you want to be a better player, you have to prepare, prepare, and prepare some more.

Kobe knew that to be the best you need a different approach from everyone else.

“basketball is an easy game to play, but a difficult game to master.”

always kept the end result, the long game, in my mind. I always focused on the fact that I had to try something to get it, and once I got it, I’d have another tool in my arsenal. If the price was a lot of work and a few missed shots, I was OK with that.

Stick with what works, even if it’s unpopular.

Some people, after all, enjoy looking at a watch; others are happier figuring out how the watch works.

By reading, by paying attention in class and in practice, by working, I strengthened my focus. By doing all of that, I strengthened my ability to be present and not have a wandering mind.

Just as important as reading was cultivating relationships with the greats who’d come before me.

That’s why I think it’s so important to have those mentors, those north stars, who you learn from and look up to.

The key, though, is being aware of how you’re feeling and how you need to be feeling. It all starts with awareness.

you really want to be great at something, you have to truly care about it. If you want to be great in a particular area, you have to obsess over it. A lot of people say they want to be great, but they’re not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve greatness. They have other concerns, whether important or not, and they spread themselves out. That’s totally fine. After all, greatness is not for everybody.

you have to have an understanding circle of family and friends.

People don’t always understand just how much effort from how many people goes into one person chasing a dream to be great.

There’s a fine balance between obsessing about your craft and being there for your family.

You can’t achieve greatness by walking a straight line.

I always listened to my body. That’s the best advice I can give: listen to your body, and warm up with purpose.

My cardio workouts centered around recovery—that is, the time it takes to recover in between sprints.

always found that short 15-minute catnaps gave me all the energy I’d need for peak performance.

Pain in one area of your body often stems from an imbalance somewhere else. With that in mind, it’s important to treat the root cause and not the effect.

MY ROUTINE CHANGED OVER TIME; MY APPROACH DIDN’T.

The only aspect that can’t change, though, is that obsession. You have to enter every activity, every single time, with a want and need to do it to the best of your ability.

One of the most important aspects of the game is listening to your body, and preparing it accordingly. I always kept that in mind.

have to work hard in the dark to shine in the light.

The mindset isn’t about seeking a result—it’s more about the process of getting to that result. It’s about the journey and the approach. It’s a way of life. I do think that it’s important, in all endeavors, to have that mentality.

What separates great players from all-time great players is their ability to self-assess, diagnose weaknesses, and turn those flaws into strengths.

A book about hard work, attention to detail and total obsession to ones craft.

The Mamba Mentality: How I Play

“The only thing that is truly significant about today, or any other day, is who you become in the process. Each of us are building our own house. Sometimes you might think you are building for your school, your family, your company, or your team, but you are always building your own house… I hope you build wisely.”

“John, everyone wants to start the next Ikea, but few are willing to be faithful selling individual matchsticks door to door. Everyone wants to build the next Apple or Facebook, nobody wants to sell matches door to door. Everyone wants to become a samurai warrior, but few are willing to faithfully chop wood, carry water.

Steve Jobs didn’t set out to transform entertainment, computers, music, tele-communications, and education. It happened as a byproduct of passion, persistence, and faithfulness to a small idea.

‘Everyone thinks greatness is sexy, it’s not. It’s dirty, hard work.’

Dream BIG. Start small. Be ridiculously faithful.

“You will learn, young John, the reason it takes longer is because with one eye on the goal, you only have one eye for the journey.”

The secret is to understand that nothing is a test, but only an opportunity to learn and grow. Many people never fulfill their potential, because they look at every situation in life as a test.

Nothing is a test, it’s only an illusion. Everything is an opportunity to learn and grow, because remember, you are building your own house.”

Whatever you do though, please don’t find your identity in something that can be gone in a moment’s notice.”

Like thirsty people guzzling salt water, achievement only creates a greater desire for accomplishing more, dehydrating us of true satisfaction and fulfillment.

The scorecard society judges us by is tragically flawed, and pursuing it will leave you completely unfulfilled.

It is time we develop a new scorecard for how we define a truly successful life.

This was tough for John, because he felt like all of the characteristics on his list were really important. But he finally wrote down: Boldness & Courage Loving Resourceful Persistence Akira smiled as the apprentices finished writing. “You now have your new scorecard. I want you to grade yourself twice a day on how you have done on the things that you have said are the most important characteristics for living a truly successful life. If you grade yourself around the middle of the day, then you will know what areas you need to focus on that evening. With this new scorecard, you can use any situation you find yourself in as an opportunity to grow these characteristics!”

