BOOKS & NOTES

I have read a lot of books and listened to hours of audiobooks. Through this time, I have avidly taken notes on all of the important learnings from each with the intention of recording the best advice I can find. All of this can be found in the broken down summary of my favorites below.

Find my virtual bookshelf here: https://bookshelf.so/tphill97

7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

Production vs. production capability: you must preserve and maintain assets.

Habit 1 - Be proactive. You can choose your own feelings

Use your R and I; Resourcefulness and Initiative.
If you wait to be acted upon, you will be acted upon.
Never say you have to do anything. You choose to do that.
Proactive people focus their efforts in the Circle of Influence. They work on the things they can do something about.
It is inspiring to realize that in choosing our response to circumstance, we powerfully affect our circumstance.
Do more than what was expected. An example is, "He anticipated the president’s need. He read with empathy the president’s underlying concern."
Responsible — “ response-able”
When you make a mistake, admit it, correct it, and learn from it—immediately. Don’t get into a blaming, accusing mode. Work on things you have control over. Work on you.

Habit 2 - Begin with the end in mind

All things are created twice. You start with a mental image and then a physical image.
I’m convinced that too often parents are also trapped in the management paradigm, thinking of control, efficiency, and rules instead of direction, purpose, and family feeling.
“The work will come again, but childhood won’t.”
Through the powers of your imagination, you can visualize your own funeral. Write your own eulogy. Actually write it out. Be specific.
A good affirmation has five basic ingredients: it’s personal, it’s positive, it’s present tense, it’s visual, and it’s emotional. So I might write something like this: “It is deeply satisfying (emotional) that I (personal) respond (present tense) with wisdom, love, firmness, and self-control (positive) when my children misbehave.”
Before a performance, a sales presentation, a difficult confrontation, or the daily challenge of meeting a goal, see it clearly, vividly, relentlessly, over and over again. Create an internal “comfort zone.”
When we read the phrases about the sounds of love in our home, order, responsible independence, cooperation, helpfulness, meeting needs, developing talents, showing interest in each other’s talents, and giving service to others it gives us some criteria to know how we’re doing in the things that matter most to us as a family.
But there is a real difference, all the difference in the world, in the effectiveness of a mission statement created by everyone involved in the organization and one written by a few top executives behind a mahogany wall.

Habit 3 - Put first things first

Organize and execute around priorities.
To paraphrase Peter Drucker, effective people are not problem-minded; they are opportunity-minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems. They think preventively.
By focusing on relationships and results rather than time and methods, the numbers went up.
A Quadrant II organizer will need to meet six important criteria.

COHERENCE. Coherence suggests that there is harmony, unity, and integrity between your vision and mission, your roles and goals, your priorities and plans, and your desires and discipline.

BALANCE. Your tool should help you to keep balance in your life, to identify your various roles and keep them right in front of you, so that you don’t neglect important areas such as your health, your family, professional preparation, or personal development.

The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. And this can best be done in the context of the week.

A “PEOPLE” DIMENSION. You also need a tool that deals with people, not just schedules.

FLEXIBILITY. Your planning tool should be your servant, never your master.

PORTABILITY. Your tool should also be portable, so that you can carry it with you most of the time.

IDENTIFYING ROLES. The first task is to write down your key roles.

SELECTING GOALS. The next step is to think of one or two important results you feel you should accomplish in each role during the next seven days.

SCHEDULING. Now you can look at the week ahead with your goals in mind and schedule time to achieve them.

DAILY ADAPTING. With Quadrant II weekly organizing, daily planning becomes more a function of daily adapting,

Again, you simply can’t think efficiency with people. You think effectiveness with people and efficiency with things.
Gofer delegation means “Go for this, go for that, do this, do that, and tell me when it’s done.”
Stewardship delegation is focused on results instead of methods. It gives people a choice of method and makes them responsible for results.

DESIRED RESULTS. Create a clear, mutual understanding of what needs to be accomplished, focusing on what, not how; results, not methods.

GUIDELINES. Identify the parameters within which the individual should operate. These should be as few as possible to avoid methods delegation, but should include any formidable restrictions.

RESOURCES. Identify the human, financial, technical, or organizational resources the person can draw on to accomplish the desired results.

ACCOUNTABILITY. Set up the standards of performance that will be used in evaluating the results and the specific times when reporting and evaluation will take place.

CONSEQUENCES. Specify what will happen, both good and bad, as a result of the evaluation.

An Emotional Bank Account is a metaphor that describes the amount of trust that’s been built up in a relationship.
Let me suggest six major deposits that build the Emotional Bank Account.
Understanding the Individual Really
Seeking to understand another person is probably one of the most important deposits you can make, and it is the key to every other deposit.
While on the surface that could mean to do for them what you would like to have done for you, I think the more essential meaning is to understand them deeply as individuals, the way you would want to be understood, and then to treat them in terms of that understanding.

Attending to the Little Things

The little kindnesses and courtesies are so important.
Keeping a commitment or a promise is a major deposit; breaking one is a major withdrawal.

Clarifying Expectations

Unclear expectations in the area of goals also undermine communication and trust.
One of the most important ways to manifest integrity is to be loyal to those who are not present.
When we make withdrawals from the Emotional Bank Account, we need to apologize and we need to do it sincerely.
Dag Hammarskjöld, past Secretary-General of the United Nations, once made a profound, far-reaching statement: “It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.”

Habit 4 - Think win/win

Win/ Win is a frame of mind and heart that constantly seeks mutual benefit in all human interactions. Win/ Win means that agreements or solutions are mutually beneficial, mutually satisfying.
No Deal basically means that if we can’t find a solution that would benefit us both, we agree to disagree agreeably—No Deal.
With No Deal as an option, you can honestly say, “I only want to go for Win/ Win. I want to win, and I want you to win. I wouldn’t want to get my way and have you not feel good about it, because downstream it would eventually surface and create a withdrawal. On the other hand, I don’t think you would feel good if you got your way and I gave in. So let’s work for a Win/ Win. Let’s really hammer it out. And if we can’t find it, then let’s agree that we won’t make a deal at all. It would be better not to deal than to live with a decision that wasn’t right for us both. Then maybe another time we might be able to get together.”
While courage may focus on getting the golden egg, consideration deals with the long-term welfare of the other stakeholders. The basic task of leadership is to increase the standard of living and the quality of life for all stakeholders.
Public Victory does not mean victory over other people. It means success in effective interaction that brings mutually beneficial results to everyone involved.
A relationship where bank accounts are high and both parties are deeply committed to Win/ Win is the ideal springboard for tremendous synergy
In the Win/ Win agreement, the following five elements are made very explicit: Desired results, Guidelines, Resources, Accountability, Consequences
Following a deep and thorough discussion of expectations, guidelines and resources to make sure they are in harmony with organizational goals, the employee writes a letter to the manager that summarizes the discussion and indicates when the next performance plan or review discussion will take place.

Habit 5 - Seek first to understand then to be understood

Empathic (from empathy) listening gets inside another person’s frame of reference. You look out through it, you see the world the way they see the world, you understand their paradigm, you understand how they feel.
Satisfied needs do not motivate. It’s only the unsatisfied need that motivates.
When people are really hurting and you really listen with a pure desire to understand, you’ll be amazed how fast they will open up.

Habit 6 - Synergize

Habit 7 - Sharpen the saw

The physical dimension involves caring effectively for our physical body—eating the right kinds of foods, getting sufficient rest and relaxation, and exercising on a regular basis.
As you act based on the value of physical well-being instead of reacting to all the forces that keep you from exercising, your paradigm of yourself, your self-esteem, your self-confidence, and your integrity will be profoundly affected.
In our family, we limit television watching to around seven hours a week, an average of about an hour a day.
Quality literature, such as the Great Books, the Harvard Classics, autobiographies, National Geographic and other publications that expand our cultural awareness,
We can refuse to label them—we can “see” them in new fresh ways each time we’re with them.
The first was “no probing.” As soon as we unfolded the inner layers of vulnerability, we were not to question each other, only to empathize. Probing was simply too invasive. It was also too controlling and too logical.
The second ground rule was that when it hurt too much, when it was painful, we would simply quit for the day.
T. S. Eliot expresses so beautifully my own personal discovery and conviction: “We must not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.”
So live life in crescendo.

NOTES:

Rating: 10 out of 10

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan Peterson

Rating: 10 out of 10

NOTES:

Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders back

To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept a terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order.

Rule 2: Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping

Order appears symbolically associated with masculinity. Chaos the unknown, is symbolically feminine.
We eternally inhabit order, surrounded by chaos. We eternally occupy known territory, surrounded by the unknown. We experience meaningful engagement when we mediate appropriately between them.
You need to place 1 foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged.
There is simply no way to wall off some isolated portion of the greater surrounding reality and make everything permanently predictable and safe within it.
To sacrifice ourselves to God does not mean to suffer silently and willingly when some other person or organization demands more from us, consistently, then is offered in return.
Hatred for self and mankind must be balanced with gratefulness for tradition and the state of astonishment at what normal every day people accomplish.

Rule 3: Make friends with people who want the best for you

Sometimes, when people have a low opinion of their own worth they choose new acquaintances, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past. Such people don’t believe that they deserve any better so they don’t go looking for it.
Before you help someone, you should find out why that person is in trouble.
It is almost impossible to convince someone to change for the better. The desire to improve, instead, is the precondition for progress.

Rule 4: Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today

When someone says in 1 million years, who is going to know the difference. The answer is any idiot can choose a frame of time within which nothing matters.
We must leave the house ruled by our father, and confront the chaos of our individual being. We must take note of our disarray, without completely abandoning that father in the process. We must then rediscover the values of a culture hidden in a dusty treasure trove of the past, rescue them, and integrate them into our lives.
What you aim at determines what you see.
Ask yourself what you would require to be motivated to undertake the job, honestly, and listen to the answer.

Rule 5: Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them

“A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success.” Sigmund Freud. However that feeling leads to an actual conqueror.
Our society faces the increasing call to deconstruct its stabilizing traditions to include smaller and smaller numbers of people who do not or will not fit into the categories that there are. Each persons private trouble can not be solved by a social revolution.
Children are much more likely to go complexly astray if they are not, trained, discipline and properly encouraged. They must socialize in order to be accepted.
Parents shouldn’t not be willing to sacrifice respect to get their children’s friendship.
Every parent needs to learn to tolerate the momentary anger directed towards them by their children after necessary corrective action has been taken.
Children act out to see if they can get away with these acts. That is why it is important to let it be known that bad acts cannot be tolerated.
Consistent correction of inappropriate behavior indicates the limits of acceptable aggression to the child.
When someone does something you are trying to get them to do, reward them.
Anger is one of the most common forms of crying for children.
If a child has not been taught to behave properly by the age of four, it will forever be difficult for him or her to make friends.
General principles for discipline include limiting the rules and using the least force necessary to enforce those rules.
Parents should come in pairs and work together to check their anger and the children.
Parents should understand their own capacity to be harsh, vengeful, arrogant, resentful, angry and deceitful.
If your child’s actions make you dislike them, think what an effect they will have on other people who care much less about them then you. That’s why you should take care of these actions as parents when they are young.

Rule 6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world

People who experience evil may certainly desire to perpetuate it, to pay it forward. But it is also possible to learn good by experiencing evil.
There is a cycle that success makes us complacent. We then forget to pay attention, take what we have for granted, turn a blind eye and then fail to notice that things are changing. We must break that cycle.
Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong.

Rule 7: Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)

Something better might be attained in the future by giving up something of value in the present.
Sometimes, when things are not going well, it’s not the world that’s the cause. The cause is instead that which is currently most valued, subjectively and personally.
The beneficence of the world manifests itself to those who love properly.
Aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix. Don’t be arrogant in your knowledge. Strive for humility. Become aware of your own insufficiency. Don’t lie about anything.
For every bad thing that occurs, there was always a good thing that could counteract it.
You should place making the world better at the top of your values.
There is no faith and no courage and no sacrifice in doing what is expedient.

Rule 8: Tell the truth - or, at least, don’t lie

What should you do, when you don’t know what to do. Tell the truth.
If you will not reveal yourself to others, you cannot reveal yourself to yourself.
You should never sacrifice what you could be for what you are. You should never give up the better that resides within for the security you already have.
The biggest of lies are composed of smaller lies, and those are composed of even smaller lies.

Rule 9: Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t

The past appears fixed, but it’s not. A happy ending can change the meaning of all previous events.
The present can change the past, and the future can change the present.
The purpose of memory is not to remember the past, but to stop the same damn thing from happening over and over again.
People think they think, but it is mostly self criticism that passes for thinking.
The great majority of us cannot listen, we find ourselves compelled to evaluate, because listening is too dangerous.
It is a good practice to routinely summarize what people have said, and then ask them if you have understood them properly.
You remember the past not so that it is accurately recorded, to say it again, but so that you are prepared for the future.

Rule 10: Be precise in your speech

Everything is intricate beyond imagining. Everything is affected by everything else.
Don’t ever underestimate the destructive power of sins of omission.
There is little, in a marriage, that is so little that it is not worth fighting about.
Why avoid, when avoidance necessarily and inevitably poisons the future.
Why remain vague, when it renders life stagnant and murky.
Why refuse to investigate, when knowledge of reality enables mastery of reality.
When something terrible happens, it is precision that separates the unique terrible thing that has actually happened from all the other equally terrible things that might have happened.
Precision may leave the tragedy intact, but it chases away the ghouls and the demons.
Be careful with what you tell yourself and others about what you’ve done, what you were doing, and where you were going. Search for the correct words.

Rule 11: Do not bother children when they are skateboarding

If things are made too safe, people start to figure out ways to make them dangerous again.
Overprotected, we will fail when something dangerous, unexpected and full of opportunities suddenly makes its appearance.
We experience almost all the emotions that make life deep and engaging as a consequence of moving successfully toward something deeply desired and valued.
Group identity can be fractionated right down to the level of the individual.

Rule 12: Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

People are social because they like the members of their own group. People are antisocial because they don’t like the members of other groups.
If you are already everything, everywhere, always, there is no where to go and nothing to be.
Being of any reasonable sort appears to require limitation.
When you love someone, it’s not despite their limitations. It’s because of their limitations.
Maybe when you are going for a walk and your head is spinning a cat will show up and if you pay attention to it then you’ll get a reminder for just 15 seconds that the wonder of being might make up for the ineradicable suffering that accompanies it.
To seek peace you have to decide that you want the answer, more than you want to be right.

