Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance or other book of interest. Also available is a complete list of the hundreds of book reviews that have appeared on The Simple Dollar over the years.

One element of personal finance that has always fascinated me is the psychology of why we buy things. The push and pull between clever marketing and branding and the desire to not completely empty my wallet is a struggle I’ve dealt with throughout my life and witnessed countless others struggling with as well.

It’s also a topic that I’ve read quite a bit about, particularly concerning marketing to children.

The challenge with this topic is that the sophistication of the techniques used tends to grow over time. Yes, many of the principles remain the same, but the implementations change. Technology is a big factor in that, but so is the wider acceptance of marketing toward progressively younger children. The internet is a big factor, but so is the use of surveillance in tracking what you do.

Martin Lindstrom’s book focuses on all of these factors, creating a pretty clear picture of how powerfully marketing can reach into our day to day lives, particularly those who think they’re immune to or above the reach of marketing. That marketing shapes what we buy, how we buy it, and how much we buy and spend.

Buy Buy Baby
Lindstrom opens with a look at the huge rush toward marketing to very young children. Many of the basic ideas we have about living are formed in the first five years of life, so marketers are now targeting the very young in order to set many of their ideas and buying preferences that will stick with them throughout life. There are several effective ways of doing this, but perhaps the most interesting is marketing to parents by making kid-oriented versions of the things we buy as adults (like kid-targeted yogurts and the like) and also doing things like making kid-friendly apps on electronic devices such as the iPhone.

Peddling Panic and Paranoia
Anti-bacterial soaps and other such products sell well because marketers have created the impression that germs are everywhere and can harm you, when in fact the evidence shows that using a lot of antibacterial products actually makes you more susceptible to illnesses because your body hasn’t built up resistances. Fear sells this product, and fear is a powerful salesperson. A similar logic applies in the produce aisle, where companies focus far more on the appearance of freshness than that of actual freshness, because vegetables and fruits that don’t appear perfectly fresh might make you ill or have other ill effects. Never mind whether or not they’re actually fresh, of course.

I Can’t Quit You
Companies have become much more sophisticated at encouraging cravings and consistently brand loyal behavior. The most powerful tool at their disposal is the microreward. If you engage in a behavior repeatedly, you receive some small reward for your effort, often one of negligible cost for the manufacturer but perhaps of great reward for you. A new crop type in Farmville, for example, or the instant taste of new information from a smartphone. These microrewards can be incredibly addictive and can keep you using a product over a long period of time. Such microrewards are often paired with micropayments – $0.99 for a new app, $8.99 for a monthly subscription fee, and so forth.

Buy It, Get Laid
It’s not simply about being attractive to the opposite sex any more. Instead, it’s often about associating the product with someone who is attractive to the opposite sex. Sometimes, it’s an Adonis-type figure – someone who is obviously attractive and of your gender simply using a product. At other times, someone who is seemingly normal – or, in some cases, of a socially awkward class – using a product and suddenly becoming very attractive. It’s progressed beyond just showing someone attractive holding a product and pitching it. It’s now a clever method of aspirational roleplaying for the viewer, as they want to visualize themselves as the person on the screen who is incredibly attractive to the opposite gender. Sometimes, it’s not even someone who is attractive – instead, it’s what that gender thinks is attractive to the opposite sex.

Under Pressure
Whenever you see someone you identify as a peer doing something, there’s a subtle pressure for you to do the same. It’s a pressure that often manifests itself on a subconscious level so that you are scarcely even aware you’re doing it. Buying habits are just one example of this (and it’s one big reason I encourage people to find frugal friends). What your friends buy and use rubs off on you, and it’s the reason that established brands are often very entrenched and hard to knock down without a huge amount of effort with the other techniques described in this book.

Oh, Sweet Memories
The sweet smell of nostalgia is a powerful one. Marketers constantly try to tap into our happiest memories, particularly from our childhood, and utilize those good feelings to convince us to buy (or at least associate those feelings with their product). Why do marketers so often repackage their products the way that they looked twenty or thirty years ago? It will often be enough to generate warm memories in a shopper’s mind, and that’s often enough to get the product into the cart. This is the end result of all of that effort marketing to young children – they set the hook of nostalgia then, and then pull the line when you’re older and have disposable income.

Marketers’ Royal Flush
Celebrities are marketed just like products. They’re marketed so that you’ll want to pay attention to what they’re doing, so that you’ll watch their movies and television shows and attend their concerts and so forth. They hire public relations firms to promote them just like a company would promote a product, and if they’re well-promoted, they can charge people for their films, their books, their albums, and so forth. In the end, famous people make more money if they’re promoted well, the products that famous people associate themselves with make more money, and everyone wins except for the average consumer.

Hope in a Jar
Whenever a trend exists, companies will hop on board to associate their products with it. When breast cancer awareness was a large trend a few years ago, products couldn’t wait to have that pink ribbon on the label so that buyers could feel like they were making a difference when it came to breast cancer. When the economic downturn happened and people became more concerned about simplicity, “simple” versions of products began popping up all over the place. Buzzwords like “wellness” and “natural” are all over the place, which is just a way to sell more or less the same old product by connecting it to the “new” way of thinking.

