This is the first business book I've read that I want to re-read immediately. Tim Ferriss has recommended this book over and over, so I've known about it for awhile. I should have read it four years ago! It covers a variety of strategies for building and running successful small businesses. Having started and failed to grow a business of my own, I recognized many of the mistakes I made in the dialogue. This is an easy read, and if you run (or are thinking about starting) a business, I would call this required reading. You can finish it in an afternoon.
Key Takeaways
Memorable Quotes
Rating: 9/10
A top business book by all accounts. I recommend this to anyone interested in any kind of business. This is even applicable to startups, despite using a small business as its example. Even though first published in 1995, it holds up over 20 years later, as these principles are timeless.
Key Takeaways
- If you want to grow your business, you need to work on your business, not in your business.
- Every entrepreneur has 3 competing identities within them. There's the strategist, the technician, and the manager. They need to be in equal parts, otherwise the business will suffer.
- Most entrepreneurs don't realize they're doing the wrong work a lot of the time.
- Standardize everything in your business so that you can hand off roles to other people. Bonus points if you design these systems to improve themselves.
- Be very explicit about your primary aim and strategic objectives.
- Even when you're the only worker in your business, you need to describe each role in detail.
Memorable Quotes
- Contrary to popular belief, my experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren't so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.
- The difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next. The difference between the two is living fully and just existing.
- If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!
- With no clear picture of how you wish your life to be, how on earth are you going to live it? What is your Primary Aim? Where is the script to make your dreams come true? what is the first step to take and how do you measure your progress? How far have you gone and how close are you to getting to your goals?
- Don Juan in Carlos Castaneda’s A Separate Peace: “The difference between a warrior and an ordinary man is that a warrior sees everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man sees everything as either a blessing or a curse.
- You should know now that a man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, not by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting. A man of knowledge chooses a path with heart and follows it. – Carlos Castaneda
- Most salespeople think that selling is “closing.” It isn’t. Selling is opening.
- the Entrepreneurial Model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important—the way it’s delivered is.
- I believe great people to be those who know how they got where they are, and what they need to do to get where they’re going. Great people have a vision of their lives that they practice emulating each and every day. They go to work on their lives, not just in their lives. Their lives are spent living out the vision they have of their future, in the present. They compare what they’ve done with what they intended to do. And where there’s a disparity between the two, they don’t wait very long to make up the difference.
Rating: 9/10
A top business book by all accounts. I recommend this to anyone interested in any kind of business. This is even applicable to startups, despite using a small business as its example. Even though first published in 1995, it holds up over 20 years later, as these principles are timeless.
