Are you looking for solid resources, inspiration, tips that will help you start your entrepreneurial journey? Insights that will encourage you to change your mindset, to pivot, to build your business and grow not only your audience, but your revenue, too? The following mentioned books sure need to be added to the top of your reading list.
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Rework
You Will Learn: A better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Read it and you’ll know why plans are actually harmful, why you don’t need outside investors, and why you’re better off ignoring the competition. The truth is, you need less than you think. You don’t need to be a workaholic. You don’t need to staff up. You don’t need to waste time on paperwork or meetings. You don’t even need an office. Those are all just excuses.
Co-written by David Heinemeier Hansson a previous guest here!
What Brenton Hayden had to say, “My favorite book is Rework. They have a chapter in there “Fire the Workaholics”. If you’re working too hard, you’re not doing it right. That’s not to say not to work hard, but you need what I call clarity breaks. If you’re tired, don’t work anymore. If you’re frustrated, stop working. If you’re angry, don’t write anymore emails, don’t do anymore work, your work will always be affected by that. If your project is taking significantly longer than you had anticipated, it is probably time to cancel that project or see if there is something that you’ve got that is an MVP of a viable product.”
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Inbound Marketing
You Will Learn: How to stop pushing your message out and start pulling your customers in. Inbound Marketing is a how-to guide to getting found via Google, the blogosphere, and social media sites.
What Jerry Mills had to say, “There’s a great book by, anybody who is thinking about starting a business they should read this book, it’s called Inbound Marketing by the guys at Hub Spot.”
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Awaken the Giant Within
You Will Learn: Practical guidelines for concentrating your thoughts and emotions on the attainment of your goals.
What Derek Sivers had to say: “I read Awaken the Giant Within. Someone who was a real mentor to me gave me this book and said you should read this. With that kind of heavy recommendation from somebody I admired, I really gave it my full attention and really dove in and read it not just once but like five times over the next five years and really ingested it.”
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Outliers
You Will Learn: That we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing.
What Frank McKinney said, “I want everybody to listen very carefully. There is a great author out there by the name of Malcolm Gladwell. You may have heard of him. He wrote ‘The Tipping Point’, he wrote ‘Blink’, and he wrote a book called ‘Outliers’. I read in ‘Outliers’ that to become an expert at anything in life, you need to put in 10,000 hours. If you want to be an expert real estate person, you want to be an expert author, I did the math.. It takes five years at forty hours a week to equal 10,000 hours. I was so astonished when I looked back and realized that’s exactly what I did.”
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The Dip
You Will Learn: If your goal is even worth the hassle. Maybe you’re in a Dip- a temporary setback that will get better if you keep pushing. But maybe it’s really a Cul-de-Sac, which will never get better, no matter how hard you try. This book helps you determine which one you are in.
What Michael Port had to say: “One of my colleagues Seth Godin wrote a great book called The Dip. It basically makes one big point. He says there’s this American idea that you never should quit anything you do. The person who doesn’t give up always wins. He says actually that’s not necessarily the case. Sometimes quitters do win. That’s different. That’s not contradictory to the concept of the pursuit of mastery, what I’m suggesting earlier. It’s not about dabbling. It’s not about a little bit of this, little bit of that, little bit of this. It’s about having the fortitude to look at what you’re doing and identifying the dip, as he calls it.”
Now Take a minute and think about some of the most successful people you know. You bet they’re great with people, are super-productive, and think differently than most. After all, that’s how they got to be where they are today. Jealous of them? You don’t have to be. You can learn these same skills by studying some of the above business books that can help you take your game to the next level.