Think and Grow Rich
From Jeffrey's list on the best books on how to be successful in business and life.
11 authors have picked their favorite books about wealth and why they recommend each book.
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From Jeffrey's list on the best books on how to be successful in business and life.
From Dietrich's list on the best books on the economic challenges of the 2020s.
This is a good book to understand the pervasive existence of “rents” in the economy. From the literal rents that homeowners in popular areas can charge, to the rents that accrue to copyright or patent holders, to the rents earned by firms using regulation to block competition, the authors document all the places in our economy where this restricts innovation. It is ultimately a book asking “what is fair?”.
I’m a professor of economics at the University of Houston, with a focus on long-run growth and development rather than things like quarterly stock returns. I write a blog on growth economics where I try hard to boil down technical topics to their core intuition, and I’m the co-author of a popular textbook on economic growth.
Most economists would agree that a thriving economy is synonymous with GDP growth. The more we produce and consume, the higher our living standard and the more resources available to the public. This means that our current era, in which growth has slowed substantially from its postwar highs, has raised alarm bells. But should it? Is growth actually the best way to measure economic success--and does our slowdown indicate economic problems?
From Jen's list on the best books for people who want to adopt a mindset of wealth.
The very first sentence of this book made me slam it shut and leave it untouched for years. It reads: “Whatever may be said in praise of poverty, the fact remains that it is not possible to live a really complete or successful life unless one is rich.” Hello? How gross is that?! It offended me to my hippie core, until I understood what it was really saying and that, erm, you kind of can’t —not if you want to fully express yourself, anyway. “Rich” simply means that you have everything you need to share your gifts fully with the world and stay at the highest vibration while you do it, whatever that looks like for you. This is now easily the book I recommend to people the most, and the one I read over and over. But you have to let a lot go because it will…
You Are a Badass at Making Money will launch you past the fears and stumbling blocks that have kept financial success beyond your reach. Drawing on her own transformation--over just a few years--from a woman living in a converted garage with tumbleweeds blowing through her bank account to a woman who travels the world in style, Jen Sincero channels the inimitable sass and practicality that made You Are a Badass an indomitable bestseller. She combines hilarious personal essays with bite-size, aha concepts that unlock earning potential and get real results.
From Don's list on the best business books for appreciating how the world really works.
The title is a trick, probably the publisher's idea. Dennis (who passed away in 2014) expresses qualms about the whole getting rich idea. Before becoming a magazine multimillionaire (The Week, Maxim, Stuff) he was a poet, jailed in 1971 for editing an obscene humor magazine. He borrowed to start his publishing empire with Cozmic Comics and Kung Fu Monthly. He writes that anyone can raise capital -- you just need enough confidence in your plan to grovel and risk your friends' money. I forever carry his advice on negotiation: whoever cares less wins. Negotiate hard, be sure about what you'd like, but be ready to walk away, because no deal is a must-do.
Sometimes I feel like we know more about the anthropologies of ancient civilizations and remote tribes than about the business most people do every day. There's mystery behind the curtain. To me, good nonfiction that goes deep inside a business is about our culture and how our world works. It's a way to understand everything we interact with and how it got there. I have enjoyed telling specific business creation stories as a business journalist, but understanding what truly turns the gears has informed writing I have done on every subject, including my humor.
I like to mix useful information with engaging stories. So I tried to make the Kickstarter Handbook a fun read and a hands-on resource for entrepreneurs. Every Kickstarter campaign is its own thrilling adventure, a story of desire and obstacle, creativity, perseverance, denial, anger, bargaining, failure and success. I think these tales help make the book a pleasant and enlightening read, no matter what you actually wanted to read about.
From Amy's list on the best books to break your reading lull.
How a book about money is so interesting is beyond me (I assume it has something to do with the author truly understanding, ahem, psychology). But this one is getting rave reviews for good reason. It’s almost addictive to read. Using nineteen short stories, it explores how historical figures navigated wealth, shows you why it was either a winning or losing strategy, and helps you apply to see the relevance to your own financial situation. This book will suck you in and make you realize that a lot of your own financial decisions shouldn’t be made on paper-only.
I’m the award-winning and bestselling author of four books about human-ing and healing. I’ve been featured in Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, GMA. CNN, CBS, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and more. My books have been translated into sixteen languages and endorsed by notable authors such as Elizabeth Gilbert; Vikas Swarup; and Sanjiv Chopra, MD, Harvard Medical School. As a writing mentor, I work closely with authors to help them get their own words into books. I live with my beautiful wife and bad cat in New York City, where we all spend most of our time planning our next meals and next adventures.
I wrote the bestselling How To Heal Yourself When No One Else Can series, which helps readers break through blocks to overcome depression, anxiety, and chronic illness. I also wrote This Is How I Save My Life, a memoir about my trip around the world to find a cure for chronic Lyme disease. Along the way, I discovered cultural mayhem, goats dressed in sweaters, and a surprise romance.
From Scott's list on the best finance books for biblically conservative Christians.