You fuel your heart with six things: what you watch, what you read, what you listen to, who you surround yourself with, how you talk to yourself, and what you visualize.

I want you to start by writing a value statement at the top. It should say, ‘My value comes from who I am, not from what I do.’ Then, follow that with a growth mindset statement. ‘Anything that happens to me today is in my best interest and it’s an opportunity to learn and grow.’ Then, I want you to write out between fifteen to sixty-three specific things you did well.”

‘Talent without character is like an expensive, fast car with no gas. It is useless without the fuel that drives it2.’”

He continued, stern. “If it rains, bottle the water and sell it. If crap falls from the sky, package it and sell fertilizer. If it is sunny, plant a garden. Use what you and you alone have been given. You do not know what other people are going through, and everyone has their own unique struggles,

“You must always keep perspective, John. It is very easy to lose it, and when you lose perspective you forget that this life is but a vapor; we are here today and gone tomorrow. Do not waste your life, John. Focus on what truly matters, and do not fall for the lies of the comparison thief.”

You might not be able to stop negative thoughts or your inner critic from screaming at you, but you don’t have to believe them or give them significance, and you can definitely talk to yourself rather than just listening to the negativity!”

John peered at the drawings curiously. They looked like this: “What is that?” “That,” replied Akira, “Is the path to mastery.”

You see John, most people want the ninety-foot-tall bamboo tree without the five years of the process. They want the bamboo to grow to ninety feet tall in six weeks, but without the five years of invisible growth, the bamboo wouldn’t have a solid foundation, and it could never sustain the massive and rapid growth that occurs.

“John, chopping wood and carrying water is the price of admission for the opportunity to reach sustained excellence. Like the roots of a bamboo tree, it is a long and arduous process of invisible growth, where you are building the foundation that is necessary to sustain success. For many years it might feel as if nothing is happening, but you must trust the process and continue to chop wood and carry water, day in day out, regardless of what is happening around you.

There will be distractions. There will be people who tell you that you are stupid or crazy for doing it. There will be people who try and lure you off the path with quick fixes and get rich quick schemes. But you must be wise and stay the path, and continue to build your foundation by chopping wood and carrying water every day. Greatness isn’t sexy John, it is the dirty, hard work that is often very boring. You have a bright future. Stay the path, and never forget --”

“Excuse me?” he said. “John, there is only one thing you have to do in life, and that is die. You are always doing what you want to do, because there is always a choice. You may not like the choices, or the consequences, but you always have a choice. When you tell yourself that you have to do something, it creates a negative internal energy, but when you realize you want to do something it creates a more beneficial internal energy.”

Goals actually allow you to shirk responsibility. But a mission? Only the person in the mirror can stop you from living that out.

Today, our parents and coaches do all sorts of things to shelter kids from the consequences of their choices, and rarely inspire them with a mission.

I believe a mission is something you can do right where you are, anywhere, using only what you have. You do not need anyone’s permission.

So, what is your mission John? It is much deeper than a goal, and it is okay to borrow one from others and then refine it as you go. But your mission will act as your internal navigation system. Without a mission, you will flounder through life and very easily end up with your ladder on the ‘oh sh**’ building.”

“Many people keep climbing and climbing, only to get to the end of their life and the top of the ladder, and realize their ladder has been on the wrong building. Without a mission, it is easy to lose perspective on what truly matters. A mission will make you think beyond the moment, which is greatly important because the only thing that is significant about the moment is who you become in the process, and the impact you have on others.

Oftentimes, failure is the greatest teaching tool.

You cannot play present if you are focused on winning or the outcome.”

When you operate with a heart posture of gratefulness, you free yourself up to be at your best and slip into the zone. When you are focused on results you tend to force things, which makes you tight, and it’s almost impossible to get into the zone.

The ultimate illusion of the human experience is control6. The person you want beside you in battle is the guy who has surrendered the outcome, and surrendered to the fact that he might die. When you surrender the outcome, you are freed up to be at your best, to be in the moment, and to trust your training. It is the one who has surrendered the outcome who ironically has the greatest chance of survival. It is the one who has surrendered the outcome who has the greatest chance of success. It is the one who has surrendered to the fact that he could fail, who has the greatest likelihood of not failing. Until you surrender the outcome, you will always be the greatest enemy to your own success. In order to reach your greatest potential you must operate with a heart posture of gratitude, commit to the controllables, surrender the outcome, and trust the process.

