How to Get Rich & Other Lessons from 2024

Tldr's of the 7 best books I read in 2024, and the other 28 if interested

These are the takeways from the 7 best books I read in 2024

Business

1. How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis

   • We’re all going to die, so have no fear

   • To get rich, you have to own assets

   • Don’t take money particularly seriously, the benefit of money is freedom over your time to live your life

2. The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham

   • If you don’t have a rational behind the price of an asset, you’re gambling e.g. Tesla is a great company, Tesla is only a great investment at X price

   • Asset classes rise and fall throughout history. Fringe investors exploit a new asset class, get good returns, LP’s pour money into where there were good returns, established asset managers “won’t get fired” for following what the masses agree with instead of doing their own diligence, bad returns leads to downsized asset class

3. The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge

   1. A very tactical book on creating incentive plans for sales & marketing

   2. Hubspot used 3 type of sales compensation formulas over its early years, optimizing for e.g. new business, retention, what was needed & could be controlled by sales reps

   3. You can compensate marketing based on qualified leads to sales

Non-Business

1. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

   1. The medium forces/can only work for certain types of messages. Visual mediums requires visually attractive content/people, that medium doesn’t support anything else

   2. This is all fine & good if we use visual mediums for entertainment. But we use them for education, news, etc. The modern dystopia isn’t 1984, it’s Brave New World - people willing want to be dopamined to death

2. The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker

   1. Don’t start or end a gathering with logistics, it sets the tone

   2. For a great toast, start with a “stub”, a barely-formed thought, not a rehearsed speech. 15 Toasts is a great format for a dinner party

3. Rejection: Fiction by Tony Tulathimutte

   1. The first 3 chapters are craftsmanship works of fiction. It makes you empathize with how incels become incels, because aren’t we all a little scared of rejection?

Appendix.

Among the other 28 books I read in 2024, if anything stuck, I wrote down a sentence or two of what I learned, which I’m sharing in case you’re looking for another read:

7. HBR’s Guide to Buying a Small Business by Richard Ruback and Royce Yudkoff

   1. If you want to buy or roll up small businesses, I’d recommend Buy Then Build for a high-level plan and this book for the tactical prior to purchase steps

8. The Little Red Book of Selling by Jeffrey Gitomer

   1. People hate to be sold but love to buy

9. The Challenger Sale by Brent Adamson and Dixon Matthew

   1. One version of actually helping your customers is teaching them something useful. Sales is about listening, seeing if you can help, find ways to actually help

10. Outlive by Bill Gifford and Peter Attia

    1. Health span matter more than life span (living a long healthy life & dying quickly is ideal)

    2. Exercise & nutrition are most important, exercise is more so partially because we understand it better. It’s not rocket science about what you should do for both

11. Powerhouse by James Andrew Miller

    1. The story of CAA, the iconic talent agency of Hollywood. There’s so much nuance in life - CAA likely wouldn’t have dominated without the aggressive personality of Mike Ovitz, all relevance eventually diminishes and he ended up seemingly lonely. I’m not sure there’s a moral, it’s nuanced.

12. What You Do is Who You Are by Ben Horowitz

    1. Culture is the worst behavior leadership is willing to tolerate and model

    2. With large enough N (employees), you’ll see the consequences of any culture to its extreme

13. Blitzscaling by Chris Yeh and Reid Hoffman

    1. If it’s a winner-takes-all or winner-takes-most (think the value of Uber vs. Lyft), raise as much money as you can and grow aggressively

    2. The business has to fundamentally work before scaling at all

14. Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t by Steven Pressfield

    1. Every good piece of writing, regardless of genre, follows the same format (i.e. 3 part story, the higher the stake the better the hero, etc.)

15. Devil Take the Hindmost by Edward Chancellor

    1. People’s willingness to speculate (which requires the benefactors wanting to take advantage of people, and the often disenfranchised masses wanting to easily make money) happens in cycle throughout history and will continue

16. Excerpts From the Second Sex By Simone de Beauvoir

    1. Based on the way society has formed, women have been generally dominated by men (both men and women perpetuate this system)

17. Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

18. Ten Drugs by Thomas Hager

19. Only the Paranoid Survive by Andrew Grove

20. The Firm by Duff McDonald

21. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

22. Ethics In the Real World by Peter Singer

23. The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber

24. Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

25. Wonder by by R.J. Palacio

26. Here’s the Deal by Joel Ankney

27. Uncommon Grit by Darren McBurnett

28. Security Yearbook 2022 by Richard Stiennon

29. Drawdown Edited by Paul Hawken

30. Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal

31. Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson

32. A Mind of Her Own by Paula McLain

33. Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

34. The Managers Path by Camille Fournier

35. The Secret to Winning Global Teams by Shannon Waller and Sunny Kaila

Disclaimer: given I only write down a sentence or two of what I remember, the book itself is always more nuanced