Book Summaries

 The Magic of NOW, not How When most people decide they want to start a business, their first intuition is to learn more—read a book, take a course, seek out advice—and then take action after having carefully considered all the facts. After all, there are a ton of top-rated MBA programs, $10 Udemy courses, free YouTube videos, and entrepreneurship how-to books—so why wouldn’t you learn all you could?  That’s got to be a whole lot safer, and it probably makes you a lot less likely to fail, right? WRONG!!!!!! Super-successful people do the opposite—they take action first, get real feedback, and learn from that, which is a million times more valuable than any book or course. And quicker! Most people: Overthink first, act later. But Every successful entrepreneur: Act first, figure it out later. Don’t be afraid to act. Be afraid of living a life that seems more like a cv than an adventure. Challenge -  Ask one person you respect for a business idea. This is a quick way to get ...

One day a friend showed me a product in development from an unknown company that was then called My Mint. The founder, Aaron Patzer, had created a tool to help people manage their finances. At the time I was blogging on my site OkDork about personal finance, and I immediately saw that this could be huge. I was so excited, that I told Aaron that I wanted to be his director of marketing.  The only problem was, as he pointed out, that I hadn’t done marketing before. So I did what I’ve always done—I just started. I hustled.  And with no experience, I created a marketing plan that got 100,000 registered users before the site even launched which got me a full-time offer: 1 percent of the company and a $100,000 job. Marketing is easy when you have a great product. Don’t base your happiness or your self-worth on being the smartest, the most successful, the richest.  There’s ALWAYS going to be someone who’s smarter, more successful, or richer. Every time you see that you’ve fallen...

Section 1 - Start It (Rediscover your Creator's Courage) Chapter 1 - Just F**ing Start (Begin before you are ready) Buddha - "There are 2 mistakes one can make along the road to truth... not going all the way, & not starting. My father was an immigrant from Israel, didn't speak english well, he sold copiers. My mom worked the night shift at the hospital as a nurse, and she hated it. I didn't want to do any of these. It was pure luck I ended up in Lynbrook high, 1 of the top 100 high schools in US. Always was an average kid. My friends were sons & daughters of America's tech elite. I got into, Berkeley's doofus class. I got and internship with Microsoft while graduating. Normally anyone with internship gets selected, I wasn't as I performed poorly on interviews. Google also rejected me. Facebook hired me.  I was facebook's 30th Employee, just 24 years old, & among smartest collection of people, but on June, 2006, got fired went from living my...