I read 100 books on money… here’s what I learned.
The Hyperfocused Entrepreneur
February 4, 2023
Read time: 15 minutes
So here’s a confession: I’ve got a bit of a reading problem.
Seriously, I used to read well over 100 books every single year, which is just like… a lot of books.
A lot of it was education, but if I’m being completely honest, most of it was just escapism or reading for ego.
Ya know, reading just so I could check a box or be able to say, yeah, I’ve read that.
Worse is when I would convince myself that by reading I was actually being productive.
One of the topics in particular I read obsessively on was that of money.
If you don’t know my story, about a decade ago I was living in the back of a van, I had $80k of debt, and less than $1,000 in savings so I was very motivated to turn my financial life around.
And to do that, I started by reading every book I could get my hands on around Personal Finances, Economics, Business, and Investing.
And here’s the harsh truth that I’ve come to accept…
Most of that reading… was a complete waste of time.
The truth is most books are just one page worth of interesting ideas surrounded by 300 pages of fluff.
Now, I love reading and I think everybody’s life would be improved by reading more…
However, in this article I’m going to try and save you a ton of time and energy by sharing 3 of the most important lessons I’ve learned from reading hundreds of books on money.
My goal is that you can take these lessons and start implementing them into your life to immediately improve your financial situation.
So let’s kick it off with:
Lesson Number One: Money is a Game
If you grew up in a family like mine, we didn’t really talk a lot about money.
It wasn’t necessarily taboo, but it just wasn’t something that came up in the course of normal day-to-day conversation.
And I find it interesting that our society simultaneously puts people who have money up on a pedestal, but then also demonizes the process of “getting” money by saying things like “money is the root of all evil” or “people that care about money are selfish and greedy”.
Growing up with these conflicting perspectives of money means that most of us simultaneously wish we had more money, but also feel weird and guilty and dirty talking about it with friends and family and strangers and whoever else will listen to us.
As a result, the majority of us suffer in silence, preferring to not ask a stupid question and look like an idiot or coming across as a greedy capitalist pig obsessed with getting rich.
And it’s this mindset that holds most people back from ever building meaningful wealth.
But here’s an interesting observation:
The people who are best at making money are the ones who understand it’s not good or bad, it’s just a Game.
Like it or not, we all have to play this game. You need money to survive in this world, so you can’t opt out.
The only thing you get to decide is HOW you’re going to play the game.
Most people who grew up in a family like mine, opt for the losing strategy of just sticking their heads in the sand and pretending like none of it really matters, or complaining that the game is rigged so they don’t even try.
Listen, I’m not saying we’re all born with equal opportunity. We’re not.
Some people are dealt some pretty crappy hands at birth while others are gifted pocket Aces.
That’s just the reality of life.
But here’s the thing…
The only thing you can control is how well you play the hands you’re dealt.
And the quality of your play is dictated by how well you know the rules and how well you execute your strategy.
Which leads us to the second lesson I learned reading hundreds of books on money:
Lesson Number Two: You Can’t Win The Money Game Until You Learn The Rules
The thing that holds most people back from even trying to understand the rules of money is they have this limiting belief that money is complicated.
And if this is you, just know this, it’s not your fault for thinking this.
See, there’s a lot of money tied up on Wall Street and in the “finance industry” designed to make the whole system seem overwhelming, confusing, and just brutally complicated.
Why do they do this?
Well, to understand why anybody does anything in life, you need to understand the incentives, and in this case, you just follow the money.
Who stands to make the most when you feel like you can’t take control of your financial future?
That’s right, stock brokers, financial advisors, even the banks who are happy to take your deposits and give you a paltry 1-2% interest rate on your savings, while they turn around and use that money to buy, let’s say, Treasury Bonds yielding them 4%.
So just like that, for taking literally no additional risk (because Treasury Bonds are backed by the US government and just about as safe an investment as you can get), they make twice as much on your money than you do.
Crazy, huh?
Almost seems unfair, right? But it’s not.
They’re playing completely within the rules, which you could be too, if you just knew the rules better.
Now here’s the part I really want you to wrap your head around…
Understanding how money works is not complicated, it’s simply been made to look that way by people who stand to benefit from your ignorance.
Let that sink in…
Go ahead and get frustrated…
And then make a decision to turn the tables simply by committing to learning the rules of the Money Game.
Now, there are a bunch of rules we could dive into here, but here are 3 that I think are the most important.
You get your head wrapped around these and you’ll probably be doing alright.
1. Money goes to whoever pays it the most attention.
My financial life started to rapidly change for the better once I started implementing two practices:
First, a budget. Which, I know, isn’t sexy, but it’s important, because the budget is your gameplan. Without one, you’re just flying blind.
