Full disclosure: Yes, those are big, scary, AFFILIATE links. That doesn’t mean I’m pushing a crap product at you – I really believe in the e-book. But knowing psychology, it probably slightly influences how much I point out the negatives. Then again, there’s that ridiculous 365-day money back guarantee they offer. Anyway, on to the review…
When I first found out that Tim Brownson (one of my favorite bloggers) and John P. Strelecky (one of my favorite book authors) were going to co-write a personal development book, I was more excited than a mouse who just found a chock-full room for storing cheese.
So when Tim offered me a copy for review on my blog, I snatched up the offer faster than you could say antidisestablishmentarianism. And despite my high expectations, I was still blown away by the content!
I’ve read probably two dozen personal development books before this one, so I thought nothing much new would come out of this. I was just expecting a very clear, humorous, concise rehash of everything I know.
I was spot on with the “clear, humorous, concise” bit. But boy, was I wrong about the “rehash” part!
Sure, the book covers a lot of good concepts I know already, and often stress on my blog. For example – just reading a book by itself won’t change your life for the better, you have to take action as well.
But there were a LOT of new concepts to me too, or some old things explained in a way that finally made them click on a deep level. And despite the cheesy title, it’s a cool an fun book!
In the book, you will learn:
- how to find out your core values (I’ve never seen this explained even half as clearly. You can really see Tim has years of life coaching experience.)
- how to tackle any negative beliefs about money that are keeping you poor
- why doing less often means getting more done
- why be a quitter
- how to calculate the Rich and Happy return of things you spend your money on (this was completely new to me, and pretty damn awesome!)
- and a ton more!
At over 200 pages, separated into 31 chapters, the book covers a ton of ground. And yet I haven’t found a single page of fluff! It’s all pure content.
Overall, the book is very well written. It has short, easy-to-read chapters, and combines the best of John’s storytelling and clear concise style with Tim’s humorous writing. And, of course, the combined knowledge of the two guys!
It’s an e-book download, so you could buy a copy and be reading it literally 5 minutes from now.
The book costs $97 $47. (Update: Tim decided to drop the price to $47, because apparently people couldn’t wrap their minds around paying almost 100 bucks for a book. To be honest, I’m more comfortable with a $47 price tag too!) Yes, that sounds like a lot of money if you think about it as an entertainment spending.
Except it’s not an entertainment spending. It’s an investment. And by investment standards, it’s dirt-cheap. You’ll get your money back many times over just by following the money bits of the book. And then you get all the happiness bits of the book on top of that! (In truth, the two go hand in hand, but you’ll find out more about that in the book.)
On top of that, it’s a risk-free investment! Why? Because you get a 365-day money back guarantee! That’s right, you buy the book, and then get 365 days to decide if it was worth your money. If you decide it wasn’t, you can simply ask for your money back (you don’t need to give a reason), and you get it. Hassle-free.
In fact, if I was in the authors’ place, I would go a step beyond that. The book is so awesome, I would quite happily ask you to ask for you money back if you feel you didn’t get at least 10 times as much value from the book as you paid for it. Seriously.
You can get more info (as well as real people’s experiences of the book) right here: How to Be Rich and Happy. Go on, grab your copy now.
And six months from now, when you wake up in the morning with a big smile on your face, looking forward to making money doing something you absolutely love, and then spending the afternoon and evening doing whatever you want, you will think back to this moment, and realize buying this book was one of the best decisions you ever made.
Have a great day, and whether or not you decide to get a copy of How to Be Rich and Happy, I will be back with you on Saturday. Ciao!
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Vlad, I think your advice is great and really enjoy your blog, but $97 for a 200 page book? Wow. Yeah it comes with some other books, but seriously, that is hugely overpriced. Book publishing costs have dropped significantly over the years and I just don’t see any kind of justification for charging that much for an advice book.
@Anon:
It’s not about how much it costs to make… it’s about how much value it brings to you.