ABCs of Real Estate Investing by Ken McElroy

Rating:8 out of 10

NOTES:

If you don’t have a plan for your capital gain from selling, you should not sell the property.
To maximize your sale price, you are better off having your market rents high and creating some vacancy.
When you are looking to sell your property, you want your rental rates to be at the market rate in the area.
Fees for property management run approximately 8 to 12% of gross rent for single-family properties.
Poor property management is one very large contributor to a properties under performance and reduced valuation.
Never, ever waive late fees or non-sufficient funds fees.
What kind of insurance you will need includes property/casualty and general liability.
Good what if questions for making more income can be found on page 124.
There is a good due diligence checklist on page 114.
If you find that the property requires any type of major repairs you can factor the costs into the final valuation.
The goal of due diligence is to find out 100 percent of everything there is to know about the property and generate an operating plan and budget from that information.
The loan contingency states that the sale is contingent on you qualifying for the loan.
You should include loan contingencies and due diligence contingencies in every purchase and sale agreement.
Once the buyer and seller agree upon terms, the attorney can draft up the purchase and sale agreement.
Sample letters of intent are on www.KenMcElroy.com
Once a valuation has been established, you’re ready to draft a letter of intent or a purchase and sale agreement.
The quicker you can tie up the property the better chance you have of closing the deal at your price.
When you know 70% of everything there is to know about a property, that’s enough to make a decision.
Property value and offer price equals NOI divided by capitalization rate.
Determine the net operating income by subtracting your expenses from your income.
If the seller does not reveal actual rent numbers in the small print on a brochure pro forma, then you must request a rent roll and use those numbers.
There are three types of income to consider with any property: actual income, actual potential income and future potential income.
Actual income is the total income the property generated in the prior 12 months.
Actual potential income is the total income the property could’ve generated in the prior 12 months had all units been 100% occupied and had the owner taken advantage of all other income opportunities.
Future potential income is the total income the property could generate at today’s market rates, 100% occupancy, and taking advantage of all other income opportunities.
Even if the seller discloses the current income on a rental property either through a pro forma document or verbally, verify it.
The five step property evaluation is:
Verify property income.
Verify expenses.
Determine net operating income.
Find the capitalization rate and valuation.
Calculate the loan payment and your profit or cash on cash.
You determine the property value, which becomes your offer. The sellers asking price is irrelevant.
Good deals the numbers work. In bad deals they don’t.
A good discussion with the property owner can be found on page 71.
The hardest road is the one you travel alone. No man is an island.
You cannot change the neighborhood, so make sure the property is in a place that you’re prepared to manage.
Read every article you can get your hands on about your target market.
When you buy right you spend your days tending a garden rather than digging out rocks.
Trust but verify.
Great locations have drive by visibility, possess a unique quality, and are in demand.
Places that have clearly defined personas are population draws almost as powerful as employment.
It is a fact that population follows employment.
Location, population, and employment are the three drivers of supply and demand.
Ideally, supply should be low and demand should be high.
The first objective of finding a rental property is to get an accurate read on the supply and demand in the area.
It is impossible for a person who has never done a real estate deal to have instinctive knowledge that one deal will be better than the other.
The market is more important than the property.
Before signing any deal, have a contractor perform a detailed inspection and file a report of all critical and non-critical repairs.
Your property search team which includes a real estate broker and property manager, will most likely refer to you the offer team which includes an attorney or lender.
You really only need an attorney, an accountant, a real estate broker, and a property manager, when starting out.
Your degree of success will be directly proportional to your degree of integrity.
The wise investor pays in the front end and reaps the rewards in the back end.
Do-it-yourselfers miss details that experts will see in a minute.
When it comes to property investing, the same when there’s a will there’s a way, has never been more meaningful.
Make yourself accountable to somebody.
Your goals and objectives need to pass the smart test. S stands for specific, M stands for measurable, A stands for agreed-upon in writing, R stands for realistic, and T stands for time achieved.
The strategic coach seven laws of lifetime growth:
Always make your future better than your past.
Always make your contribution bigger than your award.
Always make your learning greater than your experience.
Always make your performance greater than your applause.
Always make your gratitude greater than your success.
Always make your enjoyment greater than your effort.
Always make your confidence greater than your comfort.
Your goal should be measurable, and your goal should be attainable.
A goal is something you plan to achieve.
Having a goal makes you powerful.
Having a goal is not optional. Goal setting is step number one in the process.
If you don’t use fear of failure to your advantage as a motivator, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The only way you’ll know a lot about real estate is to begin in real estate.
There is no point negotiating based on the listing price, and actually doing so is a recipe for disaster.
There’s always a way to make your dreams come true, as long as they are truly your dreams.
The voice of reason is common sense; the voice of self doubt is your past leading your future.
All things are difficult before they are easy.

As a Man Thinketh by James Allen

Rating:10 out of 10

NOTES:

Self-control is strength; Right thought is mastery; Calmness is power.
The more tranquil a man becomes, the greater is his success, his influence, his power for good.
Calmness of mind is one of the beautiful jewels of wisdom. It is the result of long and patient effort in self control. Its presence is an indication of ripened experience, and of a more than ordinary knowledge of the laws and operations of thought.
To desire is to obtain; to aspire is to achieve.
In all human affairs there are efforts, and there are results, and the strength of the effort is the measure of the result. Chance is not.
You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as your dominant aspirations.
Your vision is the promise of what you shall one day be; your Ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.
The dreamers are the saviors of the world.
He who would accomplish little must sacrifice little; he who would achieve much must sacrifice much; he who would attain highly must sacrifice greatly.
Victories attained by right thought can only be maintained by watchfulness. Many give way when success is assured, and rapidly fall back into failure.
The universe does not favor the greedy, the dishonest, the vicious, although on the mere surface it may sometimes appear to do so; it helps the honest, the magnanimous, the virtuous.
A man can only rise, conquer, and achieve by lifting up his thoughts. He can only remain weak, and abject, and miserable by refusing to lift up his thoughts.
A strong man cannot help a weaker unless the weaker is willing to be helped, and even then the weak man must become strong himself; he must, by his own efforts, develop the strength which he admires in another. None but himself can alter his condition.
All that a man achieves and all that he fails to achieve is the direct result of his own thoughts.
Doubt and fear are the great enemies of knowledge, and he who encourages them, who does not slay them, thwarts himself at every step.
The will to do springs from the knowledge that we can do.
As the physically weak man can make himself strong by careful and patient training, so the man of weak thoughts can make them strong by exercising himself in right thinking.
A man should conceive of a legitimate purpose in his heart, and set out to accomplish it. He should make this purpose the centralizing point of his thoughts.
Until thought is linked with purpose there is no intelligent accomplishment.
There is no physician like cheerful thought for dissipating the ills of the body.
Disease and health, like circumstances, are rooted in thought. Sickly thoughts will express themselves through a sickly body.
The body is the servant of the mind.
The world is your kaleidoscope, and the varying combinations of colors which at every succeeding moment it presents to you are the exquisitely adjusted pictures of your ever-moving thoughts.
A man only begins to be a man when he ceases to whine and revile, and commences to search for the hidden justice which regulates his life.
Good thoughts and actions can never produce bad results; bad thoughts and actions can never produce good results.
Men do not attract that which they want, but that which they are.
Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself.
A man does not come to the almshouse or the jail by the tyranny of fate or circumstance, but by the pathway of groveling thoughts and base desires.
Good thoughts bear good fruit, bad thoughts bad fruit.
Just as a gardener cultivates his plot, keeping it free from weeds, and growing the flowers and fruits which he requires, so may a man tend the garden of his mind.
A man’s mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild.
Only by much searching and mining are gold and diamonds obtained, and man can find every truth connected with his being if he will dig deep into the mine of his soul.
He that seeketh findeth, and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.
You are literally what you think, your character being the complete sum of all your thoughts. Man is made or unmade by himself.
Act is the blossom of thought, and joy and suffering are it’s fruits.
As a man thinketh in his heart so is he.
A man cannot directly choose his circumstances, but he can choose his thoughts, and so indirectly, yet surely, shape his circumstances.
They themselves are makers of themselves.
You are what you think.

Attitude by Jay Wright

Rating: 9 out of 10

NOTES:

Treat praise and criticism like the imposters they are.
Whatever challenges you are facing, it’s almost certain someone else has faced it before.
There is no better salve for anxiety than being well prepared.
You can’t take any aspect of what you do as a leader and say this isn’t important.
Always working, always reassessing, and always trying to improve is a must when you are trying to be your best.
The Great Majesty of Life
The only certainty in life is change.
Respect everyone. Fear no one.
There is only one goal: to give your greatest effort. If someone else gets better results than you, honor them. But maintain your own self respect for offering your best. This will give you confidence against any foe.
The word crisis in Greek means opportunity.
To win the lottery, you have to buy a ticket. In other words, you have to be willing to put forth the effort to get the results.
Give your two cents. It doesn’t matter how big your contribution is: what matters is how much heart you put into it.
In the words of Saint Augustine, do not be content with what you are: push to become what you are not.
Do not have a stiff neck. Allow yourself to look around for the larger picture and opportunities to grow.
There is a sunrise after every sunset. Eventually you’ll see the lessons you learn from disappointments.
The real progress comes when no one is watching.
The three ingredients needed to make any team a success was TOP. Talent. Opportunity. Perseverance.
In any organization, the leaders job is to make sure everyone feels confident in the role and that the role is valued.
Failure isn’t forever. Never fear failure. Think of it as opportunity to learn.
If you can approach every challenge without a fear of failure, knowing that you will learn from any setback, you will find it easier to work with a free and uncluttered mind.
Shoot ‘em up. Sleep in the streets. This means to be a great player you have to be strong enough to live with the consequences when the shots don’t drop.
The world evaluates on its own terms. We evaluate on our own.
No matter how hard it gets, remain positive. “Attitude”
None of us control what happens to us in life, but we do control our responses to those circumstances.
A great attitude is a prerequisite for success.
Everyone’s role is different but their status is the same.

Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

A leader must exercise extreme ownership.
A leader has nothing to prove but everything to prove.
Leaders must have a competitive spirit but also be gracious losers.
A leader must be attentive to details but not obsessed by them.
A leader must be strong but likewise have endurance, not only physically but mentally.
Leaders must be humble but not passive, quiet but not silent.
A leader must be close with subordinates but not too close.
A leader must be confident but never cocky.
A leader must be brave but not foolhardy.
A leader must lead but also be ready to follow.
A leader must be aggressive but not overbearing.
A leader must be calm but not robotic.
Discipline might appear to be the opposite of freedom. But in fact, discipline is the pathway to freedom.
When the alarm clock goes off do you get out of bed, or do you lie there in comfort and fall back to sleep? If you have the disciple to get out of bed you win.
Discipline equals freedom.
Instead of letting the situation dictate you, you must dictate the situation.
It is critical for leaders to act decisively amid uncertainty, to make the best decisions they can based in only the immediate information available.
If you don’t think your leader understands the challenges of what you are doing, invite them out into the field and discuss with them.
One of the most important jobs of any leader is to support your own boss.
Leadership doesn’t just flow down the chain of command, it also flows up. We have to own everything in our world.
If people have questions, it’s your fault for not properly communicating the information they need.
The true test for a good brief is not whether the senior officials are impressed. It’s whether or not the troops that are going to execute the operation actually understand it.
The best SEAL units, after each combat operation, conduct a post operational debrief. You must figure out what went right, what went wrong and where to improve.
Giving Frontline troops ownership of even a small piece of the plan gives them buy in, helps them understand the reasons behind the plan, and better enables them to believe in the mission, which translates to far more effective implementation and execution on the ground.
Proper decentralized command requires simple, clear, concise orders that can be understood easily by everyone in the chain of command.
Teams must be broken down into manageable elements of four to five operators, with a clearly designated leader.
Stay at least a step or two ahead of real time problems.
Prioritize and Execute. Relax, look around, make a call.
You must brief to ensure the lowest common denominator on the team understands.
Plans and orders must be communicated in a manner that is simple, clear, and concise.
Cover and move. All elements within the greater team are crucial and must work together to accomplish the mission, mutually supporting one another for that singular purpose.
Ego clouds and disrupts everything.
The leader must not just explain what to do, but why.
Simple, but not easy.
The leader is truly and ultimately responsible for everything.
The leader must own everything in his or her world. There is no one else to blame.
The leader must acknowledge mistakes and admit failures, take ownership of them, and develop a plan to win.
Such a leader does not take credit for his or her teams successes but bestows that honor upon his subordinate leaders and team members.
It pays to be a winner.
There are no bad teams, only bad leaders.
When it comes to standards, as a leader, it’s not what you preach, it's what you tolerate.
Leaders should never be satisfied. They must always strive to improve, and they must build that mind-set into the team.
In order to convince and inspire others to follow and accomplish a mission, a leader must be a true believer in the mission.
Leaders must always operate with the understanding that they are part of something greater than themselves and their own personal interests.
When leaders receive an order that they themselves question and do not understand, they must ask the question why?
It’s also important to take the time to explain and answer the questions of the people so that they can understand the why and believe.

Rating: 9 out of 10

NOTES:

How Champions Think by Dr. Bob Rotella

Rating: 9 out of 10

NOTES:

Over the span of a lifetime, the only lasting failure is the failure to try.
If you choose to stay in your present job, you are to decide you love that job, you are grateful to have it, and you are going to work hard and well at it. That will create more options and new realities for you.
All winners and losers in life are completely self determined. But only the winners are willing to admit it.
There is a happy medium between listening to everyone and taking all the advice you were offered, and listening to no one and stubbornly hanging onto the same flawed techniques and habits.
A champion understands that when he is asked to play a role he wouldn’t choose under ideal circumstances, he is responsible for the attitude that he brings to that role.
Enthusiasm acts like a catalyst that makes all the other attributes of the champions mind work better.
Do what you love or love what you do.
For people striving to be exceptional the main lesson is not to try to do it completely alone. You need to select those people carefully, and you need to treat them right.
It is foolish to judge someone else before you can assess that persons mental qualities.
The best coaches make sure they always find a way to have all their players enter competition feeling confident about themselves, regardless of what was said in practice.
The reality is that a lot of fraternities and sororities are full of people who value partying, drinking, and drugs. If a kid joins one of these groups, the group will pressure him to put its priorities higher than kids original priorities.
In the preparation process, you have to be very aware of the competition, and the bar only moves one way, up.
An exceptional individual expects that at least occasionally, he will lose. He takes pride not in never having setbacks but in how he responds to setbacks.
Good practice is usually harder than the competition prepares you for.
You have to always be willing to go through the fire. This alludes to what happens when you take a piece of metal ore from the ground. In that state, it is loaded with impurities. You put it in a fire. In the fire, it’s impurities are burned away, and the metal becomes stronger and harder. The fire adds value.
One way exceptional people deal with failure is by refusing to remember it.
Exceptional people almost always are very good at monitoring and evaluating their adherence to a good process and catching themselves when they slip slightly.
The outcome is of secondary importance to exceptional people, because they know that if they honor the preparation and performance processes they have determined will work for them, the outcome will take care of itself.
Average people tend to overestimate how hard they are working.
Optimism leads to confidence which leads to persistence which leads to success. It’s called the virtuous circle
No matter what happens to exceptional people, no matter what set backs occurred in their lives, they found causes to keep trying.
It’s a big advantage to aim high. When you aim high, you have a chance to be great. Even your failures will be better than most peoples best.
Exceptional people immerse themselves in process goals. They care most about how well they follow the chosen process every day.
People who have learned effectiveness often like a little chip on the shoulders.
Conversely, people who have learned effectiveness latch on to any positive input that comes their way and feed on it.
Nerves are in fact a sign that an individual is about to do something he cares about.
Refuse to lose. This means never give up. You never give into doubt, fear, or fatigue. Giving up is the only true loss.
Train it and trust it. This means learn the skill thoroughly, so it is ingrained in your subconscious.
Exceptional people tend to have habits that help them achieve what they want.
If I’m better than you now and I practice more than you every day, how could you ever hope to catch me.
You can learn to love something if you make an effort to focus on the aspects of that activity that please you, thinking over and over again about how much you enjoy them.
The easiest way to keep a commitment is to love what you were doing. But you have to love the entirety of what you are doing, not just the occasional glory and rewards.
Devise an improvement plan and commit yourself to it. Persevere.
A part of real talent is the ability to select the right counselors and tune everything else out.
One of the best character traits for achieving exceptional results is a belief in your own talent.
What’s important is not avoiding adversity, but how an individual responds to it.
Vince Lombardi preached that fatigue makes cowards of us all.
The champion doesn’t care about keeping an accurate record in his own mind. He thinks and remembers in ways that will help him achieve and maintain a confident self image.
The ideas people choose to have about themselves largely determine the quality of the lives they lead.
Exceptional people either start out being optimistic or learn to be optimistic because they realize that they can’t get what they want in life without being optimistic.
Optimism is often an act of faith, a belief in something that cannot be proven.
Smile a little bit before a putt or doing something difficult.
People tend to become what they think about themselves.
The act of writing down a thought about a successful attempt helps reinforce its importance in the subconscious registry.
A champion understands that it’s fine to savor an experience when it’s positive, to remember it, to celebrate. When an experience is negative, he understands that he can’t let himself get stuck in it.

