There are numerous books on a wide range of topics, including investing, corporate structure, and the psychology of persuasion. The reality is that the majority of the information in these books is not particularly valuable when it comes to achieving financial success.
So, allow us to spare you the countless hours we’ve devoted to reading material that didn’t significantly contribute to our financial well-being.
1. “Atomic Habits” by James Clear
So, how do you become a person worthy of success? Well, you are the sum of all of your actions. So, to change yourself, you need to change your actions. And obviously, you can’t just reinvent yourself overnight. You need to do it incrementally by implementing new habits, killing old ones, and keeping the worthy ones.
And that’s exactly what Atomic Habits teaches you to do. it completely changes your view of how to approach work and allows you to stack all of your good habits day by day. It teaches you to solidify your habits until they eventually become second nature. This book is the base of every successful man.
2. “Money Master the Game” by Tony Robbins
Once you’ve built a solid base of habits and perhaps you’ve already chosen your business model and you’re starting to make some cash, you need to start setting expectations.
You need to begin to understand how to think about money, and that is exactly what you’re going to learn in ‘Money Master the Game’ by Tony Robbins. There’s one exercise where you have to design your life in three ways.
In the first scenario, you’re just scraping by, and you write down how much money you need to make that happen from your passive investments.
In the second scenario, you’re living comfortably but not extravagantly, and, once again, you need to calculate how much of a nest egg you need for that to happen.
In the third scenario, you calculate how much money you need to go all out. And you’ll realize that if you’re being honest with yourself, success is a lot closer than you may think.
Now, of course, your expectations will always change, and as you become more successful, you might want more from life. But it’s just a very powerful exercise to get you to quantify what success looks like financially. How can you start working towards success if you don’t even know what it means when it comes to cents or dollars? So, once you’ve set your expectations, you need to start executing. And executing means, how do I make that money actively?
3. “Influence” by Robert B. Cialdini
and
4. “Confessions of an Advertising Man” by David Ogilvy
One of the highest-leveraged skills you can have is the ability to persuade masses of people, and that’s really where Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion shines. This book is very powerful when you read it right before reading the next one, which is ‘Confessions of an Advertising Man’. You see, this book, paired with David Ogilvy’s ‘Confessions of an Advertising Man’, are pretty much the only marketing books that you will ever need to get rich because they’re going to teach you the fundamentals of persuasion, both in marketing and more broadly as well as the skill of copywriting.
Now, the next high-leverage skill you need in your arsenal as you build your way up is negotiation. We’ve all heard the saying that everything is a negotiation, and that’s precisely why it’s so important to be good at it. The difference between knowing nothing and just reading a few books on the topic is massive.
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5. “Never Split the Difference” by Christopher Voss and Tahl Raz
And that’s why ‘Never Split the Difference’ is going to give you the baseline you need on your path to a hundred thousand dollars a month. It teaches you a method called tactical empathy, which you can use to build trust and rapport. The techniques in this book will help you make more money, and it doesn’t have to be complicated.
Simple things like mirroring what the person is doing in front of you will have a profound subconscious effect on them. The key to success here is understanding people.
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6. “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie
and
7. “The 48 Laws of Power” by Robert Greene
And that’s where the next book comes in. No matter where you make your money, you’re going to have to deal with people.
It doesn’t matter if it’s your employees or the police. You need to know how to deal with people because the difference between knowing how to navigate the social landscape and not is truly the difference between failure and success. You need to learn how to inspire others to fulfill your vision and also how to not piss off the wrong people, because friends are far more useful than enemies. That’s why “How to Win Friends and Influence People” is perhaps the best book when it comes to understanding human nature.
That book and “The 48 Laws of Power” are your complete guide to human relationships. “The 48 Laws of Power” teaches you laws of human nature rooted in history. We also want to give you a disclaimer and say that “The 48 Laws of Power” can also be used for evil, so make sure you use it wisely.
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8.”The Personal MBA” by Josh Kaufman
Once you’ve nailed down your marketing, your product, and your relationships, there’s one central point that remains: you need to be able to build a bulletproof business.
That means you need to understand the ins and outs of business. So when you’re trying to get from ten thousand dollars per month, you can be a bit rough around the edges, but that does not fly when you want to play in the big leagues. “The Personal MBA” distills everything you need to know about business. It talks about everything from operations management and finance to leadership and accounting. We can promise you that if you read just this book, you’ll know more than most business owners.
9. “The Intelligent Investor” by Benjamin Graham
This is not just some get-rich-quick scheme; it’s a tried and tested method since 1949. The book outlines everything you need to know about value investing, which is the only way you should be investing to protect and multiply your wealth with minimal risk.
JP Morgan famously once said, “While millionaires don’t use astrology, billionaires do.”
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10. “The House of Morgan” by Ron Chernow
“The House of Morgan” is a biography of the entire Morgan family and how they created the modern-day banking system. History is doomed to repeat itself, and the only way to truly understand the future is by studying the past.
Once you have a firm grasp on the past, you can even begin to start predicting the future. History repeats itself, and you can use that to your advantage. Go ahead and think about all the different bubbles in history, everything from the gold rush in the 1850s to the rise of Bitcoin. What if you’d bought Bitcoin in 2010?
Well, if these cycles of boom and bust have happened throughout history, then they’re bound to happen again. The key is that you need to be able to spot the trend before everyone else.
So, guys, these are the 10 books that will help you become the best version of yourself financially and give you the power to understand other people if read correctly. We wish you all the best and remember: As important as it is to master your reality, you also need to understand everyone else’s.