5 best entrepreneurship books to achieve financial independence (Part 3)

In part three of our 15 16 best books to achieve financial independence blog series, we are reviewing the 5 best entrepreneurship books that will change your life.

• Part 1- best personal finance books
• Part 2 – best motivational books
• Part 3 – best entrepreneurship books

The Miracle Morning By: Hal Elrod

If you are in need of inspiration, this is the book you need to read now. Most people complain about how they don’t have enough hours in the day to accomplish their goals. Hal Elrod’s theory is that everyone has the same amount of time and the people who are successful are the ones that use every minute to their advantage. And he’s specifically talking about making over your mornings.

Elrod uses this book to teach you how to change your life by waking up differently, using your mornings more effectively, and creating a structure that works so that you are using your time wisely to get the results in life that you want. If you’re interested in transforming your life one morning at a time, you’ll want to start with this book.
Hal Elrod had a life-altering event happen when he was 20. He was hit head-on by a drunk driver and was dead for six minutes. When he was revived, doctors gave him a very poor prognosis, including permanent brain damage and never being able to walk again. Hal not only beat the odds, he wildly surpassed them. He has gone on to be an ultra-marathon runner, a keynote speaker, an author, husband, father, podcast creator, and Hall of Fame businessperson.

He maintains that the secret to his success is how he uses his mornings. He has taken that idea and created a method to teach readers how to transform their own mornings for maximum success in their own lives. This book is about how we aren’t ever guaranteed tomorrow, so we have to make the most of all of the time that we have today in order to achieve our greatest level of success.

In the book, which is called “magical” by real estate guru Robert Kiyosaki, Elrod teaches readers how to use their early morning hours most effectively. With chapters like “Wake Up to Your Full Potential,” “6-Minute Miracle Morning,” and a “Transformation Challenge,” you will be taught everything you need to know about how to makeover those first minutes and hours of your day. You will learn how to cut back on your procrastination and buckle down to work harder in every minute you have.

By using your time wisely, Elrod is teaching you to get the most out of your life. So while this is definitely a great book for people looking for better time management skills, it’s also for people who are genuinely searching for a way to get more meaning and life into the time that they have.

How the book helped to achieve financial independence:

I was so moved by Hal Elrod’s personal story and what he has had to overcome in his life to become as successful as he is. When I read this book, I thought it was full of ways to help me experience transformation in my own life too, without having to go through the same hardships that Elrod did.

The section that resonated most with me was the one on “S.A.V.E.R.S.,” which is an acronym for the things that you need to do in the morning to transform your time. I personally practice them all, but spend the most time in affirmations and visualizations, telling myself that I can do the hard things to make my dreams come true and then visualizing my changed life. Because I apply the principles of this book, my life is changing. I know that yours will too.

Will It Fly? How to Test Your Next Business Idea So You Don’t Waste Your Time or Money By: Pat Flynn

Everyone is looking for the next great and lucrative idea in the business world. The problem is that not every idea is destined to be a money-making success. How do you tell the good ones from the bad ones? How do you know which ideas to invest in and which to let go? You start by reading this book.

If you’ve ever watched the popular TV show “Shark Tank,” you’re already aware that the valuation of your business idea (in other words, what you can prove it’s worth) is one of the most important questions you need to answer. “Will It Fly” teaches you how to examine your great business idea so that you know what value to put on it – and if it has value at all.

Flynn wants you take a step back before you jump into launching your idea and really examine it thoroughly from several perspectives, and he’ll teach you how to do it. He wants to show you how to examine the market you’re trying to break into, learn to evaluate if the idea has legs, and how to determine if it’s right for you. This book is a comprehensive look at the examination and valuation of a business idea to make sure it’s a good fit all around. There are plenty of books out there that teach you how to launch your business. “Will It Fly” helps save you time, money, and effort by determining whether you should launch it at all.

Pat Flynn is a recognized leader in the business world. He has built a successful career as an entrepreneur with a hugely successful podcast. He found his passion to help others after he lost his job when the economy took a downturn.

What he wants to teach you is how to use the same skills that he did in order to become a successful businessperson on your own. You will learn Flynn’s five steps to determining whether your idea is a good one – and how to get it ready to fly:

• Mission Design (does your idea align with your business goals)
• Development Lab (have you really thought of everything that your business would need to succeed?)
• Flight Planning (what’s the market like into which you want to launch your business?)
• Flight Simulator (testing out your great idea before launching it to the public)
• All Systems Go (last look and analysis of everything you’ll need to have in place before your big launch)

With so much to learn, you’d better get started reading!

