These Are The Best Business Books To Read (7 Billionaire Books)

I read or listen to over 50 books a year on business. I skim most of them. I study a select few. These are the nine books that helped me build a $100 million business and they transformed just about everything. But why are these the books I come back to? Because they are from billionaires. And I truly believe biographies of billionaires teach you more than self help books and are the best way to learn. So the goal of this video is to save you hundreds of hours by sharing the most valuable lessons from each book, why you should read it, and how to implement these principles into your life to grow your business and make more money. And at the end, I got a little special giveaway for you, so make sure to stick around. But before we get into it, don't be a bad vibe. You need to subscribe. We don't want to fill your head with nonsense. Instead, here we do it all with common sense. Okay, first up, built from scratch. This is the book from the two founders of the Home Depot on how they built a company from nothing to $30 billion. Why should you read this one? Because it's actually $300 billion, the new market cap of Home Depot. What I love about this book in general is it the story of how two founders, step by step, built a company that's lasted far beyond them and probably will for decades in the future. I want to steal the homework from people who bootstrapped their business, didn't have a lot of cash, didn't have a lot of experience, because I think that's probably a lot of you guys. And me too. I never raised money for this company, for instance, or most of my companies. The interesting part about this book, in my opinion, it is so tactical in an age before people who wrote books were just trying to get speaking gigs and famous and talk on stages. You can't find these guys anywhere. Try to google them, they're literally not available. And because of that, this book is. It's not fluff, it's not a book as a business card. It is only for builders. So I really like it. I recommend you listen to it on audiobook. I don't think you have to read it. That's what I do and I've listened to it a few times. One of my favorite stories from the book is about them getting fired. So what actually happened to create Home Depot is that the two founders of it started at another company and that company, they were moving, they were growing within the company and they thought they were doing pretty well, but apparently they were too aggressive for what was his name? Sandy Seagullhoff, who was the head of the company. And he fired them from a company called Dalen Corporation and told them that they were inept, that he could do it all himself. And firing them is what led them to light a fire underneath them. And so I think for a lot of people, we don't realize that the thing that is waiting to propel us in the future is the most painful thing that might ever happen to us. What's interesting is the two founders, Home Depot, were also inspired by another book we're going to talk about, which is from the founder of Walmart, Sam Walton. Sometimes we can't be what we can't see. And these two guys, they saw somebody else just like them from a small town, didn't go to fancy schools, didn't have a lot of cash, but still were able to build a giant company. The other thing that is unique in this book, in my opinion, is one, they start from the idea of low prices because they couldn't afford very much. They couldn't afford to create a luxury store because they didn't have any money. So they were like, let me solve my own problem. Pain. Before Home Depot existed, you couldn't just go out and buy all the things you needed to redo your house. You had to go to specialty stores, you had to go to contractors. Sometimes you had to show your contractor's license even to get into the specialty stores. And Home Depot totally revolutionized that. So they're like, wait a second, we're kind of broke, we're kind of poor, we want to redo our house, we can't afford a contractor. What would it look like if we built a big warehouse? What if we just bought a warehouse or leased a warehouse? Brass tax, nothing really in it, not pretty. Throw up a bunch of cheap shelves, boxed goods and see if people will come in and buy our stuff. Everybody else in the industry told them that they were crazy and they said, we don't think so because we think that people want to do it themselves. They can't and they can't afford contractors. And so they took this low price pain point idea and created an empire. What's fascinating is if you were to go back before Home Depot was created and pull at the average Americans, do you want to redesign and redo your house yourself? And could you redesign and redo your house yourself? 