Can a $5 book really change your life? In this week’s video I go over 5 books that changed my life. Interestingly, they weren’t all necessarily the best books I’ve ever read – but they were books that made a huge impact on the direction of my life at the time.
In my opinion books are significantly more useful that blogs, social media posts and quick articles online. People spend months and years writing excellent books. They’ve edited them and revised them numerous times. The final polished product (if it’s a good book) is extremely valuable.
It’s crazy that you can get a book for $10 and it can literally give you ideas and strategies to make literally millions of dollars. What else has that much value?
Here’s the book list:
📚Millionaire Next Door By TJ Stanley & W Danko https://amzn.to/3a0s0NS
📚Seven Years To Seven Figures By M. Masterton https://amzn.to/2YimVet
📚48 Laws Of Power By Robert Greene https://amzn.to/3pzG7QM
📚Million Dollar Consulting By Alan Weiss https://amzn.to/3pr94yC
📚Psycho Cybernetics By Maxwell Maltz https://amzn.to/2YjdBHu
And here’s what made such an impact on me:
- Millionaire Next Door – This book was great to learn about the habits of the ‘ordinary’ millionaires in America. While I loved this book, I’ve since changed my opinion about strict frugality and waiting 50 years before actually enjoying your money. Focus on making enough money so you can enjoy it sooner, rather than playing the slow penny pinching game.
- Seven Years To Seven Figures – This book made me realise that statistically, most millionaires (~66% of those surveyed) in the United States were business owners of self-employed. After reading this, it started a chain reaction of me wanting to learn about business and how to start one.
- 48 Laws Of Power – I learned about how people grow their influence in work situations and in business. All people should read this – not to manipulate others – but to ensure you don’t get manipulated by people who are more strategic than you
- Million Dollar Consulting – I got lots of lessons from this book but the biggest one by far was learning about value based pricing. Escaping hourly work was crucial for increasing my income and being paid for the value I create, not for some random number of hours worked. Get paid on outcomes not hours. That tip is worth millions of dollars alone, no exaggeration.
- Psycho Cybernetics – This book has great examples about how your self image shapes your life. Your own thoughts about yourself and who you are, define your actions and consequently determine your results – so think carefully.
Related topics: 5 Books that changed my life, books that you should read in 2021, business book recommendations, self help book recommendations, personal finance book recommendations.
Transcription:
Good day there, Ray Corcoran here. In today’s video, we’re going to be talking about five books that changed my life. They’re going to be books that have basically made a big impact on my life, whether it was my career or my personal life. And I’m going to share them with you today, and if you want to pick them up, great, I’ll have links to them in the description if you want to go check them out.
One of my favourite things about books is the fact that books are often… people spend months and sometimes years crafting a really, really excellent, good quality book and compare that to blog articles and videos online and that sort of stuff. A lot of the time they get kind of knocked up quite quickly. Whereas with books, people really put a lot of thought, research, and fact-checking and editing to make sure that it’s a really impactful, useful thing. So a lot of people were kind of… And for only a few dollars, the value is so, so good. And I’ve had so many good things that have happened to me as a result of stuff I learned from books. So we’re going to go through a few of my favourites today.
So the first one we’ll go through today is “Millionaire Next Door.” I actually don’t know who wrote it. Thomas J. Stanley and William D Danko. So good job guys. This book came out, it was 2006, I think it was. This is one of the earliest books that I personally bought and some of the stuff that I read in it when I first read it, I actually don’t agree with as much now, but basically what they talk about is what kind of person is a millionaire in America and what kind of traits they have and what behaviours they have and what are they like? So maybe that you could emulate that and sort of crack the code to making that money yourself.
So I loved reading about this book early on, and while there’s lots of little tips in there, the biggest takeaway that I got from that book was that I think it says it was around two-thirds of millionaires in America are business owners and self-employed. So that takeaway alone made a massive impact in the direction of my life because it made me realise that I don’t want to work in a job for somebody else. And I realised that I probably will have a much higher chance of building wealth if I started my own business, which is what I did. I started off with web design, then moved into marketing and marketing services, and that worked out amazing. And this book was a big reason why I started to look into self-employment because the reason I was buying these books, I was trying to figure out how do people do it? What are the common ways that people build wealth and running your own business and having control over everything, while it was probably a bit more risky to start, paid off massively over time.
