Welcome back & good evening. I want to take a moment and break down something almost everyone in the United States and Canada treats as sacred Christmas. Now, before anyone gets defensive, hear me out. This is not an attack on tradition; it’s a critique of priorities, culture, and the way money moves in our societies. For decades, December has been hijacked by corporations, credit institutions, and advertising engines to turn families into economic targets. Millions of dollars are spent on decorations, gifts that are quickly forgotten, toys that break, and experiences that leave no permanent value. And we applaud this. We call it joy, spirit, and festivity. But what are we actually teaching our children? Instant gratification, dependency on consumer culture, and a misunderstanding of wealth and resource allocation.
Here’s the first principle: money is power, and power is preparation. The capital that families pour into Christmas such as trips, electronics, fancy clothing, and flashy experiences could be strategically redirected to tools, certifications, and assets that build long-term cognitive and financial strength for our children. Think about it. Instead of another plastic gadget, you could be buying a math textbook that turns a child into a problem solver capable of dominating the ACT or SAT. Instead of a trendy toy, you could fund LSAT prep courses, MCAT resources, or coding bootcamps. Instead of impulse purchases that depreciate the moment they leave the store, you could be investing in ETFs, stocks, or bonds for your child’s future financial independence.
Let’s get tactical. Certifications are not just lines on a resume; they are compounding assets. Programs like CompTIA for IT, CPR and BLS for healthcare readiness, or specialized coding certificates give a child or even a teen, a measurable skill and credibility that translates into opportunity. Books are another capital form. Not novels for fleeting entertainment, but textbooks, workbooks, and advanced curricula. Algebra, statistics, physics, economics, and philosophy. These are the building blocks for mastering standardized tests, understanding finance, and thinking critically. Every dollar that buys a plastic toy could instead fund knowledge that accrues interest over a lifetime.
Now, let’s talk tools. A toolbox doesn’t just teach carpentry or mechanics, it teaches problem-solving, planning, and precision. Whether it’s electronics kits, robotics kits, or physical tools for woodworking and engineering, the lesson is the same: mastery through hands-on engagement. Combine this with disciplined study routines, and you’re creating a kid who doesn’t just consume culture but produces it, influences it, and navigates it with autonomy.
Then there’s financial literacy. This is where most families fail their children. Money should flow into assets that grow, not evaporate. High-Yield Savings Accounts (HYSAs), Certificates of Deposit (CDs), ETFs, individual stocks, and bonds. All of these are real, tangible lessons in compounding, patience, and risk management. A child who sees a stock appreciate over time, who watches a bond pay interest, who learns to differentiate between asset and liability, is a child who understands the system we live in. This is how you turn financial literacy into generational power, not just seasonal distraction.
Let’s pivot back to standardized tests. ACT, SAT, SHSAT, LSAT, MCAT, M-STEP—these are not optional hurdles; they are gatekeepers. And the current system is unforgiving. Every dollar invested in proper prep. Books, courses, tutoring, practice exams is an investment that compounds in opportunities: admissions, scholarships, career paths. The irony is that while families spend thousands on one holiday, they neglect the real costliest time-saver and leverage-builder: early, disciplined education. Christmas can wait, but mastery cannot.
Now, I don’t want this to feel abstract. Let’s talk execution. A practical breakdown:
- Allocate $500–$1,000 per child toward certifications they can complete this year. IT, coding, or specialized trade certifications are perfect.
- Spend $200–$500 on high-level academic books and prep materials. Not just for reading, but for problem-solving and test mastery.
- Invest $1,000 or more in a diversified set of ETFs or stocks that the child can monitor. Include lessons on dividends, compounding, and risk.
- Purchase tools or kits that teach STEM or trades. Robotics kits, electronics kits, or woodworking tools teach precision, patience, and execution.
