Note: There is a $1,000 giveaway at the bottom of this post.

Do you think you could tell the difference between a Coke and Pepsi?

Of course you do.

When I was an RA in college, my residents insisted they could, so I bought Cokes, Diet Cokes, Pepsis, Diet Pepsis, and a generic soda to test them. Of those who tested, every one insisted they could tell the difference.

Only 3 out of 47 could.

In fact, most of us can’t even tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi in a blind test — yet when presented with data indicating how we routinely fail to tell the difference, we insist that we’re different.

Today’s book review is about a remarkable book, Sway, that details how we’re irrational, yet we fail to acknowledge it. Ori Brafman, a friend of mine, and his brother Ram Brafman write about how we insist that we behave methodically and purposefully — that we have an idea, and we act on it. Unfortunately, this ignores decades of research and great stories showing that our behavior is influenced by even the slightest of changes to our environment: We eat more because the plate is bigger, we remember things because they were presented in color on a loud commercial, and we invest in things because our friend told us about them.

I got a review copy of this book and thought it was superb even before it became a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller.

As this fascinating article from Harvard Magazine points out, ‘Poor families are often deterred from applying to colleges for financial aid because the forms are too complicated. ‘An economist would say, ‘With $50,000 at stake, the forms can’t be the obstacle,’ he says. “But they can.’” (And there’s data to prove it.)

I love exploring rationality and relating it to personal finance. For example, many of my friends at Stanford graduated with an economics degree, and many of them assumed that because they knew econ, they understood personal finance. In fact, my friend a bulge-bracket investment bank recently told me about an internal study they ran on their highly compensated portfolio managers. It turns out that the portfolio managers’ asset allocations were no better than average — an astonishing finding considering (1) how bad most people are at investments, (2) that these PMs are paid millions of dollars per year to manage professional portfolios, and that (3) asset allocation is responsible for 90%+ of returns.

Sway is a book of fascinating anecdotes about irrationality, psychology, and financial findings. It’s a key book to understanding why we behave the way we do — and to changing our own behavior. I’ll pull out some of the most interesting findings here.

How A Hot Girl Can Cost You $10,000
You’ve seen me write about how credit card companies (and any good company) test their marketing to find the optimal solution. Here, for example, are two mailings that my friend received. Can you spot the differences?

The Brafmans have a new wrinkle to add to this.

“In South Africa, a consumer lending bank wanted to push personal loans to 50,000 of its customers. Working together with a team of economists, the bank crafted several variations on the same basic loan offer letter. The different versions were randomly assigned to recipients and mailed off without the recipients ever knowing that the letter they had received was part of an experiment.

The letters included different interest rates (ranging from 3.25% to 7.75% per month); some featured a comparison to a competitor’s rate, others a giveaway…and still others a photo of either a man or a woman’s pleasant, smiling face.

Now, you’d think that the customer would evaluate the offer based purely on interest rate and the specific terms of the loan…The unexpected effect kicked in with the least relevant variation: the inclusion of a picture of the smiling face in the corner. Men who received a picture of one of four smiling women were much more likely to sign up for the loan than the men who received a picture of a smiling man. The magnitude of this effect is ‘about as much as dropping the interest rate 4.5 percentage points.’” (Page 74)

Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink does a great job of highlighting irrelevant information and its effect on our decision-making, but I found several interesting studies in Sway that I hadn’t heard of before.

Why We’re Afraid of Having Anything Taken Away From Us– And Why We Pay Dearly
We’re more motivated by loss than by gain.

“Companies like Avis and Hertz, facing the challenge of selling a product that is both useless and overpriced, have capitalized on this powerful effect. When we rent cars, our credit cards — not to mention our own car insurance — automatically cover us should anything go wrong with the vehicle. But the rental companies push additional coverage that not only is redundant but would cost a whopping $5,000 on an annual basis. But…the sales rep asks whether we’d like to buy the loss damage waiver. When we hear those words, our minds begin to whir: What if I have bad luck and end up in a wreck? What if, for some reason, my credit card won’t cover me after all?”

This simple technique also explains why we pay more for subscriptions that we don’t fully use when it would be cheaper to pay a la carte: Beyond just convenience, we worry about being overcharged a huge amount one month.

The framing of an offer is important. People criticized Coke when they tested raising their vending machine prices during warm weather to test price elasticity. Imagine the reaction had they lowered prices during cold weather. Whenever I write an email, I try not to use negative phrases. Again, the framing matters, whether in politics or personal finance.

