Many people dream of being able to quit their day job and gain some financial and personal freedom. The idea of leaving your day job, travelling the world, working from anywhere you please, and feeling great about the work you do every single day is, for many people, a great life. That’s why we’ve compiled 5 essential business books for anyone wanting to grow personally and professionally so they can live a life they only dream about.

These books aren’t a short cut or make your dream life easy to achieve. There is inevitably going to be a lot of hard work, many failures and plenty of struggles along the way, but these books give you the blueprint. You’ll have to provide the courage and the strength, but in return, you’ll get to enjoy the sweet prize at the end of this beautiful journey.

5 Books That Will Help You Start a Business and Replace Your Day Job

This is an honest to goodness “Get Rich Quick” book. But you must understand two things. First quick is 5 to 10 years. Second quick does not mean easy.

An excellent book with a cheesy title. A perfect first book for a budding entrepreneur, this will really help you to understand your own definition of “rich”, what your actual goals are, and whether or not you knew the steps involved in getting there.

(As featured in 5 Best Business Books Recommended By Entrepreneurs)

A very well-known book for budding entrepreneurs, The 4-Hour Workweek is an absolute must read if you want to learn how to have “full time” pay on a part time schedule. It has so many potential uses. The author used it to travel the world and streamline his businesses to require as little hands-on time as possible.

This book is a bible for new business ventures. Regardless of the business you build, this will teach you the mindset of creating quick “minimum viable products” and using the feedback loop to quickly change your product based on user input. Many successful new businesses operate like this.

A really interesting read into corporate counterculture. This company hates meetings and other time-wasters, and offers many new and unique work-changing practices that keep people productive. It makes fun of the typical hour-long meeting, and dives into the practices of a company that operates with primarily remote employees.

As the title of the book implies, Covey describes the seven habits of highly effective people and techniques for adopting the seven habits. Covey makes clear that an individual must make a paradigm shift before incorporating these habits into his/her own personal life.