I Read 200 Books on Money: Only These 19 Are Worth Reading

I've read over 200 books on making money. 50% were pretty useless, 25% I think were wrong, and 19 changed my financial life forever. In this video, I'm going to share the most valuable lessons from those books so that they might change your life too. Our goal is basically to learn how to make so much money no one can ever tell you what to do again, and then have some fun with it. We broke these books into four components. First you make it, then you build it, then you keep it, then you enjoy it. And all the books will be broken down into those. We also. We also have a goal. We want to hit a million subs. Can you guys help us? We're almost there. We think we can hit it by the end of the year. Then we're gonna do something really cool for all of you. Please hit the sub button. This whole segment is about mindset. So I actually started with a book by that name. This book by Carol Dweck is one of my favorites, and it'll show you why you should be more careful with how hard you work, not just how smart you are. Why do you read this book? Because from now on, after you read this, you will only want to date, marry, hire, work, or hang out with people that are growth type mindsets. A growth mindset means that you believe your intelligence and talents can be developed over time. They can change. A fixed mindset means that you believe intelligence is fixed. So if you're not good at something right now, you believe you'll never be good at it. One of my favorite quotes from Carol in this book is, did I win? Did I lose? Those are the wrong questions. The correct question is, actually, did I make my best effort? If so, you may be outscored, but you'll never lose that. It's really important once you understand the difference between these two types of mindsets, how they apply in your life, even for small things. Like when I was a kid, people used to tell me, well, you're not very smart or good at math, Cody, but you work really hard. And at the time, that used to piss me off. And I used to think I am smart and good at math, but I wasn't, according to them. And that small difference of them saying, maybe you're not that smart at it, but you'll figure it out because you keep working at it, meant that I worked at that skill for years and years and years until I eventually ran companies that had hundreds of millions of dollars under management and I was in charge of all the money, as opposed to for instance, I have a brother who was always told that he was super smart at math and he was really good at it. And he used to get so frustrated when he couldn't achieve something because he thought because he hadn't won yet, it meant that he wasn't very smart, when in actuality somebody should have just told him, good job for working so hard. No matter what your ability is, effort is what actually ignites that ability and turns it into accomplishment. I this book is one you should listen to. It's a quick listen and you can write down. Probably in my perspective, there's like four or five frameworks in here that will help just about anybody. Principles by Ray Dalio. Ray is a billionaire and a genius and goes to Burning man and appears to have, like, some fun in life. Like, look at this picture. Living his best life. And I think we want all of that. So this book is how to Steal a Billionaire Investor's homework. Before getting into the books that will teach you to be rich, you've got to establish the principles by which you live your life. That's this book. And once you establish those, it helps you figure out what your path is. Your goal is probably similar to mine. Happy and rich. How do you get there? You have principles that you do not sway from. I took two big things away from this book, radical openness and radical transparency. The idea is you always give feedback and you always tell the truth. My dad used to say, always tell the truth because it's easier to remember. And that is a big portion of this book. Now, one of the best quotes from Ray is that the greatest tragedy of mankind comes from the inability of people to have a thoughtful agreement to find out what's true most often. Why you will fail, why you will lose money, and why you will lose overall is because you don't actually want the truth. You want to be right. And if you can stop wanting to be right and want to find the truth, then the truth often leads to a lot of commas and a lot of zeros. This book will help you get there. The story that I thought was fascinating about Bridgewater, his company, they record every single conversation. So if you're in a meeting, that meeting immediately gets recorded on the cloud somewhere. And every day, anyone at any time can watch the recording. Back now, at first I felt like that was 1984, but in actuality, what it does is it keeps you truthful and it keeps you honest and it makes sure that you're always asking for feedback and giving it. When I was at Goldman Sachs. The number one thing that we did was a 360 review every single year. That 360 review meant all of your peers literally would rate you like you were kind of standing here. And they were rotated around you on everything from your skills at your job, your, your ability to hit deadlines, how good of a teammate you were. And that 360 review made me better. And it was also one of the most challenging things to hear. One of my favorite quotes from him is it is far more common for people to allow ego to stand in the