In this high‑energy YouTube monologue, the speaker (Dan, author of Buy Back Your Time) shares a personal framework for choosing books—"just‑in‑time" reading versus "just‑in‑case" reading—and then recommends four specific titles that he claims have generated the most wealth for him after reading over 1,900 books. He explains each book’s core concepts and how to apply them: 1. The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt – introduces the Theory of Constraints, teaching viewers to map the flow of money, identify bottlenecks, and focus all resources on the single constraint that limits throughput. 2. The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker – stresses time‑tracking, ruthless elimination of low‑impact activities (the 95/5 rule), and concentrating on the "big rocks" that drive 95 % of results. 3. Feeling Is the Secret by Neville Goddard – presents an identity‑based manifestation system, urging listeners to adopt "I am" statements, live in the feeling of already having what they desire, and use sleep and language to rewire self‑concept. 4. Inner Excellence by Jim Murphy – outlines elite‑performance habits: defining an Ideal Performance State, training the heart (subconscious) rather than just the mind, and focusing on controllable inputs while letting go of outcomes. Throughout, he stresses that reading alone isn’t enough; one must "study" a book, extract a single actionable idea, and implement it immediately. He offers a free executive‑assistant playbook via Instagram (#YouTubeEA), reminds viewers to default to action, and teases an upcoming leadership book he’s been writing for 2.5 years. The video ends with a call for viewers to comment which of the four books they’ll read first. The overall message is a blend of practical frameworks, personal anecdotes, and motivational urging to turn knowledge into concrete wealth‑building actions.
Chapters
If you want to make real fucking money, these are the 4 books you need to read. I've read over 1,900 books about money, business, mindset, and I'm also the author of a bestselling book. But these 4 are by far the ones that made me the most money. Now, before we get into the first book, we need a way to know whether a book is worth reading or if it's just a waste of your fucking time. I call it just-in-time versus just-in-case reading. I never read a book unless I know it's a problem I'm having today. You see, rich people read the book that's gonna solve the problem that's right in front of their face. Do you think Elon Musk is sitting there just reading books for fun? No, he's like, "Fuck, I gotta make some new space material. I gotta read all the books on just that topic." Stop reading just in case to entertain yourself. Start reading just in time to educate yourself. I study books, I don't read them. I study a book, I get an idea, I apply it in real time. See, studying means learn, do, teach. If you really wanna study a book, follow that process. One thing that I learn and I apply is worth 10 times more than 10 books that I've read and finished and forget. So now that we know how to identify a book and even assess if it's worth reading, let's get into book number 1, "The Goal" by Ilya Hu Goldratt. This is for the founder who has tried everything in their business to grow and still can't figure out why their business won't move forward. The theory of constraint is one of the most powerful frameworks to understand where bottleneck is in the business. If you think of any process from left to right, you have things that are being done at each step. And if for whatever reason within that process there's a bottleneck, there's something that's compressing the throughput, then the business can't grow to its potential. Whenever I feel like the output— sales, customers, products, whatever I'm building— the output isn't coming out as fast as I need it to, I always work my way up until I find waste. Because waste means there's a lot of stuff happening before the people at the next stage can use that to actually move the throughput forward. What I love about this book is it argues that if you have a bottleneck, to increase your throughput, you have to take all your resources and attack the bottleneck. If I make cars and I have 2 chassis, 16 wheels, and 1 engine being made every day. What is my bottleneck? The engine. So if somebody comes to me and says, "Hey Dan, I have a way where we can double the wheel production from 16 to 32," I would go, "Thank you, not needed. Let's make more engines." Do you see how that works? The argument is that in any business, there is 1 problem, 1 bottleneck, 1 challenge that if you solve, it'll increase the throughput of your business. And that's what you should be focusing on. FOCUS stands for Follow one course until successful. What's the course? Theory of Constraints tells you how to find it. If you haven't heard of The Algorithm by Elon Musk, he literally codified that into how he solves problems, how he builds businesses. Now it's one step within there, but the whole philosophy is that we have to figure out how to find where the limit is. The way you do that is you increase the amount of volume through the system to figure out where the bottleneck is, and then it'll make it obvious. Sometimes because a business is so small and things move so slow, it's hard to find out where the real bottleneck is. You want to find it? Ask yourself this question: If I tripled the amount of customers you have this month to next month, what breaks? Everybody that you know about in business uses this. Jeff Bezos makes this book required reading for all of his executives. It's how they scaled Amazon Prime so that they could ship all these products for a subscription without having their whole operations collapse. With all that being said, here's how you can find your bottleneck by using the theory of constraints. Number 1, you gotta map the flow of money in your business. Left side ideas, right side cash in your bank account. Think about that. And that is everything from an idea to build a product, to market the product, to talk to customers, to get them to give you money, to onboard the customers, to