- Hey, what's going on, friends?
In this video, we are going over seven books
that I think everyone should read in their 20s.
These are all books that I read when I was in my 20s
and they all had a tremendous impact on my life,
they helped me to improve my life
in five different categories
that we're breaking this video down into.
Those categories are relationships, productivity,
personal finance, career success, and health.
So let's get this video started off
with the first book on my list, which is Stephen Covey's
"7 Habits of Highly Effective People."
This is the book that more than any other book
helped me to improve the way that I both build
and deepen relationships with other people.
Now, this isn't entirely a book about relationships.
In fact, about half of this book
is a book about productivity,
the first three habits to deal with it,
like habit number two, begin with the end in mind,
is all about planning and understanding your goals
and habit number three, put first things first,
is all about prioritization,
but it's habit number five
that had the greatest impact on me,
"Seek first to understand then to be understood."
See, most people listen with what Covey calls
an autobiographical point of view.
You're listening because you're waiting to respond
with something from your own perspective,
your own experiences.
A lot of people don't take the time to really put themselves
in the shoes of the other person,
consider their perspective,
try to see it the way the other person sees it.
Covey calls this empathetic listening.
And when you can listen empathetically,
when you can actually do this perspective shift,
you become better able to understand the meaning
and the context behind what somebody else
is telling you about.
And in doing so,
you build much better and deeper relationships,
and you're able to make the lives
of everyone around you much better.
So that is my favorite book in the relationship category.
And now we're moving on to the productivity category.
Now there are a ton of productivity books out there.
I've talked about many of them on this channel,
but if you were only going to read one,
the one that I would recommend
is going to be Chris Bailey's "The Productivity Project."
Well, this and also "Atomic Habits" by James Clear,
but, I in fact, made two videos about that book,
so I'm not gonna include it on this list.
And "The Productivity Project" is a wonderful overview
of really the entire field of productivity.
So if you're looking for one concentrated book
that's gonna teach you all about time management,
managing our attention, your energy, procrastination,
all these different topics,
this is the book that I would recommend.
And the best idea that I wanna share
from this book is his breakdown
of the six different procrastination triggers.
And this is pulled from procrastination research
that has been done at several different universities,
where they have found that there are indeed
six different aspects or qualities of tasks
that we tend to put off, of tasks that are unpleasant.
So when a task is boring, when it is frustrating,
difficult, ambiguous, lacking in personal meaning
or lacking in intrinsic value, i.e. it's not fun,
we tend to put it off.
And there are a ton of different strategies in this book
for fighting procrastination.
But I wanna share this idea
because once you know these six different triggers,
you can now start to think critically about your own tasks
and ask yourself, "If I'm procrastinating,
"which of these triggers is causing me
"to procrastinate on this task?"
And once you know that,
you can start to figure out some things you could do
to lessen the influence of those triggers.
For example, last week,
I had to go into my accounting software
and do a ton of bookkeeping,
which is a task that I absolutely hate.
So one thing that I've realized
is that because this task is boring,
one thing I can do to make it a little bit more fun
is to add a bit of a challenge to it.
So I set a 20-minute timer and I challenged myself
to reconcile as many transactions as I could
within that time period, still kind of boring,
but a little less boring
because I had now set up a challenge,
and I also put out some of my favorite music.
So overall, those two little tweaks
made the task just a bit less unpleasant
and a bit less boring.
And with that, we are now moving on
from the productivity category
onto the personal finance category,
where I have two book recommendations for you.
And the first one
is "Your Money, The Missing Manual" by J. D. Roth,
who was one of the OG personal finance bloggers
that I was reading
back when I was in high school and college.
And this book was really my first introduction
to the world of personal finance.
And it's really just an overview of a ton
of different topics that you need to learn about
if you wanna manage your money effectively.
It talks about debt, it talks about budgeting,
it talks about credit cards, it talks about investing.
And the big idea that I would like to share from this book
with you in this video
is the concept of automated investing.
This was the book that taught me
that I should automate my finances,
essentially put them on autopilot.
So this means that you can put your bills on auto-pay,
but perhaps even more importantly,
you can put your investments on auto-deposit schedule,
which is exactly what I did after I read this book.
Now on my investment platform,
which at the time was Vanguard,
I have since moved over to M1 Finance,
works on both of these,
I have an auto-deposit schedule, where every single month
money will come out of my bank account
and go into my investment account
and be invested into a set series of ETFs,
essentially mutual funds that I have set up beforehand.
And there are two huge benefits
to automating your investing in this way.
Number one is the consistency of actually investing,
because if you have a robot doing your investing for you,
you're almost certainly going to invest more over the years
than if you were deliberately making the choice
whether or not to invest every single month.
If you were doing it that way,
there are inevitably gonna be months
when you decide that, "I'd rather buy a jet ski,"
or, "I don't feel like I have enough money,"
but if it's on a schedule,
it just comes out and you don't think about it
until 10 or 20 or 30 years later,
when you have a ton of money invested.