How to Invest in Real Estate by Brandon Turner

Rating: 9 out of 10

NOTES:

Once you’ve identified a task you must actually do it as soon as possible.
The first step in minimizing dead space is to identify what your most important next step is on your journey.
If you want to accomplish significantly more in your life, faster, you need to minimize the dead space.
You should constantly be asking yourself are you being effective or just efficient.
To be a general in real estate, hire a property manager to look after you’re rentals. Find a partner who is analytical to analyze deals. Get a family member or friend to answer your real estate related phone calls. You can almost optimize any scenario.
The best investor spends his time finding the right people, processes, and procedures that will ensure victory.
16 tips and tricks for selling your property.
- Have your property inspected before you list.
- Clean up your home and keep it clean when it’s on the market.
- Make sure you pass the sniff test.
- Take great but honest pictures of your house.
- Be available for showings.
- Be informative.
- Know your competition.
- Use an agent.
- Ask your agent for selling advice.
- Price your house right.
- List in peak market time.
  - After the property has been listed, double check the listing to make sure all the information is correct.
- Stage those weird spaces that don’t have an obvious use.
- Leave during showings and take your pets with you.
- Be prepared to walk away from an offer.
- Tell everyone you know that your property is for sale.
When your agent gives you the price that you should list your house at, ask them to justify the price point.
Seller financing only works when there is no mortgage on the house.
You can sell for sale by owner, which would end up making you only pay around 3% to a real estate agent instead of six.
When listing your property with an agent, be sure to interview several agents.
12 Ways to Finance Your Real Estate Deals
- All cash.
- Conventional mortgage.
- Portfolio lenders.
- FHA loans.
- 203k Loans.
- Owner financing.
- Hard money.
- Private money.
- Home equity loans and lines of credit.
- Partnerships.
- Commercial loans.
- Retirement accounts.
To put together a real estate deal, knowledge, money, and hustle are required.
Search and vet potential tenants while waiting for the deal to close.
27 powerful tactics for finding great deals:
- MLS/real estate agent.
- Driving for dollars. This means looking for a property that looks distressed, damaged or vacant. This could include long grass, newspapers piling up, legal notices on the doors, or old for sale signs. The process is fine deals. Find address or phone numbers for the owners. Contact owners. Find out if they want to sell. Make an offer.
- Walking for dollars.
- Civic or religious organizations. When people know what you want, they will instinctively want to help you get it. So talk about how you are an investor in real estate.
- Real estate clubs.
- Direct mail.
- Courthouse steps.
- Eviction records.
- Craigslist ads.
- Craigslist for rent ads. You can contact these people to see if they want to sell.
- Craigslist automation.
- The bigger pockets marketplace.
- Physical signs.
- Billboards.
- Car signs.
- Tv and Radio. Fiverr.com can get tasks done for 5 dollars.
- For sale by owners signs. Good sites include FBSO.com, ForSaleByOwner.com, Owner.com, Craigslist.com, Zillow.com
- Expired Listings.
- Family or Friends. A good example of a Facebook post for getting a deal is on page 195.
- Newspaper Ads.
- Landlord industry magazines/newspapers.
- Blogging/Content Marketing.
- Website and SEO. Ways to get your website to rank high or by providing great content that actually answers peoples questions, and getting other websites to link to your website.
- Paid traffic.
- Wholesalers.
- Commercial brokers.
- Online commercial market places.
It’s an absolute people business and the more people you know, the more likely it is you’re going to have success.
If you want more success, you need to make more offers. If you want to make more offers, you need to analyze more deals to determine their value. If you want to analyze more deals, you need to get more leads to analyze.
As a real estate investor, you need to get comfy with rejection because you will be rejected over and over again.
Leads come from tactics starting on page 178.
The LAPS funnel stands for leads, analysis, pursue, success.
The lack of a solid framework is the number one most common reason people struggle to find deals and quit the pursuit of financial freedom through real estate.
In the beginning of your investing find one strategy and one niche, and pursue it until you’ve mastered it.
Pick a potentially lucrative real estate niche, become an expert in that niche, and overtime use your success of develop additional niche markets.
Student rentals are another good way to invest if you live near colleges or universities.
BRRRR investing stands for buy, rehab, rent, refinance, repeat.
If you live in a house for two out of the five years and then sell it you will have to pay zero taxes on that.
To determine a vacation rental, head to a listing site and compare to similar properties.
Benefits of house hacking include low down payment financing, on the job training, you can keep an eye on your investment, and saved expenses.
House hacking is the strategy of purchasing a small multi family property using one unit to live in and renting out the other units.
Before choosing to invest with a turnkey company, always do your own math and make sure the deal really is a deal.
How to house flip can be found on page 136.
Try to average around 15% per year for a total return on investment.
Aim for a minimum of 20% equity in any deal you do. This can be done by finding a good deal for 80% of the value or putting down a down payment of 20%.
Try to obtain a cash on cash return of around 12%.
For a single-family house, try to achieve $200 per month in cash flow. For a multi family property, aim for $100 per month, per unit.
The 50% rule states that, on average and over time, half of the income a property generates is spent on operating expenses.
The 2% is the monthly rent divided by the value of property.
Most properties that fall short of one percent will likely not produce cash flow. If it’s between 1 and 2%, it probably will and if it’s above 2%, you’re almost positive to product cash flow.
Cash on cash return equals annual cash flow divided by total investment.
Annual return on investment = (ending investment/ beginning investment) ^ (1/numbers of years) -1
ROI = (V1 - V0) / V0 where V1 is the ending balance and V0 is the starting balance.
Cash flow is the amount of money left over at the end of the month after all expenses are paid.
The reason for buying and holding is cash flow, appreciation, loan pay down and tax benefits.
The expert in battle seeks his victory from strategic advantage and does not demand it from his men.
Commercial properties can sit vacant for long periods of time, so they require more experience and a stronger position of wealth to be investing.
If you expect someone to perform really well, then you should pay them really well.
Positives to investing in single-family houses include a high inventory, easy to understand, easier to sell and rent, financing is simple, cash flow and appreciation is greater, it’s simple to manage, and simple to rehab.
Corporations can issue dividends to the shareholders anytime they like. This income is not subject to the FICA or self-employment tax.
An LLC, is for asset protection, not tax benefits, because an LLC is known as a pass-through entity.
Keep your personal and business expenses separate 100% of the time.
The right entity cost can save you a ton of money in taxes each year, so definitely consult with the CPA on the best strategy.
One of the best places you can start networking is your local real estate investing club.
Good places to meet people are at local real estate networking events and clubs. You can go to www.biggerpockets.com/events or checkout meetup.com.
The best sources for finding these team members is through referrals from other investors.
Make sure that the contractor is licensed, bonded, and insured to protect you.
The people you want on your team include a mentor, realtor, property manager, mortgage broker, real estate attorney, escrow officer, accountant, insurance agent, handyman and contractor.
Once you build up your confidence in understanding the lingo of real estate, your ability to talk with others and understand what is being discussed will grow exponentially.
Having ones preparation laid before beginning an activity or project is vital to the success of that venture.
It takes a long time to get good at something.
If you want to get a promotion, ask your boss what it would take to get a promotion and then do it.
You can afford anything you want, but not everything you want.
Busy people push food decisions to the back of their mind and end up going out to dinner more frequently because they don’t have anything at home. Take 20 minutes each week to plan out the next seven days of meals.
The largest expenses are taxes, housing, and vehicle expenses.
80% of your losses come from 20% of your expenses.
By simply knowing where your money is going, and how much you were allowed to spend, you’ll naturally begin filling items into your plan.
Saving money is the first expense that should be accounted for.
There are generally five expenses in individual or family has. Variable expenses with your groceries, gas, clothing or generally required expenses I don’t usually occur on a fixed timeline. Basically the cost of living.
Fixed expenses are more or less fixed in time to month, meaning they come out each and every month around the same time including things like your mortgage payment, car payments, or credit card bills.
Donations. Savings for retirement including a 401(k) or IRA. And fun money.
A firm foundation is the key to a long lasting structure.
Don’t wait to buy real estate. Buy real estate and wait.
Before throwing money at someone else to make you successful, understand that success comes from within first.
It is easier to get long-term bank financing with a steady income from work.
Consistency in action is far more important than sporadic big action.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Rating: 10 out of 10

NOTES:

Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person's precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.
Let's realize that the person we are going to correct and condemn will probably justify himself or herself, and condemn us in return
The next time we are tempted to admonish somebody, let's pull a five-dollar bill out of our pocket, look at Lincoln's picture on the bill, and ask. "How would Lincoln handle this problem if he had it?"
Benjamin Franklin "I will speak ill of no man," he said, " . . and speak all the good I know of everybody."
Remind myself that my popularity, my happiness and sense of worth depend to no small extent upon my skill in dealing with people.
99% of the time people don’t criticize themselves for anything no matter how wrong.
Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them and figure out why they do what they do.

Principle 1 - Don’t criticize, condemn or complain

There is only one way under high heaven to get anybody to do anything. And that is by making the other person want to do it.
William James: “The deepest principal in human nature is a craving to be appreciated.”
“I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people,” said Schwab, “the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement."
We often take our spouses so much for granted that we never let them know we appreciate them.
Giving complements to people will feed their craving for satisfaction and will only improve their mood.
General Obregon’s philosophy: “Don’t be afraid of enemies who attack you. Be afraid of the friends who flatter you."
Nothing pleases children more than parental interest and approval.
The next time you enjoy filet mignon at the club, send word to the chef that it was excellently prepared, and when a tired salesperson shows you unusual courtesy, please mention it.

Principle 2 - Give honest and sincere appreciation

The only way to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.
Tomorrow you may want to persuade somebody to do something. Before you speak, pause and ask yourself: "How can I make this person want to do it?"
“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own.” Henry Ford
It is necessary to bait the hook to suit the fish. This means that in order to appease people, you must interest them in things that they enjoy.
The individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage.

Principle 3 - Arouse in the other person an eager want

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.
I have discovered from personal experience that one can win the attention and time and cooperation of even the most sought-after people by becoming genuinely interested in them.
It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow man who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others.
Being genuinely interested in other people is a great quality.

Principle 1 - Become genuinely interested in other people

The expression one wears on one’s face is far more important then the clothes one is wearing.
Smiling is one of the best ways to make people like you.
People who smile,” he said, “tend to manage teach and sell more effectively, and to raise happier children.
Abe Lincoln once remarked that "most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."
“A man without a smiling face must not open a shop."
You must have a good time meeting people if you expect them to have a good time meeting you.
A smile is a messenger of your goodwill. Whenever going outside, breathe in the air with your chin up and smile.

Principle 2 - Smile

Whenever he met a new acquaintance, he found out his or her complete name and some facts about his or her family, business and political opinions.
The average person is more interested in his or her own name than all other names.
Remember that name and call it easily, and you have paid a subtle and very effective compliment.
Most people don't remember names, for the simple reason that they don't take the time and energy necessary to concentrate and repeat and fix names indelibly in their minds.
Franklin D. Roosevelt knew that one of the simplest, most obvious and most important ways of gaining good will was by remembering names and making people feel important.
During the conversation, he took the trouble to repeat the name several times, and tried to associate it in his mind with the person's features, expression and general appearance.

Principle 3 - Remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.

And so I had him thinking of me as a good conversationalist when, in reality, I had been merely a good listener and had encouraged him to talk.
So if you aspire to be a good conversationalist, be an attentive listener. To be interesting, be interested. Ask questions that other persons will enjoy answering. Encourage them to talk about themselves and their accomplishments.

Principle 4 - Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.

The royal road to a person’s heart is to talk about the things he or she treasures the most.
Whenever Roosevelt expected a visitor, he sat up late the night before, reading up on the subject in which he knew his guest was particularly interested.

Principle 5 - Talk in terms of the other person's interests.

The law is this: Always make the other person feel important.
When seeing someone, say to yourself, “what is there about him that I can honestly admire.”

Principle 6 - Make the other person feel important-and do it sincerely.

As a result of all this, I have come to the conclusion that there is only one way under high heaven to get the best of an argument - and that is to avoid it

Rating: 9 out of 10

NOTES:

Leadership Strategy and Tactics by Jocko Willink

As a leader, you must remember you are being watched. And in everything you do, you must set the example.
Reflect and diminish means to reflect the emotions you are seeing from your subordinate but diminish them to a more controlled level.
If it is absolutely necessary to impose an ultimatum on a collective effort, place it squarely on the leader. That way the leader can work with the team to deliver and bear out the repercussions.
Ultimatums are not optimal leadership tools. They allow no room to maneuver.
You have to use caution when you dole out praise. Too much praise and people, consciously or unconsciously, back off their efforts just a little bit.
Explaining why is important, but the why has to tie back and connect to everyone in the chain of command.
The best way to ensure that people understand what you’ve told them is to ask them to explain the guidance back to you in their own way.
Rumors are caused by lack of information. So get the word out ahead of the rumors.
It is critical for the leader to keep everyone on the team as informed as possible.
Sometimes you have to quit on a short term tactical goal. But never quit the strategic mission. Never give up on your long-term strategic goals.
The best way to treat combat stress and any stress is to remove that affected individual from the stress inducing environment.
When a decision is made or a course of action comes down from the chain of command, you must execute it as if it were your own.
Micromanagement is a tool, but it is not a permanent solution. When it has reached its limitations, remove or replace the personnel to fix the problem.
Micromanagement becomes necessary when an individual or a group is not doing their job.
When leading peers take the high ground and put your ego in check.
When you have to teach a young leader some humility, put the young leader in charge of a mission or project that you know is outside their level of competency.
One of the best tools a leader has to help shape others is leadership itself; giving people responsibility and putting them in leadership positions teaches them to be better in a multitude of ways.
When bad things happen, it is important for the leader to maintain a positive attitude, to find the good in the situation.
As a new leader, don’t judge your new members based on what you’ve heard or read; try to keep an open mind and judge for yourself.
If a leader wants to be in charge of everything, he or she should try to be in charge of nothing.
When you have an idea, thought, or opinion, don’t dig in. That means don’t over commit to ideas.
Don’t take criticism personally.
You should hesitate a moment when you see that a leadership vacuum appears. This will give you time to formulate a plan and allow others to understand that a vacuum has formed.
Instead of, “I’ll tell you how we are going to execute,” try, “how do you think we should execute?”
If you are looking to mentor or coach someone, be subtle about it.
There is nothing abnormal about feeling you are not quite ready for a leadership position.
The number one way to give yourself a chance for a promotion and leadership is simple and straightforward: performance.
It is possible to have a good team that delivers outstanding performance despite a bad leader.
As a leader, you should not want to be surrounded by yes-men. As a subordinate, you should not be a yes-man.
No pride is built on easy wins, but a team has to win some to have some pride.
Pride comes from shared suffering.
Imposed discipline is an uphill battle. It is not the best way to lead. Instead, whenever possible explain the why, make sure the team members understand the benefits to the mission and to themselves and give them as much ownership as possible so they execute driven not by the will of their own intrinsic discipline.
The easy path leads to misery. The path of discipline leads to freedom.
Be sure to keep your span of control limited so you actually have some control.
Every person’s job on your team is the most important because at any moment, anyone of them could easily become the most important person.
While a leader cannot be distracted by things that are unimportant, they must also know what is important and when it is time to step down into the tactical situation and get a problem solved before it gets out of hand.
It is a crucial part of the leaders job to figure out which changes are important and which are mere distractions.
Relationships in the workplace do not mean preferential treatment. Relationships do not mean undue influence. And relationships do not mean unfiltered candor and completely revealing one’s thoughts.
Everyone is the same, but everyone is different.
To actually win strategically in the long game, you have to not care. And to not care, you have to set aside an ego.
When you are a leader and someone blames you for something going wrong, you accept the blame. You own it.
Take preemptive ownership to mitigate problems before they even happen.
If the leader knows there truly are no excuses, then he or she will make every conceivable effort to prepare.
Extreme ownership means that the leader is responsible for everything. Absolutely everything.
To build respect and influence you have to give respect and influence.
If subordinates don’t understand why they are doing something, they need to ask.
To build trust up the ladder, tell the truth to your superior.
To build trust down the ladder, give the people trust by allowing them to perform.
Get down with the Frontline troops, learn what you can from them, know and understand their part of the mission, and earn their respect as a leader and as a person.
Always be on the lookout for the fundamental principles of leadership. Cover and move. Simple. Prioritize and execute. Decentralized command. Extreme ownership. The dichotomy of leadership.
Waiting to discuss a difficult issue will not make the issue any less difficult. Attack it.
Tell the truth to your people. Tell the truth to your boss. Tell the truth to your peers. And tell the truth to yourself.
The aim of both leadership and manipulation is to get people to do what you want them to do. The highest form of both leadership and manipulation is to get people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.
A good leader builds a great team that counter balances their weaknesses.
Objections to the boss should not be presented in an offensive manner.
Play the game.
The more you talk, the less people listen.
Leadership requires good relationships with people above you, below you, and beside you in the chain of command.
You need to figure out your biggest priority problem and execute a plan to fix that problem before moving onto the next one.
Keep things simple.
Even though you have to be ready to lead, you also have to know when to follow - and that to be a good leader, you have to be a good follower.
In the absence of orders, lead.
Without everyone buying into a plan, taking ownership, and making every possible effort to ensure it is carried out and the mission is accomplished, there’s a good chance it will fail.
Arrogance and throwing rank around does not work.
Detachment is one of the most powerful tools a leader can have.
One must be able to detach themselves from the chaos and mayhem going on around, take a step back, and see what is actually happening.
If you can recognize the crazy patterns of humans, you can predict the way things are likely to unfold and influence them.
You can never rest on what you have achieved in the past. You always have to improve.