He said that a growth mindset is believing that, “anything that happens to me is in my best interest and is an opportunity to learn and grow.”

Cascading waterfalls in life are sexy and alluring, and I hope you get to experience some of them. But if we focus on them instead of true mental toughness, we so often end up compromising all the things that truly matter. Sometimes we make it to the waterfalls, many times we do not. But regardless of whether we achieve our goal or not, there is always a path of destruction in our wake.

It might be easier to justify that wake of destruction when you achieve the goal, but it is even more of a reality check when you do not. John, a wise man once said, ‘You can go chase a dream, but then sometimes you look back and there’s a trail of tears behind you. And the tears are usually your wife and kids.’7

Did you know that the Chinese symbol for crisis is the combination of two words: danger and opportunity?

no one is interested in watching a story where the hero doesn’t have to overcome a lot of adversity. That would be incredibly boring.

‘At the end of your feelings is nothing. But at the end of every principle is a promise.’

Living by feelings is never going to work out well for anyone, because feelings change. Sometimes we simply wake up and we feel differently. Sometimes, someone does something to make us feel differently. Living by our feelings is like riding an emotional rollercoaster. When you make the choice to live by a certain set of principles, it will not only protect you from your feelings, it will allow you to step into your greatest potential.

“One: you are building your own house. Two: to play present, you must train to live present. Three: you must surrender the outcome and commit to the process or you will become your own worst enemy. And four: no matter what my circumstances are, always chop wood and carry water.”

“Those are excellent! I am happy to see our time together is paying off. Now, each day when you wake up, before you enter the shooting range, or before you compete, write out four to six principles that you want to stick to no matter what. Stick them in your pocket, and if you feel yourself wanting to live by your feelings, either touch that pocket, or pull them out and say them aloud of few times by yourself. Got it?”

You can turn your warrior dial down by doing deep-breathing exercises, talking slower, lowering your voice, listening to classical music, and slowing your movements. In fact, many of your teams in the west would benefit from turning their dial down before the “BIG” games and turning it up before the “smaller” games.

But we weren’t created to sit still and learn the ‘right’ answer. We were created to explore, create, to be loved, to love and to learn.

Even though you are equipped with life changing wisdom that could transform lives, you must not share it without an invitation. Most people just want to be heard and loved, they don’t want your wisdom, and that is OK! Sometimes, you can actually become the greatest impediment to other people growing when you try and force things on them. In time, if they see you model it, they will probably start to ask for help.

with my friends and family, I always ask “would you like my opinion or do you just need to be heard and want me to listen?” Sometimes this annoys them, and just because I could help, I must make sure they need it, want it, and give their permission.

Akira told him how proud he was, saying, “You know now that excellence is within your reach, John. It is accomplished through deliberate actions, ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, made into habits, compounded together and added up over time.

“Then from now on tell people that your name is Jonathan, and do not allow them to call you anything else. Names are very powerful. In the Bible, many people experienced name changes, and those name changes were watershed moments in their lives. You have transformed through your time here Jonathan, and you need to have a new name that represents that transformation.

“When I started out, I tried to write the BEST sermons. Now I just try and love the people in the audience.” When I started out, I tried to be the best in the world at performance psychology. My focus was teaching mental training exercises, tips, and tricks to increase performance. Today, I start almost every talk with “YOU Matter.” I let people know that they matter. Not what they do. Not what they achieve. Not their goals. Not their stuff. Not their accomplishments. Not their dreams. THEY matter. YOU matter. You are a human BEING, not just a human DOING. Always remember this. Be bold and courageous, chase lions, but never forget where your true value comes from!

You don’t have to be a jerk or tell the people of your current circle that they have been negatively influencing you. You can treat them very well, but consciously choose to spend much less time around them.

According to a recent study done by a Harvard professor and published by the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007, you are 57% more likely to become obese if you have a person close to you who becomes obese. It’s never easy to spend less time with people you’ve been around for a while, but at some point you have to remember that you are the one who is building your own house.

My encouragement to you would be to actually track how you use your time each day for the next week. Most people are shocked at how they actually use their 86,400 seconds.

A book about consistency, hard work and enjoying the process.

