Book Review: The Simple Dollar: How One Man Wiped Out His Debts and Achieved the Life of His Dreams

"The Simple Dollar: How One Man Wiped Out His Debts and Achieved the Life of His Dreams" was written by one of my favorite bloggers, Trent Hamn from The Simple Dollar. I really like this book because it explains how each concept fits into the grand scheme of living a happy life. In addition to explaining why each concept is important, He gives you specific actions to effectively complete each step of the book.

Chapter 1: Prison Made of Plastic – The opening chapter starts the book off by addressing some key points when beginning to plan your escape from debt. This includes explaining why it isn't a good idea to borrow money from friends and family, even to pay off high interest debt. “Do you love the businesses you owe money to? Do you enjoy the bills they send you, requesting money? Is that a dynamic you want to add to your relationship with your friend or loved one?”

Chapter 2: Whats Missing? - Happiness does not revolve around financial success. One way to start figuring out what really makes you happy is by starting a happiness journal. Keep a notebook with you and jot down any moments throughout the day where you feel truly happy. After a few weeks, you'll begin to piece together what really matters to you, the first step towards the overall goal of this book. Creating a way for you to live your ideal lifestyle.

Chapter 3: A Visit From the Black Swan – It's surprising how much of an impact building an emergency fund can have on non financial aspects of your life. Having enough savings allows you to be more confident and adventurous in the workplace without the fear of losing your job. This same emergency fund takes all the risk out of any opportunities that may come your way, until you eventually find yourself doing exactly what you want in life.

Chapter 4: The Power of Goals in a Random World – A study by Dr. Gail Mathews compared the goal completion rate of people who write down goals to people who don't. He found that simply writing down your goals leads to an increase of 42% in achieved goals compared to people who don't. This number jumps to 72% when written progress reports are used on a regular basis.

Chapter 5: Running to Stand Still – A common problem people have is running in place. For all the effort you might put in everyday, you aren't making any progress towards the life we really want. You get a second job for your children, but aren't there to spend time with them. You'll work overtime to afford a spacious house, but aren't home to enjoy it. These are all more reasons it's so important to spend on what you really appreciate, skip on the rest to build that emergency fund, and take advantage of that dream opportunity when it comes along.

Chapter 6: With or Without You – Staying involved and creating long lasting relationships is one of the most effective uses of your time. The community you build around yourself will return far more that the amount of effort you put in. The important thing to remember here is that you need to help others as much as you can, and connect people with others who can help them, rather than trying to keep them to yourself.

Chapter 7: Minding the Gap – The gap is just the difference between your income and amount needed for necessities such as housing, transportation, and food. Minding the gap just means that this gap is your key to reaching your core values and goals you've found back in chapter 3. So use it as a path to the things on the top of your happiness list, rather than things that didn't even make the cut.

Chapter 8: Frugality as a Framework – Cheap people focus on retaining as much money for themselves as possible. Frugal people are happy to spend money on something that is inline with their core values, but try to minimize spending on anything else. “Frugality is an exchange: You’re trading the things you don’t value for things that you do value.”

Chapter 9: Cultivating People and Opportunities – Do your friends put down others and feel better about themselves when others fail, or do they encourage others, and improve the people around them. You'll want to minimize negative relationships in your life, and increase the amount of positive ones.

Chapter 10: The New Career Rules – In previous generations, your loyalty stood with the company you worked for. With Today's economic trouble and quick employee turnover, it is much more beneficial to build trust and loyalty with your peers. Participate in forums where you can share ideas and opportunities, advise new co-workers on how to fit in and get ahead, and help your peers to reach their goals. Thanks to your participation, this community will be there for you when you need it most.

Chapter 11: Life Design, Building Something New - “buying an expensive home that pushes what you can afford, constantly striving to keep up with the affluence of others, working a job that you can’t even consider leaving because the pay is just too good.” Use goals to pull yourself out of this broken cycle.

Chapter 12: Managing the Gap – Use your gap to build up a savings that can eventually fund your dream job. These savings should be enough to pay the difference between what you can make following your passion, and your living expenses.

