📚 A&B #135

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👋 Hey everyone,

Here are a few popular posts you may have missed:

• 10 New reading tip visuals.

• 15 Key lessons from "The Joys of Compounding."

• 7 Key lessons from the bestselling book “Everything Men Know About Women."

PS: I'm giving away 50 BOOKS to 1 lucky reader, learn how to enter here! 🥳

🤓 Course Update:

I finished 3 lessons this week:

• How To Filter Books Using Time & Book Reviews

• The Truth About Book Summaries (When & How To Use Them)

• When To Quit A Book (& How To Do So Without Feeling Guilty)

We're up to 265+ people on the waitlist, reply "A" to this email and I'll personally email you once the course is available for preorder!

📚 Book Summary:

This week's book is "The Joys of Compounding" by Gautam Baid.

This book is about becoming a better investor but much of the advice can be applied toward becoming a better person. If you liked "How Will You Measure Your Life", chances are you'll like this book.

Here are 3 key lessons from the book:

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1) Sell The 1st Hour of The Day To Your Most Important Client–YOURSELF

Today Charlie Munger is known for being Warren Buffett's right-hand man, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, and a billionaire, but that wasn't always the case.

In his early life, Munger was a young lawyer who got paid by the hour. One day he asked himself, "Who's my most valuable client?" He reflected on the question for a few minutes before realizing that the answer was himself.

So he decided to sell the first hour of the day to himself instead of a client. He did it early in the morning and would spend time reading books about real estate and looking over deals.

Munger did this for several years and eventually left the law firm to go full-time into real estate development.

It might sound cliche, but the best investment you can make is an investment in yourself because the more you learn the more you'll earn.

So instead of spending the first hour of your day mindlessly scrolling social media or responding to client emails, dedicate that hour to deep work and self-improvement.

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2) The ONE Habit All Successful People Have In Common

"All successful investors have a common habit: They just love to read all the time," writes author Guatam Baid.

And Munger agrees, "In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time–none, zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads–at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out."

But why is reading so important?

Odds are that no matter what you're working on, someone smarter than you has thought about your exact problem or has been in a similar situation as you and put the answer in a book.

This is one of the many reasons Munger, Buffett, and other successful investors are huge fans of biographies. Munger encourages people to make friends with "the eminent dead" to better understand how people and the fundamental truths of life.

And since it's estimated that the dead outnumber the living 14 to 1 it's worth studying and learning from the massive amount of accumulated experience from those who lived before us.

By reading more and more books, you'll be able to figure out where you are going, discover who has been there before, and find out how they overcame incredible challenges so that you can do the same.

Knowledge comes from experience and mistakes, but it doesn't have to be your experience and mistakes. So take advantage of books and learn from others.

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3) Beware The Hedonic Treadmill

There's a great quote from Benjamin Franklin that we should all remember, "Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship."

This lesson relates well to the concept of the hedonic treadmill–which is a fancy way of saying that as people make more money, their expectations and desires increase which results in no permanent gain in happiness.

This can especially backfire when a person's expenses increase faster than their income.

For instance, someone who makes $80,000 a year and spends $30,000 ends up saving $50,000 a year. But if they get a raise and start making $90,000 but then start balling out and spending $60,000 a year, their savings have dropped to $30,000 a year.

So although they're making more, they're saving less and it'll take longer for them to reach financial freedom.

To resist the hedonic treadmill, here are a few pieces of advice from Gautam:

• Avoid buying things you don't need to impress people you don't know.

• Realize that acquiring material objects won't necessarily improve your life.

• Don't confuse pleasure with happiness.

• Never measure your success or life by your possessions.

I'll end with this wonderful quote from Guatam, "Love people and use things, because the opposite never works."

✅ Actionable Advice:

1) Sell the first hour of each day to yourself:

• Spend the hour reading books.

• Spend the hour taking a course.

• Spend the hour learning a new skill.

2) Look for small leaks in your financial boat:

• Check your subscriptions services and cancel the ones you don't really use.

• Look at your yearly expenses and cut off the things that don't make a meaningful difference in your life.

3) Book quotes worth reflecting on:

• “What many people see as a three-hundred-page book is often the accumulation of thousands of hours and decades of work. Where else can you get the entire life’s work of someone in the space of a few hours?”

• “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

• “Most investors would perform better if they thought more and did less. One of the best hacks in the investment field is learning to be happy doing nothing.”

• “Each of us forever remains a work in progress—always evolving, ever changing. We’re all rough drafts of the person we’re still becoming.”

• "Good books are the most undervalued asset class: the right ideas can be worth millions, if not billions, of dollars, over time."

• "Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger estimate that they spend 80% of their day reading or thinking about what they have read. Therein lies the secret to becoming smarter."

• "Self-improvement is the best way to spend some of your time every day...carve out an hour of each day just for yourself."

• "As you read more books, your pile of unread books will get larger, not smaller. That's because your curiosity will grow with every great read."

• "One of the hardest things to do in life is to avoid good opportunities so that you have time to devote to great opportunities."

• "When the smartest minds generously share the secrets of their success with us, we ignore them, because they sound too basic and simple for us to appreciate."

• "In a knowledge economy, learning and thinking are the best long-term investments you can make in your career."

📖 Reading Lesson:

I was a guest on Anthony Scaramucci's podcast. We talk about our favorite books and share reading tips. Listen to it here!

⭐️ Weekly Quote:

"You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you."

–Dale Carnegie

Thank you for your support everyone, I'll see you next Sunday!

Read on,

Alex W.