7 Books That Changed My Life | 2026 Must Reads

Boom, people, welcome back to the show. Today we're gonna talk about my top 7 books that absolutely changed my life and helped me make over $8 million by age 26. Now, most of these books I have read multiple times, and this order I'm about to present to you, there's no specific order of like, I love this the best. I tried to rank them, but they're all different in different ways and have changed my life. So with that, let's hop into number 7, Think and Grow Rich. Now, this is a classic book. If any of you guys have seen entrepreneur stuff, everybody touts this book as one of their favorites, so I won't talk about it too long. Written by Napoleon Hill, he went out in the early 1900s, interviewed a number of the titans of industry and asked them how they thought about money. What was their psychology of money? And it was very interesting what he came up with. Now, for me, one of the biggest takeaways I took away from Think and Grow Rich was this. Naturally, I'm a very indecisive person. I have a hard time making decisions. In the book, he tells a story. There's a general that was put into a brand new position as general, and there was 2 courses of action, 2 decisions that had been debated for years on what this army group should do. So day 1, the general gets in, he's presented with both these opinions and he looks through both of them and without thinking much, apparently, in the first day or 2, he just decided to pick one and go with it. And the other guy who was pitching the other side came to him and was furious. General, you haven't seen all the facts. We've debated this for years. How could you make a decision in such haste? You probably should think through this for a couple months and make a decision. And that general said, it sounds like both these decisions are very good. Both would have a positive outcome. The biggest mistake we can make is by making no decision at all. Indecisiveness will hurt us because if we don't make a decision, we just stay still. We need to just pick a course of action and go with it. And in the book, he He says he interviews all these wealthy people and there was a common thread through all of them that wealthy people could make decisions quickly. And once they make that decision, they stick to that course of action. When I first read that when I was 21 years old, I was very indecisive. I had a hard time making decisions on what to do, and I had to rewire my brain to say, OK, I have a decision to make. I've looked at the options. I'm going to make a decision and just go with it because The time wasted and the mental headspace that I would have making the decision is going to hurt me more than making the wrong decision. That one thing absolutely changed my life. Check out Think and Grow Rich. All right. Coming down to number 6. And these books are all in different categories. It's hard to put them in order and they've helped me in so many different ways. But number 6 nonetheless is Oren Klaff, Flip the Script. This book talks about the psychology of pitching and selling people on your ideas and essentially the idea of flipping the script on the person you're pitching instead of you pitching your ideas and having— dragging them into your ideas, flipping the script where you get the person pitching you on why you should allow them into your deal or into your product. You ever had that happen before where you feel like you're selling them on why they should accept you? Some schools do this right there. They are selling you on why they should accept you in. They should allow you to pay them $80,000 a year. Right. They've done the flip the script strategy on you. Incredible book. Oren Klaffman, an incredible pitchman. I love that book. In number 6 comes Flip the Script with Oren Klaff. Number 5, we bring it into another marketing book by Mr.— I couldn't leave, I couldn't have a list without Mr. Russell Brunson. I love Russell Brunson. His book Expert Secrets is on my top 5, so number 5 coming in is Expert Secrets. This book is incredible. Russell did a great job of compiling a decade of information down to a few pages and walking through how to build a tribe, build a community, build a following, and essentially build an online product. Expert Secrets is one of the main reasons that we launched Investment Fund Secrets. Investment Fund Secrets would never have existed as you see it today without Expert Secrets. Expert Secrets walks you through the design behind information products, how to build a great tribe, a community, how to market that community to other people, how to build a message around it, how to stake a flag. The reason we have the Wall Street Rebel tag was for us to say, you know what? We are the anti-traditional Wall Street. We're the Wall Street rebels. Let's put a flag in the sand. This is where our line is. We are the degenerates. We're the people that unconventionally launch funds. That whole concept was rooted when I first read Expert Secrets. I've read that book a number of times. It's absolutely changed my life. And if you're interested in starting an online type of business that's going to have a community, a core