Every Breath You Take, They’ll Be Watching You
Technology has played a huge role in all of this. The internet, through services like Twitter and Facebook and Google, makes it very easy to identify cultural trends and demographic groups and market directly to them. If you search for something on Google, you’ll find ads related to whatever you’re searching. If you “like” something on Facebook, you’ve given marketers a clue as to what you like, making it easy for them to tailor their marketing straight toward you, tempting you in conjunction with the things you already like.

I’ll Have What Mrs. Morgenson Is Having
All of these tactics are amplified through the world around us. You might be wise to all of these tricks, but many of the people in your social network are not, and they’re often prone to speaking candidly in ways that amount to repeating the marketing material they’ve been given. This is true regarding everything from product reviews to political opinions. The people you’re closest to are the best marketing tools because you implicitly trust them.

Is Brandwashed Worth Reading?
While the book is light on solutions, Brandwashed does a very powerful job of revealing how deep the rabbit hole goes when it comes to marketing products, information, and people to us in the digital age. It’s a story I’ve read before, but the specific implementations change every time I hear the story, and it’s those specific changes that provide the real eye-opener and bring the message back home again.

For me, Brandwashed is the current standard-bearer I would point to when encouraging people to read a book on how pervasive and powerful marketing is, and I think everyone should read such a book at some point in their life.

Check out additional reviews and notes of Brandwashed on Amazon.com.

Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance or other book of interest. Also available is a complete list of the hundreds of book reviews that have appeared on The Simple Dollar over the years.

I’ve written about 250 book reviews on The Simple Dollar since I started the site in late 2006. Along the way, I’ve found a few books that I just immediately recommend for certain topics. My general personal finance recommendation is Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin’s Your Money or Your Life. My regular debt management recommendation is Dave Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover. For investing, I usually recommend Larimore, Lindauer, and LeBoeuf’s The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing. Time management? I’ll point to David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

Throughout all of those books, though, I’ve never really found a single book I could recommend about entrepreneurship. There’s not been one book that really talks about the process of taking an idea you have in your head, investing your spare time and effort into it, and building it into something sustainable that can earn you significant money over time. The closest book I’ve found to that goal is Michael Masterson’s Ready, Fire, Aim, which does a very good job covering the topic, but feels incredibly rushed in places.

That’s why I felt pretty optimistic about reading Dave Ramsey’s latest, EntreLeadership. Ramsey is very good at hammering home the basic ideas you’ll need on a topic and pairing it with enough motivation to get you to go out there and try it yourself.

EntreLeadership Defined
In order to be successful, an entrepreneur has to be a leader. Even at the very start, when a business is nothing more than a side gig or the germ of an idea, it will never get started if you don’t step up to the plate and say that things need to happen. Even then, you’ll have to communicate with people and likely delegate some of the tasks that have to be done. Without some leadership skills, it will never happen. Entrepreneurship and leadership are intrinsically connected, and the principles of leadership help even the nascent entrepreneur.

Start with a Dream, End with a Goal
A lot of us have dreams of what we’d like to do with our lives. I’ve made no secret of my dream to be a writer. Others dream of other things. The difference between a dreamer and an entrepreneur is whether or not they can convert that dream into a goal, particularly a goal with a plan to get there. A dream is a fun indulgence, but it doesn’t come true if you don’t set it as your destination and focus on how exactly to achieve it.

Flavor Your Day with Steak Sauce
A big key of entrepreneurship is good time management. In order to have the time each day you’re going to need to make your business work, you’ve got to have a great grip on your time. Ramsey advocates using to-do lists, but also reflecting on Covey’s four quadrants (important and urgent, not important and urgent, important and not urgent, and not important and not urgent), where, obviously, important should always trump urgent.

“Spineless Leader” Is an Oxymoron
The best thing you can do as a leader is to make decisions quickly based on the information you have and be able to explain why you made those decisions. “Leaders” who don’t make decisions tend to lead organizations that fall apart. Leaders who make decisions without basing them on information tend to make horrible decisions. Leaders who make decisions based on information but can’t explain them tend to sow mistrust with their team.

No Magic, No Mystery
This chapter is most of the key ideas of a “business 101″ class wrapped up into a single chapter. Ramsey covers the life cycle of a product (introduction, growth, peak, decline) and how to start over again. There’s also a deep look at marketing a product, with basic ideas such as scarcity and appeal covered in the discussion. Almost any business you get into will involve some level of marketing, so it’s important to understand the basics of it.

Don’t Flop Whoppers
Here, Ramsey discusses the process of turning a detailed idea or a small side business into a larger entity. There are two keys to this, in Ramsey’s eyes: passion and calling. Passion is something that gets you excited to get out of bed in the morning. You can’t wait to get started on the activities at hand. Calling is what you want to achieve in your life. I’m passionate about writing, but my calling is using my words to change people’s lives.

Business Is Easy… Until People Get Involved
One of the biggest challenges in growing a business beyond a solo gig is the people. I can speak to this from experience: it was dealing with employees (interviewing, training, cleaning up their mistakes, etc.) that was the single worst experience of running The Simple Dollar, in my eyes. Ramsey offers a lot of good material that covers the entire life cycle of an employee, from the hiring process to maintaining good work to letting go of problematic employees.

Death of a Salesman
The best thing a good salesman can do is to focus on the customer and come up with solutions for that customer in mind. Sometimes, that means doing things that aren’t directly beneficial for your business, such as helping with things that are outside of your business or suggesting products and services that you don’t sell. If a customer walks away from you happy with the exchange and in a better place because of it, you’ve succeeded in your goal.

