As a young man fresh out of college, I had no money and no serious job prospects.
Most of my fraternity brothers – who made up my social group at Furman University – had gone on to law school or med school or taken a professional or business management position somewhere.
I was waiting tables six nights a week at a Bennigan’s Tavern in Daytona Beach, Florida.
Despite my inauspicious start, I did have three things going for me: insatiable curiosity, a strong desire to improve my circumstances, and a passion for reading.
That last factor is probably the biggest determinant of the success I’ve experienced professionally, financially, and even personally.
Every time I would take a new job in some new industry, I would look around at my colleagues and think, “You may be smarter than me. You may have more experience than me. You may work harder and longer than me. But you know what? I’ll bet I can out-read you.”
I was like a human sponge, learning everything I could about every job I took, every company I worked for, and every subject that interested me.
Later I even told my kids as they finished up their own college education, “If you aren’t a passionate reader, I don’t think I can help you career-wise. Because that’s how I managed to get ahead everywhere I went.”
Of course, today I’m hooked on generative AI platforms like ChatGPT, Anthropic, Copilot, and Perplexity. The idea that you can ask a chatbot anything you want and have it spit out an instant answer is pretty close to my idea of Heaven on Earth.
(Although those answers need to be confirmed and verified.)
As a young man, I bought every book I could find on personal development, business success, and wealth-building.
I read dozens of them, including everything from old classics like Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie to Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey.
I wore out a yellow highlighter on every one of them. And, after I finished, I would read the highlighted parts again and again.
(That is a habit I started in college and have continued to this day. It still amazes me how much more information you will retain if you a highlight a book and then reread it.)
While driving my beater car, I also listened to motivational cassettes by Earl Nightingale and Zig Ziglar. They weren’t a hit with my passengers, but I didn’t care.
I was earning little and going nowhere yet determined to live some version of the American Dream.
Since I didn’t know anyone who was financially successful themselves – at least not well enough to ask them for advice – I relied on books and tapes to provide me with knowledge and inspiration.
They were all short on specifics, of course. But that was fine because the authors didn’t know what was happening in my life anyway.
I figured that I just needed to take their general principles and apply them to my specific circumstances. And that intuition proved correct.
People often scoff at the Self-Help section of the bookstore, but I don’t know where I’d be today without it.
(There’s also the library, of course, but I wanted to own that knowledge. Plus, libraries don’t look kindly on dedicated highlighters like me.)
I relied on these books because I didn’t have a mentor, a role model, or business and family connections – and I was far too shy to be a networker.
(Not to mention that everybody in my “network” was an inexperienced and financially-challenged young person like me.)
Eventually, I got a real estate license and made a mediocre living with it for five years. Then I got my Series 7 securities license and made a good living with it for 14 years.
Throughout my business career, I continued to read books about personal success and wealth-building strategies, mainly because the people who wrote them seemed to know a lot more about how to get ahead than my colleagues did.
However, it wasn’t until relatively late in my life that I read what I consider to be the best book on personal development ever written.
I’ll discuss that one in my next column.