Ben’s book on entrepreneurship is out today, and it’s good

May 21 6 Comments latest by My First Post

My friend Ben Casnocha’s book on entrepreneurship is out today. Congratulations for making it to the #1 Movers and Shakers list on Amazon (up 16,578%!).

I read the galleys of My Startup Life. The final book is even better, with tons of insights about entrepreneurship (see below). FYI, Ben founded his tech company, Comcate, at the age of 14. It’s now a multi-million-dollar company, and Ben is 19.

Check out the book to learn how he did this while in high school (e.g., waking up at 3:45am to take a Southwest flight down to LA, and then back up to San Francisco the same day), how to turn an idea into a company, how to fight for respect when you’re young and an entrepreneur, and how to build a team with the inevitable growing pains. I like to think that the people who read blogs about entrepreneurship will say, “Now what?” and get Ben’s book as the logical next step.

As usual, the best authors have great websites. You can sample more about what he has to say on his book site and his blog.

Related links:

• 50 books I recommend
• My other book reviews
• More articles on personal entrepreneurship

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The book that changed my life in 2 hours: The 4-Hour Workweek

April 30 82 Comments latest by Pete

There’s a time-sensitive giveaway at the end of this post.

Reading “The 4 Hour Workweek” is like having Tim Ferriss grab you by the hair, shake you, and say WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!?! YOU NEED TO USE THESE TIPS TO BE MORE EFFICIENT!! Also, the tips work. GTD fans, entrepreneurs, and basically anyone who reads this site will learn tons from The 4-Hour Workweek.

I absolutely loved this book. In fact, within 2 hours of reading it, I had completely changed the way I handle email — and I already thought I was efficient.

Three days later, I had changed the way I handle followups and meetings. The book is about creating an infrastructure so you can work only 4 hours a week (a colorful metaphor) and use your time to serve you, instead of the other way around. Tim’s insights about email, outsourcing, and business use take it to a new extreme. For example, he suggest checking your email twice a day. Now, I’ve heard this suggestion before, but usually it was a failure of the last mile for me: I didn’t know where to start.

Tim goes the extra step and provides the text of the auto-response email he uses, which basically says ‘I check my email infrequently, so here’s an FAQ you can read that will probably answer your questions. Otherwise, here’s my phone number, or be patient and I’ll get back to you.’ And, in the smartest line in the book, his autoresponder includes this line: “Thank you for understanding this move to more efficiency and effectiveness. It helps me accomplish more to serve you more.”

Who could argue with that?

Do you remember when I described how I set up my financial accounts? That article was one of my most popular because it described, step-by-step, how my personal-finance infrastructure worked. Tim describes that for his entire working style, including something fascinating I had never really considered: virtual admins. (See a related Friday Entrepreneur review here.)

He uses multiple virtual admins from around the world. As he writes, “Indian and Chinese VAs…will run $4-$15 per hour, the lower end being limited to simple tasks and the higher end including the equivalent of Harvard or Stanford M.B.A.s and Ph.D.s.” Then he goes on to describe exactly how to work with virtual admins, including how to give instruction, how to pick the best ones, and — this goes the extra mile — the best URLs for finding virtual admins.

Why would you need a virtual admin? Think about all the mindless things you do every month: Booking reservations, calling up Wells Fargo to question some account activity, researching some minor point, writing a complaint letter, proofreading, scheduling, reminders, and more.

Frankly, when I first thought about it, it sounded ridiculous. But then I thought about things like scheduling things and dealing with tons of tiny requests every month (”Fix that typo on that site!”), I realized how great it would be to be able to just send a quick email to a virtual admin to handle it — especially if they were good. This advice (and the links provided to the best admin sites) are worth the price of the book alone.

There’s more in the book. Here are some the other key insights I took away:

• “Don’t ever arrive at the office or in front of your computer without a clear list of priorities. You’ll just read unassociated e-mail and scramble your brain for the day.” (This alone has saved me about 35 hours since I finished the book 2 weeks ago.)
• “Being busy is a form of laziness–lazy thinking and indiscriminate action”
• How to end a meeting on time
• How to convince your boss to let you work at home on Fridays
• And a great lesson he illustrates:

  “For all four years of school, I had a policy. If I received anything less than an A on the first paper or non-multiple-choice in a given class, I would bring 2-3 hours of questions to the grader’s office hours and not leave until the other had answered them all or stopped out of exhaustion. This served two important purposes:

  1. I learned exactly how the grader evaluated work, including his or her prejudices and pet peeves
  2. The grader would think long and hard about ever giving me less than an A. He or she would never consider giving me a bad grace without exceptional reasons for doing so, as he or she knew I’d come a’knocking for another three-hour visit.