Rating: 10 out of 10

NOTES:

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

The last sentence of the Ethics of Spinoza reads, “Sed omnia praeclara tam dificilia quam rara sunt.” (But everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find.)
Happiness cannot be pursued it must ensue.
Ironically, in the same way that fear brings to pass what one is afraid of, likewise a forced intention makes impossible what one forcibly wishes.
Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!
What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a persons life at a given moment.
What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.
The poet Rilke wrote, “Wie viel ist aufzuleiden!” (How much suffering there is to get through!)
No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny. No situation repeats itself, and each situation calls for a different response.
We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk in meditation, but in right action in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.
It does not really matter what we expect from life, but rather what life expects from us.
Spinoza says in his Ethics, “Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus ideam.” Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future - sub specie aeternitatis.
The Latin word finis has two meanings: the end or the finish, and a goal to reach. A man who could not see the end of his provisional existence was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life.
Fundamentally, any man can, even under such circumstances as a camp prisoner, decide what shall be become of him - mentally and spiritually.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
The salvation of man is through love and in love.
Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.
Don’t aim at success - the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it.
Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, you’re freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.
You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.
Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, or a quest for power, but a quest for meaning.
The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.
There are three possible sources for meaning: in work, in love, and in courage during difficult times.
Suffering in and of itself is meaningless, we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.

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Money Master the Game by Tony Robbins

Rating: 10 out of 10

NOTES:

The secret to living is giving.
People get more satisfaction spending money on others than you spending on themselves.
Every day, stand guard at the door of your mind, and you alone decide what thoughts and beliefs you let into your life.
We tend to model our behavior on the people in our lives whom we respect, enjoy and love.
A change of focus and a changing meaning can literally change your bio chemistry in a matter of minutes. Learning to master this becomes an emotional game changer.
In the beginning of a relationship you are a giver, not an accountant. You aren’t weighing constantly the meaning of who was giving more.
The quality of our lives is controlled by the meaning we give these things.
We can be grateful for our health, our friends, our opportunities, our minds, and the fact that we get to drive on roads that we didn’t have to build, read books we didn’t have to take years to write, and tap in to the Internet that we didn’t have to create.
What’s the point of massive achievement if your life has no balance? What’s the point of winning the game if you never take the time to celebrate and appreciate the life you have?
If what you learn leads to knowledge, you become a fool. If what you learn leads to action, you can become wealthy.
Peter Diamandis likes to point out that scarcity is a function of our ability or lack of ability to access resources.
Sir John Templeton said that an attitude of gratitude will prevent a life of fear.
Usually twice every 12 years, there’s a severe bear market in a major nation, but they do not occur at the same time.
You sell an asset only when you think you found a different asset that’s a 50% better bargain.
Anymore than you would want to be your own medical doctor or your own lawyer, it’s not wise to try to be your own investment manager.
Bear markets start on the time of pessimism. They rise on the time of skepticism. They mature on the time of optimism, and the end on time of euphoria.
Sir John Templeton said that the secret of success is to always start out to give more than is expected from you, to treat the other person more than fairly.
You can’t do it all yourself. You need to have people around you who are better than you are at most other things.
Charles Schwab also said that you have to make sure that everyone of your kids is very curious. It’s not necessarily about making money.
Charles Schwab said that 98% of people should really put their money into index funds because they have the most predictable outcomes.
It’s not important what you buy, it’s the price at what you pay for something.
Kyle bass said that it’s really how you deal with failure that defines you as a person.
The secret to leadership is being decisive.
Mary Erdos says that leadership means not asking anyone to do anything you wouldn’t do yourself.
Paul Tudor Jones said that financial stress will never go away.
You should get out of anything that falls below the 200 day moving average.
Jones’ metric for everything he looks at is the 200 day moving average of closing prices.
Paul Tudor Jones said that you always want to be with whatever the predominant trend is.
Warren Buffett said to put 10% in short term government bonds and 90% in very low cost S&P 500 index funds.
Warren Buffett said that indexing is the way to go. Invest in great American businesses without paying all the fees of a mutual fund manager and hang onto those companies.
In John Bogle’s portfolio, he has 60% of assets in stocks, mostly in Vanguard stock index fund. The rest is split between Vanguard total bond market index fund and municipal bond funds. The municipal bond holdings are split about 2/3 in vanguards intermediate term tax exempt fund and 1/3 in Vanguard limited term tax exempt fund.
One must wait until the evening to enjoy the splendor of the day.
John Bogle said that you shouldn’t watch or listen to any advice from news or media and returns the stock market as it is a distraction to the business of investing.
John Bogle said that the fact is that over the long term, half of the return in the stock market has come from dividends.
David Swinson said that you should never have anything weighted more than 30% in your diversified portfolio.
If you systematically buy mutual funds that are four and five stars, holding the ones that have performed well and selling the ones that have perform poorly, you’re going to end up under performing.
The Yale model is a long-term strategy that favors broad diversification and a bias towards equities, with less emphasis on lower return asset classes such as bonds or commodities.
The best of the best anticipate and are diversified.
It is important to risk a little to make a lot, or what is known as a symmetric risk/reward.
All of the masters, while driven to deliver extraordinary returns, are even more obsessed with making sure they don’t lose money.
One of the simplest things you can do to protect your family is to establish a living revocable trust.
You can go to www.tiaa-cref.org/public To acquire a cheaper version of the PPLI.
In order to access PPLI, you must be an accredited investor.
This kind of insurance allows unlimited deposit amounts, no tax on the growth of your investments, no tax when accessed if structured correctly, and any money left over for your heirs cannot be taxed.
Private placement life insurance has been called the secret of the affluent.
You can use IRA money to fund an annuity.
In regards to a fixed indexed annuity, if you die before turning on your income stream, your entire account balance is left to your heirs.
When coupled with the all seasons portfolio, the right lifetime income product is a powerful tool.
www.lifetimeincome.com allows you to quickly and easily set up a lifetime income plan. Within seconds you can calculate your potential future income based on how much you can contribute. This site has a fixed annuity for people who are young.
No matter how your account performs, the addition of a guaranteed lifetime income rider ensures that you will receive a guaranteed annual income stream when you decide to turn it on.
One of the huge benefits of an FIA is that each and every year, any gains or upside are locked in, and this now becomes our new floor.
Fixed indexed annuity or FIA is the hybrid version where you get both a fixed rate of return and the option of a return tied to the growth of the stock market index as well as a guaranteed lifetime income feature. They are more commonly known as fixed indexed annuity’s, with a lifetime income rider or a guarantee minimum withdrawal benefit.
An annuity should be paired with other investments.
A fixed deferred annuity offers a specific guaranteed rate of return for a specific period of time. There are no annual fees in a fixed deferred annuity.
Every expert agrees that variable annuities should be avoided.
When investing in an annuity, the guarantee is only as good as the insurance company that issues it, so highly rated insurance companies are key.
The three primary types of deferred annuities are fixed annuity, indexed annuity, and hybrid indexed annuity.
Deferred annuities are when you give the insurance company money either in one lump sum or a period of years and instead of receiving an immediate income, your returns are reinvested in a tax-deferred environment so that when you’re ready, you can at will turn on the income stream you want for the rest of your life.
Immediate annuities are best, used for those at retirement age or beyond.
Now, younger individuals are starting to use annuities, specifically those where the growth is tied to a market index as a safe alternative.
Insurance guaranty association’s provide protection to insurance policy holders issued by an insurance company that has become insolvent it is no longer able to meet its obligation.
The US treasury department said that Americans should convert at least half of the retirement savings into an annuity.
The earliest years of your retirement will define your later years.
Income is the outcome that matters most for retirement security.
You need to re-balance the all seasons portfolio annually.
A 66% loss would require nearly 200% gains just to get back to even.
If you’re younger you could take advantage of the all seasons approach but also make small adjustments in the stocks versus bonds to produce greater returns.
Despite skyrocketing interest rates, using the all seasons portfolio, there was just one single losing year in the 1970s and an annualized return of 9.68% during the decade.
For the all seasons portfolio you first need 30% in stocks, 15% in intermediate term and 40% in long-term bonds, as well as 7.5% in gold and 7.5% in commodities.
There are four things that move the price of assets, inflation, deflation, rising economic growth, and declining economic growth.
Therefore there are only four different possible environments that will affect whether investments go up or down. They are higher than expected inflation or rising prices, lower than expected inflation or deflation, higher than expected economic growth, and lower than expected economic growth.
When looking back through history every investment has an ideal environment in which it flourishes.
If your money is divided equally, yet your investments are not equal in their risk, you are not balanced.
Stocks are three times more risky than bonds. By having a 50-50 portfolio, you really have more like 95% of your risk in stocks.
If you ask better questions, you will get better answers.
If you were selling stocks in an account that isn’t safe from taxes you can use tax loss harvesting to reduce taxes.
You should re-balance once or twice a year.
To be a successful investor, you need to rebalance your portfolio at regular intervals.
Dollar cost averaging is how you make the volatility of the market work for you.
The goal is to take emotion out of investing because emotion is what so often destroys investing success.
Dollar cost averaging allows you to diversify across time.
Peter Lynch said that far more money has been lost by investors preparing for corrections, or trying to anticipate corrections, that has been lost in corrections themselves.
If you want to take the island, you have to burn your boats.
The dream bucket is where you set aside something for yourself and those you love so that all of you can enjoy life while you’re building your wealth.
What’s more important even than building wealth is doing it in a way that will give you peace of mind.
Putting all your money in the risk/growth bucket is the kiss of death.
You can take a risk tolerance quiz on http://njaes.Rutgers.Edu/money/riskquiz
The portfolio below is good for a young person if you have more time to recover from any losses, and bad for someone ready to retire.
The treasury bonds and TIPS protect against inflation and deflation.
You not only should diversify between your security and risk/growth buckets, but within them as well.
The asset classes in the risk/growth bucket should be equities, high yield bonds, real estate, commodities, currencies, collectibles, and structured notes.
You should also have a risk/growth bucket.
You should try to buy into low cost, low fee bond index funds that spread out your risk because you will own every part of the bond market.
There are also corporation bonds and municipal bonds.
TIPS bonds go up in price when interest rates rise.
The four types of treasuries are Tbills, T notes, T-bonds and TIPS.
US treasury bonds are some of the safest bonds.
At least one life insurance policy belongs in your security bucket.
Your pension, structured notes, and annuity’s could also go in the security bucket.
Your home can also go in your security bucket.
Bonds increase in value when interest rates go down, and decrease in value when rates go up.
One investment that should go in your peace of mind bucket is cash/cash equivalents. This also include bonds, and CDs.
You should have a security/peace of mind bucket, where you want to keep the part of your nest egg that you can’t afford to lose.
What goes up will come down.
Asset allocation means dividing up your money among different classes, or types of investments and specific proportions that you decide in advance, according to your goals or needs, risk tolerance, and stage of life.
One single move in location could give you a 10% to 30% increase in income.
For an individual to be considered an accredited investor, he must have a net worth of at least $1 million not including the value of his primary residence, or have income of at least $200,000 each year for the last two years.
A 10% return doubles every 7.2 years, a 4% return doubles every 18 years.
When you sell investment outside of a tax-deferred account make sure you hold for a minimum of a year and a day in order to qualify for the lower long-term capital rates gain.
Tax efficiency is one of the most direct pathways to shorten the time it takes to get to where you want to be.
The average person pays 54% for taxes in a lifetime.
If you want to become wealthy get in front of a trend.
For things to get better, you have to get better.
If you wish to become great, learn to become the servant of many.
You truly become more valuable by learning to work harder on yourself than you do on your job.
At the end of the day, you need to ask yourself if your expenses bring you the thrill they once did.
If your wife has a spending problem come to a deal that if she finds something she must have, she has to send you a picture and you have 2 weeks to find it at a cheaper price. If you can’t, then she can’t buy it at full retail price.
If you have an expensive car or car payment you can also exchange that for a cheaper version.
Money power principle three. Next time you write your monthly mortgage check, write a second check for the principal only portion of next months payment.
If you have a traditional fixed rate mortgage, pre-pay your next months principal, and you could pay off a 30 year mortgage in 15 years in many cases.
Interest payments will tack on an additional 100% or more to your loan value on the house.
The first way to speed up your plan is to save more and invest those savings for compound growth.
Jim Mott said you can be rich by having more than you need, or by needing less than you have.
What you get will never make you happy; who you become will make you very happy.
When you are around people who are playing the game of life at a higher level, you either get depressed, pissed off, or inspired.
People tend to forget to include Social Security in their financial planning.
The race of life is a marathon, not a sprint. The only thing to do is focus on the path in front of you, not what the other people in your life have.
To take something that seems impossible and incorporate into your life, the first step is to unleash your hunger and desire, and awaken laser like focus.
Step two is you take massive and effective action.
Step three is grace or the acknowledgment that there’s more in this world then just ourselves.
If you are going to remember that you’re the creator of your life and not just the manager of life circumstances, you must reconnect the things you’ve created cautiously.
What makes most people just dreamers versus those who live the dream is that dreamers have never figured out the price of their dreams.
Absolute financial freedom is when you would be able to afford anything you would like to do anytime you want it. All done without working.
Financial freedom would mean you’re independent, you have everything you have today, plus two or three significant luxuries you want in the future, and you don’t have to work to pay for them.
Financial independence is when your total living costs are covered without having to work.
Financial vitality is when half of your enjoyment costs are covered without having to work.
It is critical that you have a 3-12 month emergency fund set up.
Www.tonyrobbins.com/masterthegame
The annual expenses of those five financial security topics is all you need to achieve financial security.
Financial security is being able to pay for your home mortgage, utilities, food, basic transportation, and basic insurance without having to work.
Five financial dreams are financial security, financial vitality, financial independence, financial freedom, and absolute financial freedom.
You can’t manage your health if you can’t measure it. The same goes for your finances.
There is a radical difference between 1 million, 1 billion, and 1 trillion dollars.
If you make significance your number one need you will never be fulfilled because you will always be comparing yourself to someone else.
Change your story, change your life. Divorce your story of limitation and marry the truth. You can make anything happen.
Money is nothing more than a reflection of your creativity, your capacity to focus, and your ability to add value and receive back.
You can use your story, or your story can use you.
80% of success in life is psychology and 20% is mechanics.
The fastest way to get a result is to find someone who has already accomplished what you are after and model your behavior after them.
If you want to change your life you have to change your strategy, you have to change your story, and you have to change your state.
The three biggest challenges that people face in America are finances, relationships, and bodies.
Talent and skill are two key elements to success attainable by anyone who is truly committed.
The ultimate thing that stops most of us from making significant progress in our lives is not somebody else’s limitations but rather our own limiting perceptions or beliefs.
Target date funds are not only expensive but also maybe more aggressive or volatile than you think.
Fixed indexed annuity’s are another good option within a Roth IRA.
Accessing market linked CDs and structured notes through a fiduciary advisor will eliminate most of the fees.
Market linked CDs are similar to structured notes, but they include insurance from the FDIC.
A structured note is simply a loan to a bank. At the end of the time. The bank guarantees to pay you the greater of 100 percent of your deposit back or a certain percentage of the upside of the market gains. This is especially valuable when or during retirement.
Taking a swing for the fence with no downside protection is a recipe for disaster.
If there is one common denominator of successful insiders, it’s that they don’t speculate with their hard earned savings, they strategize.
Annuity products have special tax benefits, and the money inside can grow tax-deferred.
Variable annuities are invariably bad.
Active management is ineffective in beating the market on a consistent basis.
Low cost target date funds are great for the average investor. But you aren’t average if you are reading this.
Asset allocation, where to park your money and how to divide it up, is the single most important skill of a successful investor.
If you use a fiduciary, you may be able to deduct the payment for that fiduciary from your taxes.
A Roth IRA and Roth 401(k) are one of the best legal tax havens in the face of rising future tax rates.
In 2013 the department of labor found 3/4 of 401(k)s illegal.
A fee checker for what you are paying in fees on your 401(k) can be found on: http://americasbest401k.com/401k-fee-checker
The choices on your 401(k) plan are not the best available choices. They are the ones that pay the most to be offered up on the menu of available funds.
Make sure the advisor is registered with the state or the SEC as a registered investment advisor or an investment advisor representative of a registered investment advisor.
Make sure the registered investment advisor is compensated on a percentage of your assets under management, not for buying mutual funds.
Make sure the investment advisor does not receive compensation for trading stocks or bonds.
Make sure the registered investment advisor does not have an affiliation with a broker – dealer.
The link to the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors is: http://findanadvisor.napfa.org/home.aspx
Www.strongholdfinancial.com allows you to analyze all your holdings.
To receive conflict free advice, you must align yourself with a fiduciary; An independent registered investment advisor or RIA.
In a 2009 study released by morning star, it was found that 49% of the managers own no shares in the funds they manage.
People are continually sold and influenced by those who do as I say, not as I do.
Www.moneychimp.com shows you exactly what your actual return is on your money over a period of time.
Dollar waited returns are what we actually get to keep whereas time weighted returns are what fund managers use to fuel advertising.
Jack Bogle, founder of Vanguard, said that the returns reported by mutual funds aren’t actually earned by investors.
There are even redemption fees, exchange fees, account fees, purchase fees, and sales charge.
There are also soft dollar cost and castrate costs attached to mutual funds.
Additional tax costs are charged which are around 1.13% per year.
Mutual funds charge an additional 1.44% on average in transaction costs per year.
US stock funds pay an average of 1.31% of assets each year to the fun company for an expense ratio.
To escape the fee factories you must lower your total annual fees and associated investment costs to 1.25 percent or less, on average.
Visit www.PersonalFund.com for cost calculator to see all the fees being paid for mutual funds.
The average cost of owning a mutual fund is 3.17% per year.
While investing in index is a great solution for a portion of your money, it shouldn’t be for all of your money.
By becoming the market and not trying to beat it, you are on the side of progress, growth, and expansion.
Barton Biggs observed that a bull market is like sex. It feels best just before it ends.
From 1984 to 1998, only eight out of 200 fund managers beat the Vanguard 500 index.
In Warren Buffett’s famous 2014 letter to shareholders, he explained that when he passes away, the money in a trust for his wife should be invested only in indexes so that she minimize costs and maximizes upside.
The point is that by investing in an index, you don’t have to pay a professional to try picking which stocks in the index you should own.
An incredible 96% of actively managed mutual funds failed to beat the market over any sustained period of time.
David Swensen said that when you look at the results on an after fee, after-tax basis, over reasonably long periods of time, there’s almost no chance that you end up beating the index fund.
To have unconventional success, you can’t be guided by conventional wisdom.
“Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.” - Warren Buffett
Money power principle one. Don’t get in the game unless you know the rules.
The fastest way to feel connection, a sense of how significant your life is, a deep sense of certainty and variety, and put yourself in a state where you can give to others, is to find a way each day to appreciate more and expect less.
Number five is growth and number six is contribution.
The fourth basic need is love and connection.
The third need is significance.
The second need is uncertainty.
The first human need is the need for certainty.
What you are really after is what you think money is going to give you.
If it hurts too much to save more money now, just wait until your next pay raise.
“If you don’t want to work, you have to work to earn enough money so that you won’t have to work.” - Ogden Nash
By committing to a simple but steady code of savings, by drawing down on your income each pay period and paying yourself first, there’s a way to tap the power of compound savings and let it take you to unimaginable heights.
You find the bargains at the point of maximum pessimism.
The best way to save is when you don’t see the money in the first place.
The key to success is that you have to make your savings automatic.
Experts say you should plan to save at least a minimum of 10% of your income, although in today’s economy many agree 15% is a far better number especially if you are over the age of 40.
One of the most important financial decisions of your life is what portion of your paycheck you decide to keep. How much will you pay yourself before you spend a single dollar on your day-to-day living expenses.
You have to move from just working for money to a world where money works for you.
“Before you speak, listen. Before you write, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you invest, investigate. Before you criticize, wait. Before you pray, forgive. Before you quit, try. Before you retire, save. Before you die, give.” - William A. Ward
“The man on top of the mountain didn’t fall there.” - Vince Lombardi
The majority of investors fail to take full advantage of the incredible power of compounding.
Knowing information is not the same as owning it and following through. Information without execution is poverty.
When people have no idea what to do, they just stick with whatever is chosen for them.
It is not what you earn, it is what you keep financially that matters.
Anticipation is the ultimate power. Losers react; leaders anticipate.
“A journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step.” - Lao-Tzu
When someone creates wealth, it is his or her responsibility to give back to those who are just beginning the journey or those who experience tragedies that have knocked them off the path.
“Riches are not an end of life, but an instrument of life.” - Henry Ward Beecher
Do not be arrogant about knowing, but embrace the fact that you have weaknesses, and don’t know everything. The more you learn, then more you realize you don’t know.
Ray Dalio sees life as a jungle, and a constant exhilarating battle.
Typical money managers are not going to help you win investing because they don’t have the skills or resources to play in the big game either. If they did you wouldn’t have access to them.
Everything we create in our lives starts with thought.
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” - Mark Twain
The idea is to know how to survive and thrive in any market condition.
People who succeed at the highest level are not lucky; they are doing something differently than everyone else does.
The secret to wealth is simple: Find a way to do more for others than anyone else does.
You either master money, or, on some level, money masters you.
“Money is a good servant but a bad master.” - Sir Francis Bacon
Repetition is the mother of skill (where mastery comes from).
The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your questions.
The V2MOM method stands for vision, values, methods, obstacles, and measurement.'
What do I really want? (Vision)
What is important about it? (Values)
How will I get it? (Methods)
What is preventing me from having it? (Obstacles)
How will I know I am successful? (Measurements)

