Book SummaryMoney: Master the Game, by Tony Robbins

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Money: Master the Game

In Money: Master the Game, motivational speaker and life coach Tony Robbins argues that anyone can master money, achieve financial well-being, and create their dream lifestyle. In Robbins’s view, mastering money means building an investing strategy that yields passive income for life and gives you the choice of when, where, and whether to continue working.

Conversely, neglecting to master money means that you’ll always need to trade your time for money. Robbins argues that earned wages alone can’t create true wealth if we spend that money instead of putting it to work. If you spend what you earn, you’ll need to trade more hours for more...

Money: Master the Game Summary Money Empowers You to Create Your Life

Robbins explains that money is not the end goal, but a means to achieve your goals. When you master your financial life, money becomes a tool with which to create the life you want:

• Materially, you can afford necessities, luxuries, and a good life for yourself and your family.
• Personally, you get back your time and can now spend it as you choose—whether that means more family time, more adventures, or doing work that you love.

(Shortform note: Jacob Lund Fisker of Early Retirement Extreme (both a blog and a book) agrees with Robbins that getting your time back is invaluable, but he disagrees with Robbins’s emphasis on material pleasure. Fisker’s approach is to reduce costs as much as possible, largely by rejecting consumerism. For instance, if you can learn to live...

Money: Master the Game Summary You Create Your Experience

To master money, you first need to change your mindset: Robbins writes that in any moment, your beliefs and emotions color how you perceive that experience, and they determine how you respond to it. For example, a man who’s convinced that all banks are untrustworthy will feel jaded and take little action to build his financial future.

(Shortform note: Robbins goes into more detail about how to change your mindset and behavior in Awaken the Giant Within with his six-step process of Neuro-Associative Conditioning. In short, you need to disrupt the old patterns—such as believing that investing is too hard and avoiding financial responsibility—and replace them with a new, empowering behavior and belief.)

To change your life, take conscious control of what you believe, how you feel, and how you act.

#1: What you believe: Robbins explains that your beliefs determine what you focus on. They’re habitual thoughts that cause you to interpret your experience through the “lens” of that thought—a filtering function of the reticular activating system...

Money: Master the Game Summary Change Your State and Story

After explaining the above self-mastery principles, Robbins writes that you might have limiting beliefs and emotions that prevent you from mastering money. Limiting beliefs operate in your subconscious mind—and you likely don’t notice or examine them—but they have a substantial impact on your behavior. Telling yourself that you can’t—that money is too scarce or that the game is rigged—only causes you to feel disempowered and to become complacent about your finances. This perpetuates your present circumstances, reinforcing those beliefs in a negative spiral that won’t break unless you challenge it.

(Shortform: Researchers have found that our beliefs develop when we’re young, so we often don’t remember choosing to believe them. They come mainly from childhood experiences and what our parents and peers profess to believe. These beliefs become encoded in our brain, but we can reverse that encoding by changing our thoughts. The more we commit to different beliefs, the more our brain gets used to firing along those pathways instead of the old ones.)

So to change your financial situation, you must change how you think and...

Money: Master the Game Summary Change Your Strategy

Once you’ve changed how you think and feel about money, you need to change your strategy—because thinking and feeling positively won’t work unless you take effective action. As we discussed earlier, the first step is to become an investor, rather than a consumer. As an investor, you use your money to generate passive income by buying assets—stocks, bonds, and commodities—that offer dividends as the market rises.

(Shortform note: In The Millionaire Fastlane, MJ DeMarco recommends switching from a consumption mindset to a producer’s mindset by constantly asking yourself about the things you buy. For example, ask “What value does this provide me? How did the company market it to me?” about common items like your shampoo, your choice of phone and laptop, or your clothing. This will get you used to thinking like a businessperson rather than a consumer.)

In this section, we’ll explain how to plan your financial future and start saving.

Make a Plan

Robbins explains that most people end up without enough money...

Money: Master the Game Summary Create Steady Gains While Minimizing Losses

Once you’ve developed a plan, the next step is to learn from those who’ve proven their skill—in this case, America’s top billionaire investors. In this section, we’ll explore three fundamental principles that top investors follow, according to Robbins.

After meeting with many top investors, Robbins advocates for building an investment portfolio that mimics the market and minimizes losses while growing steadily over time. This implements three principles: Play the long game, diversify your assets, and mitigate your downside. (Shortform note: This section includes Robbins’s Step 5: Ensure life-long income, and Step 6: Learn from top investors.)

Play the Long Game

As Robbins explains, the most reliable way to build wealth is to hold your investments for a long period of time. The best way to do this is with an index fund, a collection of stocks that mimics an overall market index, such as the S&P 500. In other words, owning an index fund means you own stock in every company on that index.

Since the market averages growth over the long term, holding an index fund nets you returns that mimic the growth of that index. If you own an S&P 500 index fund and the S&P 500...

Money: Master the Game Summary Find a Fiduciary

The final recommendation is to work with a fiduciary. Robbins says that wealthy investors have financial teams to help them, and the average investor can mimic this strategy by finding a reliable fiduciary. You wouldn’t want to be your own doctor, and the markets are at least as complex as medicine—hence the need for a full-time professional to help steward your finances.

A fiduciary is a financial professional with a legal responsibility to act in your best interest. You pay them directly via fees, and they cannot work for commission. This prevents a conflict of interest—whereas brokers work for commissions that incentivize them to...

Shortform Exercise: Master Your Money

Begin your journey to money mastery.

Describe your experience with investing. If you haven’t invested before, why not?