Books about leading a "principled", meaningful life, etc.?

Meditations is my favorite and Nietzsche's work is incredible insightful.

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Also i think this poem by Rudyard Kiplin is very good:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
 
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So true, if the insights gleamed from the 7 Habits/Secrets Of *insert coveted quality* type of selfhelp material are not followed up with action to actual change, it just becomes more useless trivia or another thing on life's big To Do list : Must become highly efficient. Must become enlightened by Wednesday. Must become a super duper parent. Must must must.

I prefer my "selfhelp" set to better writing and from the anti-variety, big cautionary tales: The way Rodion Raskolnikov carried on in Crime and Punishment...? Yeah, don't do that :D Shooting an Arab on a whim, like Mersault in Camus' Stranger...? Tempting, but probably gonna lead to some legal trouble. And so on.

My ex was big into David Mamet but i haven't read anything from him yet - i will seek out Three Uses Of The Knife, as per your recommendation.
It's a treatise on the importance (value) of drama, with the thread-topic "sidebar" detailing how all of us places specific values in dramatizing one's own life.

I don't begrudge the forceful tone of some of these books because there are people who need a bit of a wake-up call and realize the source of their dissatisfaction, which is themselves. Ourselves, to put it more gently. MUST MUST MUST becomes to mantra to the wise imperative that in order to attain the life we want we must destroy the one we have. Some people need that violent (read: DRAMATIC) shift in perspective/paradigm.

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A few books that changed my perspective:

Siddhartha

The Way of The Peaceful Warrior
 
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