Bryn and I listened to The Top 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires and the Middle Class during our drive home from Seattle.  It only took about 2 hours to hear the audiobook version so you could probably knock out the paper version in under an hour.  It would be worth your time.

Author Kevin Cameron Smith shares his financial wisdom is easy-to-digest chunks.  He starts out by addressing the goals of various economic classes:

• • • The poor seek to survive.
    • The middle class seek comfort.
    • The rich seek freedom.

It’s not a how-to book or a get-rich-quick manual.  Success is a journey, the author explains.

And since you probably don’t want to read the book, here are the 10 Distinctions.  How many of these apply to you?

1. Millionaires Think Long-Term.  The poor think day to day or week to week.  The middle class think month to month.  The rich think year to year or even decade to decade.
2. Millionaires Think Ideas.  The poor and middle class are consumed by things and other people.
3. Millionaires Embrace Change.  The poor and middle class are threatened by change.
4. Millionaires Take Calculated Risks.  When evaluating an opportunity, ask yourself three questions.  What’s the best thing that could happen?  What’s the worst thing that could happen?  What’s the most likely thing to happen?  If you can live with the worst thing, and the most likely thing if positive, maybe it’s a risk worth taking.
5. Millionaires Continue Learning.  School may end, but education never stops.
6. Millionaires Work for Profits.  The poor and middle class work for wages, while someone else profits.
7. Millionaires are Generous.  See The Go-Giver.
8. Millionaires Develop Multiple Income Streams.  The poor and middle class rely on just one or two, and they’re usually trading hours for dollars.
9. Millionaires Think Net Worth.  The poor and middle class think paychecks.
10. Millionaires Ask Empowering Questions.  Think “How can I realistically double my income?” vs. “How can I get a raise at work?”  ”What would make my life more meaningful?” vs. “What is the meaning of life?”

-Nick

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I’ll be honest.  I didn’t get more than a few chapters into Robert Wright’s Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.  Sorry Chris.

It’s not that it wasn’t interesting or insightful.  It was both.  But it was also 400 pages of dense academic prose and it wasn’t really working out for me as bedtime reading before it came due at the library.

Wright argues that over time, human society trends toward more complexity and more interdependence.  As our collective brain expands, life for everyone improves.  We play nonzero sum games, over and over and over again, and everyone is better off because of it.

The logic makes sense.  If you depend on your neighbor for meat and he depends on you for grain, you’re less likely to attack each other.  Fast forward a few thousand years, if we depend on China for iPhones and they depend on us for jobs, we’re less likely to attack each other.

Wright’s LONG term, BIG picture view makes the petty discourse that dominates our politics seem silly.

Are we on a predestined path to global peace and prosperity?  I don’t know… I didn’t make it to the end.

-Nick

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On the plane back from China, I killed a couple hours with Start Something That Matters by Blake Mycoskie, the founder of TOMS Shoes.  It caught my attention with the entrepreneurial angle and clinched the deal with the shoe connection.

TOMS, Shoes for a Better Tomorrow, is a remarkable brand.  Everyone knows TOMS and everyone loves TOMS.  If you’re not familiar with their story, they give a pair of shoes away for every pair they sell.

Did you know they’ve only been around since 2006?  It’s hard to believe, but I think illustrates the strength of a powerful story.

As a charity, TOMS is terribly inefficient.  Other organizations help far more people for far less money.  But that’s the beauty of TOMS — it’s not a charity.

It’s a for-profit company with a do-good story.

And it’s a good reminder that economic growth has lifted more people out of poverty than every charity, welfare program and NGO combined.  Non-profits have their place, but the profit-seeking companies typically generate more innovative solutions to the problems of the worlds poor (as argued in Capitalism at the Crossroads).

The book is a quick and interesting read, especially if you’re interested in how TOMS got started.  It’s inspirational in that it makes you wonder what other businesses the “one-for-one” model could be applied to.