One of the things from the book I don’t really agree with as much now is how much they talk about frugality and how a lot of these people that are millionaires. They drive not very nice cars and live below their means and all that sort of stuff, which is all great. And if that’s what you want to do great. But one thing I’ve kind of over time… Early on, if you’re saving up money, that’s fine. You don’t need to live lean and whatever.
But for me, I didn’t really see; I got older, I kind of didn’t really see the point in getting to 60 and then get up and then being rich and still only driving a crap car. I’m like, what’s the point of all that sacrifice. If you don’t… You’ve got peace of mind, which is valuable, but if I want nice things, why can’t I have those nice things. The book started me on the journey of being frugal and trying to make more money. But over time, I realised that having to make a lot more money should be my focus rather than being so strict with the frugality. And I’ve done another video on this as well.
The second book I’m going to show you today is, it’s a bit of a clickbait title, and it’s a bit of a cheesy… Parts of the book are kind of cheesy, to be honest, but I was relatively young when I first bought this and it did have a really, really positive impact in my thinking and how I view things. So this book is “Seven Years to Seven Figures.” So it’s very like, a clickbaity sort of title by Michael Masterson. But some of the things that I got out of this book was really… They make a lot of good, really good points, stuff like penny-pinching, and that sort of stuff won’t get you to a serious wealth, at least not at a young age. Which I think was crucial. With the previous book, it was like be frugal, and eventually, you’ll get there, which is true and when you start to run the numbers, if you’re super, super frugal, you will get there on an average salary.
But in this book, they also talk about making more than normal. So not just making an average salary. And I think that’s something that I’m personally very passionate about it’s just like well, you’re working anyway, you might as well focus on making lots of money. Cause you know, you’re spending 40 hours a week or 50 hours a week or whatever it is working, you may as well make heaps.
Some of other things that I really liked about this book as well as they talk about building multiple streams of income alongside whatever you do for your day job and also investing in real estate and just talking about some statistics around what, basically, millionaires do. And a lot of them they’re working really hard to make a lot of active money, but they do funnel all of that money out into investments, whether it’s stocks or real estate and so on. So I think that book and the previous book I kind of blended what I learned from both those books to form how I think about things. I found it super, super, super useful.
The book is “The 48 Laws of Power,” which is a classic book, which many of you may have heard of it’s by Robert Greene. This book is kind of a controversial book because it talks about it’s almost like the art of war in terms of how people manipulate others and how people can use others for their own gain. And a lot of people don’t like that because it kind of talks about how to be strategic in a workplace or a business environment. And I think an important thing to understand is you really need to understand how the game is being played because the games being played around you, whether you participate or not. And for me, not that I was looking for ways to manipulate or anything like that, but what I did find was it helped actually helped me spot those things in other people a lot better.
So there’d be lots of work environments where I don’t know someone would be quite nice to you when you were dealing with them one-on-one and then it came to like a meeting with all these other people. And then they’ll kind of change the tone a bit with you and little things like that. Especially when I was younger in corporate roles, I didn’t know what was going on. It seemed a bit odd, but I didn’t really… I was a bit slow to connect what was happening. And then, as I read this book really helped me realise the kind of things that people do to try and move up in and get more power in the workplace and ascend their career or improve their business. And it was just invaluable for me to learn, basically some of the things that other people may do and moves that other people make.
And it really makes you a lot smarter. This is probably one of the best books I’ve probably, I would say, I’ve ever read, and I’d highly recommend you check it out. Even if you don’t want to be super powerful or whatever it is, it’s more just; if you want to move up the ranks in your career or in your business, understanding how interpersonal things go down is crucial. And it’s very, very valuable. I wish I read it when I was 16. I think I found it on some random hip-hop forum back in the day. And someone mentioned it was a great book and that’s when I got it. And it just made a massive positive impact to my life.