10% of Americans back then thought they could do home improvement. Today it's more like 56%. So they have single handedly taken construction, home construction out of the hands of the few and put it into the hands of the many. That's one reason. One of the other reasons is they changed the rules of the game. How? Anywhere you have an industry where you have a middleman, there's an opportunity to build a business. The middleman in this instance used to be these specialty stores, used to be contractors. And they were like, gosh, if I just got rid of this guy in the middle, I could decrease the price by 100%, 200%, 50%, depending on the issue. So that's exactly what they did. They got rid of the man in the middle. And look at how much money they made doing that. They took the home, do it yourself market from a $35 billion market to a $365 billion market just during the writing of this book when they had created $30 billion company. I think the idea here is when somebody says you can't, it's often because they don't want you to. I want to share one of my favorite quotes. So they say the key is not to make the sale. The key is to cultivate the customer. At the Home Depot, cultivating the customer is much more important than creating a bottom line. We teach our associates that if you can save a customer money, do it. We're not looking to fleece the customer. If I can save them 100 bucks, why not do it? That reflects one of our core values. Care for them today, they'll be back tomorrow. I love this. Now they paired this idea because if that was the only idea, all your employees might say, buy everything for free from somebody else. Let me give this away. They PA paired it with one other thing. Never let a customer leave the store empty handed, period. If there was something they needed that they didn't have, then we would figure out a way to get them to their goal. I think this idea of always satisfying the customer means that they always buy something with this idea of never overcharging the customer so it simultaneously you feel like, man, they're taking care of me and man, they're taking care of me. But profit is in the middle. Now how does this apply to you? If you want to get rich, you should only take advice from those who already are rich. If you want to build a billion dollar business, you should prob listen to those who have built billion dollar businesses. These two guys have done it and it's actually lasted the test of time. So let's steal their homework. Number two, poor Charlie's almanac, which is this one right here. Okay. This is One of the best books of all time, in my opinion. Charlie Munger was the right hand to Warren Buffett in creating Berkshire Hathaway. He put together this compilation of his best speeches, emails, scripts since they started. What's fascinating about this book, in my opinion, is it's an easy read. Charlie Munger kind of talks like your grandpa, but, you know, if you mix raisins with turds, they're still turds. Kind of these quotes and idioms and pieces of wisdom that are so simple to understand because of the way that he communicates. And yet this man has created more wealth than almost anybody in this country. And the quote on the back is, there's an old two part rule that often works wonders in business, science and elsewhere. One, take a simple basic idea, and two, take it very seriously. It seems too simple. And yet that is part of the magic of Charlie Munger. I think you should read this book if you want to become a better investor, if you want to get better at decision making, if you want to figure out how to take your money and make more money with it, and if you want to replicate the best investor of our time, probably in tandem with Warren Buffett, his success. One of the best stories from Charlie Munger that I really loved is he talks about being incredibly frugal, but also caring a lot about the way that he looks. So throughout the book, there are stories from his kids, from his wife, from his friends. Perfect example from Charlie Munger is his son talking about how his father was a man of very few words, not a lot of compliments. I don't know if any of you guys have a dad like that. And so one time his son sends him a book called Trillin. And the book was about an immigrant family and the growth of this family and sort of the Midwestern values and humor that they had in building a huge business. And so his son sends the book to. To his dad and he's pretty excited. He thinks his dad's gonna like the book. And all of a sudden he gets the book back in a padded envelope with an address label written by his dad's secretary. There was no note, so his son never knew if he rejected it or not. He never even asked his dad. He just kind of thought maybe he never read it or he never received it. But it turns out his dad liked it so much that he sent copies of it to the whole family. And so I think this is a little bit of an example of these days. It seems like we always want a feedback loop. We always want to More compliments and more comments. But sometimes we can make a lasting impact just because we think it's right and we don't have to have all the rigmarole as much as you can. And Charlie Munger talks about this. Get people who don't tell you exactly what you want that they're hard on you. And Charlie Munger was certainly that. He also was really well known for sitting in what they call his Mount Rushmore chair, which was a chair probably kind of like this, where he would read newspapers every single day. He was a voracious reader. In the Mount Rushmore chair, you weren't allowed to