Loss Aversion and Commitment — Like Pringles, Once You Pop, You Can’t Stop
I’m sorry, but I had to make the Pringles reference. Anyway, the authors show how loss aversion, combined with commitment, can form a powerful persuasive force. In fact, gangs and cults use this quite effectively: They make it difficult to join the group (using increasingly difficult initiation rites) and, once you’re in, make it difficult to leave (by demanding you tithe all your money or promising physical retribution if you try). In Sway, the Brafmans write about an auction held each year in a Harvard professor’s class, where he auctions off a $20 bill. The only two rules:

“Bids are to be made in $1 increments. The second rule is…the runner-up must still honor his or her bid, while receiving nothing in return.” You would expect that people would bid up to $20 for the bill, and in fact the bidding escalates quickly until about $12 to $16. “Without realizing it, the two students with the highest bids get locked in. ‘One bidder has bid $16 and the other has bid $17,’ Bazerman says. ‘The $16 bidder must either bid $18 or suffer a $16 loss. The students continue bidding, “$21, $22, 23, $50, $100, up to a record $204. The deeper the hole they dig themselves into, the more they continue to dig.” (Page 26)

Once we commit to something, we use adaptive self-serving biases to adaptively construe results to support our decision. For example, in a classic case of post-decision attitudinal adjustment, once you buy a Honda Accord, you’ll be more likely to notice Accords and to seek our confirming evidence that you made the right choice (such as reading positive reviews and talking to other happy owners of Hondas). Not surprisingly, this affects us even in conditions of life and death, as the Brafmans compare LBJ’s commitment in Vietnam to President Bush’s commitment in Iraq.

The More We Pay For Things, The More We Like Them
The Brafmans define value attribution as “our tendency to someone or something with certain qualities based on perceived value, rather than objective data.” Why do you spend $500 on a Coach bag or $2 more on Jiffy peanut butter? Those are easy examples, but let’s take a few others:

• Why D.C. subway passengers walked past Joshua Bell’s free violin concert, when he normally charges over $1,000/minute to play (page 42). In a beautiful example of social psychology, the Washington Post asked famous violinst Joshua Bell to bring his $3.5+ million Stradivarius to L’Enfant Plaza in Washington D.C. and play like a normal panhandler. We like to think we can recognize quality when we see it, but we’re more influenced by external factors than by how we think we’d behave. Take a look at the video to change your mind (hint: People didn’t just walk by because they were late to work.)
  

• Why Sobe makes you smarter — if you pay more (page 48). When students were given a mental acuity test and told that the drink SoBe would help with their results, they were put in 3 conditions: No SoBe, SoBe that cost $2.89, and SoBe that cost only $0.89. Why did SoBe drinkers who paid more perform much better than SoBe drinkers who paid less?
• If you discount tickets, you’ll get lower attendance (page 50). In a study of Ohio State’s theater department, “the people who paid full price attended significantly more shows than those who received either [a] $2 discount or [a] $7 discount.” In fact, attendance wasn’t linear: If you got a discount, whether it was $2 or $7, you attended less — just by virtue of the fact that you received a discount. If you’re an entrepreneur or consultant wondering what to charge for your services, let this be a lesson to you: In almost every case, don’t cut your prices.

The key takeaway here is that we value what we pay for. We love to believe that we behave in an A–>B model: We have an attitude (“I like charity”) and our behavior follows (“…so I volunteer at a soup kitchen”). We rarely acknowledge that many of our attitudes are formed by our behavior in a B–>A relationship: “I keep volunteering at this soup kitchen (because it’s close by / my girlfriend wants me to / I need school credit / I was asked to), so I must think it’s important. For more on this, read about attribution theory.

Similar Books I’d Recommend
If you’re interested, I’d consider Sway plus these other books, which are some of my favorites when it comes to social and behavioral psychology:

• Moneyball
  

• Judgment in Managerial Decisionmaking (this is a horrible title for an excellent book)
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
• Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think

General Thoughts On Sway: I Like It
The book isn’t perfect: Though the stories are fascinating, at times the book rambles and struggles to link back to the chapter’s original point. Also, the authors are a little too fond of clever social-psychology phrases.