Rating: 10 out of 10

NOTES:

One Up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch

The market, like individual stocks, can move in the opposite direction of the fundamentals over the short term.
It is a bad idea to invest through shorting a stock because if the stock goes up, you will have to pay that additional difference. This is different than buying a stock because instead of just losing your invested amount you would have to pay an additional amount if the stock goes the wrong way.
It is not worth it to invest in options.
There’s simply no rule that tells you how low a stock can go in principle.
You should pay no attention to external economic conditions except serious reasons.
One of the best time to buy stocks is during the annual ritual of the end-of-the-year selling, which normally occurs from October through December.
Stop orders are automatic bail outs at a predetermined price and never really work.
If you can’t convince yourself when I’m down 25% I’m a buyer and banish forever the fatal thought that if I’m down 25% I’m a seller, you’ll never make a decent profit in stocks.
If you plan on using money in the stock market it should never be in cash. If you decide that a certain amount you’ve invested in the stock market will always be invested in the stock market, you’ll save yourself a lot of miss timed moves and general agony.
You should never put more than 30 to 40% into growth stocks. Normally about 10 to 20% should be in stalwarts, 10 to 20% should be in cyclicals, and the rest in turnarounds.
In small portfolios it isn’t safe to own just one stock. You should be comfortable owning between 3 and 10 stocks that you have researched well.
You should be getting a 12 to 15% return compounded overtime.
It’s a positive sign when insiders are buying and when the company itself is buying back it’s own shares.
You should be comparing the PE ratio of a stock to whether it is higher or lower to its own company and similar companies in the same industry.
The percentage of institutional ownership is better when that percentage is lower.
Every few months it is worthwhile to recheck the company story.
You want a relatively high profit margin in a long-term stock that you plan to hold through good times and bad, and a relatively low profit margin a successful turn around.
Pretax profit margin is one more factor to consider in evaluating a company’s staying power in hard times.
If you find a business that can get away with raising prices year after year without losing customers you got a good investment.
The only growth rate that really counts is earnings.
Before investing in a turnaround, always check to make sure the company doesn’t have an overwhelming pension obligation that it can’t meet. The pension plan assets should be higher than the vested benefits.
With a manufacturer or retailer, an inventory build up is usually a bad sign. When inventories grow faster than sales, it’s a red flag.
If cash flow is ever mentioned as a reason you’re supposed to buy a stock, make sure that it is free cash flow that they are talking about.
Goodwill is considered an asset which is the amount of money that was increased since the original creation of the stock.
When you buy a stock for its book value, you have to have a detailed understanding of what those values really are as the assets could be over valued.
If you do plan to buy a stock for its dividend, find out if the company is going to be able to pay it during recessions or in bad times.
A normal corporate balance sheet has 75% equity and 25% debt.
You should mostly ignore short term debt. If there’s enough cash to cover short term debt then you don’t have to worry about it.
One quick way to determine the financial strength of the company is to compare the equity to the debt.
If the PE ratio is less than the growth rate you may have found a bargain.
The PE ratio of any company that is fairly priced equals its growth rate.
When excited about a certain product from a company you should always try and find out what percent of sales does it represent.
When looking at the 10 year financial summary, if you can see that shares outstanding decreases every year that’s a good sign.
Long-term debt reduction on the balance sheet and an increase in cash is a sign of prosperity.
When looking at the balance sheet the assets and liabilities are critical.
If you can’t imagine how a company representative could ever get that rich, chances are you are right.
Proxy statements tell you how many shares are owned by the various corporate officers and directors, and how much those people are paid.
If the headquarters of a small company is in a fancy area run for the hills. If it is in a bad area or everything is cheap that’s a good sign.
When looking at the same sky, people in mature industries see clouds where as people in immature industries see pie.
You could always just ask them what are the positives this year and what are the negatives.
It may be a good idea to call the company. If you have specific questions, the investor relations office is a good place to get answers.
There’s no point buying a stock that is a small company trying to expand until the company has proven that cloning works.
Every so often check the entire stock markets PE ratio to see if the market is overvalued or under valued in general.
Insider selling is a terrible reason to dislike a stock.
Hotel and motel customers routinely pay one one-thousandth of the value of a room for each nights lodging.
If a competitor of a company speaks highly of that company you should be interested.
Before buying a stock, you should be able to give a two minute monologue that covers the reasons you were interested in it, what has to happen for the company to succeed, and the pitfalls that stand in its path.
Earnings is what a company makes every year after all expenses and taxes are taken out.
The five ways the company can increase earnings are reducing costs, raising prices, expanding into new markets, selling more of its product in the old market, or revitalizing, closing, or otherwise disposing of a losing operation.
If you can’t predict future earnings, at least you can find out how the company plans to increase its earnings.
The stock markets PE ratio is a good indicator of whether the market at large is overvalued or undervalued.
Avoid stocks that have excessively high PE ratios.
Before you buy a stock you might want to track it’s PE level back through several years to get a sense of its normal levels.
You could begin by asking whether the PE ratio of various stocks you own are low, high, or average, relative to the industry norms.
The PE ratio can be thought of as the number of years it will take the company to earn back the amount of your initial investment.
The PE ratio was derived by taking the current price of the stock and dividing it by the companies earnings for the prior 12 months.
If the stock price strays away from the earnings line sooner or later it will come back to the earnings.
Investing in IPOs of brand new enterprises is very risky because there’s very little to go on. It is safer to go with IPOs of companies that have been spun out of other companies.
Another stock to avoid is a company that has been touted as the next IBM, the next McDonald’s or the next Disney.
The stock to avoid would be the hottest stock in the hottest industry, the one that gets the most favorable publicity, the one every investor hears about.
The common alternatives to buying back shares are raising the dividend, developing new products, starting new operations, and making acquisitions.
If a company is buying back its shares that’s a good sign.
There are multiple websites and reports that report insider trading.
There’s no better tip off to the probable success of a stock then when the people in the company are putting their own money into it.
Invest in a company where people have to keep buying the product constantly.
The next best thing is buying shares in an aggregate producing company.
A company with a niche is a good investment.
Low growth industries are the best to invest in.
If it is involved with toxic waste or there are rumors the mafia is involved, be interested.
If you found a stock with little or no institutional ownership and the analysts don’t cover it, you found yourself a solid winner.
If there is heavy insider buying among the new officers and directors in a spin off you should be very interested in the stock.
Spinoffs can be lucrative investments from parent companies.
It’s good if the company does something dull.
A company can be good to invest in if the name sounds dull or even better ridiculous.
It’s impossible to say enough about the value of personal experience in analyzing companies and trends.
By multiplying the dollars per share by the amount of shares outstanding you’re able to find the value of the company.
Stalwarts are big companies that are generally bought for 30 to 50% gain and then sold.
Another sure sign of a slow grower is that it pays a generous and regular dividend.
Slow grower charts relatively have no hills throughout 10 years.
There are six categories for classifying stocks: slow growers, stalwarts, fast growers, cyclicals, asset plays, and turn around.
Big companies don’t have big stock moves. You’ll get your biggest moves in smaller companies.
If you are considering a stock on the strength of some specific product that the company makes, the first thing to find out is what effect will the success of the product have on the company’s bottom line.
Investing without research is like playing stud poker and never looking at the cards.
Invest in things you know about.
You should be looking for a situation where the value of the assets per share exceeds the price per share of the stock.
The best place to begin looking for the 10 bagger is close to home, if not in the backyard then down at the shopping mall.
If professional economists can’t predict economies and professional forecasters can’t predict markets, what chance does the amateur investor have to predict.
The price of an average stock can fluctuate an average of 50% in an average year.
Only invest what you could afford to lose without that loss having any effect on your daily life in the foreseeable future.
Before buying a share of anything you should ask the following questions: do I own a house? Do I need the money? And do I have the personal qualities that will bring me success in stocks?
6 out of 10 positive earning stocks is all it takes to produce an enviable record on Wall Street.
A new occurrence like a jump in earnings, the sale of a non-profitable subsidiary, or expansion into new markets is what to look for.
Stocks are most likely to be accepted as prudent at the moment they are not.
Think like an amateur as frequently as possible when investing in stocks.
A lot of investors sit around in bed with a stock is it is going up, instead of checking the company.
It’s self-defeating to try to invest in good markets and get out of bad ones.
If you can’t tell what the company does or have no idea what it sells you should stay away from it.
Stop listening to professionals. Any normal person can pick stocks just as well.
It is important not to buy stocks or mutual funds with money you’ll need to spend in the next 12 months.
The so-called advanced/decline numbers paint a more realistic picture. This means you should be more interested in how many stocks went up versus how many went down.
An amateur investor can pick tomorrow’s big winners by paying attention to new developments at the workplace, the mall, the auto show rooms, the restaurants or anywhere a promising new enterprise makes its debut.
Today, you can look for non-Internet companies that indirectly benefit from Internet traffic. Or you can invest in manufacturers of switches and related gizmos that keep the traffic moving.
Whenever you invest in any company, you are looking for its market cap to rise.
If you can follow only one bit of data, follow the earnings.
To my mind, the stock price is the least useful information you can track, and it is the most widely tracked.
If you feel left out of the dot com jubilee, remind yourself that very few dot com investors benefit from the full ride.