bother him for like two hours a day. He was stone faced. He wouldn't talk to anybody, he wouldn't engage, and he was really intimidating to his kids. But he realized that his only differentiator in life was could he consume more information than other people do? Because he didn't think he was smarter than other people. He simply thought that he worked harder by getting more into his head than anybody else could. And in this day and age with podcasts, audiobooks, YouTube, I think we all have that capability. But we're so distracted, right 30 second TikToks steal our attention all the time from a book that could actually change our lives if we went all the way through it. And so a reminder for you sometimes to go to Mount Rushmore. What is unique from this book? Munger was known for mental models. So if you go and look about stories on Munger, there will be points again and again where instead of making a decision once and deciding yes or no on it, he will say, this is a type of decision that I will probably have again, how do I answer questions like this, decisions like this? And so he has favorite quotes and lines like, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. So what would that be about? Well, in one instance, he would say, the most important thing when you're hiring somebody is to realize that you can't teach desire. It's the same quote. So what is he saying there? He's saying when you go to partner with somebody, when you go to hire somebody, you need to make sure they want it because you can't want it more than them. So if he was deciding between hiring candidate A or B, he would find the one who would want to drink. He would find the one who would want it more for themselves than he did. So he wouldn't have to keep answering that question to himself. How do I decide who to hire? It would be who is the thirstiest and actually going to drink. One of the other things that Munger does that I thought was really interesting is instead of learning from the positive, he would do what's called inversion. He would say invert. Always invert. So often when I'm going to have an activity, I go, if I did the same activity for 100 days or more, would I have a better life or a worse life? If I eat ice cream every day for 100 days, better or worse? Worse. Okay, maybe don't do it. If I read 30 minutes every day, focused attention instead of tiktoking, would my life be better or worse? Better do it. And so instead of thinking about could I be better? Think about would it be worse? And he does this again and again. And it's called inverse thinking. And very important if you want to be an investor too, because imagine one of him and Buffett's famous lines is, rule number one to investing is never lose money. Rule number two is don't forget rule number one. One. And so if you want to be a good investor, you always have to think about the downside more than the upside. Otherwise you are a happy fool distributing money to other people's hopes and dreams and never having it come back to you. Number three, the ride of a lifetime. Lessons learned from 15 years at the helm of Disney. This is so this is a book by. Oh, this is going to go poorly. I'm going to leave it right there. This is a book by the CEO of Walt Disney World, so Bob Iger. So it basically chronicles everything that happened to create the happiest company on the planet. And what I think is interesting about this book in general is that he was at Disney through a pivotal period with a ton of transitions and changes, and went from being a normal employee to the CEO of the company to one of the richest men in the world. And so I think we should steal his homework. When iger became the CEO of Disney in 2005, he came in right as Disney and Pixar were having a strained relationship. They had a partnership right where they were distributing content together. Steve Jobs was. Was over Disney. He wasn't into it. He didn't think they should continue the partnership. So Iger took a huge risk. He said, I'm going to double down on you, Steve Jobs, and on Pixar. So much so that instead of just being a partner, I'd like to outright acquire Pixar. Huge move. And Steve Jobs, if you read anything about him, loves big moves. So he realized that he was dealing with A player here, not somebody was going to tiptoe but take a huge jump. They ended up acquiring Pixar. It was one of the most successful acquisitions in Disney's entire history. And they developed a really close relationship. Steve Jobs famously said that together we saved two companies. And I think that might be true in some ways. They also had a great relationship from one visionary to another. I think this is a good example of what happens sometimes when you go all in to not half ass your way through life, but instead when you see an opportunity jump. What is unique in this book is we have seen Live Disney become one of the most acquisitive, meaning they buy a lot of business companies in the world. Watching Bob Iger acquire Star wars and all of its entities, watching him acquire Pixar, Steve Jobs brilliant brainchild and integrate those into Disney transformed the company. And every single transaction is documented in