Chop Wood Carry Water: How to Fall In Love With the Process of Becoming Great

The 85% solution: getting started is more important than becoming an expert.

Spend extravagantly on the things you love and cut costs mercilessly on the things you don’t.

it’s easy to want the best of everything: we want to go out all the time, live in a great apartment, buy new clothes, drive a new car and travel anytime we want. The truth is, you have to prioritise.

My friend Jim once called to tell me that he’d gotten a raise at work. On the same day, he moved into a smaller apartment. Why? Because he doesn’t care very much about where he lives, but he loves spending money on camping and biking. That’s called conscious spending.

Every December, I sit down with my wife and we make plans for the next year. Where do we want to travel? Who do we want to invite with us? What can we imagine doing next year that we’ll remember for the next fifty years? This planning process – where we get to intentionally design our Rich Lives – is one of the most fun things we do together as a couple.

I encourage you to think about your Rich Life. Why do you want to be rich? What do you want to do with your wealth?

if you’re thinking about buying a book, just buy it. Don’t waste even five seconds debating it. Applying even one new idea from a book is worth it.

Part of creating your Rich Life is the willingness to be unapologetically different.

There aren’t any secrets to getting rich – it just takes small steps and some discipline, and you can do it with a little bit of work.

One of the key differences between rich people and everyone else is that rich people plan before they need to plan.

I recommend cashback because it’s straightforward, there are excellent cashback cards and it’s simpler than other rewards, which require more sophistication to truly maximise.

(Sidenote: If you find yourself getting a ton of credit card offers and other junk mail, go to stopjunkmail.org.uk to get off their marketing lists.)

If you’re booking travel or eating out, use a travel card to maximise rewards. For everything else, use a cashback card.

First, to inspire you to take action on paying off your student debt, play with the financial calculators at thisismoney.co.uk.

The key to using credit cards effectively is to pay off your credit card in full every month.

1 Get your credit score and credit report (1 hour). Check them to make sure there are no errors and to get familiar with your credit. You can access both for free from Experian, Equifax and TransUnion.

I pay most of my bills with my credit card, but the bills that I can’t pay with my card – like rent or my car payment – I pay directly from my current account using automatic transfers.

Having a separate savings account forces you to keep your long-term goals in mind instead of just blowing them on a few rounds of drinks.

it’s psychologically powerful to have your savings account separate from your current account.

Leave one and a half months of living expenses in your current account, or as close to it as you can manage.

The second step on the Ladder of Personal Finance is addressing your debt.

Long-term investing is a critical part of living a Rich Life,

they offer a different scheme and fill it out. Check to see if your employer offers matching.

Run a calculation from moneybasics.co.uk to see how much you could save by paying an extra £100 or £200 per month.

It is, quite simply, about choosing the things you love enough to spend extravagantly on – and then cutting costs mercilessly on the things you don’t love.

Here’s the idea: a Conscious Spending Plan involves four major buckets where your money will go: fixed costs, investments, savings and guilt-free spending money.

Finally, once you’ve gotten all your expenses filled in, add 15% for expenditures you haven’t counted yet. Yes, really. For example, you probably didn’t capture “car repairs”, which can cost £400 each time (that’s £33/month). Or dry cleaning or emergency vet care or charitable donations. A flat 15% will likely cover you for things you haven’t figured in, and you can get more accurate as time goes on.

This bucket includes the amount you’ll send to your pension scheme and stocks and shares ISA each month. A good rule of thumb is to invest 10% of your take-home pay (after taxes, or the amount on your monthly salary) for the long term.

You don’t want to end up like this person writing on the financial independence subreddit. “Looking back at the past few years of my life and at my bank account, I would gladly give away a hefty chunk of it and work longer if it meant I could have experienced more of the world and found more passions. I built my savings, but I never built my life.”

To find your annual salary, just take your hourly rate, double it, and add three zeros to the end.

To find your hourly rate, divide your salary by two and drop the three zeros.

Make tracking your spending a weekly priority. For example, set aside thirty minutes for it every Sunday afternoon.

Finally, her credit card company automatically emails her a copy of her bill for a 5-minute review.

One per cent can cost you 28% of your returns. A 2% fee can cost you 63% of your returns.

Get smart. You should ideally be paying 0.1% to 0.3%.