Principles by Ray Dalio

Rating: 9 out of 10

NOTES:

Assume that everything will take one and half times longer and will cost one and half times more.
If you’re not worried, you need to worry and if you are worried, you don’t need to worry.
Recognize that experience creates internalized learning that book learning can’t replace.
Teach your people to fish rather than give them fish, even if that means letting them make some mistakes.
When you know what someone is like, you know what you can expect from them.
Remember that people typically don’t change all that much. It’s better to bet on changes you have seen than those you hope for.
Hire someone who is better than you.
Don’t let the little things divide you when your agreement in the big things should bind you.
Don’t pay as much attention to people’s conclusions as to the reasoning that led them to their conclusions.
If you can’t successfully do something, don’t think you can tell others how it should be done.
3 to 5 people in a group leads to optimal discussion.
Recognize that conflicts are essential for great relationships because they are how people determine whether their principles are aligned and resolve their differences.
Remember that what has already happened lies in the past and no longer matters except as a lesson for the future.
Make sure people give more consideration to others than they demand for themselves.
Aligning what you say with what you think and what you think with what you feel will make you much happier and much more successful.
Make your passion and your work one in the same and do it with people you want to be with.
Tough love is effective for achieving both great work and great relationships.
In order to be great, one can’t compromise the uncompromisable.
The best choices are the ones that have more pros than cons, not those that don’t have any cons at all.
Raising the probability of being right is valuable no matter what your probability of being right already is.
When you ask someone whether something is true and they tell you that it’s not totally true, it’s probably by and large true.
New is overvalued relative to great.
Everything looks bigger up close.
Don’t believe everything you hear.
One of the most important decisions you can make is who you ask questions of.
Getting the right people in the right rules in support of your goal is key to succeeding in whatever you choose to accomplish.
It’s often most effective to acknowledge one’s weaknesses and create explicit guard rails against them.
Understand the great brain battles and how to control them to get what you want.
Having expectations for people without knowing what they are like is a sure way to get in trouble.
Understand the power that comes from knowing how you and others are wired.
Be evidence based and encourage others to be the same.
Plan for the worst case scenario to make it as good as possible.
You can significantly raise your probabilities of making the right decisions by open-mindedly triangulating with believable people.
In thoughtful disagreement your goal is not to convince the other party that you are right but it is to find out which view is true and decide what to do about it.
If you have a different view from someone who is believable on the topic at hand, you should make it clear that you are asking questions because you are seeking to understand their perspective.
Realize that you can’t put out without taking in.
If you can recognize that you have blind spots and open-mindedly consider the possibility that others might see something better than you, you are more likely to make better decisions.
To be effective you must not let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out what’s true.
The two biggest barriers to good decision making are your ego and your blind spots.
Once you identify a problem, don’t tolerate it.
Don’t mistake a cause of a problem with the real problem.
Be specific in identifying your problems.
View painful problems as potential improvements that are screaming at you.
Remember that great expectations create great capabilities.
The personal evolutionary process is comprised of five steps. 1. Have clear goals. 2. Identify and don’t tolerate the problems that stand in the way of your achieving those goals. 3. Accurately diagnose the problems to get at the root causes. 4. Design plans that will get you around them. 5. Do what is necessary to push these designs through to results.
Asking others who are strong in areas where you are weak to help you is a great skill that you should develop no matter what, as it will help you develop guard rails that will prevent you from doing what you shouldn’t be doing.
Successful people are those who can go above themselves to see things objectively and manage those things to shape change.
By comparing your outcomes with your goals, you can determine how to modify your machine.
Think of yourself as a machine operating within a machine and know that you have the ability to alter your machines to produce better outcomes.
Higher level thinking gives you the ability to study and influence the cause-and-effect relationships at play in your life and use them to get the outcomes you want.
Whatever circumstances life brings you, you will be more likely to succeed and find happiness if you take responsibility for making your decisions well instead of complaining about things beyond your control.
No matter what you want out of life, your ability to adapt and move quickly and efficiently through the process of personal evolution will determine your success and your happiness.
Embrace tough love.
Go to the pain rather than avoid it.
Pain + Reflection = Progress
It Is a fundamental law of nature that in order to gain strength one has to push ones limits, which is painful.
No pain, no gain. The purpose of pain is to alert us and help direct us.
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
Chasing after the things we want forces us to evolve, and it is the evolution and not the rewards themselves that matter to us and to those around us.
Who you will be will depend on the perspective you have.
Evolving is life’s greatest accomplishment and greatest reward.
Rather than getting stuck hiding our mistakes and pretending we are perfect, it makes sense to find our imperfections and deal with them. As the saying goes, evolve or die.
To be good something must operate consistently with the laws of reality and contribute to the evolution of the whole, that is what is most rewarded.
Don’t get hung up on your views of how things should be because you will miss out on learning how they really are.
To try to figure out the universal laws of reality and principles for dealing with it, I found it helpful to try to look at things from nature’s perspective.
Look to nature to learn how reality works.
Believable parties are those who have repeatedly and successfully accomplished something and have great explanations for how they did it.
Be radically open minded and radically transparent.
Truth or, more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality is the essential foundation for any good outcome.
Idealists who are not well grounded in reality create problems, not progress.
Be a hyperrealist.
Dreams + Reality + Determination = A Successful Life
I have found it helpful to think of my life as if it were a game in which each problem I face is the puzzle I need to solve. By solving the puzzle, I get a gem in the form of a principle that helps me avoid the same sort of problem in the future. Collecting these gems continually improve my decision making.
Embrace reality and deal with it.
Look to the patterns of those things that affect you in order to understand the cause-effect relationships that drive them and to learn principles for dealing with them effectively.
It could be a good idea to give your kids enough money to afford excellent health care, excellent education, and a boost to start their careers.
Having a process that ensures problems are brought to the surface, and their root causes diagnosed, assures that continual improvements occur.
He who lives by the crystal ball is destined to eat ground glass.
There is almost always a good path that you just haven’t discovered yet, so look for it until you find it rather than settle for the choice that is apparent to you.
Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that gets you what you want out of life.
Think for yourself to decide what you want, what is true and what you should do to achieve those as mentioned before.
It is important to systemize your decision making.
Time is like a river that carries us forward into encounters with reality that require us to make decisions. We can’t stop or movement down this river and we can’t avoid those encounters. You can only approach them in the best possible way.
Do not believe government policymakers when they assure you that they won’t let a currency devaluation happen.
It is important to make sense of what happened to other people in other times and other places because if you don’t you won’t know if these things can happen to you and, if they do, you won’t know how to deal with them.
You can never be sure of anything: there are always risks out there that can hurt you badly, even in the safest of bets, so it’s always best to assume you are missing something.

Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki

Rating: 10 out of 10

NOTES:

The key to financial freedom and great wealth is a persons ability to convert earned income into passive and or portfolio income.
Profit is made when you buy, not when you sell.
Jog, walk, or drive a certain area once a month for 10 minutes if you are interested in purchasing a place.
Make offers with escape clauses. In real estate, he makes an offer with language that details subject to contingencies such as the approval of a business partner. Never specify who the business partner is. It could be your cat.
Whenever you feel short or in need of something, give what you want first and it will come back in buckets.
Copying or emulating heroes is true power learning.
Wise investors must look at more than ROI. They look at the assets they get for free once they get their money back.
When he interviews any paid professional, he first finds out how much property or stocks they personally own and what percentage they pay in taxes.
Pay your broker well: the power of great advice.
Don’t get into large debt positions that you have to pay for. Keep your expenses low.
Self-discipline could be the number one factor between the rich poor and middle-class.
Master a formula: the power of learning quickly.
The reason you want to have rich friends is because that is where the money is made. You should be close to the inside.
Choose friends carefully: the power of association.
Find a reason greater than reality: the power of spirit when trying to awaken your financial genius.
There is gold everywhere. Most people are not trained to see it.
When you know you’re ignorant in a subject, start educating yourself by finding an expert in the field or a book on the subject.
Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you’ll be criticized anyway.
The most common form of laziness is laziness by staying busy.
A great property manager often hears of great deals before real estate agents do.
Finding a good property manger is key to success in real estate.
Failure inspires winners. Failure defeats losers.
If you hate risk and worry, start early.
The main management skills needed for success are management of cash flow, management of systems, and management of people.
The most important specialized skills are sales and marketing.
To receive money, you have to give money.
If you are highly specialized you should join a union.
It is important to choose teachers who have actually done what you want to do.
It is important to seek work for what you will learn, more than what you will earn. Look down the road at what skills you want to acquire before choosing a specific profession.
Job is an acronym for just over broke.
You should know a little about a lot.
Find an opportunity that everyone missed.
Great opportunities are not seen with your eyes. They are seen with your mind.
It is not gambling if you know what you’re doing. It is gambling if you are just throwing money into a deal and praying.
The more real you think money is, the harder you will work for it. If you can grasp the idea that money is not real, you will grow rich faster.
If you are the kind of person who is waiting for the right thing to happen, you might wait for a long time.
Games reflect behavior. They are instant feedback systems.
Old ideas are peoples biggest liability.
Often in the real world, it is not the smart who get ahead, but the bold.
A corporation can do many things that an employee cannot, like pay expenses before paying taxes.
Section 1031 of the internal revenue code allows a seller to delay paying taxes on a piece of real estate that is sold for a capital gain through an exchange for a more expensive piece of real estate.
It Is the knowledge of the legal corporate structure that really gives the rich a vast advantage over the poor and the middle class.
Once a dollar goes into your asset column, it becomes your employee and should never leave.
His real estate strategy is to start small and keep trading up for bigger properties, and therefore, delay paying taxes on the gain. He generally holds real estate less than seven years.
With small companies, his investment strategy is to be out of the stock in a year.
Assets include businesses that do not require my presence, stocks, bonds, income generating real estate, notes/IOUs, royalties from intellectual property, anything else that has value, produces income or appreciates, and has a ready market.
Mind your own business. Financial struggle is often directly the result of people working all their lives for someone else.
The rich focus on their asset columns while everyone else focuses on their income statements.
A financial statement is your scorecard.
Without a financial statement you don’t really know where you are in life’s financial game.
An intelligent person hires people who are more intelligent than he is.
Cash flow tells the story of how a person handles money.
The Illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
An asset puts money in my pocket. A liability takes money out of my pocket.
You must know the difference between an asset and a liability, and buy assets.
Rich people acquire assets. The poor and middle-class acquire liabilities that they think are assets.
If people are prepared to be flexible, keep an open mind and learn, they will grow richer and richer despite tough changes. If they think money will solve problems, they will have a rough ride.
It’s not how much money you make. It’s how much money you keep.
Money is not real. It is made up.
Learn to use your emotions to think, not think with your emotions.
Once a person stops searching for information and self knowledge, ignorance sets in.
So many people say, oh, I’m not interested in money. Yet they will work at a job for eight hours a day.
First, the fear of being without money motivates us to work hard, and then once we get that paycheck, greed or desire starts us thinking about all the wonderful things money can buy. The pattern is then set.
People’s lives are forever controlled by two emotions; fear and greed.
Buying or building assets that deliver cash flow is putting your money to work for you.
Most people want everyone else in the world to change but themselves. It is easier to change yourself than everyone else.
Learning by making mistakes through trial and error is more and more important in today’s age.
The faster you can make a decision the more likely you will be able to seize opportunities before someone else does.
The poor and the middle class work for money. The rich have money work for them.
Money comes and goes, but if you have the education about how money works, you gain power over it and can begin building wealth.
There is a difference between being poor and being broke. Broke is temporary. Poor is eternal.
Instead of saying the words I can’t afford it, ask the question how can I afford it.

Rating: 10 out of 10

NOTES:

