This week, I read three books. Two of these books were fantastic, and one of them was atrocious. First, we have one of my favorite personal finance books, and then we have a book that I surprisingly liked. Finally, there’s a book that I rant about due to its lack of scientific research as well as its hackery. Enjoy!
Each of the links to the books are affiliate links, so if you use my link to purchase any of these books, some comes back to support what I do (and it also helps fund my reading habit).
Just Keep Buying: Proven Ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth by Nick Maggiulli
I’ve been trying to level up my personal finance game, so I’m re-reading some of my fav books. I loved this book from Nick Maggiulli, and he was one of the most down-to-Earth finance people I spoke with on my podcast. This book gave me some great reminders on saving and retirement saving/investing strategies. Nick is pretty heavy on numbers and studies that use a lot of numbers in the book, which is tough because I’m an audio listener. But since he summarizes what the numbers mean and his recommended strategy, it makes the book great regardless of whether or not you’re a numbers person.
This book has some of the most practical advice of any finance book out there, and I highly recommend it.
Who Ate the First Oyster?: The Extraordinary People Behind the Greatest Firsts in History by Cody Cassidy
This is one of the last books I’d expect to read, or even enjoy because it’s one of my least favorite genres: history. I decided to grab this book because it seemed like it’d be short chapters with some interesting information. Although I don’t like history much, I’m super curious about random topics. With that said, this book from Cody Cassidy exceeded my expectations. The chapters are short, and it’s just a bunch of random firsts, and Cassidy does an awesome job explaining how experts figured these things out. It’s a nice coffee table book or for anyone with random curiosities like myself.
Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers by Chip Heath and Karla Starr
I was going to start out this review by stating that I’m unsurprised about how bad this book is because one of the authors (Chip Heath) is a mentor to the hack Jonah Berger. Then, I reread the subtitle of this book and audibly laughed out loud. The term “science” in that title is being used in the loosest possible way.
For those of you who don’t know, Jonah Berger has made a disgusting amount of money pushing bad science and anecdotal evidence with his books and corporate speaking gigs. Chip Heath is his mentor, and I’ve never been a fan of the Chip and Dan Heath books. I decided to read this one since I’m “not a numbers person”, and man, what a waste of time.
Chip somehow started a whole course on this topic at Stanford. While I understand who valuable it is to be able to communicate numbers properly, this really didn’t need an entire book. TLDR: translate numbers into something relatable. There are some good tips in this book, but maybe for like high school kids? I just think it’s pretty common knowledge that this is the best way to get people to understand the magnitude of certain numbers. For example “The entire country of X is only as big as the state of California.”
But yeah, this book is 90% anecdotes, and I can probably count on one hand the number of studies they actually reference. There’s virtually no evidence in this book that the advice from this book helps people retain numerical information better. So, I guess if you’re one of the people under 18 who don’t know you should communicate numbers by relating them to something the audience will understand and don’t care about research and evidence, grab a copy of this book.
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I like Nick Maggiulli - I have seen him a few times on the Compound podcast. Happy to chat about personal finance or investing some time if you're so inclined!