Overall, I’m a huge fan. There were dozens of studied cited that I hadn’t heard about, and Sway uses these examples to great effect to point out examples of irrational behavior and help us understand why we act the way we do. It’s also an excellent guide for understanding why others act the way they do, and I’ve found myself thinking back to the examples while in meetings when people are acting in a particular way. It’s now permanently on my bookshelf, under the psychology section.

Giveaway: Free gas for all of 2008

All right, guys. I checked with Ori and he agreed to do this for iwillteachyoutoberich readers.

If you buy a book and send your receipt to swaygiveaway@gmail.com in the next 3 days, one winner will get free gas for the rest of 2008 (up to $1,000).

So, here are the details (full rules here):

1. Buy a copy of Sway in the next 3 days
2. Send your receipt to swaygiveaway@gmail.com (forward/scan a receipt) by 11:59pm this Monday, June 30th
3. I’ll announce one Grand Prize winner, who will get free gas for the rest of 2008

Get Sway Here.

[Edit, 7/7/08: The winner has been announced.]

The short version: My first book, Recruit or Die: How Any Business Can Beat the Big Guys in the War for Young Talent, is out in bookstores everywhere! The book advises companies how to recruit top young talent.

When I was a senior in college, my friends started recruiting at companies to lock down a job before graduation. Stanford makes it easy — you basically pick from a list of companies you want to interview with, show up, and talk about yourself. What could be more fun?

I noticed something troubling, though. Most of my friends were recruiting with the same companies: investment banks and consulting firms. These jobs are high-paying (between $75,000 and $120,000 your year out of college, with steep increases) and very prestigious. They’re also dreadfully boring and make me want to take a dull thimble and cause 646 puncture wounds on my own body, then bathe in a delightful medley of lemon juice, salt, and bees.

To be honest, seeing so many of my friends go to work at these companies made me mad. Why go work somewhere and be an Excel monkey for two years? Was it really about the money and prestige? I thought there had to be more to a career than those superficial things. And yet, these companies kept recruiting the best of the best, year after year.

I started investigating by interviewing my friends and asking them what they really wanted. I found some fascinating surprises, like the surprising number of friends who felt guilty about how much their parents had paid for their education, so they “had” to go get a high-paying jobs. Others measured their worth by the amount of money they made relative to their peers. Still others had their goals set on prestigious corporate careers and used these jobs as accelerated stepping stones.

Then I started interviewing the companies. How did the same few companies manage to attract talent every single year? Why did my 22-year-old friends rabidly want to go work for companies like McKinsey, Microsoft, and Google? It wasn’t just about the money. These companies spend an immense amount of time understanding young people, appealing to what motivates us (hint: We don’t care about retirement right now), and they’re constantly getting feedback.

I teamed up with Chris Resto (founder of MIT’s largest internship program) and Ian Ybarra to write Recruit or Die: How Any Business Can Beat the Big Guys in the War for Young Talent. We researched over 1,000 students at 180+ schools to advise companies how to recruit top young talent.

I don’t ask much of readers on this site, but if you work in a company, please buy this book and give it to the head of your HR department. Not only would I love you (and you’ll look good giving such a useful gift), but the book is chock-full of insights about strategies and tactics to recruit young talent.

As Penelope Trunk wrote,

As a candidate, this book is a peek into the secret world of your suitors. You should understand the range of ways that forward-thinking companies recruit so you know how to judge the company you’re talking to. This will help you to match your strengths properly with a company’s.

Read the introduction: http://alwaysrecruiting.com/book-excerpts
Buy the book:

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Over the last few weeks, I’ve written a few book reviews, including some with giveaways. So today, here are the winners from the last two giveaways.

From the review of Tim Ferriss’s book, The 4 Hour Workweek, we have a winner of a roundtrip ticket anywhere in the continental United States. FYI, hundreds of you bought the book and it was listed on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. And the winner is….

Brandon Kraft. Check your email!

Read my full review of The 4 Hour Workweek.

* * *
From my review of The Brazen Careerist, a great new book on career choices by Penelope Trunk, there are multiple giveaways. I asked people to write a comment about something interesting that happened at work. The comments are amazing. The following people won free copies of The Brazen Careerist for their comments:

• S (comments #18 and #55)
• Brian (comment #32)
• Scarfish (comment #24)

The grand prize winner gets a 30 minute call with Penelope Trunk, a national columnist and author for Yahoo Finance. That prize goes to…sfordinarygirl, comment #51. Note: The Brazen Careerist is now out (see my full review).

Thanks for all the interest. And seriously, check out the comments — they’re the most interesting part of the reviews.

