This Year's Holiday Shopping List

The Real Estate Espresso Podcast

This Year’s Holiday Shopping List

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This Year’s Holiday Shopping List

Welcome to the Real Estate Espresso podcast, your morning shot of what’s new in the world of real estate investing. I’m your host, Victor Menasce. On today’s show, we’re taking a look at gifts for Christmas. You might be wondering which books would make a great gift for someone with an entrepreneurial spirit. So, on today’s show, I’m going to share 10 books from my reading list that, I think, would make a great gift this holiday season. So here we go:

Number 10, Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss. This book is a collection of tactics, routines, and habits of billionaires, icons, and world-class performers based on interviews and interactions with over 200 people over the years. It is split up into three sections: healthy, wealthy, and wise. And for those with a short attention span, this book is particularly good because it’s broken down into chapters that are relatively short. They can be consumed in a few minutes, a bedtime reading if that’s all you have time for in a day.

Number nine, How to Make a Few Billion Dollars by Brad Jacobs, is written from a place of authenticity. The title sounds audacious, but the author really did it, and in the book, he describes how he did it repeatedly, once is might be a fluke, but he’s repeated his success, enough times to develop a systematic approach.

Number eight is Principles by Ray Dalio. It’s a compendium of his life lessons. Dalio was chairman of Bridgewater Associates and personally amassed a multi-billion fortune as head of one of the world’s largest hedge funds. Success leaves clues and Ray Dalio is no exception. This is a big book, and frankly, it’s worth the extra shipping weight.

Number seven, Atomic Habits by James Clear, is all about the process of habit formation. It’s about the power of small habits in creating lasting changes in your life. Unlike generic and repetitive motivational books, this book tells you that real change comes from countless small decisions, not motivation. A happy and fulfilling life is not about earning a gazillion dollars, it’s about your daily experience, and it starts with habits.

Number six is a book called Traction by Gina Wickman. It’s a roadmap on how to run a business. It’s in fact the roadmap that we use to run our business at YStreet Capital. I know several businesses, all of whom are using the same entrepreneurial operating system that is advocated in this book to run their companies.

Number five is another book called Rocket Fuel also co-authored by Gina Wickman and Marc Winters. The notion of rocket fuel is that you have two fuels in a rocket to get escape velocity. You have oxygen and maybe hydrogen or methane and together when ignited they create tremendous propulsion. Each of them by themselves does nothing. The analogy is that companies need visionaries and integrators in order to flourish. A study of companies through history shows that in most cases both types of people were present. There was John Rockefeller and Thomas Flagler at Standard Oil. There was Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at Apple. There was Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger at Berkshire Hathaway. You get the idea. If you don’t have both of these folks in your company, someone is playing out of position.

Number four Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi, is a book about relationship building. So many people are out there just networking but not really developing meaningful relationships. This book will transform the way you build relationships. It will create a new lens through which you’ll view the world.

Number three is King. This is a biography of Martin Luther King Jr. by Jonathan Egge. It’s been hailed by New Yorker Magazine, the Washington Post, Time Magazine, and the Chicago Tribune as one of the best books of 2023. It’s a definitive biography of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. It’s also one of the first to rely on recently declassified FBI files, giving greater depth to the narrative of this unique American history. This book is best for those who want to go beyond the “I have a dream” speech. I think all of us have a certain amount of idealism, and this may restore that.

Number two, Day Trading Attention by Gary Vaynerchuk, expands on ideas that have been central to the way Gary Vy looks at the world. He believes that you need to pay attention to where people are looking already. It’s easier to put something in their field of view when someone’s already looking there, rather than trying to draw their attention to where you want them to look. It focuses on understanding where consumers are spending their attention, and how to create engaging content on those channels in order to get customers to spend time and eventually money with you.

Number one is Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s a lovely read on social engineering. This was our book of the month only a few weeks ago on the podcast. It explores the ethics of social engineering, the influence of environment on behavior, and the unintended consequences of tipping points that are central to the book’s exploration of how small changes can have sweeping societal shifts.

So, those are 10 books that could be great gifts for you to give out this holiday season. And one more bonus there is my book Magnetic Capital: How to Raise All the Money You Need for Any Worthy Venture. I wrote this book based on the principles that I learned when raising capital in the tech industry, and then I relearned the process when I moved into real estate. In both processes, I discovered that there were a lot of common themes. In fact, they were almost identical. There are five principles when it comes to successfully raising capital. If all five are present, raising capital is relatively easy. When one or more are missing, then it becomes much more difficult. So those books are my suggestions for your shopping list this year. As you ponder these choices, have an awesome rest of your day. Go make some great things happen, and we’ll talk again tomorrow.