product similar to ours with Invest Fund Secrets that has an information-style product, Expert Secrets should be on the top of your list. All right, we're flying through these. Number 4, this book I read once a year. This book is one of my favorites. It's absolutely changed my life, how I deal with other people. It's helped me with personal development, how I influence and react, and I need to read it every year 'cause I have to update 'cause I fall back into old habits. This book is How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Another classic book. It's been around for, it feels like, over 100 years. And by the way, if you know, if a book's been around for 50 years and people are still talking about it, there's probably something to it. This book is absolutely incredible. The first time I heard about this book, I went to— if you guys have heard my story, I grew up in a relatively average home. My dad— I started 6 businesses in college. My dad says, go meet with one of my successful business partners. This guy can really help you out. I go meet this guy's huge mansion. I didn't know. I'm like, man, who's my dad's business partner? This is when I learned my dad was running a big fund. And this is how I came to learn about the fund world. And as you guys know my story, I was in college, I started, my dad taught me about funds. I went and had this idea for funds. I went and pitched my dad because apparently my dad had all this secret money that I didn't know about. And anyways, my dad said no, kicked me out of the— kicked me out and he said, you got to go learn this on your own. I went and launched my first fund at age 22 years old and then launched a second fund at age 24 and now we're launching 2 more funds. Anyways, it's pretty fun. You guys can watch other videos on my story but that original meeting when I I first learned about the secrets of the wealthy, the secrets of the rich, how it all works. I also was introduced to a book by that gentleman. He said one of his favorite books of all time was How to Win Friends and Influence People. This guy was one of the most well-networked people I've ever met. And he had, you know, connections to anybody you'd ever want. And he said, one of my biggest secrets is I read this book every single year. It helps change how I interact with people, how I, help people, how I motivate, how I just be a, you know, win friends and influence people. It's in the title. It's an incredible book and ultimately helps me live a happier life. When I follow some of the things it talks about in here, and it talks about being nice and friendly to everyone. There's a reason why certain people always get discounts. There's a reason why certain people always get— they don't get tickets or parking tickets or traffic stops. There's a reason that some people always can get into backstage passes and just are lucky. And no, it's not because they're blonde and have big boobs or something like that. It's because they've learned the things that he talks about in this book. And he goes, it's not by chance. It's because certain people, this is like a muscle that they use. And because they are good at talking to people and becoming friends with random strangers, they get lucky and happen to get all these perks and other things that go on in their life. One of my favorite books of all time, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Incredible book coming in at number 4. All right. Coming in at 3 and 2, it's kind of actually one book put together, but I'm going to say 3 and 2. Again, this list is whatever. Incredible book. So, I was first introduced to this book, one of the wealthiest people I know, a gentleman, we sat down, kind of a mentor of mine. He said, Bridger, you have to read this book. And he said, it's changed how I invest. It's changed how I think about the world. It has changed my whole perspective. on macroeconomics. He said, Bridger, this is a deep book. It's written by a guy who's very intense on geopolitical and macroeconomics. And he said, but if you can get through it, I think you'll gain some huge principles. So the book is, the 2 books actually written by the same guy, Peter Zeihan, Accidental Superpower and Disunited Nations, 2 of my favorite books of all time. Let me talk you through these books. So Accidental Superpower and Disunited Nations. Accidental Superpower was written in 2013. Disunited Nations was written in 2020, and Disunited Nations of the updated version of Accidental Superpower, but the thesis is this. The first half of the book, Peter goes through and describes why superpowers became superpowers, and he goes through different mechanics of things that caused them to become a superpower, and one of the biggest things he points out is geography. This is something that I've never really realized, but he goes through all of these ancient superpowers, the Egyptian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Dutch, the British Empire, China, he goes through, then ultimately goes through the United States. Why? Because of just geography. The United States and all these other superpowers became superpowers. And a few things that he points out was this. So