way of learning. You and your ego are the reason you're not going to win nine times out of 10 or someone else's ego will squash the truth. Another great story in this book is employees at Bridgewater are given baseball cards which are essentially performance reviews that are accessible to anyone in the company. These cards include your strengths, weight, weaknesses, as well as where they think you should improve. The idea is to create a culture where feedback is open, honest and constructive. All right. This framework you can take out of this book without ever having to read it. It's called Five Steps to Accomplishing Anything. And it looks like this. First you set goals, then you look at what problems exist. Then you diagnose those problems. Then you design a solution to those problems and you do the solution to those problems and then you do it again and again and again. His five step process is usually the way that I figure out how to take a problem and turn it into action. This is a book that you definitely need to read because this book in particular has a bunch of things you're going to want to highlight. You're going to want a dog ear. And for instance, if it's good enough for Bill Gates and Tony Robbins, who also read this book, and Arianna Huffington, I think it's probably worth you taking a deep dive into that's principles. This is my go to book for getting my mind right. It's called Man's Search for Himself by Rola May and it's one of my favorites because it reminds me every single day that you got one life. That's it. And you better treat it right. I hate wasting time when I can steal somebody else's 10,000 hours. That's why I read. And between running businesses, traveling, speaking, hiring, et cetera, things get wild fast and stuff can start to fall by the wayside. One of the first things to go like your mind, your mental health. That's why I have a therapist. We pay for consultants for our business. Why not hire a pro for Your mind. And I'm all in on therapy because it makes us stronger, not weaker. Pro move use better help. Who is sponsoring this video? You can learn more about it in the link in the description. Plus get 10% off your first month wink because we got your back. The idea is therapy. You fill out a questionnaire to help them find you the right match. Then you get paired with a therapist, usually in like 48 hours. They have 30,000 licensed therapists and if the first one isn't your fit, no cost to switch. The thing is, life is busy. I need my therapist to work on my schedule and they do. We build the bank account and our bodies. So let's give your cranium a little love too. Next book we've got Tony Robbins Money Master the Game. A great book for those starting out with making money. This made me realize if you can't see it, you can't be. And you need a vision for what you want from money and what you don't want. And he'll give that to you really specifically too with like exercises to write out your dream life and how much that actually costs and tangible targets to aim towards. You'll be surprised at how much more achievable your dreams are than you thought. And he'll give you a lot of guidelines on how to do that with mental frameworks and visual graphics that you can remember. One of my favorite quotes from this book is you either master money or. Or on some level, money masters you. And how you deal with money is really a reflection of how you deal with power, since it's really just a game of power. The secret to wealth is super simple. You find a way to do more for others than anyone else does. Become more valuable. Do more, give more, be more, serve more. And you will make more. How can you expect to ever be rich if you don't know what rich is to you? That's what this book will teach you. You basically have a destination in mind and then you get a framework to get there. One of my favorite frameworks he has is the five steps. One is what do I really want? That's vision. Two is what is important about it. Values. Three is how will I get it? Methods. And four is what's preventing me from getting it. Obstacles like this guy with all those distractions, get out of here. And five is how will I know I'm successful. Measurements. What can't be measured can't often be accomplished. Now, once you have that number in your head, that vision, that roadmap that mine was 100k a year in expenses I had. So then I knew I needed to make 200k a year to cover it plus save a little with taxes. And then one year later I hit that number. So every year I write down what's my number? And damned if you don't hit it. If you don't think about it consistently, you train your mind to believe that you can actually achieve the success that you want. This sounds squishy, but it's real. In fact, I think the only thing holding most people back is your belief that you will never achieve it. This book is great to listen to. Listen to it on audiobook. You don't actually have to have it printed in front of you like you do with principles. Okay, next one. Choose yourself and the side Hustle Bible. Okay, so this one is really a two for one. This is from James Altucher. They're going to teach you two things. One, if you don't choose yourself, you'll likely die miserable and broke. And a quote that I love from this book about that is every time you say yes to something you don't want to do and this will happen, you will resent people, you will do a bad job, you will have less energy for the things you were doing a