Let’s say you bought a book on investment advice that brought you $10,000 in the first year. Then paying $5,000 for it (even if it was just 20 pages long) would be a good idea.
How much would How to Be Rich and Happy worth to you? If you do all the exercises that come every few chapters, you will get far more value than $97. Thus the price is worth it. If you’re hoping a book will magically make you rich and happy without you doing anything, then no, it won’t be worth $97 to you. On the positive note, the exercises are pretty easy if you’re serious about becoming Rich and Happy.
I hope that makes sense.
Either it’s a darn good book or it’s a scam and Vlad’s in on it. I decided to take the risk and give it a try. Guess I could give a few opinions on it once I’ve got further through it.
@Shadowart:
Awesome! Let me know what you think of the book once you get through it
I have never heard of these people but I read several good reviews from bloggers I respect (including yours) and so bought it.
As a book it’s amazing. Really top notch. There was little new content for me, but that’s because I’ve read so many like books. It’s the best book for marshaling all the content together.
At least I now know someone has written the book I wanted to write!
@David:
Glad you liked the book!
I like the bits where it explained old concepts I already sort of understood in a new way that just made them really click. Like the Rich and Happy Matrix, or calculating the Rich and Happy Return on things. (Some time ago I read a programmer arguing that you really should spend that extra money in a high-quality chair if you spend a lot of time at your computer. I sort of intuitively knew he was right, but the Rich and Happy Return calculations finally got me to understand why.)
“Let’s say you bought a book on investment advice that brought you $10,000 in the first year. Then paying $5,000 for it (even if it was just 20 pages long) would be a good idea.”
That’s exactly the kind of crap justification you see from people trying to sell products WAY over cost. Look up the marketing blurbs for all the get rich quick schemes you see on late night commercials and this is exactly the line they feed you. I don’t believe Vlad is in on any kind of scam and that he genuinely thinks there’s good advice in the book. And based on his blog, I do believe there’s probably some good advice in it. However, I also believe the author of this book is seriously out of his mind charging that much. I don’t care how much “value” you think you can get out of it, that’s an outrageous cost.
Actually , if there was nowhere else you could get that advice for cheaper (or derive it) and if the return was guaranteed it would be worth it.
The important point is to ask, whether the advice comes from a good place – because one thing i might imagine is tip #1 write a book on how to get rich and sell it for 75$ !
That is the main problem with the TV schemes – they are so expensive because they suck so the person has a limited amount of time before it bursts, and a limited amount of credulous idiots.
Currently it would be a good idea to see whether someone has actually gotten the return money back – i think it might be a ‘scam’ in the way that the person for whom it fails will often kind of either assume that it is his fault, and try further , or will refuse to admit failure, in both cases returning nothing. So the return book rate will be a small percentage of failure rates, and that is why they can afford such a scheme, except that it is a scam.
It’s a good book if you haven’t read a lot on the subject already. If you have it will mostly be old stuff from new angles. Meaning you might have figured it out yourself already, or you’ll get ‘darn I knew this, but why haven’t I thought about it like this before?’ experiences.
The book preaches a pretty selfish world view. I think that’s really awesome. Reminds me of reading “The Fountainhead”.
I think they authors are good at explaining things but there are too many anecdotes about someone’s personal story for my taste (most of them are pretty similar).
Alas the price helped grabbing my attention while I read. Had I gotten the book from thePirateBay I’d probably not given each idea as much thought as I did, which do make the ideas presented within more helpful. Sadly it also makes me more likely to defend them afterwards. Vlad’s got an interesting article on the phenomena; “The Curse of Being Free”.
So here I am, arguing that the book is well worth the $97 price tag…
and then Tim decides to drop the price to $47. Seems like Anonymous here was just expressing what a lot of others thought. $97 feels like a lot for a book that you can’t put a dollar value on, so a lot of interested people were turned off by the price tag.
tl;dr: How to Be Rich and Happy now costs only $47. Knock yourself out!