Chapter 13: The Personal, Financial Boundary – Prevent financial mistakes from hurting your personal relationships. If someone you care about owes you money, forgive this debt right now before it can do any more damage, If you want to help a friend by lending them money, make it a one time gift, have no expectation of being paid back. Never borrow from friends or family yourself. These are good tips from keeping that lender-borrower relationship, along with all the negativity that goes with it, out of your personal life.

Chapter 14: Recasting Retirement – Retirement no longer means sitting at home with nothing to do. People nearing retirement age have a lot of experience and skills built up over the years that they can offer. Use your retirement savings as a vehicle to do something that is personally fulfilling, but may not be financially lucrative.

Chapter 15: The New Path to Adulthood – The traditional path to a good career involved excellent grades in high school with loads of AP courses and extra curricular activities. Then a great SAT score to get into a great University leading up to a great job. Today however, the world requires a much wider skill set than can be found in a classroom setting alone.

Chapter 16: The Power of Giving - “You can start by simply encouraging others. Give positive feedback when people contribute to the community. Speak up when a positive voice is really needed. Act energetic and enthusiastic about the things you care about. Your positive attitude can spur others on to actions beyond what you could ever provide to the community, and that is a truly powerful gift, indeed.”

Chapter 17: Holding You Back – Stop making grand pronouncements about all the great things you are going to accomplish, only to find yourself overwhelmed and defeated before you even start. Instead, focus on small behaviors you can change today. Chain together enough days of doing this and it becomes normal. You'll have accomplished your goal piece by piece without all the grand fuss and hoopla.

Chapter 18: Original of the Species - “Money is nothing more than a tool with which you can create the life you truly want.” The hard part is identifying what you truly want, and making the change to get there. You won't get different results from repeating the same experiment, and you can't get any closer to your dream life if you're too scared to to make a change.

Chapter 19: 11 O'Clock Tick Tock – Review: The most important thing about personal finance is knowing yourself, the second most important thing is setting concrete goals, the world is a random place, the most valuable thing in the world is time, the more supportive people you have in your life, the better, the fewer unsupportive people in your life, the better, blaming others for your problems is a dead end, improve and educate yourself, karma always comes around, there are very few aspects of your life that can't be changed.  

Book Review: Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time

Before I dive into my review of this book, I have a confession, the reason I picked this book up was because of the title. As you already know, I am slightly introverted and enjoy reading about people with similar experiences to mine, and how they deal with it. When I saw the title, “Never Eat Alone”, I thought to myself, “wow I would love to never eat alone again.” So if you made the same mistake as me, this is just a warning that it may not be exactly what you thought it was. While this book does have some nice tips on establishing strong relationships, the real focus is on networking in your professional life. You can also see a list of other books I've reviewed on the “Book Reviews” page of this blog.

Section One: The Mind-Set

Most professionals have had to reach out for help to get a job interview, an internship, or some free advice at some point in their career. But many others are reluctant to ask for this help because of the negative connotations we attach to the idea of networking. Keith talks about many of the misperceptions we have about networking, and describes how we can build these relationships properly. His main argument is that you shouldn't be looking for how others can help you, instead you should be looking for how you can help them.

Your “Blue Flame” is where your natural talents and abilities intersects with your passion and desire. Finding this blue flame is the key to a successful career. After identifying your career path, you need some tools you can use to reach these new goals. The main tool Kieth uses to reach these goals is the “Networking Action Plan”. The first part of this plan is identifying incremental goals that will help you to eventually reach your end objective. Then identify the people that will help you reach these goals. The third and most important part of this plan, is to determine how to reach out to these people for guidance.

The biggest take away from this section for me, is that the wrong way to network is to start reaching out to others when you need something. Instead, you can build real relationships with people you genuinely care about, doing everything you can to help them succeed before you need anything at all. Your success depends on everyone around you, not just the people above you.

Section Two: The Skill Set

So now you have the right mind set, and all you need to know is how to execute properly. This section is the important part for people like me (people who have trouble with small talk). Keith covers some great tips on how to connect with people in a short amount of time, and how to turn this into a long lasting friendship.

“Friendship is created out of the quality of time spent between two people, not the quantity.” How can you make sure the short amount of time you get with to spend with someone is of the highest quality? Research! It's okay to google someone you know you're going to meet. It's actually something you two can laugh about when you do meet. Good preparation makes it easier to find things to talk about, places to go, and activities to do with each other.