he says, number one, there is, you have to have, as far as geography goes, well, number one, obviously very strong leadership. You have to have a strong military, all that kind of stuff. But that is rooted out of a few things. Number one is deep water navigation. If a country can navigate deep waters like Portugal and Spain did, they could navigate around the world. Britain was able to do this. The Dutch. The Egyptians were able to have up and down the rivers, all this kind of stuff. You can move and trade huge sums and quantities at a very efficient rate because you can carry, you know, 1,000 apples in a cart or in a handbag, or you can carry, you know, 30,000 apples on a barge with very little work. I could talk about this book for an hour straight. It's really fascinating, but very insightful. All right. Coming in at number 1, this is hard for me to do. All these books are very influential in my life. This book that I'm going to bring in at number 1, this is the reason and how we launched Investment Fund Secrets. We followed this book to a T to launch Investment Fund Secrets. This book also gave me huge strategies on how to pitch investors in my fund, psychology of selling, the background, similar to Flip the Script, but more of the psychology and mental triggers that go into selling and pitching. The book is coming in at number 1, Launch by Jeff Walker. It's a short read. It goes through Jeff Walker's launch strategies specific to information products. He talks about, if you guys have seen any of us ever do a webinar where we, and this is how, by the way, our first weekend we made $144,000 because of what we learned inside of Launch. What we did was on our, we had built this little list that Jeff Walker has instructed us to do. We had a break-even funnel. We led this all up to launching our first mastermind group. And what we did was we kind of teased everybody. We did his pre-launch cycle, which he has where you send out videos and things that are what you're gonna talk about. You set up a webinar day. So we did a pre-launch structure all the way up to a Thursday. On this particular Thursday, it was February 20th, 2020. Like almost 3 or 4 weeks before COVID hit, okay? We did a webinar. We had about 200 people hop on live. They came on live. We followed the exact structure of what he talked about to talk on a webinar. At the end of the webinar, by the way, during the webinar, we had so much engagement, we actually broke, we used a software called WebinarJam, it broke 3 times. It kept glitching out and breaking. We ended up moving everybody over to a different channel on Zoom. We still had, I mean, people were, we were like, it was bad. They still moved over with us. It was this whole thing. At the end of the thing, we pitched our new program. We had a mastermind program for $2,000. We pitched it. We said, you guys are going to build this with us. We're going to help people launch funds. And we opened cart. OK? Live, I believe we had 35 people buy live, which was amazing. We made about $70,000 live. Then there he talks about, that was a Thursday. Friday and Saturday, he sent out email reminders. Sunday night at midnight, you have to close the cart. So that's what we did. We said, OK, we'll close the cart. Over that weekend, we made $144,000. $1,000 from people buying our program coming in. And from there, it was incredible. And by the way, the results we've had since that program is outstanding. We've had multiple funds get over $10 million. One fund that has $2.5 billion in it that joined in one of those original groups. We have a number of other funds that are near or close to $100 million each. It's been phenomenal. And people, we have one of the top 1% of all courses ever. It all started from Jeff Walker's Launch. We do— now I do the same thing for launching a fund. I follow the same principles. Launching new products, new softwares, all the stuff we do, we follow the exact same thing to a T with Jeff Walker's Launch coming in at number 1. Now coming in at number 0, oh, bonus round. I'm actually a very religious person. I love reading religious books. This is kind of a bonus side note, but I would highly recommend reading religious books. I think it taps into a whole nother side of things. I'm Christian. I love reading the Old Testament, New Testament. I also love reading the Book of Mormon. If you've read that book, an incredible religious book which has absolutely changed my life, changed the way I think about things, the whole nine yards. A few other religious books— C.S. Lewis puts out incredible religious books as well. I think they're incredible to listen to and read. So that's kind of a bonus round for my other favorite books as well. Speaking of funds, if you guys want to learn how to start a fund or scale a fund, we have other videos here that you guys can go check out and watch. Thank you so much. Let me know your favorite books below in the comments. Maybe I have to go check some of them out. Let me know why you love that book. I love to act— I love to read new books. So let me know below in the comments what your favorite books are as well. Thank you so much. And I'll see you next episode. Bye.