• Home
  • 50 Classics Series
    • 50 Self-Help Classics >
      • James Allen - As A Man Thinketh
      • Dale Carnegie - How To Win Friends and Influence People
      • Stephen Covey - The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
      • Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self-Reliance
      • Benjamin Franklin - Autobiography
      • Louise Hay - You Can Heal Your Life
      • Joseph Murphy - The Power of Your Subconscious Mind
      • Samuel Smiles - Self-Help
      • Teilhard de Chardin - The Phenomenon of Man
    • 50 Success Classics >
      • Claude M Bristol - The Magic of Believing
      • Jim Collins - Good To Great
      • Russell H Conwell - Acres of Diamonds
      • Napoleon Hill - Think and Grow Rich
      • Catherine Ponder - The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity
      • David J Schwartz - The Magic of Thinking Big
      • Wallace Wattles - The Science of Getting Rich
    • 50 Spiritual Classics >
      • Carlos Castaneda - Journey to Ixtlan
      • Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet
      • Aldous Huxley - The Doors of Perception
      • Carl Jung - Memories, Dreams, Reflections
      • Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe
      • CS Lewis - The Screwtape Letters
      • Miguel Ruiz - The Four Agreements
      • 50 More Spiritual Classics
    • 50 Psychology Classics >
      • Eric Berne - Games People Play
      • Isabel Briggs Myers - Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type
      • Louann Brizendine - The Female Brain
      • David D Burns - Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy
      • Robert Cialdini - Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
      • Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Creativity
      • Albert Ellis - A Guide To Rational Living
      • Milton Erickson - Teaching Tales
      • Erik Erikson - Young Man Luther
      • Hans Eysenck - Dimensions of Personality
      • Sigmund Freud - The Interpretation of Dreams
      • Malcolm Gladwell - Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
      • Carl Jung - The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
      • Alfred Kinsey - Sexuality In The Human Female
      • Abraham Maslow - Motivation and Personality
      • Stanley Milgram - Obedience To Authority
      • IP Pavlov - Conditioned Reflexes
      • Jean Piaget - The Language and Thought of the Child
      • Carl Rogers - On Becoming A Person
      • BF Skinner - Beyond Freedom & Dignity
    • 50 Prosperity Classics >
      • James Allen - The Path to Prosperity
      • Genevieve Behrend - Your Invisible Power
      • Richard Branson - Losing My Virginity
      • Warren Buffett - The Essays of Warren Buffett
      • Rhonda Byrne - The Secret
      • Andrew Carnegie - The Gospel of Wealth
      • Felix Dennis - How To Get Rich
      • Peter Drucker - Innovation and Entrepreneurship
      • Harv Eker - Secrets of the Millionaire Mind
      • Milton Friedman - Capitalism and Freedom
      • Michael E Gerber - The E-Myth Revisited
      • Benjamin Graham - The Intelligent Investor
      • Esther & Jerry Hicks - Ask And It Is Given
      • Conrad Hilton - Be My Guest
      • Joe Karbo - The Lazy Man's Way To Riches
      • Catherine Ponder - Open Your Mind To Prosperity
      • Ayn Rand - Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
      • Donald Trump - The Art of the Deal
      • Max Weber - The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
      • Prosperity Principles
    • 50 Philosophy Classics >
      • Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex
      • Heraclitus - Fragments
      • Soren Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling
      • Thomas Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
      • Marshall McLuhan - The Medium is the Massage
      • John Stuart Mill - On Liberty
      • Montaigne - Essays
      • Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil
      • Plato - The Republic
      • Karl Popper - The Logic of Scientific Discovery
      • John Rawls - A Theory of Justice
      • Jean-Paul Sartre - Being and Nothingness
      • Nassim Nicholas Taleb - The Black Swan
      • Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations
    • 50 Politics Classics
    • 50 Economics Classics
    • 50 Business Classics
  • Capstone Classics
    • Think and Grow Rich
    • The Science of Getting Rich
    • The Art of War
    • The Prince
    • The Wealth of Nations
    • The Republic
    • The Tao Te Ching
    • Meditations
    • Beyond Good and Evil
    • Origin of Species
  • About
  • READER REVIEWS
  • Foreign Editions
  • New Writing
  • Think Long
  • Contact
Tom Butler-Bowdon

about tOM

Picture
A message from Tom Butler-Bowdon

My mission is simple: "more people knowing more".

In the 1990s, I was working as an adviser at the New South Wales Cabinet Office in Sydney, writing briefing papers for senior ministers. I took a year off to do further study in the UK, but put aside my political economy textbooks to read a growing pile of motivational and self-help literature. On returning to Australia, I spent some time in the Outback, where the idea came to me of writing about the classic books in the self-help literature. This led to my first book.

