2/5 Star Review: Master Your Emotions, By Thibaut Meurisse

I listened to this as an audiobook on YouTube, I’m pretty sure it was read by AI, which was pretty horrible, but I was determined to make my way through it. I also picked up a free copy on Amazon during a sale.

The author spends most of his time quoting others, and even says if you want to learn more you should go YouTube it. While I don’t think it was intentional, the tone was almost condescending, and there were plenty of groan-worthy moments. The ideas presented were simplistic in nature, so if you’re looking for a quick read (or listen) with basic ideas that you’ve probably already attempted on some scale, then look no further.

It also felt like there was a lot of repetition and confusion within the book. The author says ‘problems don’t exist’ and then also says ‘everybody has problems’. He talks over and over about how emotions are formed, how to be aware, how to let go, and how to deal with negative emotions – and is a bit all over the place with his ‘how to deal’ with aspects.

That being said, the book does have fairly high ratings over on Goodreads, sitting right now at 4.15 with 14,430 ratings. I’m not personally sure what those people saw in the book, but it really wasn’t for me.

2/5 stars

1/5 Stars: IKIGAI The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life (audiobook)

This book was bad. The Western approach to finding a purpose in life was taken from others (with no credit given), and the author interviewed 100 people and tossed a few quotes around and basically called it in. At least the audiobook was short.

1/5 stars.

Review: ‘Millionaire Teacher, The Nine Rules of Wealth You Should have Learned in School’ by Andrew Hallam

Not everything I read is for pure pleasure, though personal development books do tend to fall under that category for me most times since they’re actually a lot of fun. When Cryptocurrency began to gain traction this year and was being talked about all over the place, I decided to look into old school stocks. I’m not always patient, but when it comes to money I’m a fan of slowly putting some away over time until you look back 20 years later and see what has amassed. This book, Millionaire Teacher, looks at something called Index Funds that you can invest in to do just that. Index funds are little bits of all sorts of publicly traded stock. Instead of buying into just one company (that might fail) you buy small bits and pieces of many companies. Some fail, some do well. It boats a 10% return each year, so depending on what you invest, you could gain a fair amount. It takes time, but you don’t have to be a stock market wizard.

The book was great at explaining the ins and outs of this method of making money to me – but the author also spent a whole lot of time talking about things that could have been summed up faster, or just left out all together. I did like the way they explained how to think about money, the information they had about fancy cars, and little useful tidbits here and there.

Do I think it will make me a millionaire? Probably not. I think people who read this book and assume they will get the exact same results need to step back and take a little bit of caution. Sure, if you’ve been investing since you were a child, you can certainly amass a good amount of money over the years – but most of us are well into our 30s or even 40s before we start to suddenly realize that ‘saving money’ each pay is a good thing. I don’t know about everyone else, but in school I didn’t learn anything useful about budgeting, or how to actually function in the real world when it comes to money. It’s something that could have really helped me out.

Overall? I don’t regret spending any time reading this, I learned a lot, and I feel like less of a dunce when it comes to money and investment.

4/5 stars