I used to hate reading.
Every summer, my mom had this brilliant idea: pull my brothers and me in from playing outside and make us read for 30 minutes a day. It was her foolproof plan to make sure we finished our summer reading lists before school started.
It was also my personal nightmare.
Most days, I’d sit there staring at the pages, counting the seconds until I could get back to wiffle ball, bike rides, and endless adventures. Why read when the real fun was outside?
Even as I got older, reading didn’t get much easier. Shakespeare bored me to tears (seriously, blank verse and soliloquies?). Cliffs Notes got me through high school and college.
After graduation, life offered me a surprising amount of downtime: an hour-long commute into New York City. Every day. Each way. That’s when I stumbled upon the right books—the ones that made me realize reading wasn’t boring. I just hadn’t been reading the good stuff.
I started with investing books like The Intelligent Investor. Then came personal finance classics like The Millionaire Next Door and I Will Teach You to Be Rich. And once I got hooked, I couldn’t stop.
I’ve devoured every Warren Buffett biography in print. Leadership books, self-development guides, history—if it could teach me something useful, I read it. For the last 12 years, there’s hardly been a time when I didn’t have a new book on my nightstand.
Warren Buffett once said:
“Read 500 pages every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up like compound interest.”
And Charlie Munger chimed in with:
“In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time. None—zero.”
That stuck with me.
But here’s the thing: not everyone has the time—or the patience—to read personal finance, investing, or self-development books. And that’s where The Wealth Shelf comes in.
I’ve made it my mission to distill the most valuable lessons from these books into bite-sized, actionable insights. This site is for anyone who’s curious about building wealth, improving their life, or just becoming a little wiser.
If anything here resonates with you, I hope you’ll share it with someone else who might benefit. Because knowledge, like compound interest, grows even more when you pass it on.
Let’s build a wealthier, wiser future together.