The second thing is a Daily Financial Audit.
Now, this one is interesting because in my experience, people who do not have large sums of money are awfully confused about what people who DO have large sums of money do or do not do with that money.
See, I was watching a video the other day and the guy was sharing how to get rich on a low salary, which if you’re interested I actually wrote an article on the exact same topic, but instead of giving the same old advice that you hear from everybody about how you can become a millionaire in 40 years, I actually laid out the exact blueprint I followed to go from minimum wage to millionaire in 3 years.
How to (actually) become a millionaire on a low salary.
Okay, back to this guy who was giving advice… He said something well-intentioned, but completely wrong:
“Do you think that wealthy people have excel spreadsheets where they record this “On June 23rd I bought two chicken popeye sandwiches for $10.51. No. No they don’t.”
Uh… so, actually.. Yeah, a lot of them do.
Maybe not exactly like this, but I got a good chuckle out of this because I’ve done this literally every single day for the past decade.
Seriously, here’s my journal.
If Money is a Game, then how much you’ve got in the bank account is the score. And I literally can’t think of any game where you don’t know what the score is at all times.
The score is an important piece of information telling you how you’re doing. How else are you to know if the gameplan is actually working or not?
In my experience, the people who keep their finger tightest on the pulse of their financial situation are the most well off.
So the first thing I recommend to people coming to me asking for financial advice is to simply start tracking your money and your spending habits every single day. If you do this everyday for the next year, I think you’ll be amazed to see how quickly your score starts to improve, because the truth is, Money goes to whoever pays it the most attention.
2. Hoarders generally do not become wealthy
Now, this might sound crazy… but in my experience, one of the easiest ways to tell how well a person is playing the money game is based on how they talk about it.
If they see it as a finite, limited resource that is hard to get, then I can almost guarantee they are poor.
If, however, they see money as an infinitely abundant resource that is easy to get with the right combination of strategy, systems, and skills… then they’re probably dominating the money game.
Now this might seem like an inconsequential difference, but I assure you, it’s not.
When you view money as a limited resource, then you start to see everybody else as competition, because if they get the money first, then there’s less for you.
Ultimately, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because you try to hoard all your money, your time, your resources, your knowledge, because you’re afraid others are going to take what is yours.
But here’s the reality of the situation:
There is plenty of money to go around. We can literally all be wealthy.
Now here’s something you’ve maybe never considered:
Money is only valuable where other people are concerned.
Think about it.. If it’s just you out in the wilderness with the bunnies and the bears, money has no value.
But if there’s other people involved, then suddenly money is a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account.
Pretty useful, right?
Here’s the moral of the story:
It is very difficult to win the money game if you view everybody else as the enemy.
This is why, in my experience, the wealthiest people are some of the most giving and open with their time, knowledge, and resources.
Case in point, why do I share all my tips-and-tricks and lessons learned here every week?
Well, there’s a lot of reason, but part of it is that at some level I think there’s a chance you could take this information and use it to build something amazing and hopefully win your own money game. Then, maybe you’ll come to me in the future with an incredible opportunity to work together on some really cool project and next thing ya know, boom, we’re both playing the money game at a higher level.
On the other hand, if you view other people as potential partners that you can collectively build something bigger and better together, the skies the limit to the amount of money you can amass.
Alright, now to the third rule of money I want to share with you (and again, these are not the only rules, nor are they perhaps even the most important, but they are not super obvious to most people and they’ve served me incredibly well, so I’m hoping they can do the same for you).
3. You can only do three things with money: You can Spend it, you can Save it, or you can Invest it.
This is probably pretty obvious now that it’s been said, but chances are you’ve never really stopped to consider this basic, yet fundamental truth of money.
Most people go through life losing the money game because they either spend too much, they save too much, or they invest in the wrong things.
It’s pretty obvious why spending too much and investing in the wrong things are probably not gonna help you win the money game, right?
But it might surprise you to hear that perhaps the reason you’re losing the money game is because you’re saving too much.
See, from what I’ve learned having read all these books is that it’s incredibly difficult to save your way to massive wealth.
And here’s the reason, it’s a pesky little thing called Inflation.
I’m not gonna go into the weeds on inflation here, but for the purposes of this article, just know that things tend to get more expensive over time. The result is that the buying power of your money only ever gets weaker.
So a dollar today is worth more than a dollar in 10 years from now.
What this really means is that saving is an illusion.
It’s actually a form of spending. That is, you’re paying the cost of inflation for the relative safety and security of having your money remain liquid and accessible.
So, when we really boil it down, you can actually only do two things with your money:
You can spend it or you can invest it.
When we look at money through this lens, it becomes pretty obvious which path is going to lead us to our goal of winning the money game, right? I mean, you can’t spend your way to wealth.
