Understanding Tony Robbin’s Unshakeable (what I took from it)

I spent the last couple nights before bed reading Tony Robbin’s Unshakeable, his financial freedom playbook. Here’s what I got out of it.

1. Active management of your stocks is generally a bad thing. When your financial advisor thinks they can beat the market, you should doubt that. Instead, focus on index funds, and occasionally bonds. These have significantly lower fees, and have less tax liability.
2. The stock market generally goes up, and oftentimes you get bargains in Bear markets/downturns as a result, but it requires discipline.
3. Corrections occur about once annually, 20% of corrections turn into bear markets (which happen every 3-5 years on average), no one (except Ray Dalio, and Warren Buffett) beats the market consistently,
4. Failing to invest income in the stock market is much riskier than investing because of the sheer amount of gains from investing on average, in index funds.
5. Avoid hedge funds and financial brokers; ask if your financial advisor is a fiduciary, and whether they also are brokers; brokers give worse options generally. Independent advisors are generally the way to go, but they can still be bad.
6. Financial advisors can be good though. They can be good because they can lower expense ratios, rebalance portfolios to take into consideration risk tolerance, improve asset allocation, withdraw assets in the correct order to have longer retirement windows, and can improve your behavior for achieving goals.
7. Core principles behind making money: Don’t lose too much on any one investment, invest in things that upside is worth 50 X what downside can be, maintain low taxes (selling a stock in under a year leads to additional tax incidence + fees), diversify your investments so you don’t lose everything when you lose.
8. For assert allocation, it’s good to get the right balance of stocks, bonds, and alternative investments. Index funds are typically best, but you should have a cushion in case things are going wrong
9. Psychology is important to investing- it’s good to have different points of view, so you can aggregate information better
10. When things go wrong, you should rebalance, rather than sell out, since there’s no arbitrage opportunities in following the herd.
11. Swinging for the fences is overrated.
12. Wealth isn’t everything. It’s good to know how to achieve, and the formula is: Focus + Massive Action + Grace – results
13. You should expect to keep growing and it’s good to recognize what triggers you so you can focus on staying positive and in control of yourself. Meditation can help in this respect.

Tony Robbins does this thing where his work is light on facts, and heavy on humor and anecdotes. I think generally speaking this is a good formula. It allows him to relate to his audience, and help them understand the topic. This is not an academic work, but rather an accessible, easy-to-understand set of practical tips.

Here’s where I think it goes wrong. First, it shills too heavily on businesses owned by Tony and Tony’s friends. I think this does a disservice to the audience. Second, I think this book doesn’t provide guidance into where to learn more. I think this would have helped his book by being able to provide more info to people. Third, I think this book could be written in about a third the length. For all that it talks about, I don’t think this book had much meat or fresh insights into it. I’d overall rate this book a B