You will thank yourself for enabling this robot.
Secondly, doing this helps you to avoid
what J. D. Roth calls the behavior gap,
which is the difference
between what the stock market would have made
if you just left it on autopilot
and what the average investor makes
because of their decisions.
And the example that it gives is that a 20-year period
between 1988 and 2008, where the S&P 500,
which is essentially an index
that tracks the entire U.S. stock market
made a little bit less than 8.5% return.
But the average investor made only about 1.8%,
a huge gap, and actually less than the rate of inflation.
Now, some of that gap is due to a lot of investors
diversifying their investments,
which makes them a bit more ssecure,
a bit more hardened against losses and volatility.
But a lot of that gap is due to bad decisions
that were fueled by greed or by fear or by stupidity.
And when you automate your investments,
you don't think about the market all the time,
and you don't even give yourself the opportunity
to make these dumb decisions.
Our second book in the personal finance category
is one where I'd regrettably lost
the book jacket at some point.
So Tony, can you please VFX the image on here for me?
This is "A Random Walk Down Wall Street"
by Burton G. Malkiel.
And if you're interested in investing at all,
I highly recommend reading this book.
Now for somebody who just wants a good investment setup,
you don't wanna think about it,
I think the general tips
that are in "Your Money, The Missing Manual,"
and the videos that I am planning for this channel
are going to be quite adequate.
But if you wanna understand investing,
this is the number one book that I would recommend.
He goes into a lot of detail on how a lot of people,
even very smart people, often make a lot of mistakes
in the market that will cause them
to lose out on potential gains.
But the big idea from this book
that I wanna share with you,
it was actually kind of mind-blowing to me
is just how valuable retirement accounts can be
for growing your money.
In the book, he sets up a hypothetical example
where $5,000 is invested every single year for 30 years.
And after that period, the money that was invested
in a retirement account, in either an IRA or 401k,
or another tax-advantaged account grew to $1.4 million,
whereas the money that was not invested
in a retirement account
was put into a regular old taxable account,
only grew to about $900,000.
So there's a $500,000 potential earnings gap
that is realized simply by utilizing
these retirement vehicles.
And that is why personally, I do my best to max out my IRA,
and my 401k every single year,
and then, and only then,
put money into taxable investments
and why I would highly recommend
you do the exact same thing,
unless maybe you're saving for a short-term big purchase,
like a down payment for a house.
Yee!
All right, now that I've damaged my walls
with that last book,
we are now moving on to the career category.
And this is yet another category
where I have two different recommendations for you.
And I have a very good reason for adding two different books
into this category because they are very different
and very useful for independent reasons.
So the first one that I'm gonna recommend
is "Pivot" by Jenny Blake.
And this is a fantastic book for anybody
who wants to potentially move or change their careers.
And this is a super common thing.
A lot of people, especially after they've been
in their career for three to five years,
start to realize,
"Hey, I would like to do something different.
"I kind of don't like what I'm doing right now."
And there's these creeping feelings of guilt, right?
You're like, "Well, I spent all this money
"and all this time in college,
"and I'm moving down this career path,
"I don't wanna lose all this career capital
"and everything that I've gained,"
but you have to realize that wanting to change,
wanting to move up in the world
is actually a very healthy thing.
It means that you have this drive to learn
and to adapt and to grow.
But doing so is a strategic endeavor.
And this book has a lot of strategy to offer for that.
a lot of case studies.
And my favorite concept in this book
is her idea of doing pilot tests.
So in the TV industry,
executives will order a pilot episode of a show
if they're not quite sure it's going to do really well.
So they're gonna get the pilot episode, see how it does,
and if the audience is like it,
then they order an entire season.
Piloting is essentially a strategy
to invest a little bit of time, money and resources
into a potential direction before going all in on it.
And the problem with careers is a lot of people
get fed up with where they are and then they quit their job
and they don't really know where to go.
So instead, ask yourself,
and Jenny talks about this in the book,
"Can I do some little pilot tests?"
"Are there little experiments
"that I could run in my free time
"without giving up everything I have right now
"that would allow me to test out
"a possible different career shift
"and see if it's for me, see if I can do it?"
For example, I really like doing stuff in Notion.
I like teaching people how to use Notion.
I like to build Notion templates,
like my task manager template,
but I'm not just gonna move on from being a YouTuber,
number one, because I like being a YouTuber.
But number two,
because I'm not sure if making stuff for Notion
is a viable career path,
or for my particular purposes,
a viable addition to my business.
So I tried some pilot projects.
First, had a couple of videos on this channel
teaching Notion doing some stuff, and those did well.
And then I started my second channel,
Thomas Frank Explains.
That's where I create Notion tutorials
and template tutorials.
And that is now a little bit of a side business
where I've invested a bit more than I originally did,
but I've still not completely shifted over.