The House Hacking Strategy by Craig Curelop

Look at the schedule C form in order to bucket expenses into categories for taxes.
Good finance trackers can be found on page 248.
Always keep your personal and business expenses separate and always pay off your credit cards in full.
You should also open up a new credit card specifically for house hacking. Make sure to open the credit card after you close so it doesn’t affect your credit score. Possibly get a credit card for traveling.
Once you have closed on your property, the first thing you should do is open up a new bank account for your house hacking business.
By actively tracking your finances you can avoid IRS trouble and save thousands of dollars in taxes.
For tasks that take less than an hour or two to complete use task rabbit.
If you don’t know if you should fix something or call somebody, the formula to determine this is your dollar per hour wage times hours worked should be greater than the cost of a handyman.
After you have approved the tenant, you will want to collect the deposit to hold a unit/room.
When filling out any documents, always make sure that you were the last one to sign the document.
Looking at your perspective tenants social media page is a must have when house Hacking.
Questions to ask previous landlords are on page 233
The best way to combat somebody putting their friend as a previous landlords number, is to ask the landlord to verify the address that your perspective tenant occupied.
Questions to ask employer are on page 231.
When processing an application there are four main things you are going to want to confirm: verify income, order a background check, order a credit check, and get references of previous landlords.
BiggerPockets website has landlord forms and information.
Application creation for a tenant starts on page 223
You should include in the lease that you may need to show rooms while they’re there. Give the tenants at least 24 hour notice.
When giving a tour, highlight the parts of each room that really sell the place instead of telling them about each room.
Group showings are the best for house hacks as it limits the time you would spend showing the place to individual people.
Calling a few hours before the intended time of the showing will reduce the number of no-shows.
It is important to have standards written down so that you cannot be accused of discrimination.
If there’s an eviction in their past pass on them.
Standards for prospective tenants can be found on page 206.
There are three steps in the pre-screening process. Prescreen through listing, prescreen through phone call, and prescreen in person.
To gauge if the tenant is cleanly, check what their car looks like, and what their old house looks like.
To ensure the tenant pays on time, ask them how long they have been employed at their job. If you are skeptical, ask them for employer references and the prior year’s W-2 form.
To make sure tenants pay on time use Cozy so that their monthly rent payments are auto paid.
To make sure that tenants are financially responsible their monthly gross income should be three times the rent payment and the credit score must be above 600.
The most important quality of a good tenant is their ability to afford the rent.
The pricing tool that he uses is called price labs, but there are others called beyond pricing and wheelhouse.
Rather than setting your own prices on short term rentals there are variety of tools that can set the listing price for your short term rental.
You should track of the number of inquiries you receive via email, phone call, and other sources and a spreadsheet.
Could rent to interns looking for a medium term rental.
If your plan is solely to do short term stays, you will want to have your listing on Airbnb.
Flyers help people remember your place, so help them remember your rental by giving them a flyer.
Once you have uploaded your listing to Facebook marketplace, you will want to find Facebook groups where people are looking for places to live. If you’re renting by the room, this will be your gold mine.
Facebook marketplace is one of the best places to advertise.
Unlike many listing sites, craigslist allows you to post individual rooms on their site.
When taking pictures of your property, you will want to give the feeling that the prospective renter is on a virtual tour of the property.
Describe your day-to-day life in your advertisement, and you’ll attract people who are similar to you.
To avoid running into a fair housing lawsuit, it is best to describe the property or community that attracts a type of person you want, rather than directly describing the type of tenant you want.
Before you market your property, you need to understand the local, state, and federal fair housing laws.
As you are going through the property make a list of the things you need to fix and what the seller needs to fix.
It is highly recommended to attend the inspection. Be sure that you are allowed to follow and ask questions with the inspector.
After you call the lender it is time to get inspection set up. Ask for recommendations from your agent or other people you know.
The first step of the due diligence period is to call your lender.
Once your house goes under contract this is called the due diligence period.
One clause that could be good to include is that the seller should not be responsible for any items less than $1000.
As part of your offer, you are allowed to include or exclude any fixtures or appliances.
Offering to pay for the closing cost goes further than the thousand dollars it costs and sometimes the difference between a seller choosing to accept your offer or not.
In your offer, you can suggest that the seller pays all of the closing costs, or that it be split evenly.
In total, closing costs will be around 2 to 5% of the purchase price.
The inspection contingency allows you to hire a licensed inspector to give you a full inspection of the property. If the inspector finds something you do not like, you have the ability to back out and recover your earnest money.
The financing contingency says that in the event a lender denies you a loan for the property at hand, you will not be obligated to purchase the property.
It is a good idea to include the financing and inspection contingencies in the contract.
Earnest money can help sweeten the deal. Always err on the side of giving more earnest money.
The lender is typically the reason that a deal takes so long from the buyer side. The underwriting process will take an estimated 3 to 4 weeks. For that reason it is standard for a closing date to be exactly one month after the offer letter is submitted.
When crafting an offer try and keep the offer as simple as possible.
You need to ask yourself does your strategy work if you move out?
The whole idea behind house hacking is that you will get into your first deal in year one, get into your second deal in year two, third in three and so on.
You should set a probability bar for investments that are around $300,000 at about $750 per month above the mortgage. For places that are closer to $150,000 your profitability bar should be about $500 over mortgage payments.
Monthly rent minus monthly debt minus reserves equals expected profit.
When using the net worth return on investment to analyze and predict the outcome of a deal, be conservative and use 0% as your appreciation assumption.
Natural appreciation is 6% increase.
To calculate your net worth return on investment you are going to add together your increased net worth through: cash flow, loan paid down, and appreciation. You will then divide that sum by your initial investment to determine your net worth return on Investment.
Your net worth return on investment summarizes exactly how good an investment will be.
Facebook marketplace can be good for room renting.
The best listing sites are Zillow, Trulia, and HotPad.
The best way to determine how much you should charge for rent is to look at other properties that are similar to your unit or room within a couple miles of your property. These are called comparables or comps for short.
One way to limit running out of money is making sure that your reserve always has at least $10,000 in it.
You should also put away a reserve amount each month. For smaller places it can be around $250. For bigger properties it can be around $400.
You can ask your lender what the monthly payments will be.
Most of the payment will be comprised of principal, interest, taxes, insurance, private mortgage insurance.
The things you need to know to analyze a deal: monthly payment, monthly rent, reserves, net worth return on investment.
Always try to get a warranty anytime it is possible.
Craigslist can also be useful when searching for deals.
BiggerPockets marketplace is similar to Zillow and useful.
Driving for dollars is when, instead of admiring a house and moving on with your day, you write down the address, go to the county website to determine who owns the house, and ask them if they’re willing to sell.
Some of the best times to submit an offer are on a Friday or Saturday night or even on a holiday.
Other value add opportunities include adding square footage, a garage, or an accessory dwelling unit.
A good strategy is to look for a three bedroom, two bathroom house with an unfinished basement that is over 2000 ft2.
The best properties are the ones that you are able to add value to.
You need to act quickly if you see a good property.
When setting up an MLS search with your agent, make sure that the criteria you set are specific and narrowed down.
You need to get an agent to set up notifications that are sent directly to your inbox from the MLS.
You can only have one FHA loan out at a time.
Seller financing is when the seller turns around and becomes the bank.
A home equity line of credit allows you to get a loan that is secured by the equity in your house. This is only useful for those who already own a property with a significant amount of equity.
Home possible is the Freddie Mac version. The main distinction is that the borrower with home possible needs to be a first time home buyer.
Home ready is a program that reduces the down payment and mortgage insurance requirements. It is offered by Fannie Mae. You must earn income less than or equal to the average income in your area to use it though. You can find the average area income on www.fannymae.com.
A USDA loan is a mortgage option that requires zero down payment, and is available to owner occupants who wish to purchase in a qualified rural or suburban area.
If you are looking for a property that can realize some forced appreciation, the 203K loan is one that you should consider.
Information about requirements for an FHA loan can be found on page 109.
A list of questions for contractors can be found on page 102 and 103.
www.biggerpockets.com/contractors will be very useful to find contractors.
Home advisor is a good place to find contractors.
Questions to ask a real estate agent are on page 99 and 100.
Request to meet with a real estate agent at 7:15 AM. If your agent is not able to wake up for that meeting that means they won’t be there for you when you put an offer in on a late Friday night.
You should find 5 to 10 leads for agents and then meet them in person.
Look for agents who have a presence on bigger pockets.
The agent typically gets paid 3% of the purchase price, and is paid by the seller. As a buyer you do not need to worry about paying the agent.
You absolutely must get a pre-approval letter from your lender to prove to the seller and agent that you are capable of buying a particular property.
Make sure to factor in the PMI amount. It is typically between .5 and 1% of the entire loan amount on an annual basis.
A good list of questions to ask a lender can be found on page 94 and 95.
After you find 5 to 7 potential lenders, narrow them down.
To find the best lender ask for recommendations from people you know and trust.
Finding the livable property that gets appraised at value will come after you choose your lender.
The leaser will need to see a lease signed and a deposit into your bank account to confirm that the rental income is in fact truthful.
For example a $1900 a month payment at a 5% interest rate will allow you to purchase a property priced at approximately $325,000.
You can find your maximum monthly mortgage payment by multiplying your monthly income by .5 and then subtracting any debt.
On average the debt income ratio cannot exceed 50% when including after purchase.
The next factor that any lender will review is your debt to income ratio. They will normally take your backend debt to income ratio which includes any non-property related expenses.
If you are looking to get a conventional loan from government organizations, you will need to have a credit score of at least 620. If you decide to go the FHA route, you will need to have at least a 580 credit score.
If you do need to do a hard pull or multiple hard pulls, try to do them within 30 days of each other. That way the hard pull only affects your credit score once.
When applying for new credit of any type, always ask them if they are going to do a hard or soft pull. A hard pull will reduce your credit score whereas a soft pull will not.
You will be taking out a loan that is serviced by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. When getting a loan from them, you need to have a certain credit score, debt to income ratio, and down payment; the property needs to appraise at value; and it needs to be livable. If these are not met they can deny the loan.
When trying to pick your team, don’t hesitate to ask for references. Do your due diligence.
You can search meet ups and events in your area at biggerpockets.com.
The only people you absolutely need to form a team when you start house hacking is a lender, real estate agent, and contractor if you are seeking to make improvements to the property.
You are not going to be able to start your house hacking journey on your own. You are going to need to work with a team.
There are sometimes city planning meet ups, where you can attend and get insights into which parts of the city are going to be developed.
In real estate, you can obtain insider information and then make investment decisions based off of this information. You need to network and get on the good side of the city planners to gain access to this information.
You should try and identify places in the neighborhood that the municipality is trying to improve. To do this, look at past development and see which way the city is moving.
It is always a better decision to find a property that is in a good school district.
You can research crime on www.trulia.com.
You need to be sure that you are choosing a neighborhood where you can walk down the street without feeling like you’re in danger.
Find a property close to your work to save time, money, and your sanity on your commute. And do it all while making the most of the commute by learning something through podcasts or audiobooks.
The first thing to do when buying a house is to set up a multiple listing service search with properties that are 5 to 10 miles from work. You can ask an agent to do this for you.
Class B neighborhoods are ideal for house hacking.
A class A neighborhood will be difficult to cash flow so expect to make most of your money on appreciation over cash flow.
A class A location is an area that has the newest building, hottest restaurants, best schools, wealthiest people, and highest cost real estate. This is the best locations you can find in terms of properties and tenants.
The next step to finding a neighborhood is to drive around and identify the areas that you would be interested in investing in.
The first step before picking the neighborhood is to get to know real estate professionals in the area: lenders, agents, property managers.
The largest downside to condos and townhomes is the homeowners association fees.
Many house hackers choose to begin with a condominium or townhome, because they are typically cheaper and are often in nicer areas of town which means they’re easier to rent out.
When you sell a multi family property, you are likely going to be selling to an investor. When you sell a single-family property, your buyer list will be much larger since families will also want to purchase the property.
A property that is larger than four units is considered a commercial property and will not qualify for the low percentage down house hacking loan.
Small multi-family properties are duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes.
When doing a house hack, purchasing a single-family home means that you are pursuing either the rent by room strategy or luxury house hack strategy.
You will need the property to have a structurally sound roof, running water, heat, and all the exterior walls must be intact. The options for house hacking properties include single-family residence, duplex, triplex, four-plex, townhome and condominium.
The first question you need to ask yourself is which house hacking strategy is best for you to pursue now?
House hacking limits your options, but with fewer options comes the ability to evaluate all of them and make better decisions.
If you are buying a place with inherited tenants, be sure to do your due diligence on those tenants to know all the details from the beginning.
The live in flip is another strategy for housing. This is when you purchase a property using an owner occupied loan with the intention of living there for at least two years, fixing it up, and then selling it.
Single family homes are known to appreciate more quickly than multi family homes.
Renting by room is another strategy to house hack. The Idea is to purchase a large single-family home that has at least four bedrooms and two bathrooms, and then live in one bedroom while renting out the others.
Another house hack is the traditional house hack, when you purchase a 2 to 4 unit property with a low down payment residential loan.
Renting out an additional dwelling unit is one way to house hack. Also known as luxury house hacking. You could rent it full-time or on Airbnb, but you need to make sure that your cities rental laws allow for it.
The odds that you would achieve returns equal to a house hack in the stock market are slim to none.
Your earnings divided by your initial investment equals the percentage net worth return on investment.
It is much better to be rich than to look rich.
Only buy things once your passive income can sustain it.
Only purchase things that add value to you and your life.
Nobody cares what you do.
Have a conversation with your three year old self, asking the question why to any of your problems and what you want to do.
A home warranty is when the seller promises to pay for any major repairs to the property during the first year of ownership.
The best way to avoid unwanted misses by an inspector is to fight for a home warranty on the property.
To avoid late or missed payments, or having to track everyone down once a month, it is highly recommended to set up a service where rent can be deducted automatically from their accounts. www.cozy.com is a good site.
You need to make sure that you can afford your place regardless of whether you are at 0% or 100% vacancy.
To maximize your cash flow, it is best to purchase a property that needs some work.
You do not want to get too close to your tenants because they might begin to take advantage of you.
House hacking will be more work. At times you will have to fill a vacancy, accommodate maintenance requests, keep track of rent, security deposit, and your taxes will become a little more difficult. You will have to fill out a schedule E (form 1040) and remember to account for all expenses for the maximum tax savings.
The two of the last five year rule says that if you live in a property for two of the last five years, you are able to sell the property without any capital gains tax up to $250,000 if you are single or up to $500,000 if you’re married.
If you continue to do 1031 exchanges or hold a property until your death, capital gains expense gets wiped away.
The caveat to a 1031 exchange is that the investor must identify a larger property within 45 days and close on that property within 180 days of close.
Section 1031 of the tax code says that a real estate investor is allowed to sell the property, purchase another larger property, and defer the capital gains taxes that were incurred on the sale until the investor sells the larger property.
Depreciation is a good way to save money on taxes as well.
If you are looking to save on taxes, the goal is to look for methods that can increase your expenses so that the bottom line number is reduced.
Living in the property drastically reduces the probability that something will go unfixed for an extended amount of time.
Appreciation builds the most wealth through real estate investing.
The most common loan product is the 3.5% federal housing administration loan, FHA. By lowering your down payment using this method, your return on the investment will be much higher.
The biggest misconception is that your home is your largest asset. It is actually your largest liability because it takes money out of your pocket instead of putting money into your pocket.
You will likely be obtaining an owner occupied loan with a house hack. This means that you will have to live in the home for a year.
House hacking is when you buy a piece of residential real estate that is normally 1 to 4 units, and you live in one unit while renting out the remaining units. The rental income partially or fully covers your mortgage so you can live cheaply or for free while building equity in the property as the loan gets paid down, and the property value appreciates overtime.

The One Thing by Gary Keller

Rating: 8 out of 10

NOTES:

“Be like a postage stamp - stick to one thing until you get there.” Josh Billings
What’s the one thing you can do this week such that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?
Extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus.
“Every great change starts like falling dominoes.” BJ Thornton
Getting extraordinary results is all about creating a domino effect in your life.
The key is over time. Success is built sequentially. It’s one thing at a time.
No one succeeds alone. No one.
The one thing shows up time and again in the lives of the successful because it is a fundamental truth.
The six lies between you and success include everything matters equally, multitasking, a disciplined life, will power is always on will call, a balanced life, and big is bad.
Equality is a lie as in the world of achievement everything does not matter equally.
While to-dos serve as a useful collection of our best intentions, they also tyrannize us with trivial, unimportant stuff that we feel obligated to get done because it’s on our list.
Achievers always work from a clear sense of priority.
Instead of a to-do list, you need a success list, a list that is created around extraordinary results.
The 80/20 principle asserts that a minority of causes, inputs, or effort usually lead to a majority of the results, outputs, or rewards.
The majority of what you want will come from the minority of what you do.
Don’t focus on being busy, focus on being productive. Allow what matters most to drive your day.
Once you have figured out what actually matters, keep asking what matters most until there is only one thing left.
“To do two things at once is to do neither.” Publilius Syrus
Multitasking is a lie.
Multitasking was created as a term to describe computers, but the actual term means multiple tasks alternately sharing one resource not simultaneously.
It’s not that we have too little time to do all the things we need to do, it’s that we feel the need to do too many things in the time we have.
Task switching exacts a cost few realize they are even paying.
When you see someone who is disciplined, what you are really seeing is people who have trained a handful of habits into their lives.
Success is about doing the right thing, not about doing everything right.
When you do the right thing, it can liberate you from having to monitor everything.
It takes an average of 66 days to acquire a new habit.
Be a person of powerful habits and use selected discipline to develop them.
Willpower or the ability to delay gratification was a huge indicator of future success.
Will power has a limited battery life but can be recharged with some downtime. It’s a limited but renewable resource.
The more we use our mind, the less minding power we have.
Foods that elevate blood sugar evenly over long periods, like complex carbohydrates and proteins, become the fuel of choice for high achievers.
Make what matters most a priority when your willpower is at its highest.
Pursuing a balanced life means never pursuing anything at the extremes.
Life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. These balls are called work, family, health, friends, and integrity. Work is a rubber ball and it will bounce back. The other four balls are made of glass and may be shattered if dropped.
None of us know our limits.
The only actions that become springboards to succeeding big are those informed by big thinking to begin with.
“The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a mans foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher.” Thomas Henry Huxley
If your goal is to do 10 push-ups, a good rule of thumb is to always double down and aim for 20. Go big.
The quality of any answer is directly determined by the quality of the question.
Anyone who dreams of an uncommon life eventually discovers there is no choice but to seek an uncommon approach to living it.
What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier if unnecessary.
The research and experience of others is the best place to start when looking for your answer.
What you see is determined by what you don’t.
Productivity is driven by priority and purpose.
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” George Bernard Shaw
One of our biggest challenges is making sure our life’s purpose doesn’t become a beggars bowl, a bottomless pit of desire continually searching for the next thing that will make us happy.
Financially wealthy people are those who have enough money coming in without having to work to finance their purpose in life.
The surest path to achieving lasting happiness happens when you make your life about something bigger, when you bring meaning and purpose to your everyday actions.
If disproportionate results come from one activity, then you must give that one activity disproportionate time.
Resting is as important as working.
“Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.” Peter Drucker
To achieve extraordinary results you must embrace the extraordinary effort it represents.
You must continually seek the very best ways of doing things.
You must be willing to be held accountable to doing everything you can achieve.
Mastery means that you are a master of what you know and an apprentice of what you don’t.
The path of mastering something is the combination of not only doing the best you can do at it, but also doing it the best it can be done.
If you are doing something that people will ask a lot of questions, record the question and write out an answer. That way if the question is asked again you will have the answer.
When you strive for greatness, chaos is guaranteed to show up.
No one succeeds alone and no one fails alone. Pay attention to the people around you.
“The road to success is always under construction.” Lily Tomlin
A life worth living might be measured in many ways, but the one way that stands above all others is living a life of no regrets.
Put yourself together, and your world falls into place.

