"The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need" by Andrew Tobias

Andrew Tobias is one of my writing heros. I've been reading him since I was a teenager, beginning with his cheeky first book (it's actually been purged from his bibliography), "Honors Grades on 15 Hours Per Week (How To Keep Studies From Interfering With Your College Education)". The hypothesis was that real growth in college comes from social activities, extracurriculars, and higher-level pondering, rather than firmly implanting quadratic equations and papal lineages (you should learn the equations and lineages well enough to regurgitate them on the exam, but, yeegads, don't, like, master them!).

I took it to heart and graduated in three years (with honors, just like he said), while working a part time job (delivering campus newspapers), playing music gigs in town on the weekends, helping run the campus radio station and science fiction convention, having my heart broken a few times, and learning to drink, smoke pot, play foosball, and pull all-nighters. Tobias' approach worked, and his hypothesis proved true: I got what I needed from college without spending eons hunkering down in the library (my big trick: I wrote term papers so brightly entertaining that grateful profs - normally forced to read turd after soporific turd - would gratefully underweigh my so-so exam grades).

I read everything Tobias wrote after that. It was mostly topics I didn't care about (financial stuff, and, later, gay stuff), but his writing was so clever and satisfying that I sopped up every word.

His magnum opus is "The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need", a book so celebrated that Mark Cuban's superlative blurb ("This is the only investment book I have read that truly makes sense") barely makes the cut, coming well after quotes from "giggirl" and "J. Tussing 'Sales Coach'". It's been in print forever, and updated so many times that Tobias no longer even bothers to lampoon the obvious irony of updating "The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need". Paradoxically, this book is what it claims to be and I eagerly look forward to new editions. The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, so I guess I'm killing it.

Consider this passage from the new edition on budgeting:

Where would you like to be a year from now? "Out of debt" might be an appropriate goal. And two years from now? "Out of debt with $5,000 in an IRA and $2,000 in the bank and a sound system that will wake up the dead." And five years from now? "A net worth of $60,000 headed for a million."

It is to reach these goals that you make your budget. Write them down on the second page of your yellow legal pad. Don't make them too aggressive. Try to set goals that, after going back and forth with your budget for a while, you secretly think you'll be able to exceed. If you aim too high, you'll never feel you're doing well enough. You can still have unwritten goals and hopes and dreams -- by all means! -- but think of them (and not too often, if you can help it) as icing on the cake. Sure you want a BMW. Everybody seems to want one (not me -- I want to be invisible and to fly). But it's really nuts to want one so much you're unhappy you don't have one.

DO YOU SEE WHERE I GET MY STUFF FROM??? Not just my writing style (a chunk of it, anyway), but my perspective, and my writerly delight in provoking shifts of perspective.

Notice the playful adjustment of perspective; the self-aware hacking (so much hacking in so few sentences!!) of emotion and expectation to engineer a desired result; the warmly gleeful clarity and rationality (as opposed to colder forms of clarity and rationality, which do not appeal to me).

Reread it a couple times, and perhaps you'll notice he's actually hypnotizing the reader; literally transforming perspective on the fly. Consider that final sentence, sharp (and deadly) as a dagger. It leaves you rethinking everything, reframing all that's ever needlessly gotten you down. Silly rabbit! Did you ever imagine a writer could extricate readers from human foible in one single paragraph, and with nary a heavy-handed preach?

I'm not overstating it. Read it again! Read it ten times! This is witchcraft (messianic, even). You are not the same person by the end of that paragraph that you were going in!

As for the investment advice, it left me level-headed about money through poverty and (mild) bounty. I can think of no greater testament.

Buy this book to learn how to invest. Buy it to learn how to write. And buy it to learn how to live - in warm rationality via the cultivated ability to blithely shift perspective/reframe and to savvily self-hack (not "harshly discipline") your natural drives and inclinations.