  Learn to be difficult when it counts. In school as in life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.

Tim is kind of a weird playboy. In fact, for half of the book, you’ll be shaking your head saying “Is this guy for real?” He’s a Guiness record-holder in Tango, a national champion in kickboxing, and runs a business that makes supplements “scientifically engineered to quickly increase the speed of neural transmission and information processing,” which makes me more than a little suspicious. Some of the tactics he recommends are frankly sleazy. And other people have wondered if he has a real job besides self-promotion; Tim admits in his book that he was fired from most of them.

But I’ve met him and I liked him. Also, even though this book is in some ways opposite of my philosophies on personal finance — he’s not a big fan of saving for retirement — I have to respect him for thinking through his position and teaching me concrete things that I put to work within a matter of hours.

He embraces entrepreneurship and uses the book to share street-smart tips for simplifying your life, automating your work, being more effective with your email/communications, cutting down on interruptions, and using your time to actually achieve something meaningful. I can’t recommend this book enough. In fact, if the highest praise you can give a book is that you changed the way you do things because of it, then this book gets a great review.

• See other reviews of The 4-Hour Workweek
• Listen to a podcast of Tim’s talk at SXSW (”Secrets of Doing More with Less in a Digital World”)

A bonus for iwillteachyoutoberich readers: Win a round-trip ticket anywhere
There is, of course, a bonus for iwillteachyoutoberich readers that nobody else is getting. One IWillTeachYouToBeRich reader who buys the book TODAY (Monday, April 30th) and submits your receipt to him will win a free round-trip ticket anywhere in the continental United States (just forward your online receipt or a scan from a retail store). Tim wants iwillteachyoutoberich readers to get this book and tell their friends about it, so he’s funding this out of his own pocket. And I’m thrilled because this is only being offered to my readers. (I get no referral other than the encoded Amazon link below.)

Read the Amazon reviews and get the book. Don’t forget to submit your receipt from today, Monday April 30th, using this link.

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Book Review: The Brazen Careerist (and a book giveaway)

April 24 72 Comments latest by Line

(The bottom of this review has a giveaway for 3 free books and 1 grand prize of a 30-minute phone call with the author of the book.)

Pluralistic ignorance is a fascinating concept in social psychology. It’s a phenomenon “which involves several members of a group who think that they have different perceptions, beliefs, or attitudes from the rest of the group” (more). For example, Prentice and Miller, two Princeton social psychologists, found that college students tend to think other students drink more than they actually do. Schroeder and Prentice noted that “the majority of students believe that their peers are uniformly more comfortable with campus [drinking] than they are.” This means that

“…because everyone who disagrees behaves as if he or she agrees, all dissenting members think that the norm is endorsed by every group member but themselves. This in turn reinforces their willingness to conform to the group norm rather than express their disagreement. Because of pluralistic ignorance, people may conform to the perceived consensual opinion of a group, instead of thinking and acting on their own perceptions” (source)

I find this time and time again when I talk to my friends. People will say things like, “Everyone’s earning $70,000/year when they graduate, so I should, too.” Or “nobody lives with their parents so it would be embarrassing if I did.” We often make decisions based on what we see of our friends, but we don’t see the bigger picture and realize the differences in internal attitudes and behaviors across individuals and groups. Pluralistic ignorance colors our decision-making and the worst part is, we don’t even know it.

That’s why I like the new book by Penelope Trunk, Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success. Penelope writes for the Boston Globe and Yahoo Finance (she’s covered me before), and she has an attitude. I mean that in a good way: Unlike so many books for young people, this one reads like a real person wrote it, not a damn robot. You can actually hear her in her writing. Now, she and I disagree about some career-related things, but she does a great job explaining her reasoning.