Create a schedule of structured learning: 1–2 hours of test prep daily, 30–60 minutes of reading, and weekly reflection sessions to assess progress and understanding. Here's my reading list recommendation:
Religious Texts:
- The Bible
- The Quran
- Talmud
- Apocrypha
- Dead Sea Scrolls
- Morals & Dogma
Philosophy & Ethics (Foundational Thinking and Morality)
Plato – The Republic
Aristotle – Nicomachean Ethics
Immanuel Kant – Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
John Stuart Mill – On Liberty
Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan
Friedrich Nietzsche – Beyond Good and Evil
René Descartes – Meditations on First Philosophy
David Hume – An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Jean-Jacques Rousseau – The Social Contract
Confucius – Analects
Political Philosophy & Economics
11. Adam Smith – The Wealth of Nations
12. Karl Marx – Das Kapital
13. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America
14. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince
15. John Locke – Two Treatises of Government
16. Max Weber – The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
17. Thomas Paine – Common Sense
18. Montesquieu – The Spirit of Laws
19. Milton Friedman – Capitalism and Freedom
20. Amartya Sen – Development as Freedom
History & Civilization
21. Herodotus – Histories
22. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War
23. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
24. Howard Zinn – A People’s History of the United States
25. Jared Diamond – Guns, Germs, and Steel
26. Yuval Noah Harari – Sapiens
27. Niall Ferguson – The Ascent of Money
28. Will Durant – The Story of Civilization
29. Arnold Toynbee – A Study of History
30. Barbara Tuchman – The March of Folly
Science & Critical Thinking
31. Richard Feynman – Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
32. Stephen Hawking – A Brief History of Time
33. Carl Sagan – Cosmos
34. Galileo Galilei – Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
35. Isaac Newton – Principia Mathematica
36. Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species
37. Richard Dawkins – The Selfish Gene
38. Stephen Jay Gould – Wonderful Life
39. Thomas Kuhn – The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
40. Carl Popper – The Logic of Scientific Discovery
Economics, Finance & Business Strategy
41. Benjamin Graham – The Intelligent Investor
42. Peter Lynch – One Up on Wall Street
43. Ray Dalio – Principles
44. Warren Buffett – Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders
45. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments
46. Michael Porter – Competitive Strategy
47. Clayton Christensen – The Innovator’s Dilemma
48. Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Antifragile
49. Robert Kiyosaki – Rich Dad Poor Dad
50. John C. Bogle – The Little Book of Common Sense Investing
Leadership & Executive Thinking
51. Sun Tzu – The Art of War
52. Niccolò Machiavelli – Discourses on Livy
53. Dale Carnegie – How to Win Friends and Influence People
54. Stephen Covey – The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
55. John Maxwell – The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership
56. Jim Collins – Good to Great
57. Warren Bennis – On Becoming a Leader
58. Robert Greene – The 48 Laws of Power
59. Daniel Goleman – Emotional Intelligence
60. Marshall Goldsmith – What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
Mathematics & Logic
61. Euclid – Elements
62. Carl Friedrich Gauss – Disquisitiones Arithmeticae
63. Leonhard Euler – Introductio in Analysin Infinitorum
64. Bertrand Russell – Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy
65. G.H. Hardy – A Mathematician’s Apology
66. Richard Courant – What is Mathematics?
67. George Polya – How to Solve It
68. John von Neumann – The Computer and the Brain
69. Alan Turing – On Computable Numbers
70. Isaac Asimov – Asimov’s Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology
Psychology & Human Behavior
71. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams
72. Carl Jung – Man and His Symbols
73. B.F. Skinner – Beyond Freedom and Dignity
74. Erik Erikson – Childhood and Society
75. Daniel Kahneman – Thinking, Fast and Slow
76. Amos Tversky – Judgment Under Uncertainty
77. Robert Cialdini – Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
78. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – Flow
79. Edward de Bono – Lateral Thinking
80. Steven Pinker – The Blank Slate
Literature & Critical Reading
81. William Shakespeare – Hamlet
82. James Joyce – Ulysses
83. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment
84. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace
85. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick
86. Mark Twain – Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
87. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice
88. Mary Shelley – Frankenstein
89. Toni Morrison – Beloved
90. Ralph Ellison – Invisible Man
Strategy & Warfare
91. Carl von Clausewitz – On War
92. B.H. Liddell Hart – Strategy
93. Miyamoto Musashi – The Book of Five Rings
94. Alvin Toffler – Future Shock
95. Thomas Schelling – The Strategy of Conflict
96. John Boyd – A Discourse on Winning and Losing
97. Martin van Creveld – The Art of War: War and History
98. Sun Pin – The Art of Warfare
99. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Art of War
100. Edward Luttwak – Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook
Sociology & Culture
101. Michael Bradley – Iceman Inheritance
102. Chancellor Williams – The Destruction of Black Civilization
103. Max Horkheimer – Dialectic of Enlightenment
104. Theodor Adorno – The Authoritarian Personality
105. Michel Foucault – Discipline and Punish
106. Antonio Gramsci – Prison Notebooks
107. W.E.B. Du Bois – The Souls of Black Folk
108. bell hooks – Ain’t I a Woman
109. Malcolm X – The Autobiography of Malcolm X
110. Frantz Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth
Innovation & Technology
111. Kevin Kelly – The Inevitable
112. Eric Ries – The Lean Startup
113. Peter Thiel – Zero to One
114. Elon Musk (Ashlee Vance) – Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
115. Thomas Friedman – Thank You for Being Late
116. Yuval Noah Harari – Homo Deus
117. Andrew Ng – Machine Learning Yearning
118. Shoshana Zuboff – The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
119. Ray Kurzweil – The Singularity Is Near
120. Nick Bostrom – Superintelligence
Art, Creativity, and Communication
121. Marshall McLuhan – Understanding Media
122. Joseph Campbell – The Hero with a Thousand Faces
123. Viktor Shklovsky – Theory of Prose
124. John Berger – Ways of Seeing