here. So you can hear about one of my favorite stories, which is when he goes and meets with George Lucas, who was the founder of Lucasfilm, AKA what owns Star Wars. And Lucas was like, no way am I selling this. Not for a bajillion doll. And Lucas didn't need the money. He had plenty of it. This was his baby that he didn't wanna see ruined. Now have they kind of ruined it? Different story. I do think they've beaten Star wars to death like a dead horse. But back when Bob was heading the company and running it, this acquisition they didn't think was gonna happen, they were competing with a bunch of other people and Disney actually paid less than others. They recouped their money in this acquisition faster than almost any acquisition Disney has done. I think they got a raging deal. And so you can learn a lot about deal making from Bob. And the way that he gets deals done is really interesting because I think he goes and he learns the psyche of the person that he wants something from. He spent a ton of time getting to know Steve Jobs, so much so that he was invited to his funeral to speak. And they would say I love you to each other. He got to know George Lucas so well that he would go to his house and go on walks with him. And so when he put together a transaction for them, he knew what they wanted. He didn't just sell what he wanted. Brilliant strategy. Some of my favorite quotes for him, ask the questions you need to ask. Admit without apology what you don't understand and do the work to learn what you need to learn as quickly as possible. True authority comes from knowing who you are and not pretending to be Anything else. I think we've all felt that moment where we're somewhere. We don't ask the question because we're scared. We want to look smart. He said, me asking a question has nothing to do with my intelligence level. It actually shows I'm more intelligent realized in an area where I might not know everything. One of the other things that I love is he talks about innovation, which they did a lot of on Disney, and says the path to innovation begins with curiosity. Innovate or die. And there is no innovation if you operate out of fear of the new or untested. In this day and age, a lot of us operate from fear and he wouldn't. And lastly, some of this, when we have people like Bob Iger, I think maybe they're trying to portray something. You know, when he put out this book, I think he was gonna do a presidential run. That's just my take. And so sometimes I think they're trying to portray themselves one way or another. But then he has a line this don't be in the business of playing it safe. Be brutal and be final. And I think that's true. Don't play safe. Sometimes you do have to be brutal. My biggest takeaway from this book is big swings. You know, Home Depot is kind of a series of small moves perfectly executed continuously. Bob Iger is like, go eat the whole whale at once. And I think it's good to see the two. All right, next we've got Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. I don't even have to look. It's this giant book. This one is long, but think about what Steve Jobs has done. This book is based on over 40 interviews with jobs conducted over two years, as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors and colleagues. Famously, Steve Jobs read it and said it sounds kind of true. And yet I remember many things another way. Why should you read it? Because he's one of the brilliant visionaries of our time, if not all time in the modern age. I think it's if you want to be exceptional, it's much easier to mimic somebody that you already know is exceptional. When it comes to Steve Jobs, there's so much to learn Besides the little 30 second quotes that we get from, for instance, one of my favorite stories, which was about the 1984 commercial. If you guys have never seen it, here's a snippet. On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. So in this commercial, this was revolutionary for its time. We're not even going to talk about the Technology, we're going to sell a feeling and we're going to sell a Persona. If you owned an Apple product, you would feel like this. And here is our enemy that we all stand against. And that was 1984. Brilliant. And then he did that again with this other ad comparing Dell and Apple. One of my other favorite stories from this book is about the detail of Steve Jobs. He was a perfectionist with a true belief that how you do anything is how you do everything. And there is one point. Well, there's two points. Let me tell you the first one. So when they're working on the first prototype of the iPhone, he insisted the iPhone screen should be made out of glass rather than plastic. But the engineers like, no, no, that's way too hard. So Jobs told them, I don't care. We do hard things. And he told them that people will carry their phones in their pockets alongside their keys, so it needs to be scratch resistant. We all know that. He's like, I want a glass screen and I want it perfect in six weeks to pull out this point point, Jobs takes the iPhone prototype, scratches it with his keys, and says, I don't know how we're going to do it, but we're going to do it. A