make sure they're happy, make sure they buy more stuff. And that means money in your bank account. So map out all the steps. Now, I know Most people watch this and say, well, I have a marketing problem. You may and you may not. You think that's the bottleneck, but you might have a bigger problem. You might have an offer problem, and you'll never figure this out if you don't follow that step. Step 2, find the steps where things are piling up. Like I said, ideas are a place where things pile up. If everybody on your team has all these awesome ideas, but nothing's getting executed, then that might be where the bottleneck sits. Dive into each one of these steps where you see things piling up and ask yourself, do I have a people problem, a process problem, or a profit problem? And then the third most important is you have to focus on this step until it's fixed. Stay on the problem. Don't move on the problem. Stay on it. I see people, they're like, I got a problem. They muck around with it. They think it's solved and they move on. And guess what? Game of whack-a-mole. You're playing a game of whack-a-mole in your business all the time. Bang, bang, bang. What's broken? Can't fix it. Why isn't it fixed? Stay on the problem, operationalize the problem, document it, give it to somebody, create a dashboard for the problem, make sure it's always green. Then you can move on from it. And look, I get it. You're already like, Dan, my to-do list is overflowing. That's why you need to have some support in your life. You need to get an executive assistant, and most people just don't know what to give that person. So if you want my internal playbook on how I manage my executive assistant and why I wrote my whole book, Buy Back Your Time, just find me on Instagram and DM me the word #YouTubeEA and I'll send it right over to you. All right. So once you find your bottleneck, awesome. You've got a target. But most people start adding new things to try to fix the next bottleneck instead of removing the things. Which brings me to the second book, The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker. This book is one of my favorites. Yes, for entrepreneurs, but honestly, all executives, anybody that wants to be a high performer, anybody who's just trying to be more in their life. It is so good. It helps people that are ambitious deal with the world, the noise, the pressure, the distractions. As Drucker says often, effectiveness isn't talent, it's a habit. His core habit that he argues about nonstop in this book is you got to concentrate on a few things that produce outstanding results, also known as leverage. And that means killing everything that doesn't support moving forward. And that's what Drucker calls abandonment. See, you can't add focus, you can't add more stuff. You will just get overwhelmed. You can only remove distractions that stops you from doing the thing that's going to get you results. The craziest example of this— I thought I was reading a typo when I read it— was when Elon decided to go all in on robotics and he calls up the team and says, hey, we're going to shut down the Model S and Model X production line. He stopped making a car to focus on what he knows is going to be the big idea. That's crazy and awesome. So let's be inspired a little tiny bit by some of those brave decisions. Every founder I coach, I give them the exact same process. Essentially, make a list of everything you removed this year. Not the things you add. Everybody's got that. It's the business plan. They celebrate. The team knows about it. I'm curious, what did you stop doing? What did you say no to? What did you cut? Because I'm never impressed with people that just keep adding new ideas. I'm impressed with the person who says, hey, I think we should get rid of this because these things are actually not doing anything. The person who can remove waste, subtract things from the business and have the business continue to thrive, if not actually to be more profitable and grow faster, that person in my life is highly rewarded. So here's what Drucker teaches in the book. Number 1, we have to track our time. We gotta figure out where are we spending our time. Most people think, no, I worked on this all week, I worked on this all week. And then it's like, nope. If you actually had a timer go off every 15 minutes and you wrote down what you did, you would forget that you spent 7 hours mindlessly scrolling social media. Just saying. Once you know, you can't hide from the fact of are you actually doing the work? The second thing is you cut ruthlessly. The 95/5 rule argues the same thing that Drucker talks about, which is that 5% of your activities are driving 95% of your result. Which means let's find where are those 95% of the things that we just got to cut. And this is tough because people are like, what are you saying? I got to say no to this person? I got to say no to that opportunity? I got to say no to having a coffee meeting or somebody picking my brain or a random introduction to somebody that I don't know that a friend that I hardly know made an intro to me and I'm going to give up an an hour of my calendar? Yes, you're gonna have to do that. It's not what you say yes to, it's what you say no to that's gonna help you grow your life. Number 3 is now we have the big rocks, we have the big projects. Those are in our calendar. And I always say, we gotta honor that calendar. If it's there, it's for a reason. Do the work, don't get distracted. Turn off your notifications. Don't let people walk by and do what I call GAS meetings, got a second meetings. Stop it. That's why you have to batch your meetings of similar things or take like small tasks and put them into a block and really just execute against them. And the last one is asking yourself a powerful question. What's the one thing and only the one thing that you can do today that actually matters? Now I know you're like, but I got 14. What's the one? But Dan, I can't pick one. There's too many. I got 3, I got 4. This is really important. No, there's one. One bottleneck, one thing. Do that first. That's the 5% that'll get you 95% of results. So The