The most interesting suggestion from this section was to always let your guard down. Carrying polite, formal small talk with someone you just met leads to a boring and forgettable experience. Don't be afraid to expose your interests, concerns, and passions. The more personal the better, whats the worst that can happen?

Other than offering some specific techniques for achieving the memorable encounters described above, Keith also covers how to: warm cold calling, the importance of gate keepers, follow up properly, approach conferences the right way, how to expand your circle of friends, and the importance of doing so.

Section Three: Turning Connections into Compatriots

This section was my least favorite of the entire book, because the topics included in this section remind me of why I personally have a negative attitude towards professional networking. I can see the importance of “value pinging” (ex. sending a contact a helpful article), or mixing your friends through dinner parties. But it still sounds like finding a way to keep in contact with people you don't really care about, just for the sake of keeping them as contacts.

One positive I did take away from this section was the idea of social arbitrage. Social arbitrage is a formal way of describing something most of us already do, helping others around us to succeed. You can do this by introducing a friend to someone you know can help them reach a goal, or even just by doing some research yourself and sending some of that knowledge to someone you know it will help.

“What better way is there to show appreciation and to lavish praise on others than to take an interest in who they are and what their mission is?”

Section Four: Trading Up and Giving Back

The theme of this section is this: when you do finally make it, remember where you came from, remember who helped get you there, and don't get too full of yourself. Keith tells a beautiful story of his experience in this area where he admits he had to learn these lessons the hard way.

The section starts off with how to build your brand. In order to stand out, you should find yourself a niche. Some area that combines your passions and skills to the point where you can call yourself an expert. When you finally do find it, put your shyness aside and market it like crazy. The key here is to focus on building the natural skills and talents you are already strong with, rather than focusing on your weaknesses. Find clubs where you can work on these skills, if there are none, start your own!

When you have the opportunity to move up, remember to help others move with and before you. The most valuable connections are the ones you already have. When you are a leader, you have to make the people under you feel like they are working with you, or you won't be able to move up. Remember all the people who've helped you get there and do the same for others just starting out.

Book Review: Oh, The Humanity! A Gentle Guide to Social Interaction for the Feeble Young Introvert

I am an introvert. And like most other introverts, I sometimes find it hard to survive in a world that seems to cater to the all mighty extrovert. As a result, I'm always on the lookout for good books on how to make things a little easier on myself. Flipping through Jason Roeder's, “Oh, The Humanity!”, I thought it might be useful to read, so I gave it a shot.  You can also see a list of other books I've reviewed on the “Book Reviews” of the site.

Part One: Essential Qualities You Lack

Confidence - Confidence doesn't necessarily mean acting without fear. If you had no fears, you wouldn't need confidence. Confidence, according to Jason, is taking action despite that fear. Jason touches on some tips for improving your confidence. My favorite tip from this section is keeping a pride journal. This is done by jotting down any small accomplishment, or maybe a small compliment someone gave you that day. Then, when you're feeling like you can't do anything right, you have this entire journal you can flip through to get back up and going again. Other tips include: Changing your inner monologue, taming your self consciousness, looking like you matter, and changing your environment.

Humor - Nothing can win people over faster or more easily than humor. This chapter guides you through some of the rules for using humor and, “harnessing your inner Wayans Brother.”

Curiosity - Everyone wants their thoughts and feelings validated just as much as you do. If you want others to be interested in you, then you're going to have to return the favor, because everyone else is just as self-centered as you are. The best way to get people interested in you, is to be genuinely interested in them.

Empathy - If you want to be the kind of person that a friend can go to and open up about private matters, you need to be able to put yourself in the other persons shoes. Some of these empathy rules include, not judging the other person, keeping the focus on them, and facilitating an appropriate environment.

Part Two: Conversation for People Who'd Rather Be Home Fondling Their Record Collections, Kniting Berets for Pets They May or May Not Actually Have, or Just Sitting in a Dark Room, Dreaming of an Even Darker Room

Small Talk - This topic is by far the most interesting for me personally, as I have the most difficulty with this in my own life. Jason does a nice job here explaining how easy it is to find shared interests and experiences that make for comfortable small talk, when using personal and situational observations. He also includes several nice tips on extending these starter topics into the types of conversations you can make friends with.