good job on, you will make less money, and yet another small percentage of your life will be used up, burned up. A smoke signal to the future, saying I did it again. The second thing you'll learn in this book is if you don't generate ideas and become an experiment machine, you'll never get rich. And the way to have good ideas is to get close to almost killing yourself. It's like weightlifting. When you lift slightly more than you can handle, you get stronger. In life when the gun is to your head, you either figure it out or you die. When you cut yourself open, your ideas bleed. And so I like to steal his ideas on how to bleed. Another quote I love for him is the only truly safe thing you can do is to try over and over again. You go for it, you get rejected, you strive, you repeat, you wish without rejection. There's no frontier, no passion and no magic. So you can steal his idea generating machine with this book. The framework that I love starts with the 10% success rate. Early in James career he created nine different websites. They all failed. One was like a dating site for smokers. He had a hypothesis that smokers needed a way to find other smokers. Didn't end up working out. Neither did the smart or stupid dating site that included an IQ test, apparently rating People by how stupid they are didn't catch on at the time. And his 10th website was stock picker that had 1 million users in its first month and was later sold for $10 million. So thank God he had all those failures to eventually get his big one. So how do you get better ideas? James got kind of famous for writing his ideas down, writing at least 10 every single day. And he does them in here. You can kind of see it. He does it on this little notepad, basically, where once you start coming up with ideas, you get better and better at it. So then he would come up with ideas for other people, for other companies and email them. All the companies that he emailed responded. One was to actually Jim Cramer@thestreet.com who ended up hiring James as a financial writer and later went on to buy James website stockmaker for 10 million. So this book is a super fast read. It's really easy and I think you should listen to it. You don't have to actually pick up the book and read it. Okay, now you understand how to use knowledge to form your own opinions. Once you understand that, you can obsess on following the truth rather than the narrative. If you want to be richer than 99% of people, you can't do what 99% of people do. You have to be a contrarian. My favorite book in the world for becoming a contrarian. It's called Economic Facts and Fallacies by Thomas Sowell. And the book is so good that in fact, if you looked at it, I have like 83 different things highlighted. This book helps you find the truth in economic news. I read this book so much that every time I hear Thomas Sowell's name, I can pretty much remember the quotes from it. And one of my favorite quotes that you've probably seen me tweet before is, the problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is. He confuses it with feeling. And the truth, like Thomas says, is some things are believed because they are very true. But many other things are believed simply because they've been said a lot, repeatedly. And repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence. Ain't that the truth? Somebody says a thing again and again and again until they make it a reality. Your entire point to making a lot of money is trying to figure out the truth from the lies or cap or no cap, as the kids say these days. I'm told Thomas teaches you Kind of how to do that. And then he also has stories that will change your entire perspective on the way that we structure society. It's a big mind opener and I hope you read it. Next book is Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki. It's actually a book that I've read a lot back in the day. I have a ton of highlights. This is where I think you get to make your first dollars. If you haven't read this book and you aren't worth a million plus, I'd start here. It's like money making 101. If you're already worth 100 million, you could probably skip it. For you, I'd read Skin of the Game by Nicholas Nassim Taleb. That's like the really, really rich person version of this, but it's more complex. So Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Essentially it rolls down to two ideas. One is the cash flow quadrant where he puts people in two categories of people. Those who see the world through an E or an S standpoint, and those who see the world through a B and an I standpoint. Those on the left hand side have less leverage in the form of time, taxes and salary, how they make their money. They are not as leveraged as those on the right hand side, which are business owners and investors. Because every person who generates their income on the right hand side pays less money in taxes and they have more freedom in the way that they earn. That's why the entire point of the book is largely here's the difference between the two and how do you get over to the right hand side? And then he explains some concepts like different types of income, linear, residual, active, passive, and explains to the layperson how your entire purpose is to get into a world where you make money on the right. Think about it like this. Who cares if you're an employee or not? If you make money, you just need to make sure that you are taking that money and then investing it so it works for you. I disagree with Robert on a few things. I did a whole video on this. Like, I think everyone in the world should at least talk to an accountant about having an LLC or a corporate structure for taxes. I actually use these guys. They're prime. We can link them below if you want to see how I think about this. So I don't really care if you're an employee or if you're a business owner. But I do care if you take the dollars that you make and you apply them to investing and making more dollars. Some of my favorite quotes from Robert Are like he says, for instance, there's a difference between being poor and being broke. Broke is temporary. Poor is eternal, basically. Mindset. And then rich people acquire assets. The poor in the middle of class acquire liabilities that they think are assets, AKA cars, boats, et cetera. This one, I think you gotta read the book. There's a ton of graphics examples and the cash flow quadrant. And he even has, like, a board game. If you're Super 1 on one level and you want to learn how to play the candy land of making money, you can play that, too. The next one is zero to one. Peter Thiel. Now, Peter is a billionaire, one of the founders of PayPal and Palantir, and one of the world's richest men. Also, apparently he holds a hell of a grudge, if you've ever read his story on Gawker. Amazing. But what I learned from this is how to take big swings and when to really lean in. The entire point of the book is basically to determine what game are you playing at. Is it a good enough game? Let me give you an example. Agencies, they have about 15% margin, which means if you make a million dollars, you take home on average 15% or 150, as opposed to SaaS software as a service, which has 75% margins. And if you make a million, you take home $750,000. Both make a million dollars, so that seems the same. But one business takes home 60% more on a daily basis. He has a ton of really interesting frameworks. One is that if you want to make a massive amount of money, you have to be contrarian and be right. And he has three contrarian questions that he asks that you can ask yourself. The first is, what important or revolutionary truths do you believe in that no one else agrees with? The second is how much of what you know about business is shaped by mistaken reaction to past mistakes. Third is what secrets is nature not telling you? And what secrets are people not telling you. And if you can pause and have a contrarian view on those and then be right, you can make a lot of money. The next thing that he has is this framework on being an optimist. Basically, four parts to this. On the left, you have definite optimism. On the right, indefinite optimism. Below that, definite pessimism. Below that, indefinite pessimism. Here's how they're defined. Indefinite pessimism looks like the future's bleak, but you have no idea what to do about it. Definite pessimism means the future can be known, but since it's going to be bleak or bad, we just prepare for it. Indefinite optimism means the future will be better, but we don't exactly know how to change anything. So no specific plans. You kind of expect to profit from the future but see no reason to redesign it. And lastly, the definite optimism is that the future will be better than the present if you make plans and work to make it better. Which one do you think he wants you to be? The definite optimist. And he thinks people who make millions and millions are those who are definite optimists and none of the rest. My favorite part about this book, I think is that it comes from somebody who's had massive, massive success and yet his conclusion is essentially get started, the world needs you. I think this is a good one to listen to. You don't have to read it. The next one which I have here for you is the $100 startup. This book pretty self explanatory in the name, but he tells you how to cheaply start a startup. He tells you you have no excuses and then lays out a step by step plan on identifying a profitable idea, marketing on a budget, and building a customer base if you don't have money. Couple quotes I love in this Value is created when a person makes something useful and shares it with the world. That's it you guys. It's not as hard as we make it seem to be. And I also love this product death cycle framework that he has. First you actually have features to a product, then you launch the product. At this point lots of people say we need a bigger launch, more plans. Third is you have an initial spike in users so a bunch of users start coming on board. Then fourth growth flattens, users start to fall off, you start to wonder what's wrong with it. So you add more features to the product and then you launch the product again. And then you see people start to add and users come on board to it and then you see the product flatten again. And the reason this is useful is because once you understand what a cycle looks like in startups or entrepreneurship, you understand what's coming, you prepare for it, and you don't freak out when it comes along. This book is great if you haven't actually started to start up before. Read or listen. I think this is a read lots of to do lists for you. So I would read this book number 948 laws of power Robert Greene this book will totally mess with your mind in a great way. It's really dark and sneaky and kind of mischievous and yet it's true that all power uses all of these laws, I think feeling powerless is a miserable experience. Like if you're given the choice, you would opt for more rather than less power, right? Yet it's not very liked that people are cunning and subtle in their conquest for power. And so in this book he kind of argues that if you manage to seduce, charm and deceive your opponents, you will attain the ultimate power. Maybe not all these are ethical and you never want to use them, but you can't understand Machiavellian tactics if you don't know what they are. So at least you can see the other games that people are playing by reading this book. My favorite quotes in this are, for instance, attention is the most important commodity of the 21st century. If you want to influence people, don't change their mind, shift their attention. He also has the very first law actually is, I think, one of the best laws. And that is never outshine the Master. He says, always make those above you feel comfortably superior in your desire to please or impress them. Do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite. Inspire fear or insecurity. Make your masters appear more brilliant than they are, and you will attain the heights of power. I found this to be really true. I've worked in a bunch of really big corporations and I can tell you the mistake I made again and again and again that led to other people getting promoted and more money was that I outshone the Master. I thought that what we should do is just win. And oftentimes, especially in a corporate situation, what you should do is make it look like the guy or gal above you is the winner and you are their support system. The second that you threaten the Master with your accomplishments is often the second that you will be pushed out of the way for somebody else. It's not a pretty story, but it's true. And this book is full of things that are politically incorrect and also true. I think this is a read. It's a beautifully put together book. Takes a little bit of complexity to reading it, but you guys can handle it. 48 laws of power. The next one is by a buddy of mine, Alex hormozi. This is 100 million offers. This book is a must, must read if you are struggling with product market fit or how to sell things people want for more money. Your problem actually isn't your lack of sales. It's probably that your product sucks. The market isn't saturated. Your business just also sucks. I've had to say these words to myself often. You will too. And this book by Alex can help you change that. There's a couple of quotes I love in this book. The degree of pain will be proportional to the price you will be able to charge. Decrease their pain, charge more or the longer you delay the ask. The bigger ask you can make, the longer the Runway, the bigger plane that can take off. These frameworks are really really important. The other cool part about this book is Alex has a bunch of really simplistic frameworks drawn by hand to make you understand complex things like product, market fit or lifetime value of a client. If you're going to read this book, I recommend that you actually read it on a phone because there's lots of breakdowns and frameworks and graphics. Let's get to the next one. This one is Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. Incredible book. Also a really interesting human being. So Chris Voss was probably the most foremost FBI negotiator of all time. And this book bends your counterparty's reality. A couple of psychologists in the book discovered that people will take more risk to avoid a loss than to realize a gain. So you essentially use your counterparts scaredness about losing to persuade them that they will lose something if a deal falls through. Brilliant. And this is just one lesson in this book from the most famous negotiator in the world. Every Harvard student reads this on negotiation. And every time I go and do a big deal I go back and listen to a chapter or two because I want to bend reality to fit my world. One of the quotes that I love from this is he who has learned to disagree without being disagreeable has discovered the most valuable secret of negotiation. Make him like you. The second one I love is he always says hope is not a strategy. So I was negotiating a pretty sticky partner situation and I went back and I listened to his book like I do when I'm stuck in a negotiation. I don't know how to change. And I use one technique from the book. He has one technique that I think is fantastic and it is simple and it's this. When somebody asks you something, you pause. How uncomfortable is that? Didn't you get a little weirded out just from like five seconds of pausing? And what often happens in negotiation is when you pause and are comfortable in silence, your counterparty will not be comfortable in silence. And so they will jump in and fill the silence. And you have just played a power move. And often just them jumping in to fill silence means they're going to decrease their position and you are going to increase your position. And whoever is in the power position and appears to be the one who wants at least usually wins. This book is so good that I think you should not only read it, but listen to it. Because what's really important in negotiation is something called intonation. So how your voice sounds if you say, for instance, yeah, that sounds good. What does that sound like? It's a question mark at the end of the sentence. If you say, that sounds good, it's final, the deal is closed. And listening to Chris Voss use his own intonation in the book will