Effective Executive will teach you how to remove things from your calendar. That's awesome. Now you've got more time. The next book will tackle all the limiting beliefs that's holding you back from starting the things you know you got to do. Book number 3, Feeling Is the Secret by Neville Goddard. Anybody in the mental mindset belief space knows this is the Bible, at least Neville. Neville's the OG. He's written dozens of books. I've read them all. This for me is the one you got to read. His whole argument is that your income, your bank account is a ceiling and it's tied to your identity. And if you want to win, if you want to live up, you want your bank account to fill up, then you have to live in the feeling of what you want to show up in your life. Most people say all the things they don't want. They don't realize this. They're like, well, I don't have any money and oh my gosh, I can't pay for this and this is costing too much. They don't even hear themselves. If you can teach yourself how to rewire your identity, you will literally watch your whole life change around you. It's wild to watch. I've helped so many people do this and it all comes from Neville. You have to act like the person you want to be before you actually get any of it. I always tell these kids I mentor, you got Mr. Grumpy Face and you got Mr. Happy Face. Who do you think the world wants to see win? Grumpy Face? Happy Face? Happy face wins. Grumpy face is always wondering why happy face is doing better than him. In the book, there's this great quote and it pretty much says the world is a mirror forever reflecting back to you that which you are within. Goddard calls this framework living in the end. For years I wrote down, I am an Ironman. I am an Ironman. I am an Ironman. You got to understand, when I was writing that 12 years ago, I hadn't even ran a marathon. I couldn't even swim. I never even went on one of them dinky bikes where you gotta wear a bunch of spandex. But I just thought, what is the peak expression of health? Ironman was that for me. I was trying to be the best version of myself. So I wrote down, "I am an Ironman," 4 years before I ever even attempted anything that looked like a triathlon. But then one day, one conversation with my friend Nick turned my whole life upside down.. And it started with a sprint triathlon to then an Olympic distance sprint to an Olympic distance triathlon. And next thing you know, I'm doing a half Ironman to a full Ironman. Now I've done 7 Ironmans and it all started with the belief, the identity that I am an Ironman. Can you make a commitment to who you are without any proof in the world that that is who you are? Some people will not understand this. People will argue with me. Well, that makes no sense, Dan. That's like That's like you're lying to yourself. People lie to themselves all day. All day. Notice that I didn't say I will be an Ironman. I wrote down I am an Ironman. That I am statement is a powerful freaking tool because I know this. What you tell yourself in your mind, not out loud, will be what you live out in the real world. If you think you're valuable, valuable things come to you. If you think you're resourceful, you will be resourceful. If you think you deserve it, you will ask for it. Most people have no idea that the world isn't as it is, the world is as you are. In his book, Goddard calls this living in the end, and there's 6 parts to it. Number 1, we have to assume the feeling first. Everything is a byproduct of how we feel. If I told you there's $10 million in your bank account, how are you gonna feel? Whoa, Dan just wired $10 million in my bank account, that feels great. That feeling, act like that today. The feeling comes first. The results come second. Second part, sleep is your most powerful tool. Now, don't get me wrong, you lazy people out there, don't go to bed and be like, "Dad told me to go to sleep. I'm not going to wake up." No. When you are about to fall asleep, your mind goes into this kind of like dream state. And I want you to plant in your subconscious before you pass out what you want. Fall asleep every night feeling as if it's already done. Be in the energy. I visualize it. I know what I want to create in my life. I've been there. By the time that future in my reality comes together, it will feel so familiar because I've been there 1,000 times. Number 3 is you got to speak from the identity, not towards it. Drop the "I want" and "I'm trying" and start using language that says "I am," "we are," not "we will." "It'd be nice." No, this is what I'm doing. Subtle, but it's a game changer. Not I want to be rich, not I'm trying to be rich, is I am rich. I am rich. You can decide to be rich right now. But I don't have any money in my bank account. That's okay. Rich is a feeling first. See how that works? Number 4, your self-concept is the real lever. The outside world that you think is so important and other people's opinion of you and how you're living your life, those things are just a reflection of what you believe inside. So if you want to have the most power, the highest form of leverage, change that inner image first and the outside world will follow. Number 5, the gap between assuming the identity and seeing the results is where most people quit. Most people try and try and try, and after 3 weeks they give up. And then there's the people that just seem to magically make things happen and people go, "Oh my God, they're so lucky." No. They won in the quiet battles. When nobody else was around, they won those battles, those days. Think of it this way, winners failed more than losers. They just tried one more time. You just have to persist without evidence. And the last one, number 6, is live in the wish fulfilled. Don't imagine getting there. Imagine being there and how would you live in that energy? If you actually believe you have $1 million in bank account, I guarantee you're gonna walk down the street with a a little pep to your step. You're gonna be shaking people's hand with a little bit more confidence. You're gonna be in meetings. I got an idea. Why all of a sudden you feel so confident about your idea? I got $10 