And her advice is good. She talks about issues we care about – living with our parents, getting our first job, negotiating salaries, starting a company, how to make ends meet – but reassures us that the things we feel guilty about are actually very common (see my thoughts about young people and guilt here).

For example, she writes that “Job-hopping in your early twenties is a great idea – especially if you’re still sleeping at your parents’ house. After all, the point of this period in life is to find the right work for you. But if the job-hopping doesn’t stop by age thirty, the feeling of instability intensifies to crisis.” How many of your friends don’t know what they want to do, but feel pressured to pick one single job and focus on it?

I know plenty. I also know plenty of friends who don’t know what they want to do, so they go back to grad school. Penelope shows a better way to think that decision.

That’s what’s interesting about the book: It includes not only advice on how to think about large, ambiguous topics like going back to grad school and office politics, but also includes tactical advice that’s actually good. When it comes to creating your resume, for instance, she writes,

“One page. That’s it. I don’t care if you are the smartest person on earth or if you have founded six companies and sold each of them for $10 million. The point of a resume is to get you an interview, not a job.”

She writes excellent tactical advice for building your cover letter, negotiating your salary, writing a resume that stands out (“Ditch the line about references on request. It’s implied. Of course if someone wants a reference, you will give one”).

But more than tactical advice, she uses research from places like Harvard Business School – not just her personal opinions – to remind us not to feel guilty about what we’re doing. For instance, did you know that 50% of the Class of 2003 was still living at home 3 years later?

This book reminds me to stop fighting against the same things that everyone else my age is struggling with. If I wanted to live at home so I can afford to take a low-paying job that I love, that chapter on living at home would be worth the book alone. In other words, stop worrying and feeling guilty about what other people think and focus on the important goals. The best thing a book can do is reassure us, refocus us, and then give us the tools to do more than we thought we could do. This book is a great start.

Brazen Careerist isn’t perfect, of course. It’s overly list-y for my tastes, reading in some parts like a “Top 10 Reasons to…” blog post. Also, the book is itself a bit unfocused, with points on starting your own business, perfecting your resume, working with your manager, optimizing your personal life, and doing yoga (?). But the number of insights I got from the book made up for it.

A few things that stood out to me:

• The importance of telling stories on page 52 is absolutely 100% true. So many people take the engineering-esque mindset of “If I just explain my accomplishments, they’ll understand.” Wrong. Craft a story and you win.
• A controversial and pointed suggestion about harassment on page 123 (“Use harassment to boost your career”). I don’t know what I think about this, but I’m curious to see others’ reactions.
• A pointed reminder to ask your company to pay for your training on page 178. Not only will you be more valuable to your company, your career will be enhanced. It just takes you asking.
• One more thing: What the hell is wrong with young people being afraid of using the phone? One of my stupid friends lost his Wells Fargo password and looked completely helpless. “Hey idiot,” I told him, “why don’t you just call them and get your password?” “Umm…,” he said like a beaten, sad man, “it’s not that important. I’ll just wait until I go in there next time.” On page 42, Penelope lays out why to use the phone. Key point: “You can’t lose making a cold call. No one ever says to themselves, ‘I wish I hadn’t been so aggressive in trying to get what I wanted.’”)

The book is good. So is the blog. And Penelope is a great woman with tons of interesting thoughts about career issues.

4 prizes
Penelope generously agreed to provide 4 prizes for iwillteachyoutoberich readers.

• 3 free signed, pre-release copies of The Brazen Careerist. As a special bonus, if you leave a comment with your best career story, 10 people will win pre-released, signed copies of The Brazen Careerist. The story can be about your best job, your biggest mistake, what you did on your job search, what your friends did during their college interviews…anything. Just make it interesting! Leave a comment now.
• The grand prize: a 30-minute call with Penelope Trunk, the author and columnist for Yahoo Finance and the Boston Globe.1 commenter will win the grand prize, a 30-minute phone call with Penelope to chat about your career and anything else. Remember, she’s a columnist for the Boston Globe and Yahoo Finance, so if you’re interesting, maybe your story will show up in the future.

  

  • Check out the book on Amazon.
  • Check out the blog. And leave a comment to win a free signed copy of the book before anybody else gets it.

[Update]: Again, the comments on this post are astonishing and honest and, in some cases, disturbing. I honestly believe that some of the best comments being made anywhere online today are right here on this post.

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