Related links:

• 50 books I recommend
• My other book reviews
• What might happen if you just raise your hand (or leave a comment)
• My Amazon wishlist (534 items)

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My friend Ben Casnocha’s book on entrepreneurship is out today. Congratulations for making it to the #1 Movers and Shakers list on Amazon (up 16,578%!).

I read the galleys of My Startup Life. The final book is even better, with tons of insights about entrepreneurship (see below). FYI, Ben founded his tech company, Comcate, at the age of 14. It’s now a multi-million-dollar company, and Ben is 19.

Check out the book to learn how he did this while in high school (e.g., waking up at 3:45am to take a Southwest flight down to LA, and then back up to San Francisco the same day), how to turn an idea into a company, how to fight for respect when you’re young and an entrepreneur, and how to build a team with the inevitable growing pains. I like to think that the people who read blogs about entrepreneurship will say, “Now what?” and get Ben’s book as the logical next step.

As usual, the best authors have great websites. You can sample more about what he has to say on his book site and his blog.

My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley

Related links:

• 50 books I recommend
• My other book reviews
• More articles on personal entrepreneurship

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There’s a time-sensitive giveaway at the end of this post.

Reading “The 4 Hour Workweek” is like having Tim Ferriss grab you by the hair, shake you, and say WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!?! YOU NEED TO USE THESE TIPS TO BE MORE EFFICIENT!! Also, the tips work. GTD fans, entrepreneurs, and basically anyone who reads this site will learn tons from The 4-Hour Workweek.

I absolutely loved this book. In fact, within 2 hours of reading it, I had completely changed the way I handle email — and I already thought I was efficient.

Three days later, I had changed the way I handle followups and meetings. The book is about creating an infrastructure so you can work only 4 hours a week (a colorful metaphor) and use your time to serve you, instead of the other way around. Tim’s insights about email, outsourcing, and business use take it to a new extreme. For example, he suggest checking your email twice a day. Now, I’ve heard this suggestion before, but usually it was a failure of the last mile for me: I didn’t know where to start.

Tim goes the extra step and provides the text of the auto-response email he uses, which basically says ‘I check my email infrequently, so here’s an FAQ you can read that will probably answer your questions. Otherwise, here’s my phone number, or be patient and I’ll get back to you.’ And, in the smartest line in the book, his autoresponder includes this line: “Thank you for understanding this move to more efficiency and effectiveness. It helps me accomplish more to serve you more.”

Who could argue with that?

Do you remember when I described how I set up my financial accounts? That article was one of my most popular because it described, step-by-step, how my personal-finance infrastructure worked. Tim describes that for his entire working style, including something fascinating I had never really considered: virtual admins. (See a related Friday Entrepreneur review here.)

He uses multiple virtual admins from around the world. As he writes, “Indian and Chinese VAs…will run $4-$15 per hour, the lower end being limited to simple tasks and the higher end including the equivalent of Harvard or Stanford M.B.A.s and Ph.D.s.” Then he goes on to describe exactly how to work with virtual admins, including how to give instruction, how to pick the best ones, and — this goes the extra mile — the best URLs for finding virtual admins.

Why would you need a virtual admin? Think about all the mindless things you do every month: Booking reservations, calling up Wells Fargo to question some account activity, researching some minor point, writing a complaint letter, proofreading, scheduling, reminders, and more.

Frankly, when I first thought about it, it sounded ridiculous. But then I thought about things like scheduling things and dealing with tons of tiny requests every month (“Fix that typo on that site!”), I realized how great it would be to be able to just send a quick email to a virtual admin to handle it — especially if they were good. This advice (and the links provided to the best admin sites) are worth the price of the book alone.

There’s more in the book. Here are some the other key insights I took away:

• “Don’t ever arrive at the office or in front of your computer without a clear list of priorities. You’ll just read unassociated e-mail and scramble your brain for the day.” (This alone has saved me about 35 hours since I finished the book 2 weeks ago.)
• “Being busy is a form of laziness–lazy thinking and indiscriminate action”
• How to end a meeting on time
• How to convince your boss to let you work at home on Fridays
• And a great lesson he illustrates:

  “For all four years of school, I had a policy. If I received anything less than an A on the first paper or non-multiple-choice in a given class, I would bring 2-3 hours of questions to the grader’s office hours and not leave until the other had answered them all or stopped out of exhaustion. This served two important purposes:

  1. I learned exactly how the grader evaluated work, including his or her prejudices and pet peeves
  2. The grader would think long and hard about ever giving me less than an A. He or she would never consider giving me a bad grace without exceptional reasons for doing so, as he or she knew I’d come a’knocking for another three-hour visit.