Financial Peace for Business
Businesses need to manage their finances well and, yes, be frugal. Owning a business isn’t a ticket to spending like a madman. Here, Dave takes the personal finance advice from Financial Peace Revisited and applies the advice to small business management. It actually works quite well, because the basic principles of personal finance – spend less than you earn, avoid debt, etc. – work very well for small businesses.

The Map to the Party
When a business grows into a multi-person outfit, the key to success is communication. The more people feel that they’re able to communicate and that their ideas are of value, the more they actually do communicate, the more involved they are, and the better decisions you can make for the business as a whole. Good communication feeds on itself, as does bad, so the best thing a leader can do is be candid and open.

People Matter Most
The people in your business matter more than anything else. If you can’t do right by them, you can’t do right by the rest of your business, and if you can’t do right by that, your business will eventually fall apart. Treat the people who work for you well. Respect what they need and work with it. Listen to what they’re telling you and don’t brush it off. The more you do that, the more they’ll respect you (if they’re good people that you want working for your business).

Caught in the Act
One key way to build your business is to make sure your business is recognized, particularly when you’re doing good things. Little steps, such as your email signature or your stationery, makes a difference. Mentions in the media also help. The more little pieces of positive recognition you have floating around out there, the more likely it is you’re going to draw in a random customer off the street.

Three Things Successful People Never Skip
Contracts, collections, and vendors. Dealing with each of these is the kind of detail work that can drive a person mad, but it’s the details of these things that can make or break a small business. Being detail-oriented in these areas almost always pays off.

Show Me the Money!
Be generous to the people that cause you to win. There are a lot of ways to do this – bonuses, higher salary, and so forth. Keep in mind, however, that the reason to do this is to reward the people that are showing good performance – and good performance is demonstrated in the form of happy customers.

Mastering “the Rope”
At some point, you eventually have to start delegating decisions to others as your business grows. The key to that is to make sure you’re surrounded by people you trust who you know will make decisions that are good for the business as a whole, people who share your perspective on how the business should be run. Your immediate team should consist of these people.

Is EntreLeadership Worth Reading?
This is the best single book on entrepreneurship that I’ve yet read.

Most of my problem with other entrepreneurship books is that they give short shrift to the early growth of a business, when it grows from an idea to a side business to perhaps a full time solo endeavor or one with one or two employees. They skip this part and move on to the point where a business has a handful of employees.

While that latter part is important to understand, so is the infancy of the business. It’s often that infancy that makes or breaks potential entrepreneurs, and Ramsey spends a good half of the book talking about issues at that level before moving on to growth issues.

Ramsey maintains the friendly tone that has worked well for him in personal finance books, and it works well here with entrepreneurship. There’s just the right level of detail in the information, mixed with great anecdotes.

If you’ve ever thought about launching your own business, this is a great book to start with.

Check out additional reviews and notes of EntreLeadership on Amazon.com.

Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance or other book of interest. Also available is a complete list of the hundreds of book reviews that have appeared on The Simple Dollar over the years.

Unless you’re intentionally sticking with purely entry-level jobs or greatly restricting your career choices, you’re going to eventually find yourself in a position where you have to publicly present your ideas. It might just be to a room of peers, it might be to a large crowd, or it might even be to a large television audience, but in any of those events, you’re going to be practicing the art of public speaking.

I’ll be straight with you. The best way to become a good public speaker is to practice at it, but practicing at it involves a lot more than standing in front of a mirror and looking at yourself while you’re talking. There are a lot of little pieces that need to come together for effective public speaking.

Scott Berkun has been a public speaker for a long time. It was actually his talk on the myths of innovation that convinced me to find out more about him, and it was the strength of his public speaking style that convinced me to give Confessions of a Public Speaker a read.

It was well worth it. Confessions of a Public Speaker is probably the best book I’ve ever read on the art of public speaking. It balances the entertaining and anecdotal nature of such a book perfectly with hard-hitting and useful advice on getting up in front of a crowd and sharing your ideas.

I can’t see you naked
The trick to a good presentation is to realize that the audience mostly just wants for the presentation to be over so they can do other things – maybe get back to their work, maybe network with other people, maybe goof off. Because of that, they’re mostly not going to notice the small mistakes you make, so don’t worry about them. What about the big mistakes? Just try to roll onwards from them, preferably using them as a launching pad. For example, if you make a blunder, say, “You think that was bad? …” then share an anecdote that ties you to the audience and (hopefully) helps you to get back on track.

The attack of the butterflies
The best way to relieve nervousness before a talk is to practice it enough beforehand so that it feels natural and to eliminate little things that can make you nervous beforehand. Do things like getting a good night’s sleep the night before a talk, eating a healthy meal a couple hours beforehand, chatting with people in the audience before a talk (so that they seem friendly and not oppositional), and getting there in plenty of time so that you don’t have to rush and little hiccups become easier to deal with.

$30,000 an hour
What’s a justifiable amount for a public speaker to earn? Berkun breaks down a $30,000 speaking fee and really lays out how it’s not all that unreasonable for a 60 minute speech. It requires two days to create the presentation, the stress of speaking for that long, the time to travel there and handle the logistics of getting from your home to the venue and back home, and the career effort it took to reach a point where you can command a nice speaking fee. He makes a great case for why good public speakers ought to earn a lot.