crazy thing is he had something that people called at the time the reality distortion field, where when you were in Steve Jobs proximity, you felt like you could achieve that. Elon Musk has something very similar where he says, in six weeks, we will do this. And people go, okay, we believe you, and thus we're going to do it. And so, lo and behold, thanks to him, we have glass that's scratch resistant today on our iPhones. When everybody told him that they couldn't. One of my favorite other stories is he couldn't figure out how to get all of his engineers to feel like every part of the computer, the first MacBook, was theirs. Like they had ownership in it. So he was thinking about this problem and thinking about this problem. What he finally did is he took the inside of a plate inside of the MacBook, and he had the engineers sign the plate. So even though no customers could see it, every single engineer's name was signed inside of the MacBook. They owned a piece of it. Their names would be etched forever inside of this piece of hardware. He knew that no one would ever see the detail that they had, but they knew it, too. And that's another way to project that reality distortion field. Now, what I think is unique here is that Jobs knew the truth, which is, if you want to go Fast, go alone if you want to go far, go together. And that, in fact, you really cannot create anything if you're just going to be an individual human. He probably wanted to be an individual contributor. He was known for tantrums, screaming at people, crying, high emotionality, being unnerved, losing himself in one project for weeks at a time, failing. He was a highly, highly flawed individual. And you can look up his family life and his kids to continue that point. And yet he was wildly successful. And so sometimes I think reading a book like this, it shows. Yes, he's crazy. Yes, he still won. And he did it his way, which probably means that you can too. He notoriously, in his house, had a beautiful home in California, and like one piece of furniture, which was one couch that he thought was perfectly designed because he refused to put one thing in his house that he didn't think was aesthetically perfect. And so for all you OCD mother, Steve Jobs might be your guy. Steve Jobs also did one other thing really, really well that's in this book. What does your to do list looks like? It looks like 100 items, and you need to do all of them. At his retreats, he would tell executives, you only get three, you only get three, you only get 3. And so he would skim down the list to say, we must have a list of things we will not work on in order to work on the big things. And I think that was huge. What are my favorite quotes? You cannot talk about Steve Jobs without the crazy ones. He has a line I love called here's to the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs and the square holes, the ones who think differently. This was one of the overarching beliefs at Apple, which is where think differently came from. He talks about deciding what not to do is just as important as deciding what to do. Going back to that hundred three list and then talking about the little handwriting inside of the computer, he says, I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it's inside the box. A great carpenter isn't going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though no one's going to see it. This goes back to that perfection and unseen details. This one is a reason why you should continue watching this video all the way through. Think about this for a second. One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are. So sometimes when you're lost, or when I'm lost, I go, what would the person who I think most highly of do in this moment. And even when I don't know the answer, I turn to what I think the answer might be from them. And that helps me many times. So if you're gonna take actions away from this book and from Steve Jobs, it should probably be this. It. Go all in, send it. Your difference is the thing that makes you unique in this world. Never forget that, never apologize for it. And even though you are flawed, it doesn't mean you can't be exceptional. Okay, let me sneak in a book. This one. This is by yours truly. Does that name look familiar? This book is tactical advice on how to buy your first business or your third or your fifth business, and why today, in this world around us, I think it is the key to ownership for everyone. And it might even be the key to saving this country and our communities, taking our communities back from the big guys. While I love talking about billionaires, I don't think they should own everything. I think you guys should. So if you haven't pre ordered the book, go to msmbook.com and pre order or the link below because I think we should take back a little bit of ownership in this country. And I want you guys to be the next round of billionaires and actually help pull people up as opposed to Gatekeep, which is why we do everything we do on YouTube. More of you that own instead of the few who own everything. And we have to ask permission for it. Msmbook.com I spent three years on it. You're not going to regret