How the book helped to achieve financial independence:

I met Pat Flynn at a conference in San Diego and found him to be just as credible and knowledgeable in person as he is in his books. I was privileged – and really excited to serve on the launch team for this book before it came out.

The book is geared towards educating everyone on what passive income is and how you can make a smart choice on how you choose to make your passive income. Do you want to invest in real estate? Create a product to sell? Teach a class on something that you are an expert at and then market it to people online? Whichever way you decide to go, Flynn will walk you through the exact steps to take to ensure that your strategy or product is the right one for you and help you to determine if it will be profitable.

The most important thing that I learned from this book is to focus on what is most important to me as I work on creating passive income. Why am I doing this? Why am I working so hard to earn extra money? Flynn encourages readers of this book to actually get out a pen and paper, and physically write down the things that are most important to them. That way, readers who are embarking on the journey towards passive income can always keep their goals in mind.

How to Win Friends and Influence People By: Dale Carnegie

This book was first published in 1936. The first question on your mind is likely, “Why should I have a book that is more than 80 years old on my ‘must read’ list?”

Well it’s a classic. It has sold 15 million copies since its publication. It has withstood the test of time, which means that the methods written about in its pages are still valid and usable even decades after its publication. Most importantly, this book’s main goal is to teach you how to deal with people. If you are going to be successful in business, a great set of interpersonal skills is something you absolutely must have.

Carnegie divided his book into four parts: how to handle people, how to make them like you, how to win them to your side of an issue, and how to be a leader among people. You can be good at one or two, but until you learn to master all four of these things, you’ll find it very hard to build a successful business.

This book is designed to help any entrepreneur reach his or her full potential. It’s valuable information for wherever you are in the growth of your business, no matter if you’ve just got the beginning of an idea or if you are years into building your business. Before you can reach your maximum potential in the business world or in your personal life, you’ve got to go through the self-improvement process, work on yourself, and learn how to work with people. This book will teach you how to do all of those things well.

Carnegie makes sure his principles are easy to learn and easy to apply. You will learn six ways to get people to like you, twelve strategies for how to convert people to your way of thinking, and nine ways to change other people’s minds without making them angry with you. (That last part is key!) These are invaluable tools that anyone who wants to get ahead in business absolutely needs to have in their toolbox. You’ll learn each of them thoroughly and get examples of how to apply them in your life.

This book has been in print for over 80 years and changed the lives of 15 million people. If it’s still on the bookstore shelves and still casting its spell on readers in the 21^st century, you can be assure that it needs to be on your shelf too.

How the book helped to achieve financial independence:

This book is a classic, and yet I was still amazed by how much I learned from it. Its influence after all these years is astounding. From it, I learned not to be afraid to talk to people about my dreams and goals, and that has changed my life. I’ve always been an extrovert, but I’ve never felt comfortable sharing some of my dreams with others. Reading this book taught me how to do that in a way that engaged people and allowed them to become invested in my goals too.

Because of the skills Carnegie outlined in this book, I had the courage to speak to a co-worker about a goal I had to own more real estate so that I could begin to earn a passive income for myself and my family. He responded positively and even shared that a relative of his had a property for sale that I might be interested in seeing. I went and saw it, I liked it, I bought it, and it became my first real estate investment. I would never have been able to close that deal and start making money had I not had the confidence to talk to my co-worker. Thank you, Dale Carnegie!

The Millionaire Real Estate Investor By: Gary Keller

The reason that you need to read this book can be summed up in three words: fundamentals, fundamentals, and fundamentals. Too many people are too quick to jump on a bandwagon that they think is going to be a get-rich-quick plan for their lives. They envision loads of money coming in with little to no effort on their part. I’m sorry to tell you that the most successful people in business have never earned their money that way. They earned it by understanding the basic fundamentals of deal-making and then applying that to their business ventures.

You need to read this book so that you can get started on the right foot. You need to learn the fundamentals of real estate investment from the people who have been most successful at it, and this is the book that can teach you that.

The three co-authors of this book are all very successful real estate investors. They got together to create the definitive guide on how you can build your wealth. It’s composed of three parts: “Charting the Course” to your success, “The Four Stages” of achieving that success, and “Staying on Top” once you have it.

This book strives to answer all of the most important questions you might have about how to create your business. Among them are:

• How can you tell a good investment from a bad one?
• How can you assemble a team of people to help you build your business?
• How can you make the best possible deals for success both now and in the future?

In short, this dream team of authors has written a book about how it’s possible for anyone to achieve success in real estate investing with diligence and hard work.

