Did you read ALL this stuff ? 
No, I’ve got interested in the topic only last year and I started reading books on it this year (before I was reading just blogs and listened to podcasts). I’ve read only a few positions this year, but as long as I’ll keep myself passionate about the topic, I’ll read as much as possible. First half of the list is somehow more important and I put a priority to read it first.
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http://www.dobelli.com/de/bucher/die-kunst-des-guten-lebens/
In addition I like that one here: http://www.dobelli.com/de/bucher/klar-denken-klug-handeln/ It explains many of the common cognitive biases.
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Thanks for the suggestions, Genti! Would you mind to kindly add them in the wiki post of the users collective recommandations? Just edit the main post to add your contributions 
and please explain in a few sentences why you found them so interesting. And yay, being aware of our cognitive biases is a hugely important topic for an investor!
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In response to the latest Mr. @_MP’s blog post:
- Are you a Swiss reader who plans to achieve financial independence?
I’m Polish, but yes - Switzerland-based FI seeker.
- If yes, in how many years/at what age?
That’s good question. It really depends on my and my wife’s career, our savings rate, a number of kids we will have, and so many other factors. My personal estimate is 10-15 years - so when I’ll be 40 or 45 years old. Max 50 - I’m not gonna work full time and for money after 50. No way!
- Feel free to add contextual elements such as your FU number, your savings rate, your current net worth, where will you retire early, or what will you do when you become financially independent. The goal is to inspire the many readers of the newspaper with other cases as real as mine (in addition to having a more concrete answer).
FI number - I have few targets depending on whether we retire in Poland or Switzerland. But in Poland, I’d be good with 0.5-1M CHF, in Switzerland I’d prefer to have at least 1.5-2M CHF. And 1M is in the middle - hence my forum nickname.
Savings rate - on average 50%. If I have a lot of guests, it can drop to 45%, and if I have no guests and other activities, it goes up to 55%.
Net worth - 150k (80% in VT ETF, rest in cash).
Where and what after FI - good question. I was considering starting a Personal Finance FinTech startup in Poland or in Switzerland. Maybe I’ll start studying finance/economics. I have a few ideas. One thing is certain - I’ll work no more than 4 hours a day, so that I can spend more time with my family and pursue my hobbies and interests.
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Lately, I realized that the secret to success in anything is building proper habits. I’ve read two books that changed my mind on this - “Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg and “Thinking fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman.
I learned that on average we act, think and make decisions almost half of the time on sub-conscious autopilot - habitually. The reason is that mental, emotional and physical effort burns energy (glucose) and our bodies and brains are designed to save it because for most of the human pre-history and history, it was a scarce resource and it made sense evolutionary. MRI scans of people who do something habitually (or are naturally very talented) show that there’s no much activity happening. It means that our mind can do pretty smart and complicated things in System 1 - intuitively, without effort, almost automatically - if we train it good enough.
One can build and alter habits by focusing on habit loops: cues-routines-rewards. Each habit consists of these three elements - cue telling our brain to activate the “habit procedure”, routine activity that is being executed and the reward that reinforces a habit.
And this brought me to this post - the list of habits I want to build. Some of them I already managed to implement: e.g. I started saving +50% of my income and invest in ETFs, I quit sugar and moved more towards low-carb diet and I started reading at least an hour a day. These are huge changes, that made a positive impact on my life.
There’re few other that I’d like to improve (I also got some inspiration from the Rich Habits blog):
- Physical exercise: I have no ambition to be a Navy Seal but doing half an hour to an hour of an intensive exercise every day would be perfect. (I’ve created a thread about this.)
- Deliberate Practice/Education: I always wanted to be a lifelong learner. I sort of have two purposes in this area: I want to have broad general knowledge about the world and I want to be highly specialized in “my” field. General knowledge is something I’m working on by reading more books. The specialization is something I have to rethink - I used to focus on my IT skills since I had an objective of a professional career. Now, when I realized that at some point I’ll be FI and I found so many other passions, I have to think what - if anything - should be my object of specialization.
- Networking: I need to invest more in meeting regularly with people - professionally (for business) and personally (for happiness).
- Relaxation/Leisure: I want to rest better. I thought about learning meditation, but I’m not sure how to start.
- Dreams/Goals setting: I need to clear my head and think about what I want to achieve in my life. It’s not an easy task because I have so many (often contradictory) ideas and I’m not sure which of them will make me happier and which are worth the time and effort - and I’m in the process of giving up some plans (career in IT) and acquiring new ones (focus on being a good parent/husband). I already have few ideas: one is learning more languages - German, Swiss German and French are on my list. Second, I’m thinking about a Personal Finance startup - helping people getting to FI in a smooth way for a very tiny fee.
- Effective Altruism: I’d like to help people in smart, resource-efficient way.
- Order/Minimalism: I suck at keeping order at my house and I hoard too much useless stuff.
- Technical Skills: Except for a computer system, I can’t fix anything. I need to learn how to build, fix and improve things myself.