  Learn to be difficult when it counts. In school as in life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.

Tim is kind of a weird playboy. In fact, for half of the book, you’ll be shaking your head saying “Is this guy for real?” He’s a Guiness record-holder in Tango, a national champion in kickboxing, and runs a business that makes supplements “scientifically engineered to quickly increase the speed of neural transmission and information processing,” which makes me more than a little suspicious. Some of the tactics he recommends are frankly sleazy. And other people have wondered if he has a real job besides self-promotion; Tim admits in his book that he was fired from most of them.

But I’ve met him and I liked him. Also, even though this book is in some ways opposite of my philosophies on personal finance — he’s not a big fan of saving for retirement — I have to respect him for thinking through his position and teaching me concrete things that I put to work within a matter of hours.

He embraces entrepreneurship and uses the book to share street-smart tips for simplifying your life, automating your work, being more effective with your email/communications, cutting down on interruptions, and using your time to actually achieve something meaningful. I can’t recommend this book enough. In fact, if the highest praise you can give a book is that you changed the way you do things because of it, then this book gets a great review.

• See other reviews of The 4-Hour Workweek
• Listen to a podcast of Tim’s talk at SXSW (“Secrets of Doing More with Less in a Digital World”)

A bonus for iwillteachyoutoberich readers: Win a round-trip ticket anywhere
There is, of course, a bonus for iwillteachyoutoberich readers that nobody else is getting. One IWillTeachYouToBeRich reader who buys the book TODAY (Monday, April 30th) and submits your receipt to him will win a free round-trip ticket anywhere in the continental United States (just forward your online receipt or a scan from a retail store). Tim wants iwillteachyoutoberich readers to get this book and tell their friends about it, so he’s funding this out of his own pocket. And I’m thrilled because this is only being offered to my readers. (I get no referral other than the encoded Amazon link below.)

Read the Amazon reviews and get the book. Don’t forget to submit your receipt from today, Monday April 30th, using this link.

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(The bottom of this review has a giveaway for 3 free books and 1 grand prize of a 30-minute phone call with the author of the book.)

Pluralistic ignorance is a fascinating concept in social psychology. It’s a phenomenon “which involves several members of a group who think that they have different perceptions, beliefs, or attitudes from the rest of the group” (more). For example, Prentice and Miller, two Princeton social psychologists, found that college students tend to think other students drink more than they actually do. Schroeder and Prentice noted that “the majority of students believe that their peers are uniformly more comfortable with campus [drinking] than they are.” This means that

“…because everyone who disagrees behaves as if he or she agrees, all dissenting members think that the norm is endorsed by every group member but themselves. This in turn reinforces their willingness to conform to the group norm rather than express their disagreement. Because of pluralistic ignorance, people may conform to the perceived consensual opinion of a group, instead of thinking and acting on their own perceptions” (source)

I find this time and time again when I talk to my friends. People will say things like, “Everyone’s earning $70,000/year when they graduate, so I should, too.” Or “nobody lives with their parents so it would be embarrassing if I did.” We often make decisions based on what we see of our friends, but we don’t see the bigger picture and realize the differences in internal attitudes and behaviors across individuals and groups. Pluralistic ignorance colors our decision-making and the worst part is, we don’t even know it.

That’s why I like the new book by Penelope Trunk, Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success. Penelope writes for the Boston Globe and Yahoo Finance (she’s covered me before), and she has an attitude. I mean that in a good way: Unlike so many books for young people, this one reads like a real person wrote it, not a damn robot. You can actually hear her in her writing. Now, she and I disagree about some career-related things, but she does a great job explaining her reasoning.

And her advice is good. She talks about issues we care about – living with our parents, getting our first job, negotiating salaries, starting a company, how to make ends meet – but reassures us that the things we feel guilty about are actually very common (see my thoughts about young people and guilt here).

For example, she writes that “Job-hopping in your early twenties is a great idea – especially if you’re still sleeping at your parents’ house. After all, the point of this period in life is to find the right work for you. But if the job-hopping doesn’t stop by age thirty, the feeling of instability intensifies to crisis.” How many of your friends don’t know what they want to do, but feel pressured to pick one single job and focus on it?

