Hey, my name is Bryan Uribe!

For many investors, ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’ is viewed as a classic and with reason! This book does an amazing job of helping the reader understand how money truly works, not what they teach you in school. Have you ever heard of The American Dream? The American Dream is the belief that anyone, regardless of where they were born or what class they were born into, can attain their own version of success in a society where upward mobility is possible for everyone. I remember this being explained to me as having a beautiful house with a white picket fence and having 2.5 children with a beautiful dog. The American Dream alludes to what this book aims to detail, but never really explains. This book will teach the principles of how to build wealth, not be rich.

Wealth > Riches

How do you build wealth? If your response is “I don’t know”, this book is a great place to start your learning. I found out about this book after hearing it be mentioned multiple times by a super successful real estate investor on a podcast. To qualify, the investor who recommended this book had over 50 buildings. I literally did not know what to expect, and when I received it I felt a little sketched out. The book’s cover doesn’t necessarily scream “read me, I’m going to teach you how to make millions of dollars.” To be fair, this book isn’t claiming to teach you the secrets to making millions of dollars either. This book is brilliant because it is an easy, laid back, and engaging read. If you don’t know ANYTHING about money, I recommend you start here… You literally can’t go wrong with this book, in my opinion.

Mastering the fundamentals of any skill has been crucial to finding success in everything I’ve done. If you don’t understand the fundamentals of success, you will stumble through life frustrated until you figure them out. This book has been listed as one of the best personal finance books of all time, and after hearing about this book for over a decade, I finally got a chance to read it. The Richest Man in Babylon is written in story format, as it’s based on stories from Ancient Babylon, one of the wealthiest civilizations in the ancient world. The book follows the teachings of a man who desired great wealth for himself, and his teacher, the Richest Man in Babylon. The book focuses on the fundamentals of finance that still apply today and explore how to growing wealth is typically a slow and long process. In my opinion, playing the long game is boring but delivers the best results and pays the best dividends, and this book encompasses these teachings in an easy to understand format.

“Sales… Sales is like blah right? Who wants to convince someone to buy a product? I don’t want to pressure someone into a sale, I don’t know how you do it.” I’ve heard this statement too many times to count. First off, if you’re pressuring someone into a sale, I personally think you’re creepy. Sales isn’t an art, it’s a science. While sales may be a science, it still requires some finesse. The Challenger Sale will teach you how to ask meaningful questions, understand your client, and put yourself in a position to learn. To be successful in sales, you need to listen to your leads/prospects/clients. If you aren’t learning about your client, their needs, wants, and situations, you aren’t successfully closing deals.

To quote one of my good friends “YOU NEED TO LISTEN!”

“I don’t like sales because I don’t like the thought of taking advantage of people.” I’ve heard this statement a little too much as well. You should walk into every buyer/seller relationship with the goal of walking away from the deal leaving both sides in a better position. I was recommended this book by one of my sales managers. At first, the name confused me, but once I got into the book, I saw why the book came highly recommended. Stop chasing your tail and get down to business.

This is one of the books in my rotation for a re-read.

Time to switch it up! This book is not a book on sales strategy. You will not learn how to ask for your prospect’s business by reading this book. What about how to win super profitable deals? Negative. This book is amazing because it teaches you about being a sales leader, and I don’t mean a sales manager. I love this book because this is the only book I’ve read that has obsessed over the details of being a successful salesperson. “How To Be A Rain Maker” explores what you need to do to consistently exceed your quota. In reading this book, you will learn tried and true sales tactics to keep a healthy pipeline, eliminate poor leads, and exceed your quota. If you’re new to sales, you should be starting here. Sales are a little like puberty, some of us blossom into beautiful butterflies, while some of us stay awkward caterpillars for a little longer than others.