There are also a few habits that I’d like to destroy or minimize:
- Social media addiction
- Smartphone addiction
- Internet addiction
I know from my management studies that goals have to be SMART - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound. I need to tackle this problem first and turn my habit-formation ideas into more specific SMART goals. I also have to think harder about cues and rewards to turn a routine activities into real habits that reinforce themselves every time I do them. The biggest challenge, however, is to figure out what is my purpose - what should I dedicate my life to. Before I’ll hit FI, I need to re-learn how to structure my life and adapt to these ideas.
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About Habits, you should read Scott Adams’ How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
How do you plan to help others getting to FI? I was thinking about creating an App to manage expenses, but my idea is kind of hard to develop (receipts scanner etc…)
Thanks @ma0! Added to the reading list. 
I was thinking about starting a company that would combine two approaches:
- education, training and advice to help people get their personal finances straight, teach them the basics and in general support them to increase their motivation to save and invest, and to coach them to change their attitude and adjust their lifestyles - in other words, to turn them into Mustachians
- building an (open source) web/mobile app to help them track the savings and investments and progress to FI - basically building an app that would replace our spreadsheets and online FI web calculators and portfolio visualizers, with some basic performance metrics and explanations what it all means in simple words
PS. Receipts scanner is a good idea, and I think it’s not that hard to build - it would have to consist basically of two services: OCR and regex parser making sense of the scans. I think for OCR there should be open source tools and libraries doing the job - we would have to just build a mobile frontend for it. For regex parser we would have to build the parsing rules for Swiss receipts - it shouldn’t be that hard (I’m working in a company that actually builds such parser for transaction reports from Swiss banks).
PPS. For last 3 years, I have worked in FinTech startups that were building such financial “toys” for millionaires and wealth managers - I think śomething like that needs to be built low cost and for everyone, to be really successful.
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I am going to take a look at some of my old projects to see if I can resuscitate it with some new libraries available. I’ll let you know if you are interested.
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Sure, I’m interested. I suck at coding, but I can help anyways. What programming language are you using for this? Are you using GitHub?
We need to understand the problem first. I’d use whatever makes it easier
The problem is apparently hard to solve. Check ABBYY online. Sounds like it will take more than a couple of people on their free time to solve it.
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For anyone interested, here’s an interesting e-book from FEE.org on joining libertarian moral principles with self-improvement and personal development:
https://info.fee.org/hubfs/Books%20and%20Guides/Sanchez%20-%20YourWorkYourLifeFreeYourselfFirst.pdf (epub version here)
Another good inspirational list:
21 Suggestions for Success by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
- Marry the right person. This one decision will determine 90% of your happiness or misery.
- Work at something you enjoy and that’s worthy of your time and talent.
- Give people more than they expect and do it cheerfully.
- Become the most positive and enthusiastic person you know.
- Be forgiving of yourself and others.
- Be generous.
- Have a grateful heart.
- Persistence, persistence, persistence.
- Discipline yourself to save money on even the most modest salary.
- Treat everyone you meet like you want to be treated.
- Commit yourself to constant improvement.
- Commit yourself to quality.
- Understand that happiness is not based on possessions, power or prestige, but on relationships with people you love and respect.
- Be loyal.
- Be honest.
- Be a self-starter.
- Be decisive even if it means you’ll sometimes be wrong.
- Stop blaming others. Take responsibility for every area of your life.
- Be bold and courageous. When you look back on your life, you’ll regret the things you didn’t do more than the ones you did.
- Take good care of those you love.
- Don’t do anything that wouldn’t make your Mom proud.
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Woah! Excellent great list, thanks so much for putting this up!!!
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I’m reading at the moment Jordans Petersons 12 rules for life.
Jordan Peterson also has a very popular youtube channel where you can find a lot of material about his thinking. If you wonder if the book is worth it, go to his youtube channel and there you can hear one of his talks that are part of the tour he is doing at the moment. You could try this one. (His channel has a lot of material that is really interesting but not directly related to the book).
Jordans thinking is not directly related to frugality and FIRE but I really liked it and you can learn a lot from him!
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Thanks for the recommendation. I’ve read his book and I’m huge fan of it and his youtube channel as well. It’s really one of the best self-help books out there and he’s definitely one of the best critics of the modern leftist ideologies and the irresponsible culture they produce. In short: lots of good philosophical and life-practical content.
PS. In fact, I recently recommended this book on this forum:
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Sorry, I have not managed yet to read all the threads 
Awesome book indeed! I’m not through jet – unfortunately I am a quite slow-reader…
Another insanely interesting project I’ve found some time ago:
It’s an organization that advises on career options to improve the world. It’s generally inspired by the Effective Altruism movement.
They have also a very interesting blog that writes about these concepts. One of the last posts summarizes research about how quitting job or relationship (that we’re unsure about) on average improves happiness:
“The causal effect of quitting a job is estimated to be a gain of 5.2 happiness points out of 10, and breaking up as a gain of 2.7 out of 10! This is the kind of welfare jump you might expect if you moved from one of the least happiness countries in the world to one of the happiest, though presumably these effects would fade over time.”
Yet another reason to (eventually) quit my career.
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