One year, my daughter called me with a story. A friend of hers, a third-year business student at her school, had just finished reviewing, of all things, my book on investing.
Word got out among her friends that her dad had written a book. And a group of them asked if I would teach them the basics of money.
Parents will understand why this landed the way it did. It wasn't long before that call that my daughter was, like most teenagers, somewhat embarrassed by her dad. Now she was asking me to fly out and spend time with her and her friends. I would have said yes to teaching them long division.
But it's worth pausing on what they were actually asking for, because it says something. These were bright university students, one of them three years into a business degree, and what they wanted was the basics. How a credit card works. What a credit score is. Where savings should go. What compound interest actually does. Twelve-plus years of school, some of them deep into higher education, and nobody had ever taught them the money skills every adult uses every week of their life.
The Conversations That Started It
The request didn't come out of nowhere. My daughter and I had been having money conversations for a couple of years by then.
She has very little interest in business. At the time she was studying recreational therapy, about as far from my world as you can get, spending her summers working with mentally and physically challenged children, planning a career working with kids with cancer. But she was at the age where the next steps start to feel real, and with that comes the realization that living is expensive. So we talked. How much it costs to support a family. How salaries vary by profession. How you buy a first car, a first home. It's overwhelming at that age, when it first sinks in that your parents will help where they can, but your future is ultimately built on what you can make for yourself.
Those conversations kept circling the same list of questions, the ones every eighteen-year-old should be able to answer and almost none can:
- How do you apply for a credit card, and what's a reasonable first limit?
- What is a credit score, and why does paying the bill in full every month matter so much?
- Where do you put savings, and how much should you be saving?
- How do you actually invest, and what is an RRSP, a TFSA, a 401(k)?
- What is compound interest?
And it isn't just students. When I ran my company, I hosted quarterly lunch-and-learns on investing, retirement accounts, debt, and compounding. Most of it was new to most of the room, and these were capable working adults who wanted to build wealth for their families and were missing the foundation to start. The gap isn't intelligence. It's that nobody ever taught them, and the shame of not knowing keeps them from asking.
Her friends asked. That put them ahead of most adults I've met.
I gave the group homework before I flew out: three books, read in order. Not twenty books. Three. Read those and, in theory, you don't need me. That was always the point.
The Part I Couldn't Have Written Then
Everything above I wrote years ago. I'm adding this part now, because in the years since that trip, some things happened that changed what I would tell her.
I built wealth for 27 years, sold my company, and kept chasing anyway. Then, in 2023, a blocked artery reordered my priorities in a single morning. Health, then family and friends, then wealth. That morning has its own chapter, and it is not this one. What belongs here is what it did to this letter.
Everything in those three books is true and worth learning. Compound interest is real, starting early matters, and financial security buys options and calm that are genuinely worth having. Learn it all. And then hold it in its place, which is third on the list, because the same compounding that builds a portfolio also runs in the other direction, in your arteries and in your relationships, quietly, while you're busy watching the money. I got the portfolio right and nearly missed the point.
And one more thing, the part that took me longest to see. My daughter chose to spend her working life helping children with cancer. There is no version of that job that makes anyone rich, and she knew it at nineteen, and chose it anyway. I flew out that fall thinking I was the teacher. It took me a heart attack and a few more years to notice that of the two of us, only one had the list in the right order from the start.
She should still read the books, though.
It took a heart attack to finish that thought.
Jeff Wiener founded Digitcom, a Canadian telecommunications company, in 1991 at age 23 and ran it for 27 years, growing it into an eight-figure business named one of Canada's fastest-growing companies five years running. He sold it to a private equity firm in 2017 and semi-retired at 49. He now invests in multi-family real estate and writes about building wealth, selling a business, and the second act.