Top 3 Books To Grow Your Entrepreneurial Mindset

Mike DeHaan: [0:01] Welcome to the Collecting Keys Friday Focus. What is going on, Collecting Keys fans? Welcome to this week's edition of the Friday Focus, which is Friday Focus number 52, believe it or not, which means it has been an entire year since we started doing these short little Friday episodes. And it's funny because when you first start this sort of process, you always have so many things that you're ready and excited to talk about. And after a year, it sounds like it's kinda challenging. So it's... If you have anything that you want us to talk about on Friday folks episodes going forward, please shoot me a DM at mike underscore invests and say, you know, I would love to get your opinion on this topic, and we would love to do an episode on that. Because we have a little list that we keep pulling off of, but it is getting thin. So I would love some feedback from listeners on the kind of things that you wanna hear on these monologue episodes. Anyway, on this episode, I wanted to address a question that I get asked super regularly from followers on social media and from different people in masterminds and things like that. And I get this a lot from especially newer entrepreneurs or people that are, you know, kind of trying to get out of the w two mindset. And this is a recommendation on a books that I would suggest that they read. Right? And, you know, I'm not gonna like be spouting off books like traction or rocket fuel or, you know, profit first or any of these super business these sort of books because those regularly get referred to newer entrepreneurs for some reason when they're not applicable. Like, don't know why.

Mike DeHaan: [1:40] Like, I remember trying to read those books when I was first getting started in building a business, and I felt like I was being productive by reading them, but I really didn't get anything, you know. And it wasn't until I had an established business that they really meant something to me. So we'll save those ones for later. But right now, these are the top three books that I would recommend as an, you know, general entrepreneur, someone who's looking to get started, or someone who's trying to really enhance their entrepreneurial mindset. So the first book, which is my favorite, is The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. I recommend this book to pretty much anybody that will listen. This is the book that really changed my life in terms of how I viewed the world and what was possible. It's funny. I read this book while I was still working at my last w two job, And I was actually in Hawaii with Dan and his wife on a vacation, and I was reading this book. And it was just blowing my mind, a lot of these concepts that Tim was talking about, about how to use leverage, you know, how to hire virtual staff, these concepts of, you know, building up a business or an income stream, and instead of using that as, you know, to create a new job, instead using it with the mindset of creating freedom and being able to have a mini retirements and do more with your life than just work.

Mike DeHaan: [3:02] And I became obsessed with that. And that was my driver for leaving my w two. And that concept was what carried me through all of the ups and downs that I dealt with as I started trying to figure out my entrepreneurial journey. If you don't know my full story, you can go and listen. Think it's Friday focus number 13. I reposted an episode that I did on the tribe of millionaires podcast. You can hear the long version of it. But a question people would always ask me is, how did you power through the the portion where you left your w two, and you were trying to figure out what you wanted to do next? And very well, really, I was focused on the four hour work week and get into that lifestyle. So I always recommend that book. It is a great mind shaping book. And even though some of the stuff is a little bit outdated, because it's like thirteen or 14 years old now, the concepts in there are still so so relevant and very, very powerful. So awesome book, my absolute favorite. The second book that I always recommend is The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco. And so this book, I hear regularly suggested to people as well, for people who are trying to figure out the power of business or aren't quite bought into it yet.

Mike DeHaan: [4:12] And the thing that I love about this book is it was perfectly basically building on kind of the four hour work week, which goes around to, you know, kind of how making money online, how to use leverage. And this book, The Millionaire Fast Lane, it gives you kind of an idea about how much money you can actually make if you use these kind of leverages, this kind of leverage, and what these processes can look like, and how simple they can actually be. You know, and it goes literally down to the numbers of like, this is what my customer base look like, this is how much money I was making. And the number one thing that I took away from it was that really doesn't seem like it's that hard. It's not that many people. Everyone feels like they need to have this like big business to be making money and it's not true at all. Right? I don't remember the exact numbers she has in the book, but this is an example I've given to people that are trying to explore how they're gonna replace their w two or things like that. What I'll tell them is, if you have somebody that is paying you $500 a month for a service, how many people do you need to have pay... To... How many how many customers do need to have for a year to be able to make a $100,000, which we will consider a pretty good w two? So you have... Every single person is paying you $500. How many people do you need to have in your business to make a $100,000 for you as a business? The answer is 16, which is really not very many.

Mike DeHaan: [5:31] You know, you can probably go out and talk to people and sell a $500 product to 60 people or have a service fee like $500 for relatively easily. Right? You don't need to have hundreds or thousands of people that make serious money. Now, if you wanna make a billion dollars a year, you should have times 10 to a 160. It sounds like a little bit more, but even then, that's not crazy. Right? I mean, a lot of you probably like... And in fact, a lot of you, all of you went to classes, you know, schools that had significantly more people than that in your graduating class. Right? 160 people. It's not very money at all. So that book gave me a good framework about how to sort of like frame offers, how quickly different offers can escalate into serious money, and, you know, just sort of change my view on what earning powers really exist at online. Alright. The third book, and this one is honestly the one that really drove me to real estate as a whole. And this is the Burr book from Bigger Pockets written by David Green. Now I know the BRRRR method has kind of fallen out of favor recently with interest rates and all that sort of stuff. But what this book really did was it enlightened me to the power of leverage and learning how to use debt to escalate your wealth generation and, you know, to get profit free money. And that is one of the reasons that I have been able to be so successful over the past few years, has been utilizing debt in this way, using the same money over and over and over again, and pulling profit and proceeds out of the different properties that we buy as debt. So I'm not having to pay taxes, get wrecked by taxes like you do when you flip a house or you sell an asset. So the Burbank is great.

Mike DeHaan: [7:10] You know, he goes into so many different specifics about how to fully execute it, what you need to look for in deals, like the actual fundamental compounding power of using this kind of debt this way. It is really, really powerful. I think it's actually the beginning of that book where he goes through like the difference of somebody who saves up 20% and buys a house over, you know, every couple of years versus the person that uses the BRRRR method and refinances every few months like you're meant to do. And the difference is absolutely astounding. And that was when the light bulb really clicked with me and I decided that I was going to go into real estate and pursue buying properties with a BRRRR method. So cool, guys. Well, those are my top three entrepreneurial mindset books that I recommend to everybody. I would love to hear what yours are. Do you like my suggestions? Think they're terrible? Let me know what your suggestions are. I'm always looking for stuff to recommend to people or to check out myself. I'm sure there's some newer ones out there too that people love that I haven't even heard of before. I'm not a big reader. So you should let me know. Send me a DM at Mike underscore invests and I would love to hear your opinions on the books that you like to make you better entrepreneurs. So besides that guys, if you enjoyed this, please share it with anybody who might find it interesting. Take this particular episode, go and find the young gun in your life, you know, the young college kid, high school kid who's entrepreneurial and trying to figure it out. Share it with them or just take the books that I talked about and gift these books to them because you could very fundamentally change their life for the better. It's one of the best things you can do for somebody.

Mike DeHaan: [8:43] And in fact, by not sharing this sort of information with people, you're honestly being selfish because you know that it doesn't have to be the way that everyone says it does, but you're choosing not to share it with somebody else. So take this info, share it with someone, share the episode, leave us a five star review, shoot me a follow at Mike underscore Invest, and I appreciate it, guys. Thank you all for listening, and we'll talk to you all next week. Thanks for listening to this collecting keys Friday focus. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts.