As some others in this thread have said (and Patrick discusses in the post), there are lots of things you can do to much more directly impact your change of becoming rich and retiring well/early than optimizing your investments: get a really good salary and don't spend a lot of money. One blog which I have read is Mr Money Mustache [1], which focuses on those same concepts. Many of the posts are good reads.

[1]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/all-the-posts-since-the-begin...