These are the must-read books for aspiring young entrepreneurs and the “Retired at 25″ set. Some are classics, some you’ve probably already read, and some I hope are new to you. Each is inspirational in its own way.

1. Rich Dad Poor Dad

I have a special place in my heart for Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad. It was one of the first non-fiction books I read that wasn’t for school. I was 18 or 19 years old at the time, but was in the middle of my first true entrepreneurial experience, running a painting company as a branch manager for College Works Painting. This is a book about financial intelligence, and how the school system and conventional wisdom don’t teach what it takes to get ahead. Employees, Kiyosaki argues, are fighting a losing battle because they only trade time for money. The relationship is linear; to earn more you have to work more. Business owners and investors on the other hand, leverage their time and money to reap exponential returns. Rich Dad Poor Dad is easy to understand and rings so true. I found myself saying “Yes!” and nodding along at nearly every page.

Key Takeaway: How to accumulate assets to achieve the holy grail of financial freedom: multiple streams of passive income.

The Next Level: Everything I’ve read in the Rich Dad series has been worthwhile.

2. The Art of The Start

Every great company starts with an idea, and Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start is written to help you turn that idea into a viable business. Kawasaki cut his teeth in the Macintosh division in the early days of Apples, and now runs his own venture capital company in Silicon Valley. Successful entrepreneurs, he argues, require humility and modesty mixed in with their revolutionary “curve-jumping, paradigm-shifting, patent-pending” ideas. It’s a book about how young entrepreneurs can change the world once they learn a little more about the game they’re playing.

Key Takeaway: To be great, you need to make meaning.

The Next Level: You might like Kawasaki’s Rules for Revolutionaries.

3. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Author Robert Cialdini packs weeks of sales training into Influence, and it’s all backed up by his research as a professor of psychology. This is probably the most concise and important book on how marketers and salespeople can influence customers. It’s filled with great stories and and is packed with useful and sometimes surprising information. Every entrepreneur can learn something from Dr. Cialdini.

Key Takeaway: How to sell.

The Next Level: Try Why We Buy and Getting to Yes.

4. The 4-Hour Workweek

Something we can all aspire to! Timothy Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek has been a runaway bestseller because of the promises it makes on the cover: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. The claims are certainly audacious and probably unrealistic for most, but Ferriss shows that with a little effort, a dramatic change in your lifestyle is possible. The writing style is very direct and some of the suggestions won’t work for everyone. But at the very least, you will learn some effective tips to free up a few extra hours every week, including limiting email access, outsourcing, and intentional ignorance, which should definitely improve your quality of life. If nothing else, it will get your brain turning.

Key Takeaway: Time is our most valuable non-renewable resource. Protect yours dearly.

The Next Level: The Other 8 Hours is a good follow-up read on how to better spend your time.

5. The E-Myth Revisited

Do you run your business or does your business run you? That is the key question in Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth Revisited. Many entrepreneurs fall victim to the self-employment trap, where they fool themselves into thinking they’ve got it made just because they’re their own boss. The problem is if you spend all your time working on the day-to-day grind of the business, you’re not an entrepreneur, just a glorified employee. Instead of working in the traditional sense, your job as the boss is to build systems that allow employees to do the work for you. Before hiring my virtual assistant, I was guilty of the same sins as many of the business owners featured in the book. It’s not easy to remove yourself from the system, but the rewards make it very worthwhile.

Key Takeaway: Take control by letting go.

The Next Level: For quick ideas on managing your people and your business, you can’t beat Kenneth Blanchard’s The One Minute Manager and The One Minute Entrepreneur.

6. Capitalism at the Crossroads

On the average, earthlings are better off today than at any point in our history. But on the extremes, more than a billion of us still live in dire poverty. Stuart Hart’s Capitalism at the Crossroads is a book about how businesses can improve the lives of those people and make money at the same time. The basic premise is that charities and non-profits on the whole have done a pretty crappy job at creating lasting change for the world’s poor, and that the often maligned “profit motive” can and must be used to serve the “bottom billion.” It’s an interesting read and a reminder that businesses don’t have to exploit the environment and developing nations to make money. Indeed, those that can solve some of our challenging ecological and humanitarian problems over the next 50 years stand to truly cash in.

Key Takeaway: Between 1 and 4 billion potential customers are being ignored by most of today’s companies.

The Next Level: If you want change the world, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid and The Go-Giver should probably be on your bookshelf.

Don’t have time to read these and all the other great business books out there? Why not give Executive Book Summaries a try. They give you the Cliffs Notes version of all the classics and latest books on productivity, sales, marketing, entrepreneurship, and more.

-Nick

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Potential is widely regarded as a positive trait.  We say things like sports prospects have superstar potential, or young students are really showing a lot of potential.  But what does potential really mean?

“Potential means you haven’t done anything yet.” –Bill Parcells

To be sure, having potential is preferable to not having it, but it still requires some additional force to create action.

Consider a car parked on the street.  Even though it is fully stopped, we say it has potential energy.  In the car’s case, an internal force — it’s engine — can propel it forward, turning it’s potential energy into real energy.

But what if the engine’s broken?  Then it needs a push.

What potential plans and dreams do you have that need either some motivation from within or a push from outside to get started?

-Nick

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Saturday’s Husky loss at BYU (13 straight road losses!) got me thinking about winning and losing.  I like to reason with myself that the time spent watching the game is all worthwhile if it results in a victory, but completely wasted if it’s a loss.  This is flawed logic because the true value lies in the fan experience and the friends you watch with.

Of course victory can’t be as sweet without first knowing the sting of defeat, but losing still sucks.  The problem is you have no impact on the outcome.  Or maybe if you’re at the game, a very small impact (unless you’re Steve Bartman).  The score will be the same whether you watch or not.

Watching helplessly as time ran out served as a painful reminder of some poor business decisions I’ve made this year that essentially made me a spectator in my own life.  When you lose control over your own livelihood, it’s an uncomfortable and frustrating position to be in.  Of course everything’s clearer in hindsight, but winners wouldn’t allow that to happen.

Time to “control the controllables” and get ‘r done.

-Nick

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After the wedding, we made our way toward Yellowstone via the Beartooth Highway.  This stretch of road has been called the “most beautiful drive in America,” and is only open a few months out of the year because of snow and other extreme weather conditions.  It reaches nearly 11,000 feet in elevation at the summit!

We stopped at a few places along the way, including this scenic vista at about 9200 ft.

And then again at the top:

Very cool drive, definitely recommended.

-Nick

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Over the past few months, while the biz has been broken, I’ve had a lot of time to think about…stuff.  Which is dangerous.

What do I really want to do?  What if sales never get back to where they were?  How should I be spending my time?

The last one led me toward the idea of “highest and best use,” which is a term from the real estate world.  The first example that comes to mind is in the movie Up.  The real estate development company wants the bulldoze the house to make room for some modern high-rise, but the owner won’t sell.

The two parties have differing views toward highest and best use.  In purely economic terms, the real estate developer is right.  But in emotional, historical, and sentimental terms, the old house wins.  A similar situation recently played out in Seattle.

I think Highest and Best Use (HBU) can be applied to life outside of real estate, in how we spend our days.  Is doing comparison shopping for shoes my HBU?  Or is there something else I could do that might make me happier or have a greater societal benefit?

Should Angelina Jolie personally spend her time visiting and adopting a few impoverished children?  Or would it be her HBU to instead spend her time making movies and earning millions of dollars, and then using that money to help thousands of impoverished children?

There are a few ways to look at HBU for individuals: financial, societal, and emotional.  Each one could yield a different highest and best use.  Consider a genius physicist.  He could:

• Make a fortune as a Wall Street “quant” building smarter data models for big banks.
• Design a more fuel-efficient engine, reducing toxic emissions and foreign oil imports.
• Go fishing, if that’s what makes him happiest.

A micro-economist might say that everyone is already doing their HBU.  Given our need to optimize and maximize our utility, by definition, whatever we’re doing must be our HBU.  I think that over-simplifies it.

As someone still searching for their highest and best use, I don’t know the answer.

-Nick

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I recently finished The Other 8 Hours: Maximize Your Free Time to Create New Wealth & Purpose by Robert Pagliarini.  The premise is if you sleep for 8 hours, and work for another 8 hours, you really only have the remaining 8 hours each day to truly “live.”  What you choose to do with that time largely determines your physical health, the quality of your relationships, your financial success, and your personal fulfillment.

The Other 8 Hours serves as a great reminder that everyone on earth starts with the same input (time), yet we achieve vastly different outputs based on how we spend that time.  Ideologically, the book falls somewhere between Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad and Timothy Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek.  All three begin with the near-universal truth that nobody gets rich working a 9-5, and then branch off on their different paths on how to overcome that.  While Kiyosaki focuses more on investment strategies and Ferriss discusses automation and mandatory ignorance/isolation, Pagliarini offers some concrete actions that everyone can take to improve their personal and financial lives.  Since he’s not as extreme as Ferriss, I think this book will find a broader appeal.