it. The next book, Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, the man who needs no introduction. What's interesting, though, is Walter Isaacson wrote both of these books and he did two years of research on Musk. Same thing, hundreds of interviews for people who hated him, loved him, family, friends, workers, colleagues, competitors. And so it's this very nuanced biography of one of, I think, the most controversial, misunderstood, and brilliant minds of our time. Why would I read this book? I would listen to this book again. So my book, Main Street Millionaire, you should get it in hard copy and have it delivered to you because you're going to want to highlight it, write down specific tactics and take action on it. Almost like a workbook. These two books, you don't need to read, in my opinion. You can listen to them. You can listen to them again and again and again, but on audiobook, because you're not trying to take a tactic that Steve Jobs used, you're trying to change your mindset. And then you can take a tactic from my book. All right, one of my favorite stories about Elon Musk. God, where do we start? Can we just start with this one? Which is what Elon Musk says to advertisers who won't advertise on Twitter. Go yourself. One of my favorite stories about Elon Musk is starting at the beginning. So a lot of people know him today as this titan of industry. But the cool part about the biography is it takes you back to being a young kid from South Africa and what that was like flying in planes, living wild. And it sort of explains why today he's a hard man to tell, what to do. Also, learning a little bit about his family and how they think about the world, and his father, whose father had multiple kids, too, gave me a perspective of the humans behind the man. And one of the themes you're gonna see in this series is, yes, I do think that Elon Musk is a genius, but I also think that he is a flawed. And so watching him in some of those early interactions was really useful. I also think it's interesting to look at some of his family life. You know, he's obviously had a few wives. He has many children. He's had one wife, Grimes, who I believe he's been married to twice, divorced from twice, married to three times, divorced from twice. I can't keep it straight. The. The point of it all is sometimes we got to be reasonable about the fact that just because somebody is successful in one area of life doesn't mean they're successful in all of them. Elon Musk is definitely not successful in all areas. And guess what? Sometimes that's what it takes. So let's be honest about what it takes to be a billionaire. This book really shows you that what is unique from this book. Well, if you haven't heard of first principles thinking, Musk's approach to business breaks this down. It's this idea of break the complex issues down into their fundamental truth and build them up from there. This allows you to go, I want to build a billion dollar company. That's really hard. That's really complex. Where would I start with today in order to build on it? And so if sometimes you struggle with matching your actions to your big goals, this book is useful for that. I also like Musk because he is known for extreme ownership, which means he will say when he has been wrong. And he also mandates other people do as well. I think this is critical in the billionaires that I've engaged with with. They never allow themselves to be labeled a victim by another I think you should make sure to do the same. My favorite quote. Oof. There's a lot. I like this one. I think it's possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary. Isn't that kind of freeing? When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor. You know that famous line people say where what would you do if you know, you couldn't fail? You guys have heard that before. I think it's actually the opposite. What would you do? Even if you knew you were gonna fail, what would you do no matter what? And Elon Musk is a testament to that. The last one is this one. I'm not trying to be anyone's savior. I'm just trying to think about the future and not be sad. And the reason I like that is that saviors, well, they also often become martyrs. And so Elon Musk is saying, I'm not trying to be perfect. I'm just trying to change the world in a forward looking way that I think it is better for. And I think that's important for all of us. The biggest takeaway that I take from this book is that we all are more uniquely capable than we think we are, but the world tries to tell us not to be. The world will beat you down again and again and again. And that's probably how you know you're on the right path, because you're pushing a little bit past that comfort zone. And watching him do these huge things inspires me to go, yeah, I could probably do this smaller thing because he's no more human than I am. The next book. I love this book, Sam Walton Made in America. I just re listened to it for the second or third time. It's about the founder of Walmart, Sam Walton, and his story of how to build Walmart. Now hold your phone. I know a lot of people don't love Walmart. It's not my favorite place to go shop today