-Nick

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I grabbed Practical Genius: The Real Smarts You Need to Get Your Talents and Passions Working For You from the library the other day.  Saw it on Amazon and it sounded interesting.

It wasn’t.  Couldn’t get into it.  Made it 15 or 20 pages and skimmed another 30 or so.  I guess it didn’t really speak to me.

-Nick

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If you’re looking for a travel book from a different perspective, check out Rolf Potts’ Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel.  For dreamers with itchy feet, it may be the perfect motivation to set out on a big adventure.

Potts describes how his minimalist “vagabonding” lifestyle has led to a truly enriched life as he’s experienced nearly every far-flung corner of the globe, and done it on the cheap.  The book is a little heavy on the traveler philosophy (as opposed to “tourist” philosophy) and light on the practical nuts and bolts, but I think that’s the point.  If you’re the type of person that needs to plan every detail of your trip down to the minute and penny, this type of travel isn’t going to work for you — either that or you won’t get as much out of it.

Which makes me wonder, am I too type-A to embark on this kind of journey?

Potts argues that travel today is being packaged and sold as a consumer good, just like a flat screen TV, and iPod, or a pair of sneakers.  Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that, but just something to be aware of, and be aware that an alternative exists.  Of course long-term travel is much easier to swing if you’re getting paid to do it, as the author is/was (by various magazines).

Either way, I appreciated how Vagabonding pays due respect to earlier travelers and writers, including Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir.  There’s a certain romance of the open road, about the endless possibilities that lay ahead, chasing the unknown or challenging yourself with a new adventure.  You never know who you might meet or what you might find, even if it’s just a stronger appreciation of “home.”

-Nick

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The Go-Giver is a short story (120 pages) on the secrets to success in business and in life.  It’s written in the familiar form of a parable like the One-Minute Manager and the E-Myth.

If you like business books, it’s definitely a worthwhile read.  The Go-Giver does an excellent job of explaining that which we intrinsically know, but don’t often think about.  The big “Trade Secret?” Giving.

It seems counter-intuitive, but every great company achieved success by giving customers tremendous value.  For Ford, it was affordable and reliable personal transportation.  For Amazon, it was a convenient and easy way to shop from home.  For Apple, it was 10,000 songs in your pocket.

When you focus on creating value, the money follows.  These companies aren’t hurting for profit.  Consider RetailMeNot, the greatest affiliate success story in history.  They compile coupon information from thousands of online stores, give it away to customers for free, and happen to be insanely profitable.

Lots of good stuff:

“Ultimately, the world treats you more or less the way you expect to be treated.”

The Five Laws of Stratospheric Success:

1. The Law of Value: Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment. It’s not about losing money or even having the lowest prices. Louis Vuitton can sell $1000 handbags because their customers get even more value from owning them.
2. The Law of Compensation: Your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them.  How can you scale your value?
3. The Law of Influence: Your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people’s interests first.
4. The Law of Authenticity: The most valuable gift you have to offer is yourself.
5. The Law of Receptivity: The key to effective giving is to stay open to receiving.  Because there are two parties to every transaction.

So, what can you give?

-Nick

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Social media has given customers their voice back, Gary Vaynerchuk explains in The Thank You Economy.  If you read his last book, Crush It!, you might recall his perfectly succinct chapter on the “best marketing strategy ever”:

Care.

That was it, a one-word chapter.  The Thank You Economy is basically the sequel to that chapter or at least an expansion of it.  Specifically Vaynerchuk discusses how this is a great opportunity for companies large and small to build lasting and valuable relationships with their customers.

You’ll learn:

• Why companies need to care about their customers (to survive and thrive)
• Who should do the caring (everyone, not just customer service)
• Where to care (in person and online)
• When to care (always and immediately)
• How to care (be genuine)

Good read for any small business.  Required reading for any small business interesting in starting or expanding their social media presence.