That’s why individual investors like you and me should not invest in individual stocks. Instead, we’ll choose funds, which are collections of stocks (and sometimes, for diversification, bonds).

because bonds are such a safe, low-risk investment, the return – even on a highly rated bond – is much lower than it would be on an excellent stock.

It is important to diversify within stocks, but it’s even more important to allocate across the different asset classes – like stocks and bonds. Investing in only one category is dangerous over the long term. This is where the all-important concept of asset allocation comes into play.

But in your thirties and older, you’ll want to begin balancing your portfolio with bonds to reduce risk.

Here’s what typical investors’ asset allocations – remember, that’s the mix of different investments – might look like as they get older. These figures are taken from Vanguard’s target date funds.

you should own different categories of stocks (and maybe bonds) to balance out your portfolio.

But things have changed. As we saw in Chapter 6, there are now better choices for investing: lower-cost, better-performing index funds.

Advantages of a mutual fund: Hands-off approach means an expert money manager makes investment decisions for you.

Disadvantages: Annual fees can equal tens of thousands of pounds or more over the lifetime of an investment by using expense ratios, front-end loads and back-end loads (worthless sales charges that add nothing to your returns) – all tricky ways to make mutual funds more money.

“I believe that 98% or 99% — maybe more than 99% — of people who invest should extensively diversify and not trade. That leads them to an index fund with very low costs.” —WARREN BUFFETT, ONE OF AMERICA’S GREATEST INVESTORS

target date funds are the easiest investment choice you’ll ever need to make.

Target date funds aren’t perfect for everyone, because they work on one variable alone: when you plan to retire.

matched contributions from your employer, you need to pay into your pension before you do any other investing. If your employer doesn’t offer a match, skip to the ISA section on the next page.

Note: stay away from “money market funds”, which is just another way of saying your money is sitting, uninvested, in cash. You want to get your money working for you.

After your pension match, the next best place to invest is your stocks and shares ISA.

The Rule of 72 is a fast trick you can do to figure out how long it will take to double your money. Here’s how it works: Divide the number 72 by the return rate you’re getting and you’ll have the number of years you must invest in order to double your money.

Anyway, Swensen suggests allocating your money in the following way: 30% – Domestic equities: UK stock funds, including small-, mid- and large-cap stocks 15% – Developed-world international equities: funds from developed foreign countries, including the United States, Germany and France 5% – Emerging-market equities: funds from developing foreign countries, such as China, India and Brazil. These are riskier than developed-world equities, so don’t go off buying these to fill 95% of your portfolio. 20% – Real estate investment trusts: also known as REITs. REITs invest in mortgages and residential and commercial real estate, both domestically and internationally. 15% – Government bonds: fixed-interest UK securities, which provide predictable income and balance risk in your portfolio. As an asset class, bonds generally return less than stocks. 15% – index-linked gilts: these bonds protect against inflation. Eventually you’ll want to own these, but they’d be the last ones I’d get after investing in all the better-returning options first.

HOW MANY FUNDS SHOULD I INVEST IN? A: If you’re wondering how many funds you should own, I’d encourage you to keep it simple. Ideally you should have just one (a target date fund). But if you’re picking your own index funds, as a general guideline, you can create a great asset allocation using anywhere from three to seven funds. That would cover domestic equities, international equities, real estate investment trusts and perhaps a small allocation to bonds or gilts.

The first thing you want to do when picking index funds is to minimise fees. Look for the management fees (“expense ratios”) to be low: around 0.2% and you’ll be fine.

In Chapter 5, we covered your automatic infrastructure. To set up automatic investing, configure your accounts to automatically pull a set amount of money from your current account each month. See page 172 for details. Remember: if you set it up, most funds waive transaction fees.

Let’s say you check your Conscious Spending Plan from Chapter 4, and it allows you to invest £500 per month after contributing to your pension. Assuming all of your funds have a £1,000 minimum, you’d set a savings goal of £1,000 for Index Fund 1 and save for two months. Once you accumulated enough to cover the minimum, transfer that £1,000 from savings to your investment account and buy the fund. Now, set up a contribution of £100 per month to the fund you just bought. Then take the remaining £400 per month set aside for investing (£500 total minus the £100 you’re investing in Index Fund 1) and start another savings goal toward Index Fund 2. Once you’ve saved enough, buy Index Fund 2. Repeat this process as necessary. Sure, it may take a few years to get to the point where you own all the index funds you need, but remember, you’re taking a forty- or fifty-year outlook on investing – it’s not about the short term.

most people confuse their house with an investment that they buy and sell for profit. Think about it. Who sells their house for profit and keeps the money?