Difficult People and Topics - This chapter seems silly at first, with tips such as using hunger or restroom urges to excuse yourself from painful conversations. However, politely exiting yourself from controversial conversation or difficult people is definitely a good skill to have. This chapter offers some help with how to navigate through these difficult conversations and people.

Nonverbal Communication - Everyone knows that verbal communication is only part of the equation when it comes to how you express yourself. In fact, your body language can communicate as much, or even more than what you're speaking with your mouth. Following Jason's hints on smiling, eye contact, nodding, posture, and physical contact, should bring you a step closer to a relaxed, friendly and genuine first impression.

Effective Cross-Cultural Communication - Jason makes a great point here that not everyone you meet will come from the same culture or ethnic background as you. This chapter offers some tips on how to use some extra caution when dealing with cross-cultural communication, as well as some common values and customs that vary with ethnic diversity.

Part Three: Making Friends That Last a Lifetime (Or Until Things Just Kind of Drift)

How Do I Know If Someone's My Friend - A friend is someone who puts up with your flaws. A friend encourages you. A friend is honest with you. A friend is someone you can confide in. A friend is fun. A friend will happily drown for you.

Where Will I Find My Friends? - I had never really thought about this question until reading this chapter because up until now, I've always had plenty of opportunities to make friends in school with classes, intramural sports, clubs and other events. Once I graduate however, I will no longer have such easy access to making friends. Jason offers some great tips on how to go out and meet people. My favorite of these tips is joining an adult education class or volunteering. This way, you already know you have at least one common interest to talk about with everyone around you.

Will You Be My Friend? - This isn't my top choice on the topic, but overall, this is nice short, and to the point book, with plenty of tips getting you started with overcoming shyness or introversion. There is plenty of humor throughout the book keeping it fun and easy to get through in one sitting.   

Book Review: .NET Book Zero

I read through this book in preparation for my resolution of writing applications for Windows Phone 7 devices. This book is a great starting point for anyone looking to get involved with .NET or Silverlight programming. .NET BOOK ZERO started out as an introduction chapter to .NET, trying to cover some of the key differences between C++ and C#. However, it soon became obvious that this single chapter was trying to cover too much and turned into an entire book of it's own, going over the very fine details of objects and structures, to string manipulation and nullable types.  You can also see a list of other books I've reviewed on the “Book Reviews” of the site.

Chapter 1: Why This Book – The latest version of this book is available for download free of charge at www.charlespetzold.com.

Chapter 2: Why .NET? - This chapter reviews the basic requirements of .NET programming including CIL and CLR. The first important difference between c++ and c# is pointed out right off the bat: no pointers!

Chapter 3: Runtimes and SDKs -You'll need the .NET runtime components and SDK (available here) in order to program and run .NET application. .NET namespace, class structure, and api documentation are available here.

Chapter 4: Edit, Compile, Run, Disassemble – This chapter takes a look at how namespaces are used to organize code, and the syntax used in method calls. The chapter continues to go over where namespaces fit into the compilation process.

Chapter 5: Strings and the Console – This chapter introduces the concept of static vs instance methods while reviewing the strings class.

Chapter 6: Primitive Data Types – C# supports short, int, and long integers just like C++. C# also supports boolean, character, string, floating point, double and decimal value types. Many of these data types can be used with the Math class.

Chapter 7: Operators and Expressions – Primary, unary, multiplicative, shift, relational, equality, logical, conditional, and assignment operators are discussed in this chapter.

Chapter 8: Selection and Iteration – C# supports the same selection, iteration, and flow control statements used in C++, with some restrictions. These restrictions are intended to help you avoid common coding mistakes.

Chapter 9: The Stack and the Heap – One of the most helpful chapters in this book. This chapter covers key differences between structures and classes, including what these differences mean during memory allocation, along with very clear explanations of the stack and heap.

Chapter 10: Arrays – One of the less useful chapters in the book. We go over multiple ways of initializing and filling arrays, including multi-dimensional arrays. If you have any experience with c++ you can completely skip this chapter.