-Nick

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I got a free copy of Marc Ostrofsky’s book Get Rich Click: The Ultimate Guide to Making Money on the Internet at Affiliate Summit in New York.  It was pretty much worth the price.  Ostrofsky is probably best known for selling the domain Business.com for $7.5 million (which landed him in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most expensive domain ever sold at the time), but he’s definitely more than a one-hit wonder.  He’s a smart and savvy businessman, CEO, and entrepreneur.

And that’s the problem with Get Rich Click: it’s written from the CEO’s level, with very few actionable items for the ground floor.  Ostrofsky covers a broad range of ways to make money online, but many don’t come across as genuine since he is almost certainly not speaking from first-hand experience.  Some of the examples are just plain outdated.  For example, he discusses AdWords arbitrage as a viable avenue, which has been disallowed for several years.  He also suggests creating Google ads with one URL, and redirecting people who click to a completely different URL, which is also a violation of AdWords rules.

The book is apparently sponsored by ClickBank, an affiliate network for electronic products (ebooks and software mostly).  You won’t get more than a few pages without some reference to ClickBank and how awesome it is.  And I’m not saying there aren’t legitimate products and affiliates, but ClickBank kind of has a reputation for sleazy sales pages like this one.

I work in search marketing all day long and yet Get Rich Click is filled with sentences that make no sense to me:

“Search Engine Ranking has come of age in the last 12 to 24 months — you can now easily create and deploy a traditional (title, description, Keywords inserts in content, submissions and optimization) search engine ranking process that is augmented with a Pay-Per-Click (“PPC”) process.”

What?

Ostrofsky recommends a company called Quigo as an alternative to Google’s Adsense for contextual advertising.  Quigo was sold in 2007 and has been operating as Advertising.com Sponsored Listings ever since.  It’s stuff like that, in combination with the “computer-illiterate” cartoons from 1995, and the insistence on capitalizing certain words (Keywords seems to be a fave), that make Get Rich Click seem poorly researched and not too useful.

I also found it annoying that the author found it necessary to trademark every punny little phrase he came up with:

• Get Rich Click ™
• Word of Mouse ™ — The title of his next book.
• APPortunity.com ™
• APPortunity of a Lifetime ™
• Reach Out and Touch Everyone ™
• Domain Names are Internet Real Estate ™  — Am I guilty of trademark infringement?

That said, we had the opportunity to hear Mr. Ostrofsky speak and it was clear he’s a very smart and successful guy and talented marketer.  And now a bestselling author.  If anyone wants a copy, let me know and I’ll send you mine.  It’s even autographed.

-Nick

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I meant to place a hold on Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything.  Shown here:

Turns out I placed a hold on the same author’s A Really Short History of Nearly Everything.  The “really” is very subtle; I didn’t catch it either.  Initially I was kind of bummed, but then I realized I had received the kids version — and the original is over 500 pages of pretty heavy science so maybe this mistake is going to work out in my favor after all.

-Nick

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I was looking forward to Never Get a Real Job: How to Dump Your Boss, Build a Business, and Not Go Broke, but it was kind of meh for me.  First time author Scott Gerber goes out of his way NOT to sugarcoat the difficulties of entrepreneurship, but it makes for an strange angle when the book is supposed to be about achieving financial independence through your own business.  I guess it’s better than to set unrealistic expectations, but I found it almost dreary in a way.  It was surprising to read such a constant negative tone about a subject meant to so positive.

Never Get a Real Job is aimed at the graduating and recently graduated millenial generation.  Gerber explains that if you rely on someone else for a paycheck, you’re never truly free.  But then he goes on to detail the common mistakes, misconceptions, and disasters of entrepreneurship.  By the end, I was left wondering if the start-up lifestyle was really a better way to go at all.  I think the idea was for the author to air all his rookie mistakes in the hope that readers could learn from them.

The business advice is nothing groundbreaking, but at the very least was a reminder of what I should be doing.  (Manage cash flow, keep customers happy, be creative, etc.)  On the positive side, the book does list some valuable resources for bootstrapping young companies in several areas.  I was familiar with some of the recommended companies but not all, so I’ll be checking those out.

-Nick

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