50 Self-Help Classics was published in the UK, US and rest of the world in 2003 by Nicholas Brealey Publishing. 50 Self-Help Classics has been translated into 15 languages. In 2004 it won the US Benjamin Franklin Award, and was a finalist in Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year awards. Click here to see the Second Edition of 50 Self-Help Classics.

I have a BA (Hons) degree in Politics and History from the University of Sydney, and a Masters degree in International Political Economy from the London School of Economics. 

My second book, 50 Success Classics covers the landmark works of motivation, prosperity and leadership. Rights have been sold in 16 languages. Click here to see the Second Edition of 50 Success Classics.

The third, 50 Spiritual Classics explores some of the famous writings and authors in personal awakening, and has been translated into 12 languages. 

The bestselling 50 Psychology Classics is now in its second edition.

The "PPE" (Philosophy, Politics, Economics) titles, each now in their second, revised editions, which were released in 2022:
50 Philosophy Classics 
50 Politics Classics
50 Economics Classics 

All 50 Classics books are available in audio format from Audible.com, in paperback and in Kindle form.

Here is a Testimonials page from readers.

Finally, I'm also the author of a motivational book, 
Never Too Late To Be Great: The Power of Thinking Long, which arose out of my reading of the self-help and success classics. Click here to learn more.

Interviews

A video interview marking the release of 50 Economics Classics, in which I also discuss the idea behind the 50 Classics series and my working methods.

Picture

A profile in The Oxford Times which covers the rationale behind the 50 Classics series.
Picture

A February 2018 LinkedIn interview with Pantelis Fouli, part of a series of Q&As with authors.

Transcript of an interview with Vera Ng'oma's Insights From Authors site.

​********************************


Interview with Tom Butler-Bowdon: On enabling personal advancement through existing information

from Vera Ng'oma's Insight From Authors website, 2016

Vera: You’ve been quite successful in distilling other people’s work and presenting them in a way that’s really helpful. Why did you go this route?

Tom: I feel my job is to mine the often transformative information in books and bring it to a bigger audience. Most people only have the time to read a few books a year, but just a single important insight could put them on the path to something great. What drives me is the idea that at some point in the future, the average person will possess much more knowledge than what is acceptable now. The possession of knowledge on its own doesn’t automatically translate into success, but what it does do is provide more references against which to check new information. For instance, it is easy to get swayed by some new idea or movement on social media or television, but if you have some grounding in history or economics, you will be able to say, “This idea has come around before, and it didn’t work”. What has been shown to work is x, y or z.

Vera: The aim of the 50 classics series in your own words is “leading people to expand your mind, leading people to discover people, ideas and books you may not have found otherwise”. How do you determine what books would be good to include in your work?

Tom: In any subject, be it self-help or psychology or politics, there will be a core list of famous books that you couldn’t not include. It is hard to imagine 50 Economics Classics, for instance, without Adam Smith, Keynes, Marx or Schumpeter. This core list might make up 50-60 per cent of the list. The rest is composed of people who are slightly less famous but have made an important contribution to the discipline historically – and a further list of contemporary people who are well-known in the here and now for their insights. With 50 Economics, that would include Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Thomas Piketty, famous economists often mentioned in the news who have done important research.

Vera: How has reading all these works in order to produce your books impacted you beyond expanding your own mind?

Tom: The earlier books I wrote in the series, on the classics in Self-Help, Success and Spirituality, each provided hundreds of amazing ideas that I could try out in my own life, or they inspired me onto new things. Every book I wrote about provided me with something memorable that I could use to improve my life. Today, all I need to do to remind myself of the power of a book is to go back to the ‘In a nutshell’ summary of it that I’ve written. Other people also seem to find this feature useful.

Vera: You started with the 50 Self-help classics and have now have a series of 7. Which series has been the most successful/popular with readers and why?

Tom: So far, 50 Self-Help Classics and 50 Psychology Classics have been the most popular. 50 Self-Help filled a niche, in that no-one had written a proper review of the great writings in the field, and my book gave voice to the love that people felt for these books. By the way, a revised edition of 50 Self-Help, with new chapters, will be published in early 2018.

50 Psychology classics has also been very successful because people have an enduring fascination with human nature, or ‘Why we do what we do’. It seems that people the world over have this fascination, because the book has gone into close to 20 languages now. It also provides a good introduction to the science of psychology, and I guess writing about the key books in the subject provides a good way into it, if you have not studied it at university.

Vera: Considering how prosperous most people want to be, let me pick on your Prosperity classics series. How do you define prosperity and more specifically the millionaire mindset? What does that the latter look like in operation?