125. Edward Tufte – The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
126. Robert Hughes – The Shock of the New
127. Twyla Tharp – The Creative Habit
128. Austin Kleon – Steal Like an Artist
129. Jonah Lehrer – Imagine
130. Daniel Pink – A Whole New Mind
Advanced Social & Critical Thinking
131. Nassim Nicholas Taleb – The Black Swan
132. Howard Gardner – Frames of Mind
133. Thomas Sowell – Basic Economics
134. Malcolm Gladwell – Outliers
135. Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner – Freakonomics
136. Jared Diamond – Collapse
137. Nassim Taleb – Skin in the Game
138. Peter Drucker – The Effective Executive
139. Richard Thaler – Misbehaving
140. Michael Lewis – The Big Short
Interdisciplinary & Visionary Thinking
141. Yuval Noah Harari – 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
142. Ray Dalio – Principles for Success
143. Elon Musk (Autobiography/Reports) – Elon Musk: Inventing the Future
144. James C. Scott – Seeing Like a State
145. Jared Diamond – The World Until Yesterday
146. Nassim Taleb – Fooled by Randomness
147. Daniel Kahneman – Noise
148. Clayton Christensen – Competing Against Luck
149. Alvin Plantinga – Warranted Christian Belief
150. Thomas Nagel – What Does It All Mean?
Then 34 universities you should mold your students for:
- Harvard University
- Stanford University
- University of California, Berkeley
- Princeton University
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
- Yale University
- Columbia University
- University of Chicago
- California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
- University of Pennsylvania
- Duke University
- Northwestern University
- Johns Hopkins University
- Brown University
- Cornell University
- Dartmouth College
- University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
- University of Michigan
- University of Southern California (USC)
- New York University (NYU)
- Georgetown University
- Rice University
- Vanderbilt University
- University of Virginia
- Emory University
- Villanova University
- West Point Academy
- Air Force Academy
- US Naval Academy
- Georgia Institute of Technology
- Amherst College
- Colgate University
- St. John's University
- Brandeis University
The goal is to create children who are not just prepared for a season of joy but equipped for a lifetime of performance. This is a philosophy that rejects wasteful ritual for intentional, measurable growth. It is not sentimental; it is strategic. It is about flipping cultural scripts. While other families are exhausted from debt or overspending on ephemeral things, your child is accruing knowledge, skill, and financial intelligence that cannot be taxed away or deflated by market whims.
Finally, understand the moral imperative here. Every dollar spent wisely is a vote for autonomy, intelligence, and resilience. Every textbook, certification, ETF, or tool is a weapon in the fight against mediocrity, distraction, and systemic under-preparation. If the United States and Canada want to elevate their future generations, the cultural obsession with consumerist holidays must be replaced with investment in human capital. That is the only Christmas that produces a return on both love and legacy.
So, as you plan this year and every year after, remember: gifts that depreciate in hours are entertaining, but gifts that compound knowledge, skill, and financial acumen are transformative. Teach your children to value mastery, to understand money, and to wield skill like a weapon. That is the true spirit of investment, the true spirit of power, and the true preparation for a world that will not wait for excuses.
Continuing from where we left off:
Now let’s get even more specific about building real financial power. I want you to think not in terms of disposable cash or fleeting trends, but in long-term, compounding ownership. For starters, I am going to name fifty stocks that I consider strategic for families to study, invest in, and even use as educational tools for their children. They are Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Tesla, Nvidia, Berkshire Hathaway, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Visa, Mastercard, JPMorgan Chase, UBS, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, NextEra Energy, Duke Energy, Southern Company, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Moderna, AbbVie, Bristol Myers, Disney, Netflix, Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Salesforce, Adobe, Shopify, Intel, AMD, Cisco, Oracle, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Nike, LVMH, Honeywell, Caterpillar, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, and General Dynamics.
These are not just tickers; they are lessons in market dynamics, industrial dominance, and global strategy. Show your child what these companies do, how they make money, and how they respond to global events. Teach them to follow earnings reports, understand dividends, and see the difference between cyclical and stable sectors. Every dollar invested here is a micro-class in economics, strategy, and power.
Next, we move to liquidity and control. Get your children into a credit union the moment they reach eligibility. Teach them that a credit union is not just a place to store money, it is a structure that amplifies financial discipline, provides better interest rates, lower fees, and cooperative benefits that apps like Cash App, Venmo, or PayPal cannot touch. Explain to them the difference between transactional convenience and real financial infrastructure. Once your child has an account, tie it to tangible investments by buying shares in the banks or credit unions you do business with. This shows them that banks are not just intermediaries, they are stakeholders in the broader economy. It teaches ownership, voting rights, and long-term compounding in ways that flashy fintech apps never can.
Combining these strategies with stock ownership, credit union membership, and active banking investment allows your child to develop literacy, control, and discipline. They learn to think in terms of assets rather than spending, and to understand the interplay between liquidity, ownership, and leverage. It is a direct counter to the consumer culture celebrated during Christmas and all of the superficial financial habits that dominate youth today.
By following this approach, you are creating children who are prepared academically, financially, and strategically. They will see wealth not as consumption, but as accumulation, knowledge, and leverage. This is the Christmas I endorse, one that transforms temporary excitement into permanent, generational advantage.
Thank you for viewing.