I found the book full of inspirational stories from entrepreneurs and others who have escaped the rat race.  Pagliarini shares a lot of tips on how to free up more time, leverage your talents, and squeeze more productivity from each day.  He gets a little preachy toward the end, but it’s hard not to after 200 pages of rah-rah motivational, take charge of your life prose.  Even if you take away just one positive idea from the book, it’s well worth the read.

Every minute that goes by is one you’ll never get back.  Are you doing what you want to be doing?

And if you read nothing else, read page 183. :-)

FTC Disclosure: If you buy The Other 8 Hours through the above link, Amazon will pay me 4% of the purchase price.

-Nick

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I really enjoyed Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen.  Great read.

Born to Run is a book about the Tarahumara people of the rugged canyon country of Northern Mexico.  But it’s also a book about history, business, nutrition, biology, evolution, individualism and community, motivation, and yes, even running.  The author describes himself as an oft-injured middle-aged journalist who sees men twice his age running hundreds of miles a month without any of the heel, ankle, knee, hip, and back problems he’s experienced.  How do they do it?

The quest for answers leads McDougall through the druglords’ backyard in Mexico, the mountains of Colorado, and to the plains of Africa.  He encounters an impressive cast of supporting characters along the way, including elite ultrarunners, doctors, Nike executives, scientists, and the mysterious Caballo Blanco.

I learned how humans are uniquely engineered for distance running, and why the more expensive running shoes create more injuries.  Intrigued by the supposed benefits of barefoot running, last week I left my Brooks behind and took to the sidewalks and office parks near our home “commando” style — and it felt great!  I’d gone shoe-less on the treadmill a few times but there was something special about going outside.

Even as just a one-time-half-marathoner who doesn’t particularly love running, I was really inspired by Born to Run.  It makes you want to get out there and hit the pavement and the trails.  In the end, the moral of McDougall’s story is that less is more and that as a reminder to enjoy the simple pleasures of life, even though we’ll probably never know what it feels like to run a 100 mile race.

Thanks Doug for the recommendation!

-Nick

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When I was a kid, we had lots of art supplies — crayons, markers, colored pencils, water color paints, even pastels — and the holy grail of elementary school drawing: Mr. Sketch scented markers.

Unfortunately I never wanted to use them for fear they’d run out of ink.  Yeah I clearly had some issues.

Well this came up last week when we didn’t want to take Mochi on a walk because he’d just had a bath and it was raining and wet outside, so he’d get all muddy and dirty again.  Thankfully we were reminded by the song at the end of the Avenue Q musical we just saw, something about whatever happens is “only just for now.”  So Mochi got his walk in, got dirty, and the sun still came up the next day.

It made me think about what other “Mr. Sketch markers” people might have in their lives.

• Not using the nice dishes. (They might break!)
• Not wearing your shoes in the house. (The floors might get dirty!)
• Not using your new skis. (I might hit a rock!)
• Not taking vacation. (I might fall behind at work!)
• Not moving to that new city. (I might not know anyone!)
• Not remodeling your house. (It might lose re-sale value!)
• Not calling your friends or family. (They might be busy!)
• Not asking for a raise at work. (They might say no!)
• Not starting that business. (It might fail!)

Yes, all of those things might happen.  But they might not.

It took me a while, but I think I’ve learned life is more fully lived when you take out all the “nots.”

-Nick

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It was the summer of 2005.  I can’t remember the exact text message my friend sent me, but it was something along the lines of:

“Up $5k for the month.”

What?!  I knew immediately what he was talking about: affiliate marketing.  Here I was having just moved all the way across the country to start work at my “real job” when I get this message about a friend making way more money in way less time online.

At first I was jealous and anxious to know how he was doing it.  We’d both experimented with online marketing in college, but never made any serious money like that.  That text message was an eye-opener and a huge inspiration.  It wasn’t long after that I started work on the Shoes ‘R Us site.

When you share your success with others, I suppose you run the risk of bragging, but you never know what you might inspire.  Maybe even something life-changing.  Success can be fleeting, but there are always new opportunities to take advantage of.  So cheers to that, and thanks for sending that text.

-Nick

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I really liked The Geography of Bliss.  It probably helped that I read it in my personal version of paradise, poolside at the Hilton Los Cabos.

In the book, the narrator travels the globe in search of the secrets to happiness.  (Strangely absent: the “happiest place on earth.”)  The journey is both serious and funny, genuine and lighthearted.  I’ve been told it’s a guy’s version of Eat, Pray, Love, but I haven’t read that one so I can’t say.  The Geography of Bliss appealed to the globetrotter in me, and it will make you think about what makes you happy.  In the end, author Eric Weiner arrives at the inevitable conclusion that there is no single magic-bullet for long-term happiness, but he shares plenty of wisdom and insight along the way on what might help get us there.

-Nick

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