How to work a tough room
The best defense against a tough room is on-site preparation. Get to the room as early as possible and get a feel for how you’ll sound in there. If there are other speakers, watch them and see how the crowd reacts to them. Are they an easy crowd or a tough crowd? If you’re the first speaker, encourage people to sit near the front, not spread out throughout the room (this way, you have a smaller area to focus on with your gaze and attention). The more you know the room and the crowd, the better off you are.

Do not eat the microphone
There are four key parts to assembling any good presentation. Take a strong position in the title of the presentation. Think carefully about your audience. Make your specific points as concise as possible. Know the counterarguments from an intelligent audience and address them. If you do these things, you’re going to have a presentation that grabs their attention and makes your case as well as possible. A good way to start is to simply list the five key points to making whatever case you want to make, honing those key points down, then making sure you’re able to handle the inevitable counterarguments.

The science of not boring people
The shorter your presentation and the faster the pace of it, the less likely you are to bore people and the more likely you are to make them leave with a positive impression of your message. Presentations that go on too long or dwell too long on specific points are often easily forgotten, which completely undoes the entire point of your presentation. Make it snappy.

Lessons from my 15 minutes of fame
My favorite point from this chapter is that memorization and teleprompters are evil for the vast, vast majority of speakers. If you have your speech memorized or are just reading it, you’re almost always not sounding genuine or human. Focus on knowing your points cold and delivering them naturally without reading a single thing. This sounds much more conversational and much more interesting to the person receiving the message.

The things people say
The best way to improve on your presentation is feedback, but feedback isn’t as easy as you might think it is. Having someone just watch your presentation and critique it doesn’t really help. A much better tactic is to ask people how your presentation compares to other ones, as it’s much easier for people to compare and contrast two things (plus it feels less insulting when pointing out your flaws). Another great tactic is to simply videotape your own presentations, then watch the tape and see what’s wrong with the presentation.

The clutch is your friend
If you’re not connecting what you’re talking about to the lives of the people you’re presenting it to, they’re not going to be very interested. How is this relevant to their lives? Another key: you can’t just tell them it’s relevant. You’ve got to show them. Doing something is the most powerful way to learn, and you’ve got to get as close to having the audience do something as you can in the format of your presentation.

Confessions
The remainder of the book is almost like a blog. It addresses a bunch of very specific points about presenting, such as choosing the right pointer (this one) and how to properly put a wireless microphone on (clip it to your neck, then hide the cable inside your outer shirt). There’s just a bunch of good little tips here.

Is Confessions of a Public Speaker Worth Reading?
If you are on a career path that is going to involve making presentations in public at any point, Confessions of a Public Speaker is going to be well worth reading. It’s the best single volume on public speaking I’ve yet read.

The only complaint is that there’s not a whole lot on actually creating slides and building a presentation. Thankfully, a book I reviewed earlier, Presentation Zen, does that wonderfully. These two are great complements to each other.

Check out additional reviews and notes of Confessions of a Public Speaker on Amazon.com.

Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance or other book of interest. Also available is a complete list of the hundreds of book reviews that have appeared on The Simple Dollar over the years.

I was about to review the third edition of Liz Pulliam Weston’s Your Credit Score several months ago when I found out that a fourth edition was forthcoming, so I waited until this new and updated edition was released to write this review. What I found was that the book remained a detailed and useful resource concerning how credit scores work in America.

Part of the challenge of credit scores is that the exact formulas for calculating them remain trade secrets. At best, companies like Fair Isaac issue guidelines on how to improve your credit score, but they don’t tell you exactly how they’re calculated.

Unsurprisingly, this can result in some serious confusion. Even worse, these scores are used for all kinds of things, from determining how trustworthy you are during a job interview process to determining your rates when you buy insurance.

Weston has written a pretty solid concise guide to understanding and navigating this minefield.

Why Your Credit Score Matters
If your credit score is good, banks will want to do business with you. They’ll provide you good rates on things like mortgages and car loans. If your credit score is bad, banks will pretty much avoid you because, to them, you’re not worth the risk. Even if you don’t really care about such things, it’s important to keep tabs on your credit score because it’s often the first way you find out that your identity has been stolen. People open up lines of credit in your name, use them for purchases, and you’re the one holding the bill – not something you want to have happen to you.

How Credit Scoring Works
Your credit score is calculated based on your credit report, which is a compiled document about you listing all of the sources of credit you have, such as student loans, credit cards, car loans, mortgages, and so on. You can get your credit report from the federal government at annualcreditreport.com. Generally, five factors make up your credit score: your payment history (have you been making payments?), how much you owe (do you owe a lot?), how long you’ve had credit (longer is better), your last application for credit, and how many different types of credit you use, and all of these pieces are obtained from your credit report.

FICO vs. “FAKO” – Competitors to the Leading Score
The primary formula used for calculating a credit score is called FICO (short for Fair-Isaac Corporation) and it’s the general formula that’s used for calculating your credit score. Unfortunately, the FICO formula is a trade secret, meaning we don’t know exactly how it works. Some companies offer alternatives to FICO, but none of them have caught on.

Improving Your Score the Right Way
How do you improve your credit score? First, get your credit report, as mentioned above, and then make sure you know what every entry on that report is and that it’s correct. Next, make sure to pay all of your bills on time, and then pay down your debts. Also, if you’re trying to improve your score and you’re carrying any debt at all, it’s probably not a good idea to close any of your credit cards or lines of credit.

