Book Summary (9/31) : The Joys of Compounding

Chapter 9 : Achieving Financial Independence

1. You cannot really understand how the world truly works unless you have financial independence. Once you achieve this state, it changes everything. It enables you to look at reality in a truly unbiased manner.
2. Building wealth over time has less to do with your income levels or investment returns and more to do with your savings discipline.Never depend on a single source of income; make an investment in yourself and learn a new skill to create a second source.
3. Taking a whole week off to focus on our thinking process may sound like a farfetched scenario, but this is possible once we achieve financial independence. Only then can we engage in frequent pauses, self-reflection, and a calm distillation of thoughts, patterns, and wisdom.
4. To accelerate wealth accumulation, you can take some risk and start some sort of business.As Steve Jobs once remarked, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.” In short, you need to have faith.

It’s good to have money and the things that money can buy, but it’s good, too, to check up once in a while and make sure that you haven’t lost the things that money can’t buy.