Posted by John Duff
I have long since lost count of the number of books that I have published in the self-improvement category.
I’ve learned many a kitchen secret from Graham Kerr, Jean Anderson and JoAnna Lund, and although I wouldn’t call myself a master in that domain, I manage to put a meal on the table most nights.
I’ve read far too much about living longer and stronger and staying in my prime with this singular result: for the past decade or so I have started my day with a power shake with protein powder and flax meal thanks to a long out-of-print guide to eating according to the circadian rhythms.
And with a half dozen sign language books under my belt, the best I can conjure up is “I love you”—not always the most appropriate phrase in the work place.
All the parenting books have been passed along to my siblings whose children I hope have benefited.
And those volumes dedicated to language – spelling and grammar – occasionally see the light of day when spell check or the online synonym finders fail me.
At the risk of playing favorites, I will take this leap to declare my gratitude for Dan Solin’s series of personal finance books. His The Smartest Investment Book You’ll Ever Read (2006) saved my financial butt during those years of tumult in the stock market and the resulting recession. Sure I lost a little, but nothing compared to what I might have without the help of his book. We published The Smartest 401(k) Book You’ll Ever Read in 2008 but I, of course, had a year’s jump on this before it hit the marketplace and was able to re-jig my own pension plan to some notable advantage just as things in the financial sector were imploding. In 2009, as I entered my seventh decade of life on earth, The Smartest Retirement Book You’ll Ever Read captured my interest. (It is often said in my professional circles that we publish subjects in which we are personally interested and hope that there are enough consumers sharing those interests to make the investment pay off.) I learned pretty quickly that one can’t start to plan too early for this sort of thing. I encourage my younger staff members to heed the advice that I wish had been available in my 20s and 30s. But still, Dan’s book assured me that late is better than never.
Now, as The Smartest Portfolio You’ll Ever Own hits the market, I find myself embracing heretofore enigmatic notions of the Fama-French three-factor model (market, size, and value), the perils of stock picking and marketing timing, the meaning of standard deviation, passive management (which is so much more powerful than the term might imply), asset allocation, and rebalancing. But, what’s most important to me is that my level of anxiety about money is manageable since I don’t find myself subject to the whims of the stock market or succumbing to the dire news that spews forth from CNBC, Fox Business, Bloomberg, and other financial media on a daily basis.
I promise all the other authors who we publish that in future blogs I’ll be sure to tell readers how I choose to be happy, why I know that dyslexia is a gift, how to make wrinkles disappear without surgery, why hoarding starts – and how to stop it, and the countless other self-improvement techniques that have added immeasurably to my life – and to the tens of thousands of readers of their books.
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