Credit Scoring Myths
The biggest myth that goes around about credit scores is that your score will be helped by closing old credit cards or having your credit limits reduced. This actually can hurt your score if you’re carrying any debt because it alters the “how much you owe” element of your credit score, which is based on a comparison of your actual debt versus your credit limit. The closer you are to your credit limits on the whole, the worse off you are. So, if you have a $2,000 debt on a card with a $2,500 limit and another card with $0 debt with a $2,500 limit, you’re utilizing 40% of your credit limit. Not bad. But if you cancel that $0 debt card, you’re suddenly using 80% of your credit limit – not good.

Coping with a Credit Crisis
Many people tend to retreat into their shell when things get financially bad, but that usually just makes things worse. A much better approach is to handle it head-on. Look for ways to free up some cash by selling off things in your closet. Prioritize your payments so that you’re not going to lose your home or your car. Contact some of your lenders and discuss the crisis you’re going through – some lenders will put your debts into forbearance during a job loss or other such situations. Weston discusses credit counseling (and doesn’t give it much of a thumbs-up) and bankruptcy as final options after you’ve tried everything else.

Rebuilding Your Score after a Credit Disaster
Much like dealing with a bad situation, recovering from it also requires you to be proactive. Check your credit report regularly and make sure it’s correct with regards to your current situation. Resolve the bad spots still left on your report. Also, if you have the opportunity, make sure that you get positive things about yourself added to your report. If you have a line of credit that’s not being reported that’s in good shape, try to get that to appear on your report by contacting the company who is offering that line of credit.

Emergency! Fixing Your Credit Score Fast
It’s difficult to get changes made immediately to your report and your score. If you do try this route, you need proof of what you’re saying or else you’re just wasting both your time and their time. A much more reliable route is to focus on the positive change you can make over a month or two by doing things such as paying off as much of your credit cards as possible (improving your ratio, as described above), using your credit cards very lightly, and trying to get positive things added to your credit report.

Insurance and Your Credit Score
Insurance companies use your credit score as an element of determining how much to charge you for insurance, so one of the best things you can do to improve your insurance rates is to improve your credit score. Of course, that’s not the only factor in determining your insurance rates, as things like your deductible amount also influence how much you pay.

Can Bad Credit Cost You a Job?
Employers often use credit scores to help winnow down applicants for an open position, particularly in a poor job market. If an open position has a deluge of reasonably qualified applicants, employers are going to look for reliable and trustworthy people, and like it or not, credit scores are often used as a quick thumbnail to check how reliable and trustworthy people are.

Keeping Your Score Healthy
Pay your bills. Pay down your debts. Have an emergency fund. Have adequate insurance (for example, life insurance for you and your spouse). These things all go a long way toward ensuring that your credit score is healthy for the long haul.

Is Your Credit Score Worth Reading?
Weston’s book focuses in on credit scores like a laser beam. If you ever had any interest in understanding how credit scores work and how they affect your life in more detail, this is absolutely the book to pick up.

Keep in mind, though, that this book hits a home run with the topic at hand, but doesn’t really address much else in terms of personal finance (outside of issues directly connected to the topic), so if you’re looking for more of a full picture, you might want to pick up a different book and look at this one as a supplement.

Check out additional reviews and notes of Your Credit Score on Amazon.com.

Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance or other book of interest. Also available is a complete list of the hundreds of book reviews that have appeared on The Simple Dollar over the years.

As many long-time readers of The Simple Dollar know, I’m quite focused on time management practices. Without good time management skills, I would have never been able to get The Simple Dollar off the ground.

One particular facet of time management was always a challenge for me, though. I would always find that I was more productive on some days than others and at some times of the day as opposed to others. I also began to realize that there were other factors tied heavily to my productivity: the amount of sleep I got the last few nights, whether I forgot to take medications, and so on.

Eventually, I began to realize that energy management was in a lot of ways as important as time management, and that’s exactly the philosophy described in this book, The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz.

Fully Engaged: Energy, Not Time, Is Our Most Precious Resource
The basic premise of the book is that people are most productive when they go through periods of high stress followed by periods of renewal. This is in contrast to the typical idea of time management in which everything is approached like a marathon with a consistent level of stress throughout. The problem with that route is that it doesn’t account for your natural fluctuations in energy. It eventually leads to “burnout” or significant disengagement (you’re just collecting a paycheck).

The Disengaged Life of Roger B.
Roger B. is a person who spends so much of his time responding to external stimuli (the incessant demands of his job, a busy family, community responsibilities) that he’s essentially burnt out on everything and isn’t giving good performance in any area of his life. This is mostly because he never takes time for himself to genuinely relax and figure out what he wants out of life. I’ll admit that pieces of the story sounded incredibly familiar to me.

The Pulse of High Performance: Balancing Stress and Recovery
The key idea in this book is that best way to really perform well in any area of your life is to stress that area hard, then follow that period with a respite that’s free from stress. That doesn’t mean being on call or just having low stress. It means time to recover and rethink. It means a genuine period of rest and reflection and regrowth without a continuation of the stress. A great sports champion doesn’t play nonstop. Why should a great writer or a great employee?

Physical Energy: Fueling the Fire
The authors start off by looking at physical energy, heavily looking at physical fitness as a way to build up physical energy. They recommend that people train by working very hard for periods, followed by periods of almost no work at all. Stress your body nearly to the point of breaking, let it rest and recover, then repeat. This will make your body stronger.

