These Rules Make It Impossible To Fail In Life

Jack Canfield struck gold as a co-author of the best-selling Chicken Soup for the Soul book series, but it took years for him to achieve success. In The Success Principles, he details 67 principles to help anyone achieve their goals and dreams, based on his study and interviews with hundreds of successful people. The basic formula for success is to identify what you want, know that you deserve to have it, and use the book’s principles to get you there.

The book's Principles include taking responsibility for your life, setting goals and visualizing success, facing your fears, forgiving others so you can move forward, asking for and graciously receiving feedback, and appreciating your successes.

People who succeed in sales have high incomes and job security. However, while many people enter the profession, only a few succeed. In fact, of every 100 salespeople, just four of them will earn as much as all the rest combined. In The Psychology of Selling, bestselling author and management consultant Brian Tracy explains how you can become one of those top salespeople by understanding how your customers think. He walks you through basic and advanced selling techniques, demonstrating how you can dramatically increase your sales success by improving your skills just a little bit on a consistent basis.

Robert Kiyosaki wants you to forget the traditional path from college to a good job to a stable retirement, because it doesn’t exist anymore. In his first follow-up to the international bestseller Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Kiyosaki implores you to make your money the way the rich do: by developing assets. Using the simple concept of “Cashflow Quadrants,” Kiyosaki teaches you which types of income lead to financial freedom, and which don’t.

Combining contrarian financial advice and the blunt persona that built his brand, Kiyosaki puts both your wallet and your mind on the path to wealth. In our guide, we compare Kiyosaki’s advice with conventional wisdom and expand on his tips for succeeding in business and investing.

In Money: Master the Game, motivational speaker and life coach Tony Robbins argues that anyone can master money, achieve financial well-being, and create their dream lifestyle. In Robbins’ view, to master money means building an investing strategy that yields passive income for life and gives you the choice of when, where, and whether to continue working. Conversely, neglecting to master money means that you’ll always need to trade your time for money.

Our guide unpacks Robbins’s approach to changing your money mindset and financial strategy, and we contrast it with popular approaches to financial independence such as Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) and Early Retirement Extreme (ERE).

To the outsider, the world of investing can seem daunting to enter—if not outright impossible. But according to investment professional Howard Marks, anyone can learn the basics needed to invest successfully.

In his 2011 book The Most Important Thing, Marks outlines the key tenets of his approach to investing. He argues that the best approach for investors is value investing, which involves determining securities’ intrinsic value and purchasing below it. To practice it successfully, you must learn the nature of market cycles to find opportunities for purchasing mispriced securities, while also learning how to mitigate the risk entailed by investing.

In this guide, we’ll outline the fundamentals of value investing, discuss market cycles and how they’re useful to the value investor, and analyze the common mistakes that often leave investors exposed to unnecessary risk. Throughout the guide, we’ll also examine recommendations from other investors that supplement—and occasionally challenge—Marks’s investing wisdom.

A massive bestseller now in its 13th edition, Burton Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street provides a comprehensive and entertaining introduction to the world of finance. Malkiel leverages his experience as an academic economist and former Wall Street portfolio manager to explain for the lay reader the intricacies of security analysis, asset valuation, and investment theory. He also offers a wealth of practical investment principles that will be useful for novice and seasoned investors alike.

In Unscripted, MJ DeMarco—entrepreneur, investor, and best-selling author of The Millionaire Fastlane—insists that there’s only one way to achieve financial success: Adopt an entrepreneurial mindset.

He claims that most people don’t practice this mindset and can’t achieve financial success because they have unproductive beliefs about money that dissuade them from pursuing an entrepreneurial path. However, he argues that though these beliefs are pervasive, they’re surmountable: You can remove their influence, cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset, and achieve your financial goals.

This guide walks you through DeMarco’s advice for cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset and achieving financial success, covering:

• How beliefs about money fall into one of three financial mindsets—each influencing how you manage your finances and the amount of wealth you accumulate
• Eight unproductive beliefs about money that prevent you from achieving the wealth that you want
• Actionable ways to remove the influence of unproductive beliefs and adopt an entrepreneurial mindset

Additionally, we’ll supplement DeMarco’s ideas with psychological research and practical advice from financial advisors and successful entrepreneurs.