The Last Safe Investment summary

How often do you find yourself spending money as a shortcut to happiness? If you add up the emotional purchases you made in the past 12 months, how much have you spent? Did those gadgets and clothes bring you lasting joy, or did you pull out the credit card again a week later?

Most people think that earning more money will make them happier. But happiness can get very expensive if we believe it comes from spending more. To increase your wealth, it’s actually far more useful to explore what’s undermining your happiness.

Raj Bandyopadhyay, an Atlanta-based software engineer, is feeling discouraged. He dreams of working in data science, but knows that thousands of his peers have the same dream. There’s only one way to get his foot in the door: Raj needs to connect with industry leaders.

He figures he can attend some local networking events but, after doing a little research, he discovers that there aren’t any. So, even though he has no experience, he decides to create his own: a weekly meetup with a guest speaker from the tech industry. Over time, attendance increases and Raj becomes well known. In just 12 months, he goes from being invisible to getting headhunted by a hot new start-up looking to appoint a chief data scientist.

In 2004, art experts named Marcel Duchamp’s The Fountain as the most influential artwork of the twentieth century. It is not, however, a magnificent painting akin to the works of Dalí or Picasso. It is a standard urinal, which the artist bought in a showroom.

How could something that Duchamp didn’t even make be so significant?

On his first day as president of a construction company, Lee Franklin was thrown in at the deep end. He was put in charge of building 28 cell sites for a phone company in just six months. It was an intimidating challenge. Lee had no technical knowledge about how cell sites worked, and it usually took 18 months to build just one.

But Lee possessed a super skill that made him perfect for the job. He knew how to create a mental model – a sort of schematic diagram that helped him gain an overview of the relevant technical knowledge. It meant he could work effectively on technical projects, and alongside professionals with decades of experience, without needing that know-how himself.

Picture two coworkers – Kim and Rowan. On paper, they both have the same education and level of experience. But in practice their approach to work is vastly different. Kim typically drags himself through the day, coffee by coffee, because he surfs the net until the early hours and doesn’t get enough sleep. Rowan, on the other hand, tackles her tasks with energy and focus. She’s far more likely to get a promotion than her work buddy, Kim.

Bosses often determine an employee’s value on measurable qualities, like performance results. But how well we perform has its origins in something harder to measure – how much we prioritize taking care of ourselves physically. Being healthy enhances our charisma, confidence and longevity, adding to our workplace value.

When graffiti artist David Choe was commissioned to paint murals for a new tech start-up, he turned down the $60,000 fee. To many people, this would seem foolish. Sixty-thousand dollars isn’t pocket change. But Choe took a calculated risk. He asked to be paid in equity instead. That equity is now worth about half-a-billion dollars. The start-up Choe spray painted was Facebook.

Equity is partial ownership in a company, normally in the form of shares. It defies the notion that we must work longer and harder to earn more, making it a valuable asset. Getting equity at the right stage in a company’s development can lead to huge rewards later on. This is why so many secretaries and parking attendants in Silicon Valley end up as millionaires.

On a rainy Californian night in 2007, author Bryan Franklin’s car was rear-ended in a tunnel. He was rushed to the hospital for tests to see how serious his head injury was. Waiting for the results took a few scary hours, but in that time Franklin received over 60 text messages from worried friends.

Many of these messages came from a community of people living in a cohousing facility, in San Francisco. Franklin had only known them a few months, but in the weeks after he was discharged from the hospital, they brought him meals, offered massages to treat his whiplash, and helped with his insurance claims. Franklin was astounded by the support. When he asked a friend why everyone was being so generous, she said it was because they were a tribe.