Millionaire Women Next Door
Good Reads, my very favorite website, is a social website about books. Like with Facebook or lj, you make friends, and sometimes your friends or even strangers "like" your reviews. Here's a review I wrote last year that got "liked" by a new user yesterday. It was interesting to re-read it. Boy, do I get personal in my reviews sometimes!
Millionaire Women Next Door: The Many Journeys of Successful American Businesswomen by Thomas J. Stanley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
After The Millionaire Next Door made me feel so down on myself, I wasn’t as enthusiastic about reading Millioniare Women Next Door as when I first ordered it from my library. But when it finally arrived a few weeks later, I figured I might as well bite the bullet and have another unpleasant look in the financial mirror.
Surprisingly, the book turned out to be much more inspirational than the first. The author does revisit many of the same themes - the importance of thrift, the dangers of economic outpatient care on adults - but he also includes the success stories of numerous millionaire women. And who doesn’t love success stories?
More important is how the book has impacted my own life. I can name four specific ways:
(1) The most practical, real-world change is that I’ve created a spreadsheet of all my credit cards and used the “chart” function to turn it into a graph. Now I’ve got a clear, visual summary of how much I owe, and my goal is to reduce that debt by 25% or more by December. I don’t know whether or not I can become a millionaire , but I do know that my first step to financial solvency is to wipe out that debt.
(2) Though I haven’t done it every day, I’ve taken to writing down specific goals. Some are daily and some are long-term, but setting specific goals is one of the things successful women do routinely.
(3) This one is a change of mindset. Early in the book, it states that most of these successful women don’t spend much time, if any, thinking about how their lives could have been different, and not all of them led charmed existences before becoming rich. Unfortunately, regret, specifically about sabotaging my future by messing up in college, occupies so much of my own mental energy, I’ve determined it to be my mid-life crisis. And it’s deep-seated, too. Because of the book, I began to stop these thoughts whenever I caught myself, but they came back in such a powerful dream, I woke up at 3 am from it. In the negative part of my dream, I again met the college official who interviewed me for the college I didn’t go to and now wish I had. In a positive part, though, my family members agreed that I should have a “second chance,” so I was going to go back to being 18 again. But when I woke up, I realized that if I’m ever going to get a second chance at college, it won’t be by going back in time. It has to be now. That’s as close to a “never look back” attitude as I can get to.
(4) This is another mindset change, and it’s connected with the previous one. Most of the millionaire women profiled in the book run their own businesses, but most of them didn’t become millionaires until they were in their forties or fifties and usually with a few failed businesses behind them. I found that incredibly comforting in light of my own age and mistakes. Who knows what the future might hold for me?
With insights like that, is it any wonder I’ve rated this book a 5?
View all my reviews
Millionaire Women Next Door: The Many Journeys of Successful American Businesswomen by Thomas J. Stanley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
After The Millionaire Next Door made me feel so down on myself, I wasn’t as enthusiastic about reading Millioniare Women Next Door as when I first ordered it from my library. But when it finally arrived a few weeks later, I figured I might as well bite the bullet and have another unpleasant look in the financial mirror.
Surprisingly, the book turned out to be much more inspirational than the first. The author does revisit many of the same themes - the importance of thrift, the dangers of economic outpatient care on adults - but he also includes the success stories of numerous millionaire women. And who doesn’t love success stories?
More important is how the book has impacted my own life. I can name four specific ways:
(1) The most practical, real-world change is that I’ve created a spreadsheet of all my credit cards and used the “chart” function to turn it into a graph. Now I’ve got a clear, visual summary of how much I owe, and my goal is to reduce that debt by 25% or more by December. I don’t know whether or not I can become a millionaire , but I do know that my first step to financial solvency is to wipe out that debt.
(2) Though I haven’t done it every day, I’ve taken to writing down specific goals. Some are daily and some are long-term, but setting specific goals is one of the things successful women do routinely.
(3) This one is a change of mindset. Early in the book, it states that most of these successful women don’t spend much time, if any, thinking about how their lives could have been different, and not all of them led charmed existences before becoming rich. Unfortunately, regret, specifically about sabotaging my future by messing up in college, occupies so much of my own mental energy, I’ve determined it to be my mid-life crisis. And it’s deep-seated, too. Because of the book, I began to stop these thoughts whenever I caught myself, but they came back in such a powerful dream, I woke up at 3 am from it. In the negative part of my dream, I again met the college official who interviewed me for the college I didn’t go to and now wish I had. In a positive part, though, my family members agreed that I should have a “second chance,” so I was going to go back to being 18 again. But when I woke up, I realized that if I’m ever going to get a second chance at college, it won’t be by going back in time. It has to be now. That’s as close to a “never look back” attitude as I can get to.
(4) This is another mindset change, and it’s connected with the previous one. Most of the millionaire women profiled in the book run their own businesses, but most of them didn’t become millionaires until they were in their forties or fifties and usually with a few failed businesses behind them. I found that incredibly comforting in light of my own age and mistakes. Who knows what the future might hold for me?
With insights like that, is it any wonder I’ve rated this book a 5?
View all my reviews