Lots of people understand that, logically, they should create a well-diversified portfolio of low-cost funds. But they also want to have fun investing. If you feel this way, sure, use a small part of your portfolio for “high risk” investing – but treat it as fun money, not as money you need. I set aside about 10% of my portfolio for fun money, which includes particular stocks I like, know and use (companies like Amazon that focus on customer service, which I believe drives shareholder value); sector funds that let me focus on particular industries (I own an index fund that focuses on healthcare); and even angel investing, which is personal investing for private ultra-early-stage companies.

Investing isn’t about picking individual stocks. Research shows that even veteran portfolio managers will, on average, fail to beat the market.

If you want to invest in cryptocurrency, be my guest. As I said, once you have a solid portfolio in place, I encourage you to invest 5% to 10% in something fun!

The best way to rebalance is to plough more money into the other areas until your asset allocation is back on track. How? Assuming your domestic equities now represent 45% of your asset allocation – but should actually be only 30% – stop sending money there temporarily and redistribute that 30% of your investment contribution evenly over the rest of your investment categories. You can do this by “pausing” your automatic investment to particular funds from within your investment account.

Check out the chart on the next page to see how it works. In this case, you can see that after eight months you’re more or less back on target, so you can go back to your original allocations.

To keep the maths simple, I recommend the free financial dashboard at trustnet.com to help guide your rebalancing.

Note: In some cases, the numbers in the above columns don’t add up to 100% because of the variables of rounding.

The Myth: Making more money will move you up in tax brackets, causing you to get taxed more and actually earn less. Reality: Please, for the love of God, spend three minutes learning about something called “marginal tax brackets”. If you start earning more and move up tax brackets, the “marginal” amount – or the money in the higher tax bracket – is taxed at a higher rate, not the entire amount you earn.

Invest as much as possible into tax-deferred accounts like your pension and ISA.

EVALUATE YOUR CONSCIOUS SPENDING PLAN (3 HOURS) Use these as general guidelines, but take them seriously. If your money is following these suggested percentages, that’s a Big Win toward a Rich Life. □ Fixed costs (50–60%) □ Investments (10%) □ Savings (5–10%) □ Guilt-Free Spending (20–35%) □ Reassess current subscriptions (cut if necessary).

Every year, you get a capital gains tax allowance – a level of profit from your investments before you pay tax.

Bottom line: Invest in retirement accounts and hold your investments for the long term.

1. CREATE AN EMERGENCY FUND. An emergency fund is simply another savings goal that is a way to protect against job loss, disability, or simple bad luck. Especially if you have a mortgage or you need to provide for your family, an emergency fund is a critical piece of being financially secure.

Eventually, your emergency fund should contain six to twelve months of spending money (which includes everything: your mortgage, payments on other loans, food, transportation, taxes, gifts and anything else you would conceivably spend on).

Technically, your decision comes down to interest rates – so if your student loan has a super-low interest rate of, say, 2%, you’d want to pursue option one, given you can make an average of 8% by investing in low-cost funds.

The thing that makes the biggest difference about the British system, however, is that student loan debts in the UK are automatically cancelled after 30 years (lucky you!).

Given that the stats suggest about 83% of people most probably won’t be able to do so, option one is likely to be your smartest bet, unless you earn a high enough salary to make option two worthwhile. For more information, have a look at https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/students/student-loans-tuition-fees-changes/ and https://www.ucas.com/student-finance-england/repaying-your-student-loan

Log into your investment account no more than once a month – that’s it.

Are they maximising their pension payments, at least contributing as much as their company matches?

Interestingly, changing the number of guests doesn’t change the cost as much as you’d imagine. In the example on the next page, reducing the head count by 50% reduces the cost by only 30%. Beyond the obvious – negotiating for better prices on the venue and food – the best suggestion I’ve heard about cutting wedding costs is to tackle the fixed costs.

Fundamentally, there are two ways to get more money. You can earn more or you can spend less. Cutting costs is great, but I personally find increasing earnings to be a lot more fun.