So if you have something that you wanna do,
or if you're fed up
with where you currently are in your job,
ask yourself, "How could I pilot a small change?"
Our second book in this career category
is Josh Kaufman's "The Personal MBA,"
and I truly do believe that everyone in their 20s
should read this book
because this is a high-level of overview
of many of the different concepts in business,
of sales, of marketing, of value creation,
of how to work with others.
And when you understand
the fundamental concepts of business,
you understand the goals and motivations
of your employer better,
and that makes you a higher-value employee.
So if you want to get a raise,
if you want to get a promotion,
if you want to get new and more exciting duties at your job
and take on leadership roles,
reading a book like this,
and understanding the fundamentals of business
can be a very useful thing to do.
Now, the big idea that I wanna share in this video
from this book is the different types of value creation
that he goes through in the book.
This was sort of a mind-opening read for me
when I went through this section
because a lot of people
don't really understand value creation.
If you ask the average person,
"What are the different methods
"of creating value in business?"
they're gonna answer with two different categories,
products, and services.
But as Josh explains in the book,
there are actually quite a few more
different types of value creation.
And if you're somebody
who wants to maybe start a business one day,
understanding these and knowing what they are
can be very useful to you.
So I'm not gonna list all of these.
I'm gonna put them up on the screen here
so you can screenshot them if you want.
But I do want to highlight just a few of them.
Product is a very obvious one.
This book is a product,
my Notion templates are a product.
Service is also pretty useful,
a barber is offering a service.
But what about a shared resource?
Something like Disneyland,
that is something that people can come and enjoy,
but they don't buy it
and it's not really a service in itself.
Also, option was a very interesting one for me.
And here's an interesting question.
What is the value that a place like Planet Fitness, a gym,
is offering to its patrons?
We might automatically say it's a service, and that is true.
But I think that the main value that a Planet Fitness,
especially a big box gym like that is offering is an option.
You are getting the option to do something
but you don't necessarily have to exercise it.
So really they're paying for the optionality,
not necessarily the service or the shared resource.
And that brings us to the health category,
where my one book recommendation for you
is Dr. John Rady's "Spark, The Revolutionary New Science
"of Exercise and the Brain."
And I'm recommending this book literally for everyone
because this book hammered into my brain
the need for exercise,
not just for my body, but for my mind.
As this book explains in excruciating detail,
exercise benefits your focus, your creativity,
it helps with anxiety, it lessens ADHD symptoms,
if you can believe that,
it lessens stress and depression,
it, in almost every way fathomable,
helps you regulate your mental health.
This was very important for me
because as an ambitious entrepreneur
with a pretty computer-based career,
it has always been very easy for me
to justify skipping workouts
because going to the gym for an hour or two
makes me feel like I'm putting off
the things that I need to get done.
But as this book makes abundantly clear,
exercising isn't a waste of time,
it isn't taking my work time away from me.
It's actually a force multiplier for my work time.
Think about it.
I can either choose to work 10 or 12 hours a day,
skipping all my workouts, probably not sleeping well,
probably not eating well,
and in that case, each hour that I put into my work
is probably only worth about 20 minutes
'cause I'm spending a lot of it groggy or procrastinating
'cause I just don't feel very focused,
or I can actually get my workout in.
I can actually sleep eight hours.
I can actually eat a good diet.
And if I do that,
maybe I only have time for six hours of good work in a day,
but every single one of those hours truly is worth an hour.
So if I'm taking my health seriously in general
and making sure to exercise everyday specifically,
the value of my time,
the effectiveness of it is essentially doubled.
And I don't have to work as many hours
to get the same amount done.
And "Spark" is really the book that helped me
to really take that seriously.
Now, if there's one more piece of advice
I can give you here is that not all these books
may be ones that you need to read right now,
even if you are in your 20s.
Really, the main thing that you,
and pretty much everything else
should be prioritizing above all of those skills
is thinking critically,
especially with respect to your goals.
So if you have a goal that is aligned
with one of these five categories we just went through,
then maybe it is worth picking up one of these books.
And if you wanna improve your ability to think critically,
which is incredibly important,
then this video's sponsor, Brilliant,
has a brand new Logic course that you should check out.
Learning to think logically,
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So if you wanna start improving
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you can go over to brilliant.org/thomasfrank,
or click that link right there to sign up,
and that link is gonna get you 20% off
their annual premium subscription.
If you're looking for something else to watch,
I've got a video right there
on James Clear's "Atomic Habits," another amazing book,
and that video goes through three
of the biggest lessons in it,
or perhaps you're curious
about how I actually make my videos.
Well, I've got a full breakdown on my second channel,
which you can watch right there.
Beyond that, hit the like button for the algorithm,
follow me on Twitter for bite-size content.
And I wanna know in the comments down below,
what is the number one book that you recommend
for people in their 20s or for people in general?
Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next one.