Worse Book I’ve Ever Read

To understand the worse book I’ve ever read you must first understand the types of book that I like to read. My favorite genre of books to read are “self-improvement”, biographies and autobiographies. I like the idea of reading a book and learning more than when I first opened up the book. I can acknowledge that I don’t know everything. There are books out there that will tell you some of the things that you don’t already know. In the case of biographies or autobiographies you can learn “how” or “why” a person did something. In the case of self-improvement, you can learn what you need to tweak in yourself. The self-help books that I like the most are those that tabulate information about a bunch of people who have done great things and present the tabulated information back to the reader.

The Worse Book I’ve Ever Read

Anyway, now that I’ve described the types of books that I like to read, i will spend the rest of this article telling you the worse book I’ve ever read and why. This book that I call the worse book that I’ve ever read matches the criteria of the type of book that logistically I normally like to read. This book in my opinion actually is one of the single most damaging books to African-Americans in modern times. The name of the worse book I’ve ever read is “The Wealth Choice: Success Secrets of Black Millionaires” Black by Dr. Dennis Kimbro. I read the book over 5 years ago. I had previously read Napoleon Hill, “Think and Grow Rich” which is an excellent book, so I totally got the formula that Dr Kimbro was going for. The book was conceptually sound but the single largest challenge that I had with the book was the statement that there are only 35k black millionaires in the United States.

Incorrect Statement that only 35k Black People are Millionaires

The major premise of the book was that only one tenth of one percent of the US populations or 35k black people are millionaires. The real number of black millionaires in United States is 2 percent of the black population. I read this book long before I actually made it into the black 2 percent. This book by Dr Dennis Kimbro came out in 2013. One might say, well maybe we really did only have .001 percent of the US population that were black millionaires in 2013. No, the number in 2013 was 2 percent of the black population and the number now in 2018 is 2 percent of the black population. We must acknowledge that the 2 percent of the black population number is bad and the lack of growth on that 2 percent number is bad but Dr Kimbro’s claim of 35k is even worse. The deeper problem is that after “The Wealth Choice: Success Secrets of Black Millionaires”, every publication recited this incorrect 35k number. The book came out in 2013 and at least for the next 5 years when performing a Google search for “number of black millionaires in the US”, that book with the incorrect number would pop up at the top of the search results list. I call it the single most damaging black book in modern history. I even recently read an article this week that again quoted the 35k number. Nowhere else other than that book and publications that quote from that book can one find this 35k number.

My Estimate on the Amount of Black Millionaires in the United States

Here is my estimate on the amount of black millionaire households in the United States:

126 million US Households * 13.3 Percent of Population (black) * 2 percent

=

327,600 black millionaire households in the US (about)

327,600 black millionaire households (about) is a far cry from the 35k millionaires that Dr Kimbro states. The book downgraded the amount of black millionaires by at least 100 to 200 percent. Imagine a company that misstated its corporate earnings by over 100 percent. That company’s stock would just tank instantly. The problem that I have is that it’s five years later and Dr Kimbro never came out and said, my bad the 35k number that I quoted in my book 5 years ago was wrong. If he did that then maybe I would consider removing it from my “all time worse books I’ve ever read” list.

Readers:

Do you think there are only 35k black millionaires in the US? What is the all time worse book you’ve ever read?