Tom: The Oxford English Dictionary defines wealth as “an instance or kind of prosperity”. That is, it is contained within the larger concept of prosperity. Whereas wealth is simply the possession of money or assets, or the process of getting more and keeping more for ourselves, prosperity is defined as the state of “flourishing, thriving or succeeding”. In short, wealth is about wealth, but prosperity is about life, taking in larger ideas of good fortune, abundance and well being.

I write about Harv Eker’s book The Millionaire Mindset in 50 Prosperity Classics. Here is something I learned from Eker: Never complain, act. Eker’s golden rule for wealth and life is ‘never complain’. What you focus on always expands, therefore if you complain about problems they will only grow. Complaints are, he unceremoniously remarks, a ‘crap magnet’, and he challenges the reader to not complain once in a seven-day period, including mental complaints. He has been amazed at how many lives this small exercise has transformed.

What has this got to do with wealth? Poor people have a habit of blame, complaint and justification. Their financial or life situation is always the fault of the economy, their upbringing, their spouse or something else. Rich people, on the other hand, believe their life is to be shaped according to their will. They never consider themselves victims. If something needs to change, they take it upon themselves to act.

You can keep a set of behaviors that keeps you in mediocrity, Eker remarks, but just remember that “every time you blame, justify, or complain, you are slitting your financial throat.” Why not adopt the rich way of experiencing the world, which is a joyful focus on opportunities and action.

NB:Your readers may find this list of “Prosperity Principles” useful.

Vera: Success is the other concept that does not have universal meaning although many equate it with having a lot of money.  What was the frame/concept of success you used to pick the books featured in the success classics series?

Tom: I framed success in terms of “authentic achievement” – that is, not just money, power or fame, but achievement that truly fulfils the potential of the person. Plenty of people were rich but not happy, plenty of people had power but were evil, and many today are famous for no good reason.  From the inspirational rags-to-riches stories of such entrepreneurs as Andrew Carnegie, Warren Buffet and Sam Walton to the leadership lessons of Sir Ernest Shackleton, Eleanor Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela, I wanted 50 Success Classics to go back to the basics to find the classic books on staying true to ourselves and fulfilling our potential.

Vera: You do of course now have the book ‘’Never too late to be great’’ an original work.  Many people start retiring not just physically but mentally too by mid life. How does one become great if they are focusing on greatness later in life and more generally what’s the recipe for being great?

Tom: I started to think, if all the self-development stuff out there is true, why hasn’t it delivered everything we want already? The answer is that books with titles like ‘Change Your Life in 7 Days’, while superficially attractive, have nothing to do with the reality of building success through the years and decades. What really matters is not our level of our motivation in any one moment, but how we bring desired things into being across a lifetime. The flash or vision of a great organization, a great family, or work of art takes years to make real. Even great spiritual leaders like Mother Teresa, St Paul, the Buddha and Malcolm X, who each experienced famous epiphanies or callings, still had to do the hard work of gathering the followers and implementing the vision over several decades.

So success generally takes longer that we would like to admit, but there was another fact that I couldn’t ignore: most people today are enjoying longer lifespans, and therefore most of us have second, third or fourth chances to begin and complete big life projects that may never have been possible if we had lived in another generation.

Our culture glorifies instant success when, particularly given the facts around increasing longevity, it makes a lot more sense to start thinking long…to see our lives in terms of ripening or unfolding. People tend to overestimate what they can achieve in a year, but underestimate what they can achieve in a decade, and if we do start to think in longer timeframes, suddenly a lot more becomes possible. That is a more realistic approach, precisely because it factors in obstacles, changes of mind and unexpected events and makes genuine success more likely. This does not mean some people don’t achieve great things when young, but their visibility blinds us to the way that most people do.

Vera: Greatness is arguably specific to each individual and is a journey. What have you discovered are some important platforms and stepping stones to greatness that people generally discount?

Tom: Good question. Apart from the role of time itself, there is having a supporting family and group around you that keep loving no matter what is happening in your professional life. There is an element of good fortune involved, in that by being born in a certain place and a certain time we have opportunities that give us a big head start towards doing something great. So gratitude for this is important.
On a superficial level, it doesn’t hurt to stand out from the crowd in some way, by looking different, sounding different, being bold, breaking down barriers in terms of ethnicity, gender, background. It is always good to be the first in something. Others may be ‘better’ than you, but being first has a real advantage.

Vera: If you were to draw 3 top lessons from your work that has enriched your own life and career that others could learn from, what would those be?

