Introduction:
As you can probably guess by my reviews of books such as The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and How to Win Friends and Influence People, I’m a big fan of books that teach you how to be better at life. The 7 Habits teaches you how to be more successful in life and your career, 48 Laws of Power is about how to use conniving personal skills to your advantage, and Rich Habits is about how to develop daily habits that help you manage your money and build wealth.
All of us struggle with bad daily habits. Procrastination, overeating, smoking cigarettes, and other vices lead to less than ideal home and work life. Rich Habits aims to help you build a list of your daily bad habits and then come up with alternative good habits that you should replace them with. If you want to improve your life, then you should definitely buy it after reading this review!
Summary of Rich Habits:
Rich Habits, written by Thomas C. Corley, is about how to build wealth and become more financially successful through building good daily habits. Corley is a CPA, CFP, and M.S. in Tax, so he certainly knows what he’s talking about.
There are three main sections of Rich Habits. The first section is composed of fictional short stories about people with bad habits. While a bit cheesy, the stories show how one’s life can collapse under the weight of bad work and financial habits. Not showing up to work, eating out too much, not focusing on building relationships with customers, etc. are all shown through the short stories.
Corley then switches gears and presents a plan called Rich Habits. While I’ll let you read the book to find out what they are, they generally boil down to identifying your bad habits and then working on replacing them with good ones.
For example, instead of spending 30 minutes in the morning mindlessly watching the local news or scrolling through social media, instead read for 30 minutes about your line of work. Instead of spending $10 on a burger for lunch, make a healthy meal at home and then invest the money. Through doing so, Corley says you’ll be able to excel in your career and begin to improve your life.
Finally, Corley ends Rich Habits by switching back to the short stories. This section, however, is about how the characters from the first section applied the Rich Habits to their daily lives and became happier and more successful because of it. Again, the stories are more than a little bit cheesy. But, they are concise and effective ways to see how seemingly small changes to your daily habits can improve every aspect of your life dramatically.
Analysis of Rich Habits
I thought Rich Habits was exceptionally helpful. For one, it’s short, barely over 100 pages. So you won’t get too bored reading it like you might if you started off with reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. While both are helpful, Rich Habits is certainly more concise.
Additionally, I liked Rich Habits because, in it, Corely identifies a key problem- bad daily habits- and sets out to solve it by offering a few simple suggestions. Making a list of good and bad habits and aiming to complete the good habits while avoiding the bad habits might seem like an overly simple idea. But, because it’s so simple, I think that it’s more likely to be effective.
Finally, Rich Habits is great because it’s not some get rich quick scheme. It’s not about how to become successful through speculating in highly risky investments or following some arcane daily guide to life. Instead, it’s about how to make small changes to your daily habits that will have outsized changes in your life and help you be more successful.
Conclusion
Many Americans, myself included, struggle with bad habits. We don’t listen to Marcus Aurelius’s commandment to get out of bed and build something, nor do we listen to Socrates’s advice on living well or Epictetus’s advice on how to act correctly.
Far too often we remain trapped in bad habits that lead to unsuccessful lives. If you read Rich Habits and buy into the strategy Corley lays out in it, chances are you’ll be more successful.
As conservatives and capitalists, we should be focused on being successful and building up the economy. America is a wonderful land of economic opportunity; the American dream is alive and well. That economic freedom described by Hayek in The Road to Serfdom and Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom means that there is almost limitless potential for all of us to become financially free.
But that financial freedom, the ultimate goal of Rich Habits, is only obtainable for most people through being disciplined and having good habits. Learn the importance of saving and investing. Educate yourself on how to perform better in your job. Read newsletters that keep you informed. Build good habits and you’ll be successful. That’s the point of Rich Habits, and it’s advice I am going to try to follow. I hope you’ll join me.
Why do I hope that? Because Americans need to relearn how to save. The government social safety net was never supposed to be so large, as described in Free Market Revolution. It used to be shameful to take handouts, even small ones. Can you imagine the shame real Americans from our glory days would feel about having to take money every month from the government?!
So, avoid that by learning how to have rich habits. You’ll be happier and be a better American. It’s what I am going to try to do and I really hope all young conservatives join me!
By: Gen Z Conservative
