Notes from Tony Robbins’ “Money: Master the Game” book (Chapters 6 & 7)
And with this we have officially reached the last two chapters of this wonderful book.
Chapter 6 is a series of interviews between Tony and masters of investment. However, the summary itself is short because what is discussed in those 50-odd pages is already discussed in the other 550 pages of the book — after all this book is greatly fuelled by what Tony learned from those conversations.
Chapter 7 is completely focused on happiness and fullfilment. Tony reminds the reader that it is not about accumulating wealth, rather it’s about focusing our energy on the right elements, leading a meaningful life, and giving to others.
Common obsessions
Out of the 12 interviews with investment masters, Tony found four obsessions common to them all:
Don’t lose
This group is obsessed with not losing money. They are laser focused on protecting against potential losses. Losing money costs a much more precious resource than money to recoup the investment: your time.
Risk a little to make a lot
These masters search deeply for asymmetric risk and reward, that is, deals where they can risk a little money to make a lot more money.
Anticipate and diversify
Investors have little information to make good decisions earlier than the competition. The timing for asymmetric risk and reward is tight.
As such, they do their homework and due diligence to ensure the information they do have is right — and strike if the research proves their gut feeling.
In the meantime, diversification protects them from fluctuations and any (bad) surprises.
You are never done
Never done learning, never done growing, never done giving.
The Masters list
The interviews are all fairly short and the contents are already made abundant in the rest of the book. You can say that Tony expanded those 12 interviews into a full-blown book that puts each idea under the microscope!
At any rate, I will leave the list of master here if you want to research them separately:
- Carl Icahn
- David Swensen
- John C. Bogle
- Warren Buffett
- Paul Tudor Jones
- Ray Dalio
- Mary Callahn Erdoes
- T. Boone Pickens
- Kyle Bass
- Marc Faber
- Charles Schwab
- Sir John Templeton
Three decisions to improve the quality of our lives
In the last chapter, Tony raises once again the point that wealth alone won’t provide you fulfilment. However, there are three keys decisions you can make consciously to live a better life:
- What are you going to focus on?
- What does this mean?
- What am I going to do?
What are you going to focus on?
Where focus goes, energy flows. There are a few things at play here.
Sometimes you have to stop and appreciate what you have already accomplished and be grateful. Ask yourself
What do you tend to focus more on: what you have or what’s missing from your life?
Be grateful for your family, friends, a recent promotion or even something as simple as finally reading that book you had on your backlog for months.
Beyond having and not having, you can also fall into the rut of spending too much focus and energy on what you can’t control.
Do you tend to focus more on what you can or can’t control?
Remember, putting more energy into what you can’t control will lead to higher stress levels, which you can’t do anything about and, ultimately, lead to frustration. The portion you can control is what you can directly impact to increase the likelihood of a positive outcome.
What does this mean?
Life is not without the meaning we attribute to what happens
Meaning equals emotion and emotion equals life.
Remember, the meaning we attribute to experiences will impact how they are perceived by our memories long-term. As Tony reminds, you can still go through pain but don’t have to suffer because of it.
What am I going to do?
The actions we take can be dramatically driven by our emotions.
This is directly impacted by the previous two decisions: if you focus on the important aspects of your life and change the meaning to something more empowering, then you can aim to do better.
This is also where self-awareness comes into play: if you steadily grow awareness of behavioural patterns, you can slowly start to continue with the positive behaviours and amend the negative ones.
After all, you don’t want to merely hope that positive emotions just show up; you want to condition yourself to live them.
The final secret
As we near the end of the book Tony starts to laser focus further on happiness, fulfilment, and leveraging money to achieve those.
Tony raised three aspects of spending which can directly help to achieve happiness, taken from the book “Happy Money: The Art of Smarter Spending” by Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton:
- Invest in experiences: travel, read a book, take a new course, anything that can help you grow
- Buy time for yourself: use money to outsource your tasks and save time for what you really want to do
- Invest in others: give back to others once you are in a position to do so
In addition, the authors of the book have scientifically proven that people get more satisfaction from spending money on others than themselves!
In other words, giving makes you both happier and healthier!
Give to others
There is a big part of this section dedicated to giving to others — money specifically.
Of course, you can think of this once you are in a position of financial stability enough where you can give some money to others, for example a charity or a non-profit organisation.
The idea is very much of giving to pursue fulfilment and what Tony calls a deeper wealth — an emotional one. That money can go on to provide food to people in need or even education for isolated populace.
Closing thoughts
And with that we’ve reached the end of the book — or at least the last chapter. There will be another summary for the “Checklist for success” Tony left at the very end of the book.
But for now I will leave you with the last quote at the end of chapter 7.
Live life fully while you’re here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You’re going to anyway, so might as well enjoy the process. Take the opportunity to learn from your mistakes: find the cause of your problem and eliminate it. Don’t try to be perfect; just be an excellent example of being human.
