I'm talking about life decisions that worked out perfectly and left you with no regrets. Here are mine:
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Quitting Facebook - I quit using facebook about 2 years ago. It's a toxic platform that destroys your privacy, worsens your mental health, and endangers democracies. Much happier since I quit, and no regrets at all. Talking to friends and family face to face or through text is way better.
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Quitting my old toxic, stressful job - I quit working at a top 500 software firm a while back and have been much happier ever since. There was little to no work/life balance, co-workers were extremely antagonistic, the work was amazingly both boring and stressful, and management didn't care about anything. Quit for another job that paid around the same with a much better culture. No regrets.
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Reading books - Books have completely re-shaped my world view, and I would be much worse off without them. Here is my list:
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"The Better Angels of Our Nature," "Enlightenment Now," and "Factfulness" by Steven Pinker (first two) and Hans Rosling (last). The world is improving overall, not getting worse like the media makes it seem. Reading the facts convinced me it is logical to be an optimist.
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"Ultralearning" by Scott Young and "A Mind for Numbers" by Barbara Oakley. Two books that teach the science of efficient learning. These books helped me understand the best strategies for long-term knowledge retention. Every public school in the world should be teaching the concepts in these books.
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"The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing," "The Millionaire Next Door," and "Your Money or your Life," by Taylor Larimor, Cotter Smithand, and Vicki Robin (in that order). As well as various FIRE blogs. These books helped me learn the basics of personal finance, investing, and early retirement. Previously I thought that working until you die was an unavoidable fact of life. Reading about FIRE and smart money management made me question that assumption, and freed me from the shackles of corporate nonsense.
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I'm interested in hearing what other people have to say. Give me what you've got.
What are some of the things you got out of those investment/finance books? I'm curious as to whether they would be helpful for me.
I always thought those books were the basic stuff you would already know.
Thanks!
Not OP, but I'm a big fan of the Boglehead's Guide.
John Bogle was the founder of Vanguard and was one of the key figures in promoting index funds and low cost investing. This book covers his investing philosophy in an easy to understand manner.
To tl;dr the book, buy 1 total market , 1 total bond, and 1 total international index fund. That gets you a weighted piece of everything. There is no picking winners, you are picking EVERYTHING.
This will give you an AVERAGE return every year with no need for you to do any trading. Why do you want average instead of the best? Because no one can predict what will be best, but 75% of all funds perform LESS THAN AVERAGE.
It greatly simplifies investing with results you can verify yourself, and it takes almost so the stress out of investing so you actually do it and stick with it, and the quantity of time your money spends invested without touching it is what gets you the positive return on investment.
The book is about 300 pages, so this is obviously simplified. If you'd like a longer but still quick explanation check out the Bogleheads forum wiki.