This is an honorable mention! For some salespeople, this is considered a bible. For other salespeople, they’ve never read this book and never plan to. I’ll be honest, I didn’t start to learn from this book until I was halfway through. Some of the recommendations in this book are pretty straightforward if you’ve already been in sales, and have seen some success. While this book is a classic sales book for many, I believe this book is best suited to helping people understand emotional intelligence. The book focuses on how to talk to people, how to work with difficult people, and how to continue moving towards your goal no matter what type of personality you’re dealing with.

“I want to start a business but don’t know where to start! How do I start a business? I don’t have enough money to start a business I’ll just wait till I get my money right.”

Excuses are easy to make if you don’t have the motivation to make a change. If you’re interested in making a change, starting a business, and using a framework that has worked for hundreds of other budding entrepreneurs, this is the book for you.

“Monopolies are bad. Monopolies stifle innovation. Monopolies [insert hyperbolic criticism about businesses].” This book is effectively a book on monopolies. To be clear, it isn’t a book that preaches how to manipulate and take advantage of a market. Zero to One is easily one of my favorite books because it talks about how to build a business that is highly defensible. Zero to One is a book on innovation that consistently highlights how innovative companies grow to have monopolistic levels of market share. It is a truly fascinating book as it debunks a lot of common ideas around building businesses.

Zero to One is one of my Top 5 Favorite Books.

When LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman was asked: What is an entrepreneur? He said “someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down.” While this is a famous quote from Reid, in his book Blitzscaling, he adds to that quote. When companies experience exponential growth that can sometimes cripple a business, that’s called Blitzscaling. Blitzscaling is like jumping off a cliff, building a plan on your way down, while adding rockets to the plane. Blitzscaling isn’t easy, if it were everyone would be doing it. Blitzscaling doesn’t work for every business, if it did, everyone would be doing it. Blitzscaling gives you a view into the innerworkings and how some of the largest and most successful companies built their businesses.

What drives your resource engine? Do you have a repeatable set of steps that drive success in your business? What is your core business model? What’s your flywheel? Turning The Flywheel is a book with 37 pages that packs a punch. I don’t do anything without considering the flywheel and how to drive my resource engine. Turning The Flywheel is a Monograph that as written to accompany “Good to Great” but this book is so good, you can read it by itself and still walk away with your mind blown.

Since the start of my career in 2012, I’ve always been fascinated by the way some companies rise to the top of their industry. I’m fascinated by companies whose impact spans centuries despite starting from an ambitious founder’s dream and a small, trusty team. When I picked this book up, I didn’t have any expectations but as I got into it, I was blown away by the level of detail and insights provided on some of the world’s most legendary companies. Built to Last is based on rigorous research on some of the world’s most enduring companies. I have applied many of the concepts I learned in this book and this has helped me look at companies, operations, and business strategy with a new perspective.

How do you start a company? How do you scale a company? How do you do all of that without blowing the budget? Once you have a company that’s generating revenue, it’s typically easy to just throw money at growth. The Lean Startup challenges that costly, ineffective approach and shares the methodologies the world’s most successful tech start-ups used to achieve scale, success, and remarkable success. One of my favorite phrases  is “Measure 100 times, cut once” and this book presents how businesses can approach growth with the “measure 100 times and cut once” mentality.

Ready for my favorite book of all time? Here it goes! 80/20 Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall is one of the most detail-oriented books I’ve ever read. Do you ever wonder why you work so many hours to see so little results? This book explains why! 80/20 Sales & Marketing is a book explaining the Pareto Principle and how the principle is much more dynamic than the original principle’s intent.

The Pareto Principle is simple. 80% of what you do generates 20% of your results, and 20% of what you do generates 80% of your results. If you focus on 20% of 20% of what you do, you will generate 80% of 80% of your results. This may sound confusing for some, but as you go through the book you are exposed to new concepts and theories that will blow your mind.

If you want to become extremely effective, this book is for you!

80/20 Sales & Marketing is one of my Top 5 Favorite Books.