Emotional Energy: Transforming Threat into Challenge
A similar theme – stress, rejuvenation, repeat – pops up again here when looking at emotional energy. Rather than facing a steady ongoing level of emotional stress, you should look at that consistent threat as a challenge and tackle it head on. Yes, this will cause a great deal of stress at once, but resolving that issue will reduce your stress over the long term.

Mental Energy: Appropriate Focus and Realistic Optimism
You can’t just focus mentally on one thing all of the time. You also can’t focus entirely on what others insist that you focus on. You have to spend at least some of your time doing what you want to do, unwinding from the tightness that you’ve built up. Without that unwinding, you’re unable to keep the things you need to focus on in your life in perspective and you’re unable to determine what’s realistic regarding them.

Spiritual Energy: He Who Has a Way to Live
Here, the authors argue that much of the ongoing stress in our lives comes from living in a way that isn’t in accordance to the values we have, whatever they may be. Often, living in accordance to those values means occasional peaks of stress (when doing something that’s hard) followed by a sense of peace and ease of living because those values guide you. You aren’t doing things that are wrong to you, making life easier to handle.

Defining Purpose: The Rules of Engagement
So, how do you really get started on this? The authors say that the foundation of all of this is purpose. Why are you here? What do you want to do with your life? What’s the destination? On top of that are your values, which guide you to that purpose. You move toward that purpose by simply taking on challenges in your life head-on, then taking genuine breaks where you turn off that cell phone.

Face the Truth: How Are You Managing Your Energy Now?
It’s often hard to face the real challenges in our life. We tend to take shortcuts that work well in the short term, but fail us in the long term. We keep up a wall at work. We take a pessimistic, snarky attitude about things. The list goes on and on. However, if we take that short-term heat head on and face the truth of our situation, we can move onto a path that actually makes life easier.

Taking Action: The Power of Positive Rituals
How do you keep going on this path? The authors suggest positive rituals. All of us have a morning ritual where we go through certain actions automatically each day. If you want to move toward the big goals in your life, you need to add to your daily rituals. Make going for a walk each day “normal.” Make working on your novel a bit each day “normal.”

Is The Power of Full Engagement Worth Reading?
I felt that The Power of Full Engagement offered up a powerful perspective on managing one’s time and energy. The idea of bearing down on particular things then alternating them with a rest period is a powerful one. The book also does a great job of walking through the ramifications of that perspective in different dimensions of life.

If you’re finding it difficult to achieve the things you want to achieve in life, The Power of Full Engagement is well worth a read. I found lots of food for thought in those pages, which is the most I can really ask for from a book.

Check out additional reviews and notes of The Power of Full Engagement on Amazon.com.

Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance or other book of interest. Also available is a complete list of the hundreds of book reviews that have appeared on The Simple Dollar over the years.

The vast majority of retirement books I’ve read focus on maximizing every dollar to actually arrive at retirement. They don’t look at the period of retirement itself.

The relative freedom from time constraints that retirement offers opens the door to a lot of things that would otherwise be impossible, and this is where How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free by Ernie Zelinski comes in. Rather than looking strictly at retirement savings as part of one’s plan for retirement, Zelinski looks deeply at the personal choices made in retirement as part of that plan.

It’s an interesting and fresh perspective on retirement, and Zelinski’s breezy and friendly tone certainly helps push it along.

Thank Heaven for Retirement!
If you do not plan for an active retirement, you’re setting yourself up for a difficult and expensive retirement. If you work until late in life under the pretense that you’re setting yourself up on easy street due to your big pile of savings, you’re going to find that you don’t have a lot of years to enjoy it. Instead, a much better path is to live relatively lean, work toward an early retirement, and plan for a retirement life that’s active and full of adventure.

Retirement: A Time to Become Much More Than You Have Ever Been
A good retirement doesn’t involve sitting around and doing nothing all day. It means applying yourself to something that you’ve always wanted to apply yourself towards but never felt that you could due to the need to have an income-producing job. If this new activity produces income, great! If it doesn’t, it’s still filling your hours with lots of contentment and enjoyment of life, and not filling those hours with idleness or expensive activities.

So Many Worlds, So Much to Do!
Zelinski makes a challenging suggestion for anyone who’s retired. On the first day of retirement, unplug your television set and unsubscribe from cable. This will force you to be more active, which will improve your health. It will also push you to actually take on the big dreams you have rather than putting them off until tomorrow because there’s something good on television.

Take Special Care of Yourself – Because No One Else Will
Some degree of physical activity is an essential part of a healthy retirement. Zelinski recommends a daily walk at a minimum – and preferably more than that. Long walks, bicycle rides, and other activity should be part of your life every single day. This will not only improve your quality of life, but the length of your life as well. If you allow yourself to be sedentary, you’ll gain weight and lose the energy you need to live an active and vibrant life. A walk through your neighborhood or through nature is also a free form of entertainment, something that can’t be said for many other forms of entertainment.

Learning Is for Life
Much like physical activity keeps your body healthy, mental activity keeps your mind healthy. Zelinski recommends a commitment to lifelong learning in which you strive to learn something significant each day. One way to do this is to take a college course in a topic that’s interested you at your local community or public college. As an aside, I had a friend whose grandfather was in college at the same time as him. The grandfather actually wound up being in an assigned project group that I was in and my interactions with him were some of the best experiences of my college years. Going back to college does not mean you’ll be out of place.

