| As a young man, I bought every book I could find on personal development, business success, and wealth-building. I read dozens of them, including everything from old classics like Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie to Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey. I wore out a yellow highlighter on every one of them. And, after I finished, I would read the highlighted parts again and again. (That is a habit I started in college and have continued to this day. It still amazes me how much more information you will retain if you a highlight a book and then reread it.) While driving my beater car, I also listened to motivational cassettes by Earl Nightingale and Zig Ziglar. They weren't a hit with my passengers, but I didn't care. I was earning little and going nowhere yet determined to live some version of the American Dream. Since I didn't know anyone who was financially successful themselves - at least not well enough to ask them for advice - I relied on books and tapes to provide me with knowledge and inspiration. They were all short on specifics, of course. But that was fine because the authors didn't know what was happening in my life anyway. I figured that I just needed to take their general principles and apply them to my specific circumstances. And that intuition proved correct. People often scoff at the Self-Help section of the bookstore, but I don't know where I'd be today without it. (There's also the library, of course, but I wanted to own that knowledge. Plus, libraries don't look kindly on dedicated highlighters like me.) I relied on these books because I didn't have a mentor, a role model, or business and family connections - and I was far too shy to be a networker. (Not to mention that everybody in my "network" was an inexperienced and financially-challenged young person like me.) Eventually, I got a real estate license and made a mediocre living with it for five years. Then I got my Series 7 securities license and made a good living with it for 14 years. Throughout my business career, I continued to read books about personal success and wealth-building strategies, mainly because the people who wrote them seemed to know a lot more about how to get ahead than my colleagues did. However, it wasn't until relatively late in my life that I read what I consider to be the best book on personal development ever written. I'll discuss that one in my next column. Good investing, Alex | 
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar