Double Yellow's Company Driver to Independent Thread

Yeah, I can't think of an attractive mileage-based lease -- I'd be looking for a percentage deal and something unique (JIT, hazmat, Canada, military, etc).

I'm still a very much a newbie -- I'm ahead of other newbies only because I did lots and lots and lots of research before jumping in. Almost to the point of paralysis...

And while I am critical of Rutherford for promoting dubious products, but he does 1 thing very well: Get people to start thinking about their numbers -- particularly (fuel) costs. One of the (many) books I read/listened to before taking the plunge was Rutherford's "Stop Holding the Steering Wheel." At $250, most around here will tell you it is a waste of money. But KR offers a money back guarantee and to this day I haven't taken him up on it because even though SHTSW offered no content for the independent, I probably got at least $250 worth of truck & insurance buying advice.

I know $250 for a book sounds crazy on a trucking forum, but I spent at least $600 each semester on books while in college. A number of semesters topped $1000. My poker library probably cost $1500 and I probably spent triple that on coaching. More than half of the books (and coaching/training) were not worth the paper they were printed on, but a few were worth a thousand times their cost. And sometimes what really opened one guy's eyes will do nothing for someone else so you can't just rely upon an agreed canon.

"Price is what you pay. Value is what you get." -- Warren Buffett

Anyway, that isn't an endorsement of the KR book (I'm ambivalent about it) or the CMC (I haven't attended and have no plans to). But I do think seeking & sharing ideas can have a huge boost to your bottom line and Kevin Rutherford is about the only quasi-public person talking about the business of trucking.



With that said, here are some books I do recommend (roughly in order):

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (Michael Lewis)
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life (Alice Schroeder)
The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America (Warren Buffett)
Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
How to Win Friends and Influence People (Dale Carnegie)*
The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game (Michael Lewis)
How to Negotiate Anything, Anywhere (Herb Cohen) -- pretty much all of Herb Cohen's negotiating books are at least entertaining
The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (Charles Duhigg)
The Millionaire Next Door (Thomas Stanley)
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Steven Levitt)
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Burton Malkiel)
Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy (Thomas Sowell)
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and the Markets (Nassim Taleb)
Read 'Em and Reap: A Career FBI Agent's Guide to Decoding Poker Tells (Joe Navarro)
The Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes (Mark Skousen)
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Nassim Taleb) -- only read if you liked Fooled by Randomness
One Up On Wall Street: How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In The Market (Peter Lynch)
Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products (Leander Kahney)
Irrational Exuberance (Robert Shiller)
This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Carmen Reinhart)
You Can Read Anyone: Never Be Fooled, Lied To, or Taken Advantage of Again (David Lieberman)
Caro's Book of Poker Tells (Mike Caro)
The E-Myth Revisted (Michael Gerber)
Where Are the Customer's Yachts? (Fred Schwed)
Guerrilla Negotiating: Unconventional Weapons and Tactics to Get What You Want (Conrad Levinson)
Think and Grow Rich (Napoleon Hill)
Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul (Howard Schultz)
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Ben Franklin)
The Art of War (Sun Tzu)
Jack: Straight from the Gut (Jack Welch)
The 4-Hour Workweek (Timothy Ferriss)


*Bit of trivia: The only diploma in Warren Buffett's office is from the Dale Carnegie course*

 

Nice. I start by looking up recommended books for a given topic (business start up, investing, biographies, etc), but wind up going off on tangents based on other people's recommendations or just by what happens to be available for download from the library.

Not really. Started late (2006 -- after Party Poker left the US) messing around with online hold'em freerolls. Built up like $25 from freerolls and blew it playing $4 180-man SNGs. Found twoplustwo, learned about the kelly criterion and bankroll strategies, deposited $50 (a lot of money for a college kid) and played micro tournaments until it was in the thousands. Then I started short stacking live $1/2 games until I'd built up a bigger roll and transitioned to $2/5 NL hold'em cash games in local & then regional card rooms. This was during the housing/construction boom and, man, people were just throwing money away trying to be the next Daniel Negreanu while you were playing ABC poker...

After construction went bust I mostly went back online, made a decent living 30-tabling $20 double-or-nothings, but eventually grew bored and transitioned to $10 6max SNGs where I had to unlearn being a DON pushbot. I worked my way up to 6-10 tables of $50-$200 6max SNGs, but by Black Friday I had played millions of hands and the games were drying up and most of the profit was coming from rakeback which was kinda demoralizing. It had become just a job so it wasn't a huge disappointment when the FBI seized the domains of Stars, Tilt, & AP/UB. I haven't played a hand since (though I was tempted when in North Dakota -- it was like the construction boom times 10).