teach you much about negotiation. The next book, the One Thing. This is by my friend Jay Papasan. And this book is so good because it reminds you that you can have everything you want, but not all at the same time. J paired with the founder of Keller Williams, which is the biggest private real estate company in the world. Gary Keller is a billionaire right here out of Austin, Texas. And there's a bunch of stuff I like about this book, but I'm gonna read you a couple quotes that are my favorite. See, I actually do read all of these. When you do the right thing, it can liberate you from having to monitor everything. This is really important because it turns out that for the most part, task switching is what kills us. It basically, there's a bunch of great graphs in here, and we'll blow this one up. But most of the time, our work is 20% of what we do each day. 80% of what we do is found in the gaps in the switching between our main tasks. And this book talks about all the ways you can focus on the one thing that will drive everything. At my team, I say Nonstop, find the 20% that drives the 80%. That's called Pareto's Principle. It's a real rule found in nature that in every situation, almost always, there will be two things out of ten that are the most important. And if you do those two things, you can forget about doing the eight, which is kind of cool. How Jay talks about it is the one thing becomes difficult because we've unfortunately bought into too many others. And those others are what he calls muddling in the middle. They're tiny little things that will never actually drive outsized results. If you're gonna read this book, here's what I think. You read it once, actually, like this. You highlight it, and then you listen to it, because this is the type of book that you come back to. There's one particular framework which I find useful in goal setting, and it's called Goal Setting to the now. Basically, what it means is you go from your someday Goal like someday maybe I'd like to have this to five years to one year, to monthly, to weekly, to daily, to right now. And if you can take your big huge goals and break it down that way, it becomes like eating an elephant. One little chomp, chomp at a time. This book is really interesting. Super easy read the one thing next one is called Merger Masters. This book is old school and if you read it, you're gonna have a little pain in front of you because it's hard. It's a really dense book written by incredibly intelligent billionaires and millionaires. Because the thing is, mergers and buying businesses is how I've made my tens of millions of dollars. This is the game of the rich. They don't buy things, they buy empires. And while this book is not easy to read, if you can understand it and bring it into your everyday psyche, you can find a path to millions of that. I feel very confident. One of my old bosses when I was on Wall street said, if you can truly understand the truth, the words risk arbitrage, and put it into practice, you will print millions. And I tend to believe him. Risk arbitrage is a fancy word for old school mergers and acquisitions. They used to essentially see a situation in which a merger between two companies was going to happen and they were underpricing or overpricing this merger happening, and whatever the difference was between what they thought the value was and what the pricing was, was the risk trade that they make. This thing in the middle is called arbitrage, the difference between two things. And they would make what's called the spread between the two, how much room is between two prices. Risk arbitrage was the first way that the billionaires on Wall street were made. And this book can help teach you the game. If you understand risk, you know how to win more. All right, here's a quote I love. How do you make money? Spinoffs, split ups, liquidations, mergers and acquisitions. If you don't understand those words, you need to. Also, one of the other quotes in the book is you don't have to be right all the time. Even Ted Williams, for you youngsters, that's a former baseball player struck out three out of five times and he was still in the hall of Fame. And so this will teach you if you understand the spread enough, you don't always have to be right because there's wiggle room. I would read this book. It's almost impossible to listen to. It's going to go right over your head. The long and short of it by John Kay, the title says it all. A guide to finance and investment for normally intelligent people who aren't in the industry. So you aren't idiots, but you might be idiots on finance. This book is the book for you. Now this book is really interesting because it breaks down from one of the smartest economists out there, a really tight description of what finance is. It's raw, it's opinionated, and its purpose is going to be for you to understand the industry of finance. Maybe a little bit of the dark side of finance, but it's best to know the enemies you're up against. And there are many enemies when it comes to making money. A couple of the quotes I loved from this book it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. The other one is stock markets are not a way of putting money into companies, but a means of taking it out. And then finally, I think you can't win the game if you don't know what you're playing and who your competitors are. This book is. How short is this book? This book is like 250 pages on almost everything you need