Chapter 11: Methods and Fields - Most of this chapter goes over syntax of defining methods and fields. There are some notes of interest in this chapter as well. This chapter introduces c#'s alternative to using pointers by taking a deeper dive into the differences between classes and structures, and what these differences mean during the parameter passing process in c#.

Chapter 12: Exception Handling – A very short and concise review of structures of exception handling including try(), catch() and throw().

Chapter 13: Classes Structures and Objects – This chapter re-visits classes and structures, while adding some new concepts as well. The bulk of this chapter is spent on how memory is allocated on the stack and heap for different data types, and what this means for efficiency.

Chapter 14: Instance Methods – Any instance method in a class has access to the instance fields of that class. This greatly simplifies code by reducing parameters that need to be passed between functions. Instance methods can also call any other instance method, static method, or static fields of it's class. A static method has access to none of these.

Chapter 15: Constructors – This chapter goes over basic syntax for creating a constructor. All classes have a default parameter-less constructor. This constructor is deleted if a constructor is defined by the user and an error is thrown if it is used.

Chapter 16: Concepts of Equality – Every class and structure includes a method named equals. This method is defined by the System.Object class, and inherited by all other classes. This chapter defines what you are actually comparing when you use the equals operator with any class including user defined classes.

Chapter 17: Fields and Properties – In use, properties look and behave just like fields. The major difference is that properties can have code attached to them, which can be used for get and set methods. This makes using properties much cleaner to use in most cases.

Chapter 18: Inheritance – A class can only inherit from one other class, where all non-private fields, properties, and methods are inherited. However, constructors are not inherited. This chapter looks at the order of which constructors are executed from parent to child class.

Chapter 19: Virtuality – getType() and typeOf() are methods that return an object of type Type. This object can be used to determine if two objects are of the same time. Only methods and properties can be declared as virtual.

Chapter 20: Operator Overloading – Any operator can be overloaded to work with a user defined class. These operators include: +, -, !, ~, ++, –, true, false, *, /, %, ==, !=, <, >, <=, >=. This chapter includes syntax for overloading these operators, as well as example use cases.

Chapter 21: Interfaces – Classes can inherit from only one class, however they can inherit an infinite amount of interfaces. A class must include a methods of an interface it is implementing.

Chapter 22: Interoperability – This chapter demonstrates how to use platform invoke, which allows you to use Win32 API functions from your .NET programs.

Chapter 23: Dates and Times – This chapter introduces the DateTime object. Constructor parameters, tick counts, DateTime calculations and TimeSpan are explained throughout this chapter through the DateTime example project. This project is continued throughout the rest of the book.

Chapter 24: Events and Delegates – A delegate is a reference to a method. Handling events across objects is a common use of delegates. An event handler is attached to special delagates called events. These event handlers are called once an event is fired.

Chapter 25: Files and Streams – This chapter takes you through the lowest levels of file input/output with the FileStream class, reading and writing text files with the StreamReader and StreamWriter classes, and finally higher level file reading with the Environment, Path, DirectoryInfo, Directory, FileInfo, and File classes.

Chapter 26: String Theory – All strings in C# are immutable, which means that a string can not be altered once it is created. Instead you must create a new string whenever you need to adjust a string in some way. This chapter covers string manipulation and performance factors when when working with strings.

Chapter 27: Generics – Generics is the C# method for implementing the C++ template. Generics also support defining constraints that restrict the type of object that can be used with your generic.

Chapter 28: Nullable Types – Any value or structure can be made a nullable type. This is useful for defining a way for defining a value as not yet defined.

Summary: If you have a good amount of programming experience, .NET Book Zero definitely has it's share of less interesting material, some of which include data types, arrays and operators. However, I would still strongly recommend this as a starting point for anyone making the jump from C++ or C to C#. The chapters on delegates, properties, and class structures will give you a complete understanding of new concepts with extremely clear and concise explanations and examples. Chapters on stack and heap, differences between structures vs. classes, fields vs. properties, and static vs. instance were like a bonus review that cleared up some concepts that I never completely understood myself. And as a free download available at www.charlespetzold.com, the price can't be beat.