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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Listen to the Intro
Learn to Earn summary
Peter Lynch
A Beginner's Guide to the Basics of Investing and Business
22 mins
Table of Contents
Learn to Earn
Summary of 8 key ideas
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Key idea 1 of 8
Investing allows you to participate in the corporate world that is all around you.
Picture this: You wake up to your iPhone’s alarm. You brush with Colgate toothpaste, shower with Dove soap, pop in your Bausch and Lomb contacts lenses and put on your 7 for all Mankind jeans and Express shirt. You drive your Jeep to work, grabbing a latte from Starbucks on the way.
Sound familiar? Morning to night, we interact with corporate America, consuming goods and services made by companies that range from small to gargantuan. But that involvement does not have to be passive. By owning stock in these companies, you can own your own piece of corporate America.
But what is a corporation, exactly? Well, it’s the formal name for a company, for one. The word comes from the Latin word corpus, meaning “body,” and anyone can start a corporation. All you have to do is pay a fee and file papers in the state in which you have your legal address. Add an “Inc.” to the end of your company’s name, and voila! You’ve become an incorporated company – which means that your business is a separate entity from you, an important distinction for legal reasons.
Most corporations in the United States are private. This means they can be owned by one person, a family, partners, or any other arrangement in which certain people call all the shots. Think of your local family-owned gyro shop or your cousin’s freelance marketing business: These are private companies, and only their owners get to make decisions about how they run.
A public company, on the other hand, is one in which anyone can buy a share. Once you give them your money, the company sends you a stock certificate that shows that you own a piece of it. Think Nike, Disney, Coca Cola—all big public companies in which, once you’ve bought their shares, you can claim ownership proportionate to the size of your investment.
Gender, ethnicity, and level of education don’t matter when it comes to the stock market; if you can pay, you can play. Investing in stocks might be the truest act of equality and democracy.
The earlier you start investing, the more you can earn. But most young people lack an in-depth understanding of the stock market and how it works. In the next blink, we’ll start fixing this with a short history lesson.
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What is Learn to Earn about?
Learn to Earn (1995) is a beginner’s guide to investing. It gives novice investors information about the history of capitalism and advice on how to pick investments and choose stocks.
Who should read Learn to Earn?
- High schoolers who are interested in finance
- People of any age who want to learn about investing
- Anyone interested in the stock market
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