Personal blog on early retirement, a little traveling, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
There’s a certain type of personal finance book that makes you want to close it halfway through and go simplify your portfolio immediately. “A Wealth of Common Sense” by Ben Carlson is one of those books. It doesn’t try to teach you a complicated system or sell you on a strategy you’ve never heard of. The entire argument is: you’re probably doing too much, the complexity isn’t helping, and here’s why simplicity tends to win.
I’ve read The Slight Edge twice, which tells you something. Most self-help books I finish once, appreciate in the moment, and forget by the following month. Jeff Olson’s central idea stuck around in a way that most don’t, and I think it’s because the framework is simple enough to actually use day-to-day rather than just appreciate as an idea.
“Set for Life” by Scott Trench is one of those books that’s more useful in your late twenties than your late thirties, which isn’t a knock — it’s just the honest audience. Trench built his framework from his own experience going from broke recent grad to financially independent relatively quickly, and the whole book is oriented around aggressive early-stage wealth-building. If you’re past that stage, you’ll still find useful ideas, but the action items are most relevant when you’re starting from zero.
Here’s something most people don’t realize when they pick up “The Way to Wealth”: it’s not really a book. It’s a short essay Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1758 as a preface to the final edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack. The whole thing takes maybe 30 minutes to read. What you’re getting on Amazon is usually a very slim volume — the essay itself, possibly with some historical notes. That’s it. Which means if someone tells you “this book changed my life,” what actually happened is that a 30-minute read from 1758 changed their life. That’s either impressive or concerning depending on how you look at it.
Isaiah Berlin’s essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox” has been a source of intellectual curiosity and amusement since its publication in 1953. Berlin, a British philosopher and historian of ideas, was inspired by a fragment of poetry from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Berlin used this fragment to classify writers and thinkers into two broad categories: hedgehogs, who see the world through the lens of a single idea or principle, and foxes, who have multiple viewpoints and are not constrained by a single ideology.
