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A short, entertaining, and easy read that can be finished in only a few hours while still drinking in all of its advice. Each chapter tells a story where there is a takeaway lesson in financial literacy. The stories are set millennia ago in and around a prospering Babylon, but the lessons are as at home in the modern (then 1926, now 2024) setting. The lessons are explicitly stated and often restated (spend less than you earn!) so they leave little to interpretation. The stories themselves are very entertaining and told in mostly dialog format.

Habit building (or destruction) is framed in a modified stimulus/response theory as promoted by the likes of Watson and Skinner that is (1) cue, (2) craving, (3) response, and (4) reward. Trying to exercise self-control, while useful, is not a winning strategy compared to modifying your environment to include less temptation (cues) in the first place. The reward following the habit (later explained to be fix or variable interval) is not actually what motivates the behavior; it is the anticipation of the reward that moves us to action. If you want to build a certain type of habit, it is very effective to surround yourself with people that are part of that habit's culture. An extreme example of this is given where a pair of Hungarian parents trained their three daughters to be chess masters by immersing them in the habit of practicing and playing chess.

Overall the book focus on getting leads through various methods including warm and cold outreach, free content, and paid adds. These methods can be leveraged through customers' word of mouth, employees, agencies (tread carefully, treat this as education), and affiliates. All of these methods, channels, and tactics can be applied both to aquiring customers as well as finding employees. These employees can be then used to find both more customers or more employees as a way to scale up and "build your team". The main takeaways for me were that you should take care to not stop too soon when advertising, aim for a 3:1 return on your ads so that your ads are profitable, and if you find a better return you should ramp it to the moon until it breaks.

All in all it was an easy read and mostly clear with actionable advice. The first few chapters are a little rough around the edges and some of the pricing concepts are not really fleshed out and certainly not explained as well as the rest of the book. After you get past the weak pricing chapter, the other chapters are typically presented with step-by-step reasoning on how and why you would want to structure your offer one way or another. The last section on enhancing the offer you've built (by following along) is the longest and ends with a number of ways to take your offer to the next level by customizing them with scarcity, urgency, bonuses, and guarantees. The last part of the final section on naming was particularly interesting; in particular I found the section on national vs local marketing and the pros and cons of each enlightening.

Random notes for how T1 diabetes might be controlled via a low carbohydrate diet (keto).