Before the numbers, there was the mindset
People often ask what I read to learn about investing. The honest answer is that the books before I invested weren’t about investing at all — they were about mindset.
In the 1990s, while I was studying for my CPA and working as a young auditor, long before I made my first SGX investment at 35, five books before I invested shaped how I thought about work, money, and discipline. Two of them weren’t about money at all. That’s exactly why they mattered.
The mindset books before I invested
I read Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich” and “Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude” during those early auditing years, alongside a lesser-known book simply called “Keys to Success.” None of these are personal finance books. They’re about discipline, persistence, and the belief that consistent effort compounds — a lesson that, looking back, quietly prepared me for decades of unglamorous saving before I ever opened a brokerage account.
I don’t think I could have sustained saving from age 22 without first absorbing that mindset. The money strategy came later. The mental groundwork came first.
Where the actual investing books came in
The investing education came a little after, through two classics: Peter Lynch’s “One Up On Wall Street” and Benjamin Graham’s “The Intelligent Investor.”
Lynch’s book stuck with me because of how ordinary his advice felt — pay attention to what you understand, don’t overcomplicate your reasoning. Graham’s book was heavier, more foundational, the kind of book you return to rather than finish once. If you want more on his approach, The Motley Fool’s overview of Benjamin Graham is a good starting point. Between the two, I picked up enough conviction to eventually make that first SGX investment at 35, years after I’d first started saving.
But books were only half of it. As a trained accountant, I had another resource most new investors don’t: I could actually sit down and read a company’s audited financial statements myself. Not summaries, not other people’s interpretations — the real numbers, the notes, the auditor’s opinion. That habit taught me more about a company’s actual financial position than any single book could, and it’s a skill I still lean on today.
Why the order mattered
Looking back, I think of these as literally the books before I invested — mindset first, technical knowledge second. Discipline came first. The technical knowledge came second, once I already had the patience to use it well.
I meet people now who want to jump straight to portfolio strategy without ever building the underlying discipline to stick with a plan for decades. I understand the impulse — the technical stuff feels more actionable. But the mindset is what makes the technical stuff actually stick.
If you’re building your own reading list
You don’t need to read these exact five books before I invested to benefit from the same order: mindset first, tactics second. But I’d gently suggest not skipping the mindset layer in favour of jumping straight to investing tactics. The tactics are only useful to someone who’s already decided to stay the course for decades, not months.
If you’re curious where I’d start today if I were building this all over again, my Start Here page walks through exactly that.