Billionaire Investor Reveals The Top 3 Books To Get Rich - Andrew Wilkinson

Yeah, I'd say the most influential book I read—it has a horrible douchey title—it's called How to Get Rich, and it's by this guy Felix Dennis. Have you read this book? He's the guy who started Maxim magazine. That's what he's best known for, but he built this huge publishing empire. He had all these technology magazines, a very wide variety of businesses, and he wrote this book when he was in his 70s. It basically tells his story of going from kind of like this almost communist hippie guy who started making Bruce Lee posters—right, literally, that's how he got started, he started selling Bruce Lee posters—and somehow ended up in this publishing empire because he went, 'Oh, I can make these magazines that sell the posters.' He got into the magazine business and over time expanded into this thing. I think reading that when I was 19 or 20 was really instructive to go, 'Okay, this guy's kind of like me. He's a nobody and he managed to build this big thing.' So I think the most important stuff I read in the beginning was expanding my mind to all the possibilities. From there it was really the tools. For example, there's a really great book by Jay Abraham called Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got, and it's kind of like this huge list of all the different ways that you can make money. So basically it's like cheat codes. It's like, okay, if you're a dentist—just as a really boring example—you could have a membership program, you could have a referral program, you could advertise in a very particular way. It's just everything as a business that you can do to make more money, or to market, or to get more customers. I read that book and it was very foundational. Then I read another book called Influence by Robert Cialdini. Robert Cialdini is a famous psychologist who I think has done a ton of landmark studies around psychology, specifically around people's behaviors. For example, there's this study where if you put your hand in a bucket of cold water and then you put it into a bucket of medium water, you'll perceive it to be colder than if you put it in a bucket of hot water and then into the middle. Like weird stuff like that. And he takes that psychology and he applies it to business and decision making. So for example, let's say you're a realtor. You take someone to a house, right, an absolute horrible place. Then you take them to the most expensive possible house, the ridiculous mansion, and they're going, 'Oh my God, I would never buy this place, this place is out of my budget.' And then you take them to the reasonably priced, good house. And when people see the good house, the contrast of the other two causes them to jump on it and go, 'Well, this is amazing, because those other two are too extreme.' He applies that to things like realtors or sales, or even pricing. If you have a product you're selling, you can have $9.99, $4.99, or $20. Most people will choose $4.99. I read that book and was just devouring it, going, 'Oh my God, there's all these psychological things that I wasn't factoring in.' I learned to use those when I was selling, when I was marketing our products, all that kind of stuff. And then another great book I read was called Made to Stick. That was really the book that taught me how to write. It's by Dan and Chip Heath. I'll still always remember the first line of the book is something like, 'I was in a bathtub full of ice and I fell to my back and realized that there was an incision where my kidney was.' That's the start of the book. And the whole idea of the book is: how do you write in a way that hooks people? How do you write in a way that's memorable and raises eyebrows?

Peter Thiel did that. The first line of his book is, 'The eggs kept falling and I knew I had to keep catching them.' What a weird sentence, but he obviously read a book like Made to Stick. He knows how to hook people. So those three books—the Jay Abraham one, the Dan and Chip Heath one, and Influence—those really were foundational for me in terms of just how do you operate an exceptional business. And you'll notice that none of those are really business books. None of them are business operating manuals. They're simply just three distinct skill sets.