Ask HN: Which books made you the most money?
Most wealth creation books are fluff. I wonder of there are any good books out there that have directly contributed to your wealth building endeavors. Which books have helped you make more money.
It's a classic, but for some reason not too popular. As the subtitle says, there are literally step-by-step instructions on how to build a great company. It's a little dry. It's a 600 page book. And checklists can be intimidating.
I didn't even read the whole thing, but it shows how the process is more like R&D than gambling, and removes any doubt. I feel like a lot of modern startup "advice" was pulled from this book and mutated beyond recognition, becoming more like cargo cult.
So by the time they reach the funding stage, they're no longer a startup. The emphasis of the book is more on how to create a company that's easy to fund.
When you say this, I'm not sure if you mean that the book:
A. Removes doubt from the things that are genuinely simple and straightforward, freeing your mental energy to focus on the complex dynamic uncertain parts.
B. Deceives you into thinking there is a cookie-cutter solution to be applied without concern for uncertainty and risk.
But that's a good question. IMO, there's two chaotic things humans have to deal with - war and software. Both of these adopt a lot of processes to deal with all the chaos.
There's an interesting military anecdote by Joel Spolsky. If you're at a mine field, you stop. If you're being shot at, you charge at the enemy, while shooting back. If you're in a mine field and being shot at, which do you do? You charge and shoot because stopping will just get you picked on one by one. These rules are thought out in advance, so everyone knows what to do in the situation.
The book is similar, but for startups. It feels rigid, but it tells you the next step. So my answer is A.
A handful of core rules presented as friendly parables.
Read through it, worked many of the examples. Had a 20 bump in salary.
I was a competent programmer and a Linux user, but system stuff always seemed like black magic.
With this book I was able to tackle much harder problems
Like learning assembly, sometimes it’s not directly useful, but it does make you write better code; since you understand more of what’s under the hood.
It's by no means a great book, but it covers the basics, it's accessible, and I read it at just about the right time around 18 years of age.
Something better / more modern might be:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317640/the-index-ca...
Learning the basics of accounting goes a long way too.
Unfortunately, you also need to read up a little bit on the gory details of taxes and deductions, pension schemes, etc in your country, and that stuff changes all the time, so the books and knowledge rapidly gets out of date - you want to try not to get distracted by the minutiae of that, and focus on accounting, assets and liabilities, income and expenses.
I suggest The Millionaire Next Door as a better book.
A good takedown of Rich Dad from John T Reed:
https://johntreed.com/blogs/john-t-reed-s-real-estate-invest...
I also read Rich/Poor dad around 18 and it had a profound impact. I understood how should I think about money, I understood what cashflow is, how companies different from simple humans in terms of tax and a tonns of stuff like that. It's just a good introduction to basic finance for those who don't have a clue.
Easier to sell get rich quick advice than to actually get rich it seems.
Read about Walt Disney's bankruptcies and failures. Should we conclude the same about him?
https://www.streetdirectory.com/travel_guide/5535/marketing/...
A whole lot of the ventures or projects explored by Amazon were complete failures and lost money. Says to embrace it. The winners more than make up for the losers.
It's what got me into fundamental analysis, which after investing for more than a decade had definitely a positive impact on how I allocate money etc.
It isn't a modern book by any means and there might be much better alternatives, but I've started to build some reasoning around assets and get excited about investing.
The other good book was bogleheads
It allowed me to buy value stocks around March 2020, because I believed they were undervalued. So I'd say his methodology is as relevant as ever during market crashes.
I'm in the same boat. I often wonder how negotiations go where both sides have read the book and use the same tactics...
I think I remember this book as basing your negotiation off of what both sides value. This should lead to near-fair value for both sides. Of course that's not going to happen often (if ever) in the real world. I think the book even mentioned that its strategy is still valid even if the other side has read it.
It's also an amazingly enjoyable and engaging read.
It was the first book I read on investing (if you can call it that) and got me interested in the general topic. That led me to consuming a lot more information on the subject and knowing who/what D. E. Shaw was when they called in 1997. I'd have turned them down just like all the other recruiters who would dial all of our extensions in numerical order back then. (You could literally hear the phones ring in sequence as sourcers just called all the phones and didn't even know who was on the other end. They just knew we had a bunch of programmers and placing programmers was easy and paid well.)
Reading the book [and subsequent books] probably did help me to have a better grasp of the subject of trading during the interviews, so in that regard it also helped indirectly.
Never turned much of profit at the poker table, but the life-lessons in that book have been invaluable.
It's what pushed me into programming and eventually data science in other languages, which led to a significant push in my career.
That's not to say that you should read this book, but instead a remark on how adding high-demand skills to my skillset made me more money than any of the side-hustles or hobbies I've ever tried.
I have no (interesting) problems to solve with VBA/Vim/Powershell/Keras/Never Split the Difference-style negotiation in my day-to-day work or not enough fantasy to conjure these up in my private studies.
The lack of experience then disqualifies me for roles where I would be confronted with these (interesting) problems. Never understood how to learn intricate stuff inside a void of direct applicability
The egg would be the effort you expend on that skill to meet the basic requirements of the interview for such jobs
The new chicken borne out of this would be you learning on the job and carrying on from the fundamentals you've learned to get the job
In fact, what pushed me into VBA was when $manager thought I would be a good fit to learn it, and gave me the book! I was a lucky case, as the new skills ended up being immediately required.
I had a manager come up to me and show me his spreadsheet has spent a week building. (He was very proud)
I asked him why he didn’t use a pivot table and in a few seconds I had re-create it is exact report from the same source data.
I was involved in pretty much every high-level decision and a major corporation for several years there after because of that.
But "Investing for Dummies" teached me many valuable lessons. I read it when I was ~15 so it was my first insight into economics, business, and investing. It's well written and digestable.
Bad title, but this helped me to automate saving and put my energy into more important things.
In my 23s (2008) when I started my career as a Java Developer it was Effective Java. Applying that rules and talking about them with other colleagues makes me better and self-confident developer which other noticed. That leads to better salary negotiations in the future (and my job made me most money). After 10+ years it still helps, because I work mostly in enterprise environments when maturity is way lower and at the same time nowadays lot of juniors joining java community and they are even more junior than I was back in my start of career.
For me there is no better way for your wealth building than real knowledge. Learn hard skills, nurture soft skills, work smart. Lot of investment opportunities are just gambling (with money of naive people), choose wisely.
The few times I've encountered people talking about Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was in the context of religious people taking the point of the book to be that "science" thinks one thing for a long time, until it suddenly doesn't, and then suddenly "science" thinks another, different thing when some rebel comes along with new ideas (e.g. Copernicus and heliocentrism), and then they use this gloss as a justification to ignore any science that contradicts whatever weird beliefs they're currently defending.
Not to suggest this is what's happening in this case, but "religion" was the first thing that popped into my mind when contemplating how one might attempt to make a lot of money from ideas in that book.
But I might just have had bad luck in my encounters with people talking about Kuhn and his book.
On the other hand, writing and selling a wealth creation book could work. Better to sell the miners their shovels than be a miner yourself.
p.s. There was a talk in my city once about making money as a musician...but I couldn't afford the entry fee.
From negotiations to strategy my boy Sun Tzu has never let me down.
Negotiate your salary, people!