Tie your work to the company’s strategic goals – and show the boss how you’ll make her look good. Highlight the ways you’ll make your boss’s life easier by being the go-to person she can hand anything to. And remember that your company will make much more off your work than they pay you, so highlight the ways you’ll help your company hit its goals. Your key phrase here is: “Let’s find a way to arrive at a fair number that works for both of us.”

2. Have another job offer – and use it. This is the single most effective thing you can do to increase your salary. When you have another job offer, your potential employers will have a newfound respect for your skills. People like others who are in demand.

Negotiating tactic: Interview with multiple companies at once. Be sure to let each company know when you get another job offer, but don’t reveal the amount of the exact offer – you’re under no obligation to. In the best case, the companies will get into a bidding war and you’ll profit while watching two multinational firms rumble over you. I can think of no better way to spend a casual weekday.

3. Come prepared (99% of people don’t). Don’t just pick a salary out of thin air. First, visit greendoor.co.uk and mysalary.co.uk to get a median amount for the position. Then, if you can, talk to people currently at the company (if you know someone who has recently left, even better they’ll be more willing to give you the real information) and ask what the salary range really is for the job. Finally, and this is important, bring a plan of how you’ll hit your goals to the negotiating session.

5. Negotiate for more than money. Don’t forget to discuss whether or not the company offers a bonus, stock options, flexible working, or training. You can also negotiate holiday leave and even job title.

Negotiating tactic: Your line here is, “I understand you can’t offer me what I’m looking for right now. But let’s assume I do an excellent job over the next six months. Assuming my performance is just extraordinary, I’d like to talk about renegotiating then. I think that’s fair, right?” (Get the hiring manager to agree.) “Great. Let’s put that in writing and we’ll be good to go.”

If you want to learn more about negotiation, I’ve put together a package of in-depth negotiation videos and tips. Check out iwillteachyoutoberich.com/bonus/ for details.

Surprisingly, from a financial perspective, the most important factor is how long you keep the car before you sell it. You could get the best deal in the world, but if you sell the car after four years, you’ve lost money. Instead, understand how much you can afford, pick a reliable car, maintain it well and drive it for as long as humanly possible. Yes, that means you need to drive it for more than ten years, because it’s only once you finish the payments that the real savings start.

There are four steps to buying a car: Budgeting, Picking a Car, Negotiating Like an Asian and Maintaining Your Car.

CALCULATE TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP (TCO). This means you figure out how much you’ll be spending over the life of the car

BUY A CAR THAT WILL LAST YOU AT LEAST TEN YEARS,

DON’T ▪ LEASE. Leasing nearly always benefits the dealer, not you. The two exceptions are people who want the newest car and are willing to pay a lot for it, and the occasional business owner who leases a car for tax benefits.

The real savings come once you’ve paid off your car loan and driven it for as long as possible. Most people sell their cars far too early. It’s much cheaper to maintain your car well and drive it into the ground.

If possible, buy a car at the end of the year, when dealers are salivating to beat their quotas and are far more willing to negotiate.

I know that keeping your car well maintained doesn’t sound sexy, but it will make you rich when you eventually sell your car. So take your car’s maintenance as seriously as your retirement savings. As soon as you buy your car, enter the major maintenance checkpoints into your calendar so you remember them. Here’s a hint: the average car in the UK is driven a little over seven thousand miles per year. You can use that number as a starting point to calculate a maintenance schedule based on the car manufacturer’s instructions. Of course, you also need to have regular oil changes, watch your tyre pressure and keep your car clean. I keep a record of each service I have, along with any notes. When I sell my car, I’ll show the documentation to the buyer to prove how meticulous I’ve been (and charge the buyer accordingly). People often forget this and slap their foreheads when they go to sell their car, only to be negotiated down (by someone like me) for not keeping detailed maintenance records. Don’t let yourself get outmanoeuvred by a lack of paperwork.

If the garage door breaks or the toilet needs repairing, that’s coming out of your pocket, not a landlord’s – and home repairs are ridiculously expensive. So even if your mortgage payment is the same £1,000/ month as your rental, your real cost will be about 40% to 50% higher – in this case, more like £1,500/month when you factor everything in.

Bottom line: If you don’t have enough money to make a deposit and cover your total monthly costs, you need to set up a savings goal and defer buying until you’ve proven that you can hit your goal consistently, month after month.