either. I don't read this book because I want to recreate Walmart. I read this book because Walmart is a $500 billion a year company that I want to learn how to build something so lax such as that. Why do you read it? Because it's about a man who never sought the limelight. In fact, one of my favorite stories in the book is Sam Walton was quiet. He never did PR tours, he never did interviews. He just built the business for decades and decades until finally, somehow somebody put him on the Forbes 100 list as one of the richest, if not the richest, man in the world. I think it was the richest man in the world. And all of a sudden, all of these reporters did descend on his tiny town in Arkansas and they start trying to interview his friends, his family, everything about them. And unlike most people today who crave the Internet, me, in some ways, he's pissed. He's like, I don't want to talk to all of these people. I'm just trying to build something lasting because I want to. And I thought that was really refreshing in this day and age. One of the other stories I love, he talks about what I'll call checking for dust. Dust across his business. Sam was known actually for never being on time to meetings, randomly canceling meetings, and almost being impossible to schedule with, which kind of makes me feel better because I'm that way. I don't know if you guys are like, I'm late a lot, I'm all over the place. I kind of jump here and there. My mind goes in. Fractured manners. And Sam was the same. But he said the key to running a business even as big as Walmart is that he would just go and check, check on things all the time. He was notorious for having these old kind of beat up planes. Not like a fancy private jet, we're talking two prop planes. I get it, still expensive. But this guy's a billionaire. And he would go and fly around all the stores. They say to this day, nobody has visited more retail stores than Sam Walton. And he was known for, when he went there, he would go immediately and talk to the associates and ask them what they thought. Not the management, not the heads, not the executives. He'd go up to the front person and he'd say, how's this business doing? What's going on? What do you think? What should we be changing? He was just looking for dust all around his business. And that is usually what CEOs do. What is unique in this business? If I had to pick three things from Walmart that I want to replicate, it was one. Obsessed with your customer. He has a quote that I'll share later about it, but okay, let's share it right now. The quote is, there's only one person who can fire anyone, all the way up to the boss at any time, and that is the customer. And he was right. He was obsessed with the customer in every way, shape and form. And if you want to build a company, you should be too. The second thing is cost conscious. So famously, Sam Walton would share a hotel room. Nobody called the HR these day, day and age with his other executives. Every time they track traveled and they weren't staying at the ritz or the Four Seasons, they were staying at like a Motel 6 with all of them together. I try to do that in my company. Like for instance, we're flying to LA tomorrow and you know, kind of old Cody might have just gone and stayed at the Four Seasons or the Ritz are a fancy place, but we're all going to stay in an Airbnb together. And I want to make sure that we know at this company that I am just as cost conscious as everybody else. I am not flying private all the time. We're flying all southwest to Las Vegas today. And I mean, I'm not looking for virtue signaling to say that's so great and you know, I'm doing anything special. But these days everybody's flexing their Lambo, their rari, their private plane. And yet the billionaires, they pay attention to the pennies. And so I want to remember that. And I think you should too. Sam Walton knew his competitors. He was famous for going to other people's stores. He had this little recorder, like a tape recorder, because he's old and now he's dead, I think anyway, he's definitely dead. He's old and dead. So he had this little tape recorder and he would take it around to all the stores and he would record his thoughts like, well, they're selling watermelons here for 39 cents. We've got them for 54. They've got the books up front, which is smart, as opposed to the videotapes in the back. You know, we've got gum up front and that's actually a great markup. Their price is too high. We could go lower. So he would go around all of his competitors and record what they were doing. He would famous for saying that his best ideas came from everybody else. He would just make them a little bit better, cheaper and more customer centric. Some of my other favorite quotes are great ideas come from everywhere. If you just listen and look for them, you never know who's going to have a good idea. So he was relentless about saying he'd be in a conversation chatting with you and then he'd be like, hold that for a second. Then he'd go on his voice recorder and he'd record his little idea. And I love this. So I carry a tiny notebook everywhere to do the same thing. He has this line, every time