Tom: 
  • Think long – you probably have more time than you think to achieve your aims
  • Trust your Intuition – if something seems obvious to you, even if no one has thought of it, just go for it! Equally, if something doesn’t feel right, leave it.
  • Live in Day-Tight Compartments – big ambitions can seem too daunting, but if you break things down into daily tasks and focus on the present (what I call process over outcome), one day you will wake up and a big project will be completed.
BUTLER-BOWDON
Home
About
Contact




50 CLASSICS SERIES
Humanities & Social Sciences
Personal Development
50 Psychology Classics
50 Philosophy Classics
50 Politics Classics
​
50 Economics Classics ​
50 Self-Help Classics 
50 Spiritual Classics
50 Success Classics 

Business
50 Business Classics

​

​
© COPYRIGHT TOM BUTLER-BOWDON, 2023
​. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
  • Home
  • 50 Classics Series
    • 50 Self-Help Classics >
      • James Allen - As A Man Thinketh
      • Dale Carnegie - How To Win Friends and Influence People
      • Stephen Covey - The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
      • Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self-Reliance
      • Benjamin Franklin - Autobiography
      • Louise Hay - You Can Heal Your Life
      • Joseph Murphy - The Power of Your Subconscious Mind
      • Samuel Smiles - Self-Help
      • Teilhard de Chardin - The Phenomenon of Man
    • 50 Success Classics >
      • Claude M Bristol - The Magic of Believing
      • Jim Collins - Good To Great
      • Russell H Conwell - Acres of Diamonds
      • Napoleon Hill - Think and Grow Rich
      • Catherine Ponder - The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity
      • David J Schwartz - The Magic of Thinking Big
      • Wallace Wattles - The Science of Getting Rich
    • 50 Spiritual Classics >
      • Carlos Castaneda - Journey to Ixtlan
      • Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet
      • Aldous Huxley - The Doors of Perception
      • Carl Jung - Memories, Dreams, Reflections
      • Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe
      • CS Lewis - The Screwtape Letters
      • Miguel Ruiz - The Four Agreements
      • 50 More Spiritual Classics
    • 50 Psychology Classics >
      • Eric Berne - Games People Play
      • Isabel Briggs Myers - Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type
      • Louann Brizendine - The Female Brain
      • David D Burns - Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy
      • Robert Cialdini - Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
      • Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Creativity
      • Albert Ellis - A Guide To Rational Living
      • Milton Erickson - Teaching Tales
      • Erik Erikson - Young Man Luther
      • Hans Eysenck - Dimensions of Personality
      • Sigmund Freud - The Interpretation of Dreams
      • Malcolm Gladwell - Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
      • Carl Jung - The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
      • Alfred Kinsey - Sexuality In The Human Female
      • Abraham Maslow - Motivation and Personality
      • Stanley Milgram - Obedience To Authority
      • IP Pavlov - Conditioned Reflexes
      • Jean Piaget - The Language and Thought of the Child
      • Carl Rogers - On Becoming A Person
      • BF Skinner - Beyond Freedom & Dignity
    • 50 Prosperity Classics >
      • James Allen - The Path to Prosperity
      • Genevieve Behrend - Your Invisible Power
      • Richard Branson - Losing My Virginity
      • Warren Buffett - The Essays of Warren Buffett
      • Rhonda Byrne - The Secret
      • Andrew Carnegie - The Gospel of Wealth
      • Felix Dennis - How To Get Rich
      • Peter Drucker - Innovation and Entrepreneurship
      • Harv Eker - Secrets of the Millionaire Mind
      • Milton Friedman - Capitalism and Freedom
      • Michael E Gerber - The E-Myth Revisited
      • Benjamin Graham - The Intelligent Investor
      • Esther & Jerry Hicks - Ask And It Is Given
      • Conrad Hilton - Be My Guest
      • Joe Karbo - The Lazy Man's Way To Riches
      • Catherine Ponder - Open Your Mind To Prosperity
      • Ayn Rand - Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
      • Donald Trump - The Art of the Deal
      • Max Weber - The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
      • Prosperity Principles
    • 50 Philosophy Classics >
      • Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex
      • Heraclitus - Fragments
      • Soren Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling
      • Thomas Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
      • Marshall McLuhan - The Medium is the Massage
      • John Stuart Mill - On Liberty
      • Montaigne - Essays
      • Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil
      • Plato - The Republic
      • Karl Popper - The Logic of Scientific Discovery
      • John Rawls - A Theory of Justice
      • Jean-Paul Sartre - Being and Nothingness
      • Nassim Nicholas Taleb - The Black Swan
      • Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations
    • 50 Politics Classics
    • 50 Economics Classics
    • 50 Business Classics
  • Capstone Classics
    • Think and Grow Rich
    • The Science of Getting Rich
    • The Art of War
    • The Prince
    • The Wealth of Nations
    • The Republic
    • The Tao Te Ching
    • Meditations
    • Beyond Good and Evil
    • Origin of Species
  • About
  • READER REVIEWS
  • Foreign Editions
  • New Writing
  • Think Long
  • Contact