I recently went way more in-depth on this particular topic in the article I mentioned earlier (how to become a millionaire on a low salary). If you want the step-by-step strategy to becoming a millionaire within the next 5 years, definitely scroll back up and check that out.
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Lesson Number Three: There are hundreds of strategies for winning the money game, but…
First, there is no one size fits all answer.
Warren Buffet’s journey to becoming the richest man in the world was completely different from Jeff Bezos who took a different route than Elon Musk.
Anybody telling you this is the way to get rich, is simply telling you the way they got rich, and that does not necessarily mean it’s going to work for you.
And ya know, here’s an important note: What they’re teaching could be a fantastic strategy that simply won’t work for you and your unique circumstances and context.
And I think this often gets missed, even by myself, when I’m talking about things that have worked for me and that I feel confident can work for the majority of people out there…but the truth is what I’m teaching you and what countless other gurus are teaching you, has to be filtered through the lens of your unique life circumstances, your skills, your resources, and not to mention your wants and desires.
So I want you to keep that in mind as you move through your wealth building journey. That there is no one path to the top of the mountain.
Some are going to be easier than others, not to mention that some paths are gonna be easier for me than they were for you (or visa versa).
So just don’t get too caught up in the comparison game of seeing what’s worked for other people and then beating yourself up because it’s not working for you.
But, with that said, I have noticed patterns around wealth creation strategies from reading all these books and talking to other successful people and it seems to me that there are certain strategies for winning the money game that have higher probabilities of success than others.
Your time and energy, then, is best spent focusing on learning those strategies.
In particular…
This is the strategy I’ve seen work MOST often for winning the money game.
Build a cash-generating machine and then pour the proceeds into cash generating assets
This is what led me to my personal strategy which is to:
Build a Business and Invest in Real Estate.
There’s a lot of reason why this is such a powerful and proven strategy for winning the money game:
First, if you build the right business with the right form of leverage, then there’s no limit to how much you can make.
And then if you take that money and pour it into quality physical assets (like real estate) that generally become more valuable over time AND produce monthly cashflow, you can quickly start moving your income into a far more tax advantaged position.
And this is one of those lessons I learned from reading all these books… it’s this:
It’s not about what you make, it’s about what you keep.
Think about that..
Right now, if you’re working a W2, you’re trading your time for money.
This is considered active income and you’re gonna pay a ton in taxes. In fact, if you make around $55k a year then you’re going to pay around 22% in taxes. So right there, $12k is just woof… gone.
And it only gets worse as you start making more and more money.
So what are you to do?
Well, you start mimicking the strategies of those who are ahead of you in the money game…
Specifically you start taking that active income you’re being taxed so heavily on, and you use it to invest in assets (in particular, real estate, because this sector has some of the best tax treatment around.
Now, the money that’s being generated by these physical assets is considered passive income or capital gains which get taxed way less.
As a result, your money is out there working harder for you than you worked for it.
And this might seem like an incredibly basic strategy, but as they say, Fundamentals win championships.
If you execute this strategy over a long enough time period, it’s seriously hard to lose the money game.
Now, if you want to learn more about building businesses, then I encourage you to check out the Hyperfocused Newsletter that we put out each week.
You can join 15,000+ other subscribers here.
On the real estate side, check out my real estate focused podcast (Multifamily Investing Made Simple) which has over 350+ episodes.
Alright guys, those are just 3 of the lessons I’ve learned having read hundreds of books on Money.
There are countless other lessons, but if you peel them all back and just focus on treating Money like it’s a game, ya learn the rules, and then ya master the strategies, you’re gonna do pretty well for yourself.
Until next week, my friends,
Stay Hyperfocused,
AV
From The Podcast This Week:
How to turn $1,000 into $10,000 in 30 days.
Want more? Here are some ways to go even deeper:
1. Unleash your hyperfocused mind to dominate life, business, and everything in between? Here’s how:
→ The Hyperfocused Masterclass: the exact system I used to overcome ADHD, write a bunch of books, build some successful businesses, and acquire a whole lot of real estate. Join now!
2. Learn to passively invest in commercial real estate with better returns, less risk, and zeo hassle.
→ Invictus Capital: my real estate private equity firm.
→ Multifamily Investing Made Simple: Top Apple Podcast.
→ Passive Investing Made Simple: Amazon Best Selling Book with 100 5 star reviews.
3. Want more like this? Check out these 3 popular articles from the vault:
- My Simple 3-Step Framework For Making More Money
- These 6 Skills Will Make You Millions
- It Never Gets Easier, You Just Get Better
4. The Amplified Impact Podcast: A daily podcast for those in relentless pursuit of Less, but Better:
