The 3 Books That Changed My Life (and, a Little, My View of Karma)

There was this period of my life when I was running.

Not literally. Running in the way solo entrepreneurs do, stacking time zones, launches and clients, then closing the laptop at night with the strange feeling of having crossed my own life without really being there. You tick boxes. You optimize everything. Except yourself.

It was in one of those stretches, tired of being efficient and a little absent from myself, that I crossed paths with Kim Lange again.

1. Bad Karma, by David Safier

Kim is the TV host of David Safier’s novel. Haughty, brilliant, at the top of her career. And completely distant from her daughter, her husband, from everything that truly matters. Her fate is sealed in a few lines as absurd as they sound: on a hotel rooftop, she mistakes for a shooting star what is actually the washbasin of a Russian space station burning up in the atmosphere, and it lands on her. Off she goes to the afterlife, where she learns she has accumulated a deplorable karma. Her sentence: reincarnation as an ant, then a slow, laborious climb back up the ladder of existences in the hope of finding the people she neglected.

What struck me was not the moral of the book. It was the mirror. I saw myself again, right in the middle of a conversation that mattered, letting the other person’s sentence drift by because a Meta Ads notification had just lit up my phone, and that number had to be checked, right there, right now, before even knowing why. The book made me laugh until I cried, which is already a lot, and left me with a question that never let go: what if real karma were simply the sum of all the moments when we choose to be elsewhere?

2. The Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz

The second book arrived at the right moment, as they always do. In it, Don Miguel Ruiz distills Toltec wisdom into four simple commitments: be impeccable with your word, never make assumptions, always do your best, and above all, take nothing personally. This article is also my contribution to the event « Les 3 livres qui ont changé ma vie » hosted by the site Des Livres pour changer de vie, which dedicates a piece to this book that I really enjoy and which explores Toltec wisdom in far more depth than I can here.

That one, "take nothing personally", hit me hard. I remember a vicious comment under an ad I had spent hours polishing, a throwaway line written by someone I would never meet, and I carried it for days like a verdict on my entire work. This little book reminded me that an outside reaction almost always speaks about the person who voices it, not about me. It sounds simple, said like that. It took years to truly sink in.

3. Your Second Life Begins When You Realize You Only Have One, by Raphaëlle Giordano

The third book tied the first two together. Where Kim Lange had shown me what not to become, and the Toltec agreements had taught me to detach from the gaze of others, Raphaëlle Giordano handed me the most precious tool: how, concretely, to become the architect of your own days again.

Her heroine, Camille, has everything one could wish for on paper: a husband, a son, a career. And yet joy has slipped through her fingers without her knowing exactly when. A minor car accident leads her to Claude, a "routinologist", a profession invented out of thin air, neither psychologist nor coach, who diagnoses her with acute "routinitis". What I kept from it is not the promise of one great night when everything changes. It is the idea that you do not need a tragedy to wake up: routine settles in silently, and just as silently you can decide that it is not a fate but a material you can sculpt.

What Remains Once the Book Is Closed

Three books, three different sparks. A novel that made me laugh at myself. A wisdom text that detached me from the judgment of others. A story that handed me back the keys to my own days. None of the three transformed me with a wave of a magic wand. But laid end to end, they made their way, slowly, until they became a manner of being a little more present in my own life.

And you, which books changed yours?