Ok, now it’s honesty hour… I know it seems like I’m up to a lot, but I don’t want to work that much. I read the 4-Hour Work Week in 2018 a few weeks after I read 80/20 Sales & Marketing by Perry Marshall… This book is a must-read for young entrepreneurs who are looking to transition from working 40-hours a week to owning their own business. This book is a must-read for everyone. Manage your time better, manage your time smarter, and live the life you deserve.

The 4-Hour Work Week is one of my Top 5 Favorite Books.

Do you want exponential success? Welcome to 10X! 10X explains how the amount of effort you have to dedicate to achieve a specific kind of result is the same as the effort you would have to dedicate to achieve a result that is 10 times greater. Grant Cardone is best known for being a real estate influencer, high powered businessman, and for his book 10X. The 10X book was so successful that he ultimately went on to build his entire brand around 10X. It can be argued that his success today came from the effort he put into 10X. I haven’t read any of the other books by Uncle G, but this one is an absolute gem.

How do you eat an elephant? One piece at a time. How do you eat a frog? You just do it. I discovered this book through a tweet. I am a professional list maker and completer, but even as a professional, I could always use tools, tips, and tricks to continue improving. Eat That Frog! challenged me to approach task and time management in a simple way that I never considered. No one wants to eat a frog, but when you have to eat a frog, you just have to get it over with. To understand the analogy, you’re going to have to read the book!

Easily one of the most transformative books I’ve read… I found a copy of The Pearl in my bedroom when I first moved out of my parent’s home. The copy of The Pearl I ended up reading was my older brother’s as he had to read it in High School. I’m 100% confident he didn’t take away what I took away from the book because… high schoolers right? In short, The Pearl woke me up to the reality that while I want to be wildly successful, I never truly sat down to think/plan out what I would do with all of that success. The Pearl follows a man who finds “The Pearl of the World” in a time where his people were oppressed. While he was technically the richest man in his village and maybe on the continent, The Pearl came with many challenges and tragedies that no amount of money could justify.

The Pearl is one of my Top 5 Favorite Books.

Success has much more to do with your mental, emotional, and spiritual health than the amount of money in your bank account. Peace is something most of us lack. Americans aren’t particularly known for their culture of mindfulness and restraint. Overall, in today’s modern world, most people are consumed in technology, vanity, and things that don’t add to their life. If you are struggling with the above, I recommend this book be at the top of your reading list. If you’re not struggling with the above, you probably already enjoy content related to living a better life. This is a must-read for everyone in my personal opinion.

“They don’t know me son!” and “who’s going to carry the boats!?” are two of my favorite lines from David Goggins, that don’t make sense without context, but if you know, you know. I started listening to Never Finished on Audible while I was mowing the lawn and was instantly hooked. I’ve always been driven, passionate, and focused on achieving my dreams. In a weird way, this book made me realize the level of drive, passion, and focus I had on my dreams was cute. Never Finished fired me up in a way that I didn’t know was possible, and now I oftentimes find myself saying “just go a little harder, give it a little more, you got this”. This book pushed me to give it that extra bit of juice, and it’s been highly rewarding.

Never Finished is one of my Top 5 Favorite Books.

Have you ever heard the concept of 10,000 hours to master a task or skill? That concept was popularized by this book. Outliers transformed the way I think about work, my upbringing, the small habits I adopt and break, and how I’ve gotten to where I’m at today. This is easily one of the books that’s had the greatest impact on me and continues to impact my daily life. I don’t want to spoil this book, but I would recommend this book to anyone at any stage in life.

How well do you react to change? Do you not even think about it and just deal with the change? Do you observe the change and wait around see if things will go back to what you were used to? Do you wait around for days, weeks, months, maybe even years for things to go back to how they were?

Who Moved My Cheese? was a fascinating story that invited me to reflect on how I react to change. Long story short, I don’t like change, but I don’t lose to change. This book is a quick read that has the potential to provide you with some deep insights, if you’re open to receiving them.