to know about the game of finance and investing. And then at the end for you guys it has something else really cool which is a glossary of financial and investment terms. If you speak the language of money, it turns out you can make a lot more of it. And so it has everything in here from like asset backed securities to beta to benchmark to blue chips to alternative investments to alpha and everything in between. You got about 30 pages of definitions to make your life slightly easier. If you don't understand why you're reading I would read this one as opposed to listen to it. Mastering the VC Game. A venture capital insider reveals how to get your startup to IPO on your terms. If you want to raise money and do venture capital, you need to read this book. Venture capitalists and the rich, they speak in contracts, terms and slangs. This book paired with the other two will teach you the terms that those in Silicon Valley raising money know. Master this or impress your friends with all the words that you know. A couple of ways to tell if you should read this book or not. Do you know and understand what liquidation preference is, AKA who receives money first in investing? And if something goes sideways, do you understand what protective provisions are? Those are things that VCs or investors can put in there and you should be really careful careful about because then they can control you by being an investor in your company. So if you understand those two Maybe you don't have to read it if you don't. I would read this book. When I first started raising money and then started looking to invest in startups, I read this book and every book I could find in investing in startups. This one is probably the only one you need. It saved me millions of dollars by now, starting with the fact that I actually could understand and read a term sheet, which is like kind of 101 in investing. And also to make sure that I understand. When I was meeting up with other startup founders, with other investors, we all were speaking the same code. It's almost like going to Mexico and not speaking Spanish. You want to do your duolingo first. That's this book. Some of my favorite quotes from this book are, if you're going to fail, fail quick and cheap. There's no stigma in failing that way. Very vc. And the culture of a startup is that you're on a mission, not just doing a job. Now, why those two things are important is because when you are in startup land, you have to realize that it is totally different than anything you've ever done when you're investing. Investing in a startup is betting on hopes and dreams. This book will help you make sure that if you are going to do that, you will actually know how likely those dreams are to come true. Should you read it or listen to it. Read, but be patient. Not a fun book. We're not here for fun. We're here to make some money. So now you have the mindset, you have the money, you build the skills to keep making more money. Now we focus on how do you keep it. And there are two books to do that. Book one Good to Great first line in the book, good is the enemy of great. Jim Collins uses basically a decade of research in the conquest of how to make good companies great. And then he shares the findings with you. He uses two main frameworks for how to turn a company that is good into a great company, which means a company that makes a lot of money. One is to build through the breakthrough flywheel. Here's what it looks like. A flywheel is essentially a specific process for figuring out the best way to achieve future results that stack on top of each other. So as you hit one result or as you achieve one result, it starts pushing the flywheel without you actually having to do any work. Think about it like a water wheel with a river running through it. And the main framework he talks about is that you need three things. You need disciplined people, disciplined thought, and disciplined action. And if you can get those three, then you can build a big company that survives long past you. And also that makes you a lot of money that you don't have to work in all the time. Disciplined people basically involves getting the right leader and the right team. Disciplined thought involves understanding of brutal facts and setting a core set of values. And disciplined action means you create a culture where the right people will work within the defined values with the appropriate amount of freedom, AKA non micromanagement. And I love this description and the visual he has for it. If you want to be so good, others do the work for you, you have to also be a level 5 leader according to him. And that means there are sort of five different levels. You start out as a highly capable individual, then you go to a contributing team member, then you go to a competent manager, then you go to an effective leader, then you go to a level five executive. You can kind of see right now through a quiz in the book whether you are one of those five levels or which of those five levels you are. And once you climb to the top, it turns out it's a lot easier to make money over time and to actually keep it. One of my other favorite quotes from this that I harass a lot on my team is when in doubt, do not hire when you know you need to make a people change act, exclamation point now. And put your best people on the biggest opportunities, not on the biggest problems. Let that one sink in for a second. Often we want stuff off our plate, so we hire people