Walmart spends $1 Foolishly, it comes right out of our customers pockets. Every time we save them a dollar that puts us one more Step ahead of the competition, which is where we always plan to be. And I think that's true. The last one I'd added on for him is high expectations are the key to everything. I've struggled with this in my business again and again. The idea of telling the people that we are on a bigger mission and that every time you submit some piece of work, I want you to be so proud of what you've created that you want to show it off. And if you don't, don't ship the product yet. But you should have this belief and pride in what you do. How do I apply this to my life? I make sure that in my businesses we all know three things. Employees first, because without happy employees, you can't have the second most important thing, which is customers first, and the third most important thing, which is that we are so proud of what we do, that when we send it, we would be okay if it was going to the person we look up to more than anything in the world. And I think Sam Walton did that. Next we got. Am I being too subtle? Oh, I love this orange book. This is by Sam Zell. Sam Zell was a self made billionaire. He has a crazy nickname which was the Grave Dancer. And he was famous for taking old beat up companies, real estate, etc. Pulling them from the grave. So they were struggling, gonna die, maybe you already had died and basically bankruptcy and revitalizing them. He would buy companies for pennies on the dollar. He was a relentless businessman. I like to listen to him because I'm an investor. I like to take my money and make more money. Maybe you guys are the same. He is one of the best of all time to do that. So if you want your money to make more money, you should listen to this book. One of the. My favorite stories about Sam Zell is he was known for being really eccentric. So Sam Zell, look at this guy, drove a motorcycle. Motorcycle and had leathers made for all of his executives that said Zell's Angels, which just kills me. And so you got this old billionaire driving around on motorcycles because he did not care what anybody thinks. One of my second favorite stories from Sam Zell is he famously had one of his associates come into his office. They were going to do a deal and the guy brings this big huge binder worth of stuff and puts it on Sam's desk and is like, I think we should do this deal. Sam says, can you explain it to me, you know, in like three minutes? So he explains the deal to Sam in three minutes and Sam says we should do the deal. And the idea was this, that if you can't explain your deal, your investment in three minutes concisely and convince somebody a fat binder doesn't matter. But sometimes the only way to get somebody to convince to doing a deal in three minutes is to do all the work in that fat binder. And so he was sort of famous for this idea of complexity makes you look smart, simplicity makes you money. Now what is unique from this book? He is the master at leverage. He was sort of one of the first people to create real estate levered investments called REITs Real estate investment Trust and that was compiling a bunch of real estate together to grow it. I think what's also unique is Sam's had a bunch of really big failures fuckers in the news when this guy died. I think it was the Chicago Tribune, excuse me if it wasn't some Chicago newspaper because that's where he was from, had the headline say Failed media Tycoon Sam Zell dies. That's because he bought one newspaper and the newspaper didn't make it. By the way, I don't think you're a failure if you build a billion dollar multi, multi, multi billion dollar company. You become a billionaire, you have a very successful family and you have hundreds of successful ideas and businesses. So shame on them. Some of my favorite quotes from them, I am not a reckless person, but taking risks is the only way to achieve above average returns. My second favorite one is if you ain't the lead dog, the scenery never changes. And then lastly you just build up a tolerance for rejection. You learn to keep asking and find ways to get to keep a conversation going. A no is just a beginning of a conversation. So if you're struggling and you don't know where to go next, you might want to go with Zam. Okay, I want to close this out with that. The truth of the matter is, if you want to become a billionaire, what's the fastest way to do it? Read books by billionaires. So what am I going to do for you guys? I'm going to give away all these books and multiple copies of them. How am I going to do it? I want you to tag me on Instagram odysanchez with a picture of you watching this YouTube video. You can also tell me which book you prefer. You can let me surprise you. I'll write you a little note in it, but make sure to tag me on Instagram. You can tell me in the YouTube comments if you've done that so I can go and look for you guys. But I want you guys to become billionaires. So I'm going to shoot you a bunch of these. Make sure. Also msmbook.com Little Pre Order Baby, I'm going to do cool stuff for you later. Until next week. Thank you guys for being the few who do.