So the fourth book, you may be noticing a bit of a trend with these books because this one also has a million dollars or seven figures in the title. So that it kind of indicates really what I was thinking about when I was in my early twenties, but it is what it is. This book is “Million Dollar Consulting” by Alan Weiss. He’s done a heap of books and I’ve got a bunch of his books, but what I really liked about his books have been how he thinks about pricing specifically. So one thing that he really talks about, I don’t know if he was the first person to sort of coin the term “value based pricing,” or I don’t know, he definitely helped make it a lot more popular when it comes to business and pricing services and that sort of stuff. That was a massive game-changer for my income to understand that it’s not about being paid per hour, even though you might have retainers and that sort of stuff.
Being paid per hour is a mug’s game and it’s not the right kind of… It doesn’t incentivize the right kind of behaviour because it kind of means that it rewards inefficiency. The more hours I do, the more I get paid, even though it should be about value, what’s the value to the person to solve that problem. And if I can fix a problem in five minutes and charge someone 10 grand and it’s worth 100 grand for them to fix, then that is a great outcome for you and much more efficient. And it really helped me understand because I do a lot of consulting to brands and that sort of stuff. And it really helped me understand the value of what was happening because I was doing marketing campaigns for companies and they were making literally one, two, three million dollars over the course of 12 months because of stuff that I directly conceptualised, planned out, executed, from start to finish, it was completely me. And we just took their product and sold a whole bunch of it.
And the upside for them was tremendous. But then I would get paid, and it would be a fixed fee or relatively small amount. And given there was extreme value on their side. So they were super happy. I mean, I’m happy about that. But in reality, if I understood my pricing better and the value that I was bringing, especially early on, I could have been paid a lot more for all of that work. And that’s one thing that, that book really helped me structure my pricing and think about how I offer my services, what I’m actually offering, rather than all the little micro details. I’m actually offering outcomes and solutions for people, rather than you get two calls and you get five emails or you get whatever detailed stuff that’s important, but really what I’m doing is solving a problem for money. And that’s what any business does you solve problems for money.
So it really helped me sort of structure that and word it to the prospect as well. And just understand that I’m making them… you can make, especially in like marketing services and stuff, you can make these people serious amounts of money and which is what we’re supposed to do. This is our job. But we always want to make sure that we’re being paid relative to the value of bringing if we’re bringing significant value and we’re the difference between this company doing a little bit of revenue and a massive amount of revenue, then we should be paid accordingly. So that it’s fair for both parties. So, and that book really made a massive difference in how I think about pricing, structuring my offers, what to focus on in sales conversations and stuff like that.
So the fifth one, I actually got it on audio books. I haven’t got the physical copy. It’s called “Psycho-Cybernetics” the author is, I think it’s a Maxwell Maltz or something like that. A big part of the book is self-image. And basically they start to look at studies about how people think about themselves. So, what do you actually think of yourself? Do you think you’re naturally good with numbers, for example? Or do you think you’re just not a fit person? Everyone has all these beliefs about own about themselves. And it’s a really, really powerful thing, because if you don’t think about yourself in a positive light, then you don’t take positive actions either. Like if you don’t think you’re a fit person, you’re probably not going to be inclined to actually exercise, but then if you don’t exercise, you’re not going to be a fit person. So it’s a bit of a loop that starts with what you think about in your head.
So that’s my five books. I hope you found that interesting or useful. Maybe you care, maybe you don’t, but these books made a massive dent. Like if I think about the trajectory of my life was going on at one point, it wasn’t bad or anything, but it was just… I was going one way. And some of these books really like dented and hit me to go a totally different direction. And in my opinion, it was a much more positive direction. So these books change your life in a world of social media and quick hits and just quick little snippets and posts. Sometimes sitting down with a book for a few hours can dramatically change your life, which I can’t say the same about a lot of social media posts that come out these days. So hope you found that useful. If you to check out the books, I’ll have links in the description. And if you have any books that you’d recommend or you’ve read that have changed your life, please tell me I’d love to hear about them, and I’ll check them too.