This book is an effort to deliver to a twenty- to forty-year-old person the life lessons learned by a sixty-seven-year-old Canadian billionaire. The word “billionaire” is a very crude and inaccurate measure of how well I have played the game of life. I hope it creates enough curiosity to motivate readers in this age group to get away from their cell phones, BlackBerrys, emails, and computers long enough to acquire some knowledge the old-fashioned way: through reading a book.

I grew up in a time of no computers, television, or jet planes. At eight years of age, I went to the closest public library and made a wonderful discovery: I could borrow three books for three weeks. I started reading a book a week. If you read a page a minute, then set aside an hour a day, it’s very easy to read a book a week. This habit contributed more to my knowledge base than my three university degrees. Over the following fifty-nine years, I’ve read about twenty-five hundred books, 80 per cent of which would be nonfiction.