Your Wealth Is Where Your Friends Are
A good, reliable friend is something invaluable to have, but you can’t build friendships by sitting at home alone. Seek out community activities related to things you’re interested in, or just get involved with a volunteer activity. Doing these things will essentially force you to meet like-minded people, and there are few better situations from which to build a friendship. A friend is a person who will be there for you when you need them and bring joy into your life when you don’t need them as much, and that’s an invaluable thing to have.

Travel for Fun, Adventure, and More
Retirement travel can actually be really inexpensive since you’re not tied to the traditional idea of the “tourist season.” You can travel to locations on your own schedule, not those of school calendars or professional guidelines. You can also travel like a migrant, meaning you can move slowly, scoop up deals as you go, and do things at your own schedule. This makes it easy to travel almost anywhere surprisingly cheap.

Relocate to Where Retirement Living Is Best
In my opinion, Zelinski’s best single piece of advice comes in this chapter: move to a college town. A large college offers tons of cultural opportunities, speeches, performances, groups, and countless other things to get involved in, most of them for free. The college town that I once lived in was a vibrant place with a lot of older people involved in the college community. You couldn’t go to an event without a lot of older people there, which made it interesting both for me and for them.

Happiness Doesn’t Care How You Get There
Don’t leave this world with songs unsung that you wished you had time to sing. The last thing you want to have in your final years are regrets of things that you could have easily done. Your retirement years are often the time to do those things. Most of the things that people wished they could have done are things that require time, and time is what you have in spades in retirement. Use it.

Is How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free Worth Reading?
Rather than approaching retirement as merely a savings goal, How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free looks at retirement as a period to capitalize not so much on the money you’ve saved, but the asset of time.

In other words, saving for retirement isn’t about saving money. It’s really about saving time. The more you put away for retirement, the more time you give yourself to accomplish all of the things you dream about accomplishing, whether it’s writing a novel or learning a musical instrument or camping in every national park.

It’s a great perspective and a useful one, and Zelinski writes about it with an irreverent and breezy tone that makes this a fun book to read, too. This one’s highly recommended to anyone within ten years or so of their retirement, on either side.

Check out additional reviews and notes of How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free on Amazon.com.

Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance or other book of interest. Also available is a complete list of the hundreds of book reviews that have appeared on The Simple Dollar over the years.

One of the first books I reviewed on The Simple Dollar was Dave Ramsey’s More Than Enough. I found it to be an interesting take on personal finance, as it ties together personal finance and character and personal growth into a single package. While I didn’t think that it was the first book you should read if you were in personal finance panic mode, I did recommend it as a worthwhile read.

A few weeks ago, a reader emailed me and suggested that I read what my reader described as a “companion” to More Than Enough, entitled How to Have More Than Enough. My reader suggested that it was a much better read than the first book.

Store Manager, to Aisle One, Please!
Many people feel unhappy with big aspects of their life, but they also find change to be stressful. The key thing to remember about any change that you take on in your life is that the end goal of it is to put you in a place where you are no longer unhappy with some aspect of your life. For example, choosing to live a life that involves less spending can be really stressful, but the end goal of it is actually a stress-reducer: freedom from debt and financial worry.

Foundation Failure
Why do people get into situations where they’re unhappy with some aspect of their life? Ramsey’s argument is that some basic foundation of their life has failed in some fashion. Ramsey argues that most lives are held up by a series of posts, and when one or more of those posts begin to rot and fall away, the entire structure of our lives begins to fall apart. Thus, the best thing we can do is to constantly shore up those things that we rely on. This chapter focuses a lot on values – the immediate things that we hold true and hold dear in our lives. What are we doing to reinforce those things? Most of the rest of the book focuses on nine more of these “poles” that hold up everyone’s life.

Vision – Binoculars Looking at Your Future
Vision refers to knowing where you want to go in life. This ranges from something as simple as what you want to accomplish this week to what you hope to accomplish over your entire life. If you focus on nothing but today, you’re going to walk in a rut in your life and never get to any of the places you’d like to go someday. The big key is to just start thinking about it and writing it down. What would you like to have people say about you at your funeral? What has your life meant? What can you do to get there?

Unity – A Tangled Rope Is Just Loops
Unity simply means doing things with respect to the people around you. So often, it’s easy to just do what we want and ignore what others need or want. However, if you focus on listening to the needs of others and incorporating those needs into your daily actions and choices, you’re going to find that your entire life flows much better. This goes from things like cleaning out the dishwasher to big things like how to spend a big windfall. The more you listen to the key people in your life and involve them in your major decisions, the easier your life will flow and the more they’ll involve you.

Hope – Fuel for the Explosion!
Is the future awash with possibilities or is it something to dread? If you look at the future as something to avoid and to fear, then you’ll find that your future is indeed a darker place. A much better approach is to look at one’s future as a place for hope and optimism, where the things you want in life are destined to happen. A key part of this equation is to look for the good “what-if”s and chart a path to them, and also look for paths away from the bad “what-if”s.

People Who Need People – Support and Accountability
You need other people in your life. For many people, though, it’s a surprise to learn that others need them in their lives. There are people out there who need you to be at your best. At the same time, those people are often the ones who can be there for you when you need help. It’s a two way street of support and accountability that can constantly push you on to better things if you let it happen.