I know plenty. I also know plenty of friends who don’t know what they want to do, so they go back to grad school. Penelope shows a better way to think that decision.

That’s what’s interesting about the book: It includes not only advice on how to think about large, ambiguous topics like going back to grad school and office politics, but also includes tactical advice that’s actually good. When it comes to creating your resume, for instance, she writes,

“One page. That’s it. I don’t care if you are the smartest person on earth or if you have founded six companies and sold each of them for $10 million. The point of a resume is to get you an interview, not a job.”

She writes excellent tactical advice for building your cover letter, negotiating your salary, writing a resume that stands out (“Ditch the line about references on request. It’s implied. Of course if someone wants a reference, you will give one”).

But more than tactical advice, she uses research from places like Harvard Business School – not just her personal opinions – to remind us not to feel guilty about what we’re doing. For instance, did you know that 50% of the Class of 2003 was still living at home 3 years later?

This book reminds me to stop fighting against the same things that everyone else my age is struggling with. If I wanted to live at home so I can afford to take a low-paying job that I love, that chapter on living at home would be worth the book alone. In other words, stop worrying and feeling guilty about what other people think and focus on the important goals. The best thing a book can do is reassure us, refocus us, and then give us the tools to do more than we thought we could do. This book is a great start.

Brazen Careerist isn’t perfect, of course. It’s overly list-y for my tastes, reading in some parts like a “Top 10 Reasons to…” blog post. Also, the book is itself a bit unfocused, with points on starting your own business, perfecting your resume, working with your manager, optimizing your personal life, and doing yoga (?). But the number of insights I got from the book made up for it.

A few things that stood out to me:

• The importance of telling stories on page 52 is absolutely 100% true. So many people take the engineering-esque mindset of “If I just explain my accomplishments, they’ll understand.” Wrong. Craft a story and you win.
• A controversial and pointed suggestion about harassment on page 123 (“Use harassment to boost your career”). I don’t know what I think about this, but I’m curious to see others’ reactions.
• A pointed reminder to ask your company to pay for your training on page 178. Not only will you be more valuable to your company, your career will be enhanced. It just takes you asking.
• One more thing: What the hell is wrong with young people being afraid of using the phone? One of my stupid friends lost his Wells Fargo password and looked completely helpless. “Hey idiot,” I told him, “why don’t you just call them and get your password?” “Umm…,” he said like a beaten, sad man, “it’s not that important. I’ll just wait until I go in there next time.” On page 42, Penelope lays out why to use the phone. Key point: “You can’t lose making a cold call. No one ever says to themselves, ‘I wish I hadn’t been so aggressive in trying to get what I wanted.’”)

The book is good. So is the blog. And Penelope is a great woman with tons of interesting thoughts about career issues.

4 prizes
Penelope generously agreed to provide 4 prizes for iwillteachyoutoberich readers.

• 3 free signed, pre-release copies of The Brazen Careerist. As a special bonus, if you leave a comment with your best career story, 10 people will win pre-released, signed copies of The Brazen Careerist. The story can be about your best job, your biggest mistake, what you did on your job search, what your friends did during their college interviews…anything. Just make it interesting! Leave a comment now.
• The grand prize: a 30-minute call with Penelope Trunk, the author and columnist for Yahoo Finance and the Boston Globe.1 commenter will win the grand prize, a 30-minute phone call with Penelope to chat about your career and anything else. Remember, she’s a columnist for the Boston Globe and Yahoo Finance, so if you’re interesting, maybe your story will show up in the future.

  

  • Check out the book on Amazon.
  • Check out the blog. And leave a comment to win a free signed copy of the book before anybody else gets it.

[Update]: Again, the comments on this post are astonishing and honest and, in some cases, disturbing. I honestly believe that some of the best comments being made anywhere online today are right here on this post.

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I get a lot of emails wondering what books I read, so I decided to make a list of them.

Here are 50 of my favorite books in personal finance, social psychology, entrepreneurship, and design. Each one has been pretty influential to me. Check them out.

Note: This damn Amazon thing was the easiest way out there, but it still doesn’t work perfectly. If the box below doesn’t show up properly, here’s a full link: http://astore.amazon.com/iwillteachyou-20.

The full link again to the list: http://astore.amazon.com/iwillteachyou-20.

And if you’re wondering what I want to read, here’s my Amazon wishlist.