Ispent my college years working as a valet at a nice hotel in Los Angeles.

      One frequent guest was a technology executive. He was a genius, having designed and patented a key component in Wi-Fi routers in his 20s. He had started and sold several companies. He was wildly successful.

      He also had a relationship with money I’d describe as a mix of insecurity and childish stupidity.

      He carried a stack of hundred dollar bills several inches thick. He showed it to everyone who wanted to see it and many who didn’t. He bragged openly and loudly about his wealth, often while drunk and always apropos of nothing.

      One day he handed one of my colleagues several thousand dollars of cash and said, “Go to the jewelry store down the street and get me a few $1,000 gold coins.”

      An hour later, gold coins in hand, the tech executive and his buddies gathered around by a dock overlooking the Pacific Ocean. They then proceeded to throw the coins into the sea, skipping them like rocks, cackling as they argued whose went furthest. Just for fun.

      Days later he shattered a lamp in the hotel’s restaurant. A manager told him it was a $500 lamp and he’d have to replace it.

      “You want five hundred dollars?” the executive asked incredulously, while pulling a brick of cash from his pocket and handing it to the manager. “Here’s five thousand dollars. Now get out of my face. And don’t ever insult me like that again.”

      You may wonder how long this behavior could last, and the answer was “not long.” I learned years later that he went broke.

      The premise of this book is that doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people.

      A genius who loses control of their emotions can be a financial disaster. The opposite is also true. Ordinary folks with no financial education can be wealthy if they have a handful of behavioral skills that have nothing to do with formal measures of intelligence.

      My favorite Wikipedia entry begins: “Ronald James Read was an American philanthropist, investor, janitor, and gas station attendant.”

      Ronald Read was born in rural Vermont. He was the first person in his family to graduate high school, made all the more impressive by the fact that he hitchhiked to campus each day.

      For those who knew Ronald Read, there wasn’t much else worth mentioning. His life was about as low key as they come.

      Read fixed cars at a gas station for 25 years and swept floors at JCPenney for 17 years. He bought a two-bedroom house for $12,000 at age 38 and lived there for the rest of his life. He was widowed at age 50 and never remarried. A friend recalled that his main hobby was chopping firewood.

      Read died in 2014, age 92. Which is when the humble rural janitor made international headlines.

      2,813,503 Americans died in 2014. Fewer than 4,000 of them had a net worth of over $8 million when they passed away. Ronald Read was one of them.

      In his will the former janitor left $2 million to his stepkids and more than $6 million to his local hospital and library.

      Those who knew Read were baffled. Where did he get all that money?

      It turned out there was no secret. There was no lottery win and no inheritance. Read saved what little he could and invested it in blue chip stocks. Then he waited, for decades on end, as tiny savings compounded into more than $8 million.

      That’s it. From janitor to philanthropist.

      A few months before Ronald Read died, another man named Richard was in the news.