Intensity – Move the Rock
Many people are willing to give up at the first obstacle. If you come at your goals with a low intensity, it’s going to be very easy to derail you, and any goal that’s worth achieving is going to have some obstacles along the path. Instead of letting those challenges derail you, you’ve got to focus hard on those challenges and overcome them. For example, if you’re watching your weight, instead of eating that delicious piece of pie, you’ve got to have the intensity and content of character to push it aside.

Diligence – That Dirty Little Secret
On the flip side of intensity is diligence – the ability to stick with something through thick and thin. It’s easy to ramp up the intensity in challenging moments, but it is diligence that will get you through the plateaus and the valleys where success seems far off. For example, intensity will get you through Thanksgiving dinner without gaining five pounds, but diligence will keep you from eating 500 calories a day more than you should and slowly gaining weight. It’s a focus for the long term.

Patience Is Power
Hand in hand with diligence is patience. Most goals don’t happen overnight. Many goals don’t happen in a year. In the society we live in today, it’s easy to have a mindset that you need results now and if they don’t immediately happen, something’s wrong. That mindset will keep you from achieving great things because it will cause you to abandon goals before you can possibly achieve them. Patience is an essential key for building a great life.

Contentment
It’s easy to fall into a mindset where you want what others have. It can be a very pernicious mindset to crawl out of, too. The key to success is to simply be happy with the things you have, even when you could have other things if you were willing to sacrifice some of your goals. Without goals, it’s easy to fall into a trap of keeping up with the Joneses and never being truly content with what you have.

Giving – The Great Misunderstanding
When we are scared or when we don’t feel confident about our lives, we tend to clench our fists and hold on to what we have. A big step towards being happy with our lives is a willingness to let go of that tight grip and give of ourselves to others, not just in the form of money, but in the form of time and talent and energy. By doing this, we can begin to see that the bounty of gifts we have is actually more than enough.

Is How to Have More Than Enough Worth Reading?
This book is actually very much like More Than Enough except with some additional workbook elements added in. I compared the two books side by side and found that there really wasn’t very much material at all cut from the original book. Instead, this version mostly just benefits from the direct addition of workbook materials.

If you’re just looking for a book that focuses on character and personal growth and how it relates to personal finance, either How to Have More Than Enough or More Than Enough will suffice. However, I think I would give this one the edge because, due to the workbook elements, it provides just a little bit more push for you to actually start evaluating your life and making positive changes and some more food for thought about living a values-oriented life.

Check out additional reviews and notes of How to Have More Than Enough on Amazon.com.

Saving Pennies or Dollars is a new semi-regular series on The Simple Dollar, inspired by a great discussion on The Simple Dollar’s Facebook page concerning frugal tactics that might not really save that much money. I’m going to take some of the scenarios described by the readers there and try to break down the numbers to see if the savings is really worth the time invested.

Connie writes in: I trade books by mail. It costs me about $2 to send out a book via media mail and I have to also spend the materials to wrap it. If I just swap page turners at my local used book store, I can get them at $2.50 a pop if I buy a bunch at once. Am I really saving anything trading by mail?

This sounds like you use PaperBackSwap, a service I love and have been using for years. Much like you, I’ve been curious at times whether or not it’s worth it and I’ve ran the numbers several times. Each time, I’m pretty sure I’ve decided it’s a good deal.

For starters, my estimate of the cost of my supplies is about ten cents. I use a sheet or two of printer paper, a single printed page with black and white ink on it, and some packing tape. Media mail varies by weight, but the typical range for me is $2.41 for a paperback in the mail. So, my total cost for shipping out a book is $2.51.

Now, let’s compare that to the used bookstore. At my local used bookstore, they will take most books in trade for anywhere from $0.25 to $1. They also sell used books at varying prices, anywhere from $1 (for Harlequin romances and the like) to $5 (mostly hardbacks). There’s also sales tax on your purchases, so that tacks on another 7%.

If I were just swapping for Harlequin romances, the local used bookstore would probably be cheaper. I could trade in one for $0.25, buy a new one for $1 (minus the $0.25 credit), and walk out of there having paid about $0.80 for a novel.

However, most of the books I want to read there are on the $3 or $4 shelves. I tend to read a lot of nonfiction, some science fiction and fantasy, and some general fiction, too. I might get $0.50 in trade for the books I bring in, but my net cost is either $2.50 or $3.50 for a book I want to read, plus the sales tax. That means either $2.68 or $3.75 for a new (to me) book after paying the sales tax.

If you add on top of that the fact that I can do PaperBackSwap at home whenever I want and there’s a much more extensive selection there, it starts to become a no-brainer.

In Connie’s case, she’s shipping out books for $2.51 via media mail, or she’s buying them for $2.68 at her local used bookstore. For her, the cost is pretty close, so it really comes down to other values. Would she rather support the local business? Or would she rather enjoy a larger selection online?

As for me, I’ll just keep using PaperBackSwap. It’s a service I’ve used for many years to recycle my read books because it’s convenient and the selection is pretty good.

There’s also another take-home point here. If you’re an avid reader, trading used books is really a bargain. Let’s say I spend eight hours reading a book that I swapped for $2.51. That means I was entertained for a cost of about $0.30 per hour.

While that’s not as cheap as the library, it’s pretty cheap, and there’s no danger of late fees or other such things if you don’t get your book finished or if your son drops a library book behind his bed.

Not only that, if you read something at least a little challenging, you’re growing your mind, too. You’re learning something new and improving your literacy. That’s what I call a real value.