This book will teach you the critical things that you need to do in order to be a success in the real estate investment world. As you read through the chapters, you’ll learn, among other things, how the really successful people in life have gotten to where they are by taking luck out of the equation and relying on their skills and knowledge. You’ll learn the “myth-understandings” about what people believe is true and what is not when it comes to real estate investing. And you’ll learn the ways that millionaire investors think, ways that have gotten them to where they are today.

This book will give you all the tools you need to understand how to be a successful investor in real estate. All you’ll need to do is start to apply them.

How the book helped to achieve financial independence:

I learned four incredibly important things from this book:

1. I need to think like a millionaire in order to become one.
2. I need to learn how to acquire good real estate and what the best avenues for purchasing that real estate are.
3. I need to make sure that I own my real estate investments as soon as possible so I’m not losing money to a mortgage.
4. I have the power and capability to make one million dollars annually in passive income.

As you read those four things, don’t get stuck on number four. I’m not there yet. But I’m working towards it and I know that I will get there. Because of the confidence and knowledge that I gained from this book, I worked for and got my real estate license, which means that I am saving a lot of money every time I buy an investment property because I do all the work myself. It’s small steps like this that are helping me to become a smart investor and getting me to my goal.

The One Thing by: Gary Keller, Jay Papasan

More productivity. Less distractions. Is it even possible to achieve one of these things, let alone both of them? Authors Gary Keller (of Keller Williams Realtors) and Jay Papasan say that you definitely can. In fact, this book has been so influential, it’s not just used by individuals looking to achieve balance, it’s used by whole companies, churches, and businesses to help train their employees on how they can each become more focused, and therefore better contributors to their organization’s bottom lines. If it makes that much of a difference in the business world, think about how much of a difference can it make for you!

“The One Thing” been called “part motivational book, part self-help book” by Publisher’s Weekly. It may be a mix of several things, but they all come down to focus and helping you achieve it so that you can succeed in business and in life.

Keller and Papasan want to help you realize that if you are too scattered in your thoughts and actions, trying to do too much and be too much, you are less likely to be able to succeed in any one area, let alone all of them. Instead their theory is that the more successful people are the ones who know what that one thing is that is most important to them, they have focused on it, and they use that focus to drive them to achieving their best results in every part of their lives.

There are three parts to this book. The first breaks down the lies that we tell ourselves and how they can damage us. The second talks about the truth, what we need to believe about ourselves and how to ask yourself the right questions to start to understand the truths about yourself. Finally, there is the part about results, how to change the way that you live in order to get the results that you want in life, both in your business life and your personal life.

Creating balance in your life is a necessary step to take as you begin to form your business and work hard to make it a success. What you’ll learn from this book is how to focus so that maintaining that balance once you’ve created it is a natural and easy part of your life. When you have that focus and balance, you’ll be amazed at how successful your life will become.

How the book helped to achieve financial independence:

“The One Thing” has been transformational for me. I have used the principles in it to set specific and achievable goals that I can already see coming true in my life. The “one thing” that I have chosen to focus on is my goal of being able to substitute my wife’s income with what I make in passive income. I am very close to that goal today and I work on taking concrete steps every single day to make it happen. I have done it by facing and getting past my fears and focusing on meeting my goals step by step.

For example, much of my passive income right now is through my real estate holdings. In the beginning, I was scared to take the steps to buy property, find renters, and be a landlord. Instead of focusing on my fears, I focused on my “one thing” – replacing my wife’s income. That got me going and spurred me on, so I did the work, went to open houses, closed a deal on a house, screened potential renters, secured tenants, and then moved on to do it all over again. The system works for me and it can work for you if you keep your focus on that one thing.

The Armchair Real Estate Millionaire by Michael Dominguez

When you’re working a 9 – 5 and buying property for passive income, risky and overwhelming opportunities can lead to big financial losses and bigger regrets. Real estate should fund your life, not run your life!
In  “ArmchairReal Estate Millionaire“, investor realtor Michael Dominguez provides the roadmap to crafting a portfolio of quality investment properties for positive cash flow. Filled with expert wisdom and a straightforward approach, this is your simple guide to property investment that creates consistent and sustainable wealth and savvy retirement planning — without taking over your life.
In the book, you will learn:

• A predictable property – buying framework that can boost you to millionaire status in just 10 years.
• How to compile a power team of professionals to maximize your investment potential.
• A formula to find the best tenants for you and your houses.
• Tips to increase the resale value of a home with simple upgrades.
• Case studies, insider tips, and lessons from other risk – adverse investors — and much more!