kind of mindset block and you want some tough love delivered in bite-sized pieces, this book delivers. It's not one you sit down and read cover to cover. Keep the physical copy nearby, search for certain words when you need them, flip through when you're feeling stuck. In that format, it's surprisingly powerful.

The Book That Validates Your Quieter Ambitions

Company of One by Paul Jarvis

Paul Jarvis lives on Vancouver Island, and we joke about landing there and knocking on his door because honestly, he's a bit of a hero to us. He worked in corporate, left, started his own company of one, and became incredibly successful and a whole lot happier.

This book, written in 2019, is about building a company without a giant team. The title is self-explanatory, but the concept is refreshing. It keeps you focused on better over bigger.

The main narrative everywhere else is grow, scale, grow. Hire three assistants, build a team, expand rapidly. But what if you don't want that? What if you intuitively feel like a big team isn't for you?

There's a way to be very profitable and very joyful in your business without all of that. Jarvis walks through his realization of this concept and how he implements it.

From what we understand through interviews and talks, he's living his version of a wonderful life. He lives in a beautiful, remote place with the freedom to structure his time exactly as he wants. For him, success isn't building the world's biggest whatever. It's having the ability to do what he wants with his time.

That's true success. Creating a business that suits your life, your goals, your desired lifestyle.

If you're someone who maybe doesn't want the typical path of constant expansion, this book will feel like permission and validation. It's a refreshing take on business in today's age.

The Book That Explains Why People Want What They Want

Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis

This might not seem like a business book at first glance, but it's one of the most important books you could read for understanding your audience and crafting offers that actually resonate.

This is easily in our top 20 favorite books of all time, certainly for nonfiction. It's not tactical or strategic in the traditional sense, but the material applies directly to understanding customer behavior, crafting offers, and making sense of why people make the choices they make.

If you don't understand mimesis (mimetic desire), at minimum go watch the TED talk. But really, read the book.

Luke Burgis is a scholar of René Girard, the late Stanford professor and philosopher who brought mimetic desire theory into popular consciousness. This theory also underpins many big social media startups. Peter Thiel studied under Girard, and you can see these concepts woven throughout successful tech companies.

The core idea: understanding what drives your own behavior and desires as a person, as a business owner, as a human operating in the world. When you understand it about yourself, you can understand it about other people.

The book is somewhat heady and theoretical in parts, but it includes amazing examples. Burgis breaks down brands like Ferrari and Zappos, explaining why they took off or why they failed when they did. He discusses the role of scapegoating in our culture. There's so much here that's relevant to all of us operating on the internet.

Understanding mimetic desire helps you see why certain offers work and others don't. Why some brands create passionate followers while others struggle for attention. Why people want what they want in the first place.

We can't recommend this enough, both for business insights and for understanding yourself and the world around you.

How Our Recommendations Have Changed

Here's what's interesting about doing this exercise: our taste in business books has completely shifted.

A few weeks ago, we took a giant box of books to donate. Profit First was in that box. So were dozens of other tactical business books. We're done with them. We've established those systems, we know them, and we don't need to revisit them.

The books we're drawn to now focus on mindset and balancing what it means to be an entrepreneur with having the life we actually want. After ten years, we've figured out the operational stuff. What it means to be a business owner now is very different than it was in year one or two.

But here's an important caveat for those of you who haven't figured out all those systems yet: you're operating in the age of AI. So much of the tactical stuff we struggled with for hours and hours? You can get that information in a quick response from ChatGPT or Claude, basically for free.

We remember having to hire people just to learn how to create an email sequence. We had to piece together information from multiple sources to understand basic business systems. That's not your reality anymore.

The books worth sitting down with now, the ones worth buying in audiobook format or keeping on your physical shelf, are these story-based and mindset-based books. Tactics are readily available on demand. But understanding human behavior, shifting your mindset, thinking bigger, and designing a business that gives you the life you want? That still requires deeper work.

What's Actually Worth Your Time

If you're just starting out, focus on understanding the fundamental systems. Get Profit First if money management is confusing. Pick up $100 Million Offers if you're stuck on pricing and positioning. Read Company of One if you need permission to build something smaller and more intentional.

If you've been at this for a few years and the basics are handled, shift toward the mindset work. The Benjamin Hardy books will push your thinking. Wanting will change how you understand desire and behavior. The Mountain is You will call out the ways you're holding yourself back.

The beautiful thing about where business education is right now: you get to choose. You don't have to read everything. You don't have to implement every framework. You can pick the one or two books that speak to exactly where you are and what you need next.

These six books have genuinely shaped how we think about business. Not because they're trendy or because everyone recommends them, but because they delivered real value when we needed it. They changed our approach, shifted our perspective, or gave us permission to do things differently.

That's what a good business book should do. Not just fill your head with information, but actually change how you operate in the world.

Jeni Barcelos and Sandy Connery are the co-founders of Marvelous, the platform helping wellness creators build and grow profitable online businesses. Together, they host the Wellness Creator Podcast and bring decades of experience in tech, wellness, and entrepreneurship to everything they teach and create.

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