to do the things that feel problematic. What we should do is hire people to do the things that will have the highest ROI or return on investment for you. Maybe a quick Rule 1. If you don't understand hiring, you'll never be really, really rich. You have to understand hiring. You can never achieve multiple, multiple, multiple millions by yourself. You just can't do it. And so one of the keys to hiring that I love from his book is that you do not hire unless it is a full yes. If it is a maybe, you move on. I would listen to this book. I don't think you have to read it. And sometimes I listen to stuff while I work out a great one to end on. Only the paranoid survive. Andy Grove, CEO of Intel Imagine your company is about to die. You are running out of money. You see no steps ahead, you aren't sleeping, and you're worried if you don't make an immediate change, you will fail miserably. You keep this book by your desk for that moment. Almost every leader goes through it, Andy did it intel. And you can steal his homework. You know, he had some of my favorite quotes of all time. Like, strategic change doesn't just start at the top. It starts with your calendar, which is a micro quote that will have a macro impact. And the other one that I really like is if you're wrong, you will die. But most companies don't die because they're wrong. Most die because they don't commit themselves. They fritter away their valuable resources while attempting to make a decision. The greatest danger is in standing still. Really true. This is a total. Listen. You can listen to this at two and a half speed and be done in like two hours. The last entire segment of this, you've made the money. You have a bunch of it. You know how to build it, you know how to keep it. Then this weird thing happens. You start realizing that a lot of people with money are fucking miserable and they suck to be around. So these last two books help you with how to not be a rich miserable fuck. In fact, I was thinking of putting together a whole YouTube video on that. If you want that video, put that in the comments for later. I think there is a very specific way for you to make a ton of money and have a lot of fun while doing it. Okay, but we'll start with these two books. Your money or your life. This book sparked the entire Fire movement, if you guys have heard of that. Financially independent, retire early. Brilliant book by a woman who basically said the key is remembering that anything you buy and don't use, anything you throw away, anything you consume and don't enjoy, is money down the drain. Wasting your life and energy and wasting the finite resources of the planet. Any waste of your life energy means more hours lost to the rat race. Making a dying. And she meant that on purpose. Instead of making a living, it's making a dying. So how you spend your money is your vote on how you want the world to exist. And this book, Vicki does an incredible job of listing out exactly how she opted out of the rat race, how she saved, specifically what she needed in order to retire early and enjoy her life. Vicki hasn't had a job for decades now and has inspired a movement of tens of thousands of humans to do the same. In fact, this subreddit is all about the Fire movement and how to do it. There's also a really famous guy, Mr. Money Mustache, that talks all about this with specifics. I don't really like that game. I like making money. I find this all to be fun. And there's another group called Fat Fire, which is like, can you be rich and also retire early? That one kind of appeals to me. But this one's a great book to read because I remember the first time I read it years and years and years and years ago. I must have cut my spending by like 75% after reading one book, which meant that she probably saved me hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. It's more interesting when you earn a bunch of money realizing that you don't need it to enjoy life. And then the last book, Adventure Capitalist. I read this book by Jim Rogers when I was traveling in Latin America building a multi billion dollar asset management business. If you've ever wanted to make a ton of money while adventuring with the joy of exploration, it encourages people like you and me to reach out to this big, huge world, step outside of our comfort zones, and actually approach life with a sense of curiosity and excitement while making tons of money. Jim's fascinating. I've gotten to know him over the years and he actually worked with George Soros on the first fund that they had. He had something like a multiple hundred percent return, which was crazy at the time. Made a bunch of money and then peaced out and decided to drive his motorcycle all around the world, starting in Latin America. And he invested as he went. And then he tricked out some crazy looking Mercedes, you can see this with a convertible. And he drove all around Europe and Asia and into Africa doing the same thing, investing. He went from gold Rolexes and Gucci loafers on Wall street to boots and being kind of what's dubbed now the Indiana Jones of finance. This book for me was the first time I felt like I could actually have an adventure and also be a billionaire. And so I want to leave it with you because maybe it will also inspire you to get rid of the loafers and put on a pair of boots. And that's, I think, better for all of us. All right, That's a lot of books to read. 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