million in my bank account, so I don't need you to care about my idea. See how you will have this quiet confidence when you start acting from that place? If you do those, it'll change everything external, but it starts internal. Now, these 3 books, they're great. This will get you going. They'll help you find the bottlenecks. They'll get rid of the distractions. And now you start living from this like elevated identity. But I genuinely believe this next book might be the most important of them all. Number 4, "Inner Excellence" by Jim Murphy. This is not just for business owners. This is for everyone who is wondering why things aren't going their way. Murphy's a cool dude. He reminds me of myself where he like did the business stuff, but then studied the elite performers and started to find the patterns. When he studied 20 years of the top performers and he realized there are some people that had all the skills, high achievers, and didn't win. And then there's the people that had that and actually won at the highest levels. The people that failed, they gripped too hard on their life. The ones that won realized it wasn't about that. It was about letting go. What Jim realized is that the harder you chase the outcome, the worse you perform, the more pressure you put on. You've probably experienced this. Right? You like know you got to give a talk and you're like in your head about this talk and you're like, oh my God, if I suck, everybody's going to know. And then you like start stumbling across your words and you're in your head and then you can't figure it out. And then all of a sudden, whatever you were worried about came true. It's kind of crazy versus when you sit down and have coffee with a friend. Do you stress out? What's the difference? I'm pretty sure you don't put a lot of pressure on having a conversation with a friend. What happens is you got to focus on your inputs, what you put in, the intention, the prep, the doing, the practice. The outcomes, the results, those are the byproduct of the inputs. The private victories are what's celebrated in public, but nobody sees the private victories. That's what you can control. The fix isn't trying harder and holding on and trying to control. It's actually letting go of what you can't control. When I think of that book, these are the 3 biggest lessons that I took away that that's allowed me to find another gear. Number 1 is know your ideal performance state, your IPS. This is knowing when you performed great, what was true? What state did you get in? You gotta get clear on exactly how you wanna feel when you perform and how you do it. Before I come in and I shoot, the team and I have a checklist. You think I just like come in here and stand in front of a camera and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I just mouth off? No, there's a process. Turn our phones off. We talk about what I'm going to talk about. We get a pump in, we hydrate. We make sure that the energy is set way before I start talking. If you feel good, you will play good. Second is you got to train the heart, not just the mind. I learned a long time ago that your subconscious, things you're not even aware of, it runs your performance. Like, did you ask your heart to beat right now or did it just magically beat? You can have that same effect on your life. It's not logic or willpower. It's literally your heart. You can train it to be fully engaged in the process and at the same time be completely unattached to the outcome. As Ram Dass wrote about often, it's being involved and unattached. The third is you got to redefine success. Your only goal should just be about giving your best, being present, and being grateful, and control what you can control and everything else, let it be. If the weather changes, it is what it is. If people don't show up the way you want them to, It is what it is. I can't control how other people are. I just go, did I show up? Did I do the work? And then the scoreboard's gonna be what it's gonna be. Most people define their success and their worth on the outcomes that they create. What they should be looking at is the inputs that created those outcomes and celebrate those. Whether the outcomes come or not, you can't control that. You can only control those inputs, and that puts you in control. This is a total game changer, not just for business owners, but anybody that wants to be an even higher achiever. So here's the deal. I gave you 4 incredible books that impacted my life in a deep and powerful way. And all I need from you is one thing. I need you to make a commitment. I need to know out of the 4, which one are you most likely to read? I'm not even saying to buy it. I'm just saying which one speaks to your heart the most and leave a comment below. Now, if you want to take it to another level, you buy the book, you start reading it. But again, just in time versus just in case. If it's not the one you should be reading right now, Stay with what you got. I care more that that is what you're doing than you just buy these books and collect them in some pile that you might be already doing. The winners aren't the ones that finish the book. They're the ones who apply what they read. They study the book. They execute against the book. I have a sign above my door. It says, "Default to action." I don't care that people just consume knowledge. I care that they take action. And if you made it this far, I've got a secret for you. And it's something I haven't shared with anybody. I'm in the process of writing a leadership book and it is going to be a banger. 2.5 years of writing, editing, researching, interviewing. It is going to be my best work. It comes out early next year and I just wanted to let you know because I want you to stay tuned for it. If you thought Buy Back Your Time was great, this one is another level. And remember, if you want my full EA playbook, just find me on Instagram and DM me the word #YouTubeEA and I'll send it right over. Next up, if you're still thinking you don't have enough time to read all these books, watch this video right here and I'll teach you how to manage your time to do the things you want.