Finally, will you be able to stay in the house for at least ten years? Buying a house means you’re staying put for a long time. Some people say five years, but the longer you stay in your house, the more you save. There are a few reasons for this. When you go through a traditional estate agent, there are large transaction fees – usually 2% of the selling price. Divide that by just a few years, and it hits you a lot harder than if you had held the house for ten or twenty years. Now add in stamp duty, which is a significant whack. There are also the costs associated with moving. The bottom line here: Buy only if you’re planning to live in the same place for ten years or more. I have to emphasise that buying a house is not just a natural step that everyone has to take at some point. Too many people assume this and then get in over their heads. Buying a house changes your lifestyle forever. No matter what, you have to make your monthly payment every month – or you’ll lose your house and watch your credit score tank. This affects the kinds of jobs you can take and your level of risk tolerance. It means you’ll need to save for a six-month emergency plan in case you lose your job and can’t pay your mortgage. In short, you really need to be sure you’re ready for the responsibility of being a homeowner.

If you’re thinking of your primary residence as an investment, property provides mediocre returns at best.

How to handle your money yet still enjoy the finer things in life.

I Will Teach You To Be Rich: No guilt, no excuses - just a 6-week programme that works

But if you don’t stop to live what you’re doing—if you don’t make space to experience the joy of the game—you’re missing something. You’re missing the biggest thing.

How an athlete plays when they’re exhausted tells you everything about who they are as a competitor. The successful ones don’t even think about being exhausted. They’re so used to it that all they think about is performing.

Finding a reason for hunger when you have every reason to feel full—that’s what separates good from great.

Because life and leadership are about communication. Communication is the most essential when the stakes are highest.

“If you’re not talking, you’re not playing defense.”

Ego poisons success—confidence is necessary for success. Figuring out the difference is the most important realization a young athlete can ever make. And nothing else you do in your time in sports will serve you better as a human being than learning that lesson.

Sure, you could say, “It’s a business. You’re supposed to be coworkers, not friends.” And that attitude can work for a while—when things are going well. But when they aren’t, when you need to level with one another about what’s going wrong and how to fix it, you’ll find that teams with that attitude don’t have what it takes.

That’s the thing about leadership: It’s always changing. And being a leader means being willing to change to meet your team’s needs at any given moment. Whoever it is that steps up on any given day, however your leadership style changes over time, being a leader means keeping the ethos of what your team is doing intact. Championship organizations need to have a championship mentality. Leaders keep negativity from seeping in, and they don’t let their teammates see them giving in to it.

Being a leader means knowing your teammates, speaking to each one of them, letting them know that they all matter.

But one thing that is seared in my memory from those early days is watching LeBron stretch. He had a thirty-minute stretching routine, and he told me he stretched every day when he woke up in the morning and then again before going to bed at night. And that’s on top of stretching before and after workouts, practices, and games.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

The one skill that will carry you forward in life, the best thing you can take from the game—whatever that game is for you—is the ability to be a teammate. To be of use to others. To want others to do well . . . and to help yourself do well by helping them.

That’s why even the biggest winners have to keep winning in perspective. In 2001, I was a high school All-American, and Kobe Bryant came to talk to us at a training camp. This was in the middle of his great run with Shaq on the Lakers. I remember him saying something like, “If you think winning is going to complete you, you’re wrong.” He told us that there’s always going to be a next season, there’s going to be another champion next year, and even if you repeat, one year you won’t. The high of winning is temporary, and if you make chasing that high into your identity, it’s going to let you down.

“Athletes decide first what they want to be, then proceed to do what is necessary.” Do what is necessary. It takes what it takes. It’s that simple. It’s that complicated. But it’s possible.

If you knew what it was going to cost before you started—“hit ten thousand free throws, run a thousand wind sprints, and do five hundred pull-ups and you’ll be a champion”—anyone could do it. Or almost anyone. What’s hard isn’t just the work. What’s hard is giving everything you have with no guarantees but the love of the game.

It takes what it takes. Every day. Of your whole life. And even then, it might not be enough.

“Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you’re comfortable with . . . it’s work, it’s exercise. Find the torture you’re comfortable with and you’ll do well.”

We don’t control what happens to us, the Stoics say. We only control how we respond.

A book about hard work and enjoying the process. This book made me think more highly of Chris, he's more than just an athlete.

Letters to a Young Athlete

‘Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party’.10 Even when you think you’ve turned your TV off, it might still be on.

A book about how to take care of your data in the modern age. I picked up a few tips and tricks on how to take care of my privacy across all devices.