God and Money is primarily a guide to giving, but secondarily it is a testimony of how the authors were attending Harvard and became convicted about their extravagant lifestyles and the need to give more. The book largely discusses the different approaches to act on this burden.
While God and Money focuses on giving, they followed up with True Riches which uses a “putting off and putting on” type of approach: pride to gratitude, coveting to content, anxiety to trust, indifference to love are the chapter topics. At around 100 pages, the book is limited in scope and repeats some of the material (such as the testimonies and approaches) from the previous book.
The biggest drawback for these authors is they haven’t built platforms. Neither have author profiles on sites, such as Goodreads and BookBub. Only one has an Amazon profile. The website, God and Money, is limited with no…
From Robert's list on the best books on early retirement and financial independence.
A page-turner about personal finance? This one comes close! Humor is a key ingredient throughout, along with an approachable, off-the-cuff writing style. The chapter on retiring early with kids does a superb job of overturning myths by telling the stories of parents who have actually achieved it. The advice on "Don't Follow Your Passion (Yet)" is spot-on, as is their fun-to-read revelation that traveling the world can actually be cheaper than staying at home.
Robin and I are passionate about early retirement because we’ve lived the journey ourselves. At the age of 28 we had just $16.88 to our name, with bleak job prospects and college and car loans to pay off. Fifteen years later (despite average combined gross salaries of just $89,000), we had achieved our dream of retiring early to travel the world. Another fifteen years have passed since then, and we’re still happily retired with more than $1.5 million in investments and plenty of world travel under our belts (with more, hopefully, to come). We think the very fact that we’re so ordinary is what makes our journey interesting – because guess what? What we did is easily repeatable by you.
How to Retire Early proposes a slow-and-steady approach to financial independence and is aimed primarily at those working 9-to-5 jobs who earn middling rather than super-high salaries.
What makes this book different from all the other books out there on early retirement? We think it's the amount of personal financial detail we provide. We don’t hold back! You can use this information as a kind of financial yardstick to measure what is possible in your own life. We retired from full-time work at the age of 43. In this book we share with you the roadmap we followed to get from full-time work to financial independence in less than 15 years. If we can do it, so can you!
From Charles' list on the best books for thinking like a Strong Towns advocate.
I was introduced to Jane Jacobs as required reading during graduate school. I’m convinced that most urban planners who claim to adore Jacobs have not actually read her, particularly Cities and the Wealth of Nations, which is my favorite. Its thoroughly brutal logic stands in contrast to nearly everything we still do to manage our cities. Jacobs is an insightful genius.
Everyone should be able to live a meaningful life in a place they love, where their day-to-day efforts participating in society result in the community becoming a more prosperous place over time, for themselves, and for those who come next. I founded Strong Towns to help people recognize that they have this opportunity, that they and their neighbors working together have the capacity to make things better, despite everything else going on. Cities are works in progress. It is not our job to finish ours, but we all have a role to play in making it stronger.
Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity breaks with modern practice to present a new vision of urban development in the United States. Presenting the foundational ideas of the Strong Towns movement he co-founded, Charles Marohn explains why cities of all sizes continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, and reveals the new paradigm that can solve this longstanding problem.
Inside, you’ll learn why inducing growth and development has been the conventional response to urban financial struggles―and why it just doesn’t work. New development and high-risk investing don’t generate enough wealth to support themselves, and cities continue to struggle. Read this book to find out how cities large and small can focus on bottom-up investments to minimize risk and maximize their ability to strengthen the community financially and improve citizens’ quality of life.
From Scott's list on the best finance books for biblically conservative Christians.
Ms. Pegue is a speaker and television host on TBN. She made a splash in 2005 with her book, 30 Days to Taming Your Tongue, which she then capitalized on by publishing a 30 Day Series. Taming Your Finances was second in the series.
Although some of Ms. Pegues’s other books are outwardly Christian, this one is not.
Ms. Pegue has no children, which will compromise her credibility with readers who have children. With eight children, no debt, and two paid-off mortgages on a single-income pastor’s salary, I believe I’ll have the credibility they desire.
Ms. Pegue was the CFO of West Angeles Church of God in Christ when it took on a $35 million loan to construct their building, which was the largest loan ever given to a religious institution.
The book is also fairly short at only 140 pages.
From Scott's list on the best finance books for biblically conservative Christians.
Mr. Alcorn’s book provides an eternal view of our temporary wealth and possessions. The primary focus, spread over the course of the book, can be boiled down to one point: the heavenly perspective we should have will help us be good earthly stewards.
In Mr. Alcorn’s own words, the book is “thoroughly researched…a biblical comprehensive view,” and it should be at over 500 pages! He strives to cover every conceivable topic related to money, such as investing, retirement, gambling, inheritances, giving, and the list goes on.
Is there such a thing as too much of a good thing? As one review who provided a one-star review said, “In the interests of full disclosure I have only read halfway through this book.” Mark Twain famously said, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one.”