The Richest Man in Babylon by George Clason

Rating: 9 out of 10

NOTES:

Gold slips away from the man who invests it in businesses or purposes for which he is not familiar or which are not approved by those skilled in it’s keep.
Gold is reserved for those who know its laws and abide by them.
The man who seeks to learn more of his craft shall be richly rewarded.
Desires must be simple and definite. They defeat their own purpose should they be too many, too confusing, or beyond the training to accomplish.
The seventh remedy is to increase thy ability to earn.
It behooves a man to make preparation for a suitable income in the days to come, when he is no longer young and to make preparation for his family should he be no longer with them to comfort and support them.
The sixth remedy is to insure a future income.
Every man should own the roof that shelters him and his.
The fifth remedy is to make of thy dwelling a profitable investment.
The penalty of risk is probable loss. Study carefully before parting with thy treasure each assurance, that it may be safely reclaimed. Do not be mislead by thy own romantic desires to make wealth rapidly.
The fourth remedy is to guard thy treasures from loss.
A man’s wealth is not in the coins he carries in his purse but it is in the income he builds.
Gold in a purse is gratifying to own and satisfies a miserly soul but earns nothing. The gold we may retain from earnings is but the start. The earnings it will make shall build our fortunes.
The third remedy is to make thy gold multiply.
Engrave upon the clay each thing for which thou desirest to spend. Select those that are necessary and others that are possible through the expenditure of 9/10 of thy income. Cross out the rest and consider them but a part of the great multitude of desires that must go unsatisfied and regret them not.
Just as weeds grow in the field wherever the farmer leaves space for their roots, even so freely do desires grow in men whenever there’s a possibility of there being gratified.
Confuse not thy necessary expenses with thy desires. Most people have more desires than your earnings can gratify.
That which each of us calls are necessary expenses will always grow to equal our income unless we protest to the contrary.
The second remedy is controlled thy expenditures.
For every 10 coins that are placed within thy purse take out for use but nine. Thy purse will start to fatten at once and it’s increasing weight will feel good inside thy hand and bring satisfaction to thy soul.
The first remedy is to start thy purse to fattening.
There are seven remedies to making money.
Why should so few men be able to acquire all the gold? Because they know how.
The remaining 2/10 shall be divided honorably and fairly among your debt.
Around 7/10 of all that you earn should be used to provide a home, close to work, and food to eat, with a bit extra to spend. It is important that you do not spend greater than 7/10 of what you earn for those purposes.
Enjoy life while you are here. Do not over strain or try to save too much.
Will power is but the unflinching purpose to carry a task you set for yourself to fulfillment.
Opportunity is a haughty goddess who wastes no time with those who are unprepared.
Seek advice from those who are competent through their own experience to give it.
He who takes advice about his savings from one who is an experienced in such manners, shall pay with the savings for proving the falsity of their opinions.
Why trust the knowledge of a brickmaker about jewels? Would you go to the breadmaker to inquire about the stars? No. You would go to the jewel merchant for advice about jewels.
Your savings should be no less than a 10th no matter how little you earn.
If you would become wealthy, then what you save must earn, and it’s children must earn, and it’s children’s children must earn.
A part of all you earn is yours to keep.
Learning is of two kinds: the one kind being the things we learned and knew, and the other being in the training that taught us how to find out what we did not know.
Wealth is a power. With wealth many things are possible.
If you have not acquired more than a bear existence since ye were youths, it is because you have either failed to learn that laws governing the building of wealth, or else you do not observe them.

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Rating: 7 out of 10

NOTES:

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you’re thinking about it.
We draw pleasure and pain from what is happening at the moment, if we attend to it.
In intuitive evaluation of entire lives as well as brief episodes, peaks and ends matter but duration does not.
Losses evoke stronger negative feelings then costs.
It is a departure from the default that produces regret.
People expect to have stronger emotional reactions to an outcome that is produced by action than to the same outcome when it is produced by in-action.
The rich and vivid representation of the outcome, whether or not it is emotional, reduces the role of probability in the evaluation of an uncertain prospect.
The aversion to the failure of not reaching the goal is much stronger than the desire to exceed it.
We are driven more strongly to avoid losses than to achieve gains.
A stable relationship requires that good interactions outnumber bad interactions by at least 5 to 1.
Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good.
The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.
Losses loom larger than gains and people are loss averse.
Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.
When the organization has almost come to an important decision but has not formally committed itself, you should gather for a brief session with people who are knowledgeable about the decision. The premise of the session is to imagine that you are a year into the future. The implemented plan now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.
The people who have the greatest influence on the lives of others are likely to be optimistic and overconfident, and to take more risks than they realize.
The common tendency to neglect the statistics of similar cases was perhaps the major source of error in forecasting.
Intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.
To maximize predictive accuracy, final decisions should be left to formulas, especially in low validity environments.
The first lesson is that errors of prediction are inevitable because the world is unpredictable. The second is that high subjective confidence is not to be trusted as an indicator of accuracy.
Actions that seemed prudent in foresight can look irresponsibly negligent in hindsight.
A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world, you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.
Intuitive predictions tend to be overconfident and overly extreme.
Rewards for improved performance work better than punishment of mistakes.
Anchor your judgment of the probability of an outcome on a plausible base rate.
Question the diagnosticity of your evidence.
Poor performance is typically followed by improvement and good performance by deterioration, without any help from either praise or punishment.
The emotional tail wags the rational dog.
If you think the other side has made an outrageous proposal, you should not come back with an equally outrageous counter offer. Instead you should make a scene, storm out or threaten to do so, and make it clear that you will not continue the negotiation with that number on the table.
We pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about the reliability and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify.
Any effects of the world are due to chance, including accidents for example. Casual explanations of chance events are inevitably wrong.
We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what you see in life is random. We like to think that there is order to things.
The hot hand in basketball is a massive and widespread cognitive illusion.
If you can’t solve a problem, then there is an easier probably you can solve. Find it.
Before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in a group and reduces the weight of those who speak early and assertively.
Understanding a statement must begin with an attempt to believe it. You must first know what the idea would mean if it were true. Only then can you decide whether or not to un-believe it.
In order to persuade someone, make your messages simple, and try to make it memorable. Put your ideas in a verse if you can, they will be more likely to be taken as a truth.
You experience greater cognitive ease in perceiving a word that you have seen earlier, and it is this sense of ease that gives the impression of familiarity.
Simple common gestures can also unconsciously influence our thoughts and feelings.
The idea of money primes individualism: a reluctance to be involved with others, to depend on others, or to accept demands from another.
When people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.
Activities that impose high demands on system 2 require self-control, and the exertion of self-control is depleting and unpleasant.
If you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. This has been named ego depletion.
People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.
People who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by temptation are most likely to yield to the temptation.
Pupils are sensitive indicators of mental effort, they dilate substantially when people have to solve difficult problems.
We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.
When faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.
System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.
System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of system 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.

Tools of Titans by Tim Ferris

Rating: 9 out of 10

NOTES:

You never have to be upset about anything. Everything is for a purpose.
Even if you don’t know what you're doing, just begin.
What’s on the other side of fear? Nothing.
A persons success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.
The little things are the big things. Pay attention to the little things and the big things will come.
End the day with high quality work as you will internalize it over night.
If you are trying to teach someone something, do it by learning the macro from the micro. Teach the ending stuff first so that they understand the entirety of what is being taught.
Write everything down and keep a journal.
Do you want to be taken seriously? Then take things seriously.
Love is given, not received.
Praise specifically, criticize generally.
Earn with your mind, not your time.
Anger is a hot coal that you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at someone else.
Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
You have three options in your life for every situation. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it.
The first rule of handling conflict is don’t hang around people who are constantly engaging in conflict.
Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.
If you are looking for a recipe online, look for specific details and plans as it shows the person who wrote it actually made it.
Ignore 90% of the criticism. Promote 8% of the criticism to show you are open to it.
10% of people will find a way to take anything personally.
It’s better to be in an expanding world and not quite in exactly the right field, then to be in a contracting world where people’s worst behavior comes out.
Just take on the pain and wear it as a shirt.
Even the best in the world struggle.
Don’t panic. Let the silence do the work.
A good definition of love is being willing to die for someone who you yourself want to kill.
Secrets are a buffer to intimacy
Zen mantra is, “Sit, sit. Walk, walk. Don’t wobble.” When you are doing something, do it to 100 percent with no other distractions and multitasking.
On one level, wisdom is nothing more than the ability to take your own advice. It’s actually very easy to give people good advice. It’s very hard to follow the advice that you know is good.
Work will work when nothing else works.
If you don’t have the patience to read something, don’t have the hubris to comment on it.
In excess, most things take on the characteristic of the opposite.
Make commitments in a high energy state so that you can’t back out when you’re in a low energy state.
Schedule and pay for things in advance to prevent yourself from backing out.
If you find yourself saying, but I making so much money, you should re-look at while you’re doing the job.
Money can always be regenerated. Time and reputation cannot.
When given a choice... take both.
The person who clears the path ultimately controls its direction, just as the canvas shapes the painting.
Imagine you have a large glass jar. Next to it, you have a few large rocks, a small pile of marble-sized pebbles, and a pile of sand. If you put in the sand or pebbles first, what happens? You can’t fit the big rocks in. But if you add the big rocks, then the medium-sized pebbles, and only then the sand, it all fits. This applies to life and picking the most important tasks and choices.
Always increase the speed of your mouse/track pad.
Aim to optimize upstream items that have cascading results downstream.
Invest in the best router you can afford.
Everything breaks at roughly multiples of three and powers of 10.
When you complain, nobody wants to help you.
If you spend your time focusing on the things that are wrong, and that is what you express and project to people you know, you don’t become a source of growth for people, you become a source of destruction.
“Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.” Pierre-Marc-Gaston
More than 80% of the interviewees have some form of daily mindfulness or meditation practice.
Success, however you define it, is achievable if you collect the right field-tested beliefs and habits.
The superhero’s you have in your mind are nearly all walking flaws who’ve maximized 1 or 2 strengths.
Rolling your foot on a golf ball or tennis ball helps stretch your hamstrings.
You can use teeth for stem-cell banking.
Hyperthermic conditioning can help you to increase growth hormone levels and substantially improve endurance.
20 minutes sauna sessions post work at least four times per week, typically at roughly 160 to 170°F.
“If the best in the world are stretching their asses off in order to get strong, why aren’t you?” Christopher Sommer
When in doubt, work on the deficiencies you are most embarrassed by.
Flexibility can be passive, whereas mobility requires that you can demonstrate strength throughout the entire range of motion, including the end ranges.
If you don’t have cancer and you do a therapeutic fast one to three times per year, you could purge any pre-cancerous cells that may be living in your body.
Dom suggests a five day fast 2 to 3 times per year.
You should sweat like you’re being chased by the police daily.
You shouldn’t need caffeine or alcohol.
Make the last 30 to 60 seconds of your shower pure cold.
A good tea to get is called duck shit oolong tea.
Tell people what you want, not what you don’t want, and keep it simple.
The quality of your question determines the quality of your life.
Going 16 hours without eating generally provides the right balance of autophagy and anabolism.
Having a very strong gluteus medius, tensor fasciae latae, and vastus medialis is essential for complete knee-hip alignment and longevity of performance.
If you are over 40 and don’t smoke, there’s about a 70 to 80% chance you will die from 1 of 4 diseases: heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, cancer, or neurodegenerative disease.
Strength training aids everything from glucose disposal and metabolic health to mitochondrial density and orthopedic stability.
There is a big difference between understanding something and simply knowing his name or labeling it.
The quickest way to know if you have less than 10% body fat is if you can see the lineal alba on your abs. You need to be able to see all your abb rows.
You should vary your food sources.
Taking gotu kola for 6 months will get rid of stretch marks.
If you do static stretching and you don’t finish with a contraction, you are more likely to get an injury.
Strength is the mother quality of all physical qualities.
Training is something that should be enjoyed.
When doing an exercise that makes you feel gassed, decide beforehand that you are going to rest from one set to the next for a certain number of breaths.
Do everything you can first. Be first, because it comes in your favor. Like saying hi first.
Break a sweat every day.
Spend as much time in a lunge as you can.
Soft is the solution for bedding.
The softest mattress you can get your hands on his ideal, but avoid those made solely of memory foam, as it locks you into extension.
Lying on a bed and a mattress store for five minutes. If you have to cross your feet your bed is too hard.
Where flat zero drop shoes, where the toes and heel are an equal distance from the ground as much as possible.
Kids don’t do what you say. They do what they see. How you live your life is their example.
To avoid jet lag once checking into your hotel, go ride on a bike for 15 minutes to reset things.
Ask yourself is that a dream, or a goal?
Worrying about something when it is about to happen isn’t going to change a damn thing.
One of the best ways to go to sleep is by decompressing the spine.
A good pre bed cocktail is 2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar, 1 tablespoon honey, stirred into 1 cup of hot water.
If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. Making your bed also reinforces the fact that little things in life matter.
Meditation helps you channel drive toward the few things that matter, rather than every moving target and imaginary opponent that pops up.
Meditation is an indulgence. Don’t sit for so long that it becomes burdensome.
Take 10 seconds every day and wish for 2 people to be happy.
Dealing with the temporary frustration of not making progress is an integral part of the path towards excellence.
Quality long term results require quality long term focus.
Strong views, loosely held. Stay strong to your views unless someone gives you facts you didn’t know.
When working out, put your mind in the muscle and meditate while working out.
It’s not what you know, it’s what you do consistently.
Expect disaster
Own as little as possible
When you are early in your career, just say yes to everything.
Busy = out of control
Talk to a few people who are currently where you think you want to be and ask them for pros and cons.
The reason your suffering is you’ve focused on yourself.
The ultimate quantification of success is not how much time you spend doing what you love, but how little time you spend doing what you hate.
Hope is not a strategy. Luck is not a factor. Fear is not an option.
“Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.” Thomas Edison
The world doesn’t need your explanation. When saying no you don’t need to come up with an explanation.
People who have had crappy service jobs tend to stay grounded for longer.
You should choose projects and habits that, even if they result in failures in the eyes of the outside world, give you transferable skills or relationships.
Ask yourself what persistent skills or relationships can I develop instead of what short-term goal can I achieve.
A lot of removing stress is just how you look at the world, but most of it is really the process of diversification.
If you’re not first in a category find a new category that you can be first in.

Winning Through Intimidation by Robert Ringer

Rating: 8 out of 10

NOTES:

The longer you fiddle around with a deal, the greater the odds that it will never close.
Before a person closes a deal, it’s human nature for him to worry that there may be a better deal down the road.
Greed is a great catalyst for causing ones wishes to override reality.
The secret to bluffing is to not bluff.
Everyone wants what he can’t have, and does not want what he can have.
If you insist on sleeping with big dogs, you are guaranteed to end up with big fleas.
Assume nothing! If your mother says she loves you, check it out.
With a written agreement, you have a prayer. With a verbal agreement, you have nothing but air.
People are generally unrealistic about most things, particularly in touting their own deals, products, and prospects. This is why you have to take most of what you hear with a grain of salt, take matters into your own hands, and do your homework.
Concentrate your efforts in finding a few make-able deals rather than working on a large number of unmake-able deals and clinging to the desperate hope that one of them will miraculously close.
You are not through until you have crossed all the t’s, dotted all the i’s, and the check has cleared the bank. Everything else is fluff.
It is not what you say or do that counts, but what your posture is when you say or do it.
The results a person achieves are inversely proportionate to the degree to which he is intimidated.
The Leapfrog theory states no one has an obligation - moral, legal, or otherwise – to work his way up through the ranks. Every human being possesses an alienable right to make a unilateral decision to redirect his career and begin operating on a higher level at any time that he, and he alone, believes he is ready.
The outcome of most situations in life are determined over the long term. The guy who gets off to a fast start merely wins a battle; the individual who is ahead at the end of the race wins the war. Battles are for ego trippers, wars are for money grippers.
Cornerstone number four is the ice ball theory, which states: given the apparent, ultimate fate of the earth, it is vain and nonsensical to take oneself too seriously.
Cornerstone number three is the mortality theory, which states: given that your time on earth is limited, it makes good sense to aim high and move fast.
Cornerstone number two is the theory of relevance, which states; no matter how interesting or how true something may be, the primary factor to take into consideration is how relevant it is to your achieving main your objective.
When stating success or honesty, you have to be specific about what you mean by those, because those definitions change for individual people as they can be based off of various standards.
Cornerstone number one is the theory of relativity, which states; in order to settle on a rational course of action or in action, one must first weigh all pertinent facts in a relative light and carefully define his terms.
Reality is neither the way you wish things to be nor the way they appear to be, but the way they actually are. Either you acknowledge reality and use it to your benefit, or it will automatically work against you.
The theory of next. The key to maintaining a positive attitude is to recognize that no one deal is that important. The person with a true positive mental attitude possesses the power to say next to the next deal when things don’t work out.
You develop a positive mental attitude being good at what you do, by understanding what it takes to succeed, and by having the self-discipline to base your actions on those realities.
“Just fake it till you make it” are perhaps the most damaging motivational words ever spoken.
“Freedom comes from seeing the ignorance of your critics and discovering the emptiness of their virtue.” Ayn Rand