Leo Babauta

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With the countless distractions that come from every corner of a modern life, it’s amazing that we’re ever able to accomplish anything. The Power of Less demonstrates how to streamline your life by identifying the essential and eliminating the unnecessary – freeing you from everyday clutter and allowing you to focus on accomplishing the goals that can change your life for the better.

The Power of Less will show you how to:

• Break any goal down into manageable tasks
• Focus on only a few tasks at a time
• Create new and productive habits
• Hone your focus
• Increase your efficiency

By setting limits for yourself and making the most of the resources you already have, you’ll finally be able work less, work smarter, and focus on living the life that you deserve.

View More about Power of Less, The: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential…in Business and in Life

Love this post from the FreshBooks folks today: Your biggest competitor is obscurity. When given the choice of sharing something that your company is doing vs. holding it in for competitive advantage - in this day and age - always lean towards sharing. Speak up! Teach! Be heard!

“Do you know who your biggest competitor is? It might not be as straight forward as you think. Let’s use FreshBooks as an example. You probably think QuickBooks is our greatest competition. They’re not. Our greatest competition is obscurity.”

Your takeaway:

… you need to fight to be heard … get out your fog horn and make sure the world knows all about you!

Read the post: Your biggest competitor is obscurity

Neil Patel has a great article at QuickSprout about seven big business mistakes that he’s made.

Personally, the current biggest potential issue for me is his #1 mistake: “Don’t spread yourself too thin” Take this and his other six tips to heart!

Over the past 6 years I founded 9 .com companies. Most of the companies failed miserably and lost me a million dollars or so, but luckily a few of them did well enough to cover my loses. The main reason I had a lot of unsuccessful ventures is because I made some really big mistakes. Hopefully you can learn from my mistakes and not make them.

Check out the article and steer clear of these mistakes! 7 Business Mistakes That Nearly Broke Me… Literally

Guy Kawasaki

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More uncommon common sense from the bestselling author of The Art of the Start.

In Silicon Valley slang, a “bozo explosion” is what causes a lean, mean, fighting machine of a company to slide into mediocrity. As Guy Kawasaki puts it, “If the two most popular words in your company are partner and strategic, and partner has become a verb, and strategic is used to describe decisions and activities that don’t make sense” . . . it’s time for a reality check.

For nearly three decades, Kawasaki has earned a stellar reputation as an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and irreverent pundit. His 2004 bestseller, The Art of the Start, has become the most acclaimed bible for small business. And his blog is consistently one of the fifty most popular in the world.

Now, Kawasaki has compiled his best wit, wisdom, and contrarian opinions in handy book form. From competition to customer service, innovation to marketing, he shows readers how to ignore fads and foolishness while sticking to commonsense practices. He explains, for instance:

• How to get a standing ovation
• The art of schmoozing
• How to create a community
• The top ten lies of entrepreneurs
• Everything you wanted to know about getting a job in Silicon Valley but didn’t know who to ask

Provocative, useful, and very funny, this “no bull shiitake” book will show you why readers around the world love Guy Kawasaki.

View More about Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition (Portfolio)

Are you a programmer with lots of creative entrepreneurial ideas but scared to leave the man? Well, check out Dan Grigsby’s talk from RubyFringe at InfoQ: Dan Grigsby on Programmer/Entrepreneurs and Creative Hacking and Marketing.

He talks about how tools today let you do more software development faster. He talks about how this enables trying out tons of things for free and seeing what sticks. He talks about marketing Tai Chi, breaking into the “walled garden” and other creative marketing hacks. Go check it out and get your ventures rolling!

[SHAMELESS AFFILIATE LINKS]

Be sure to check this awesome book he mentioned in the talk!

Eric Schlosser

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America’s black market is much larger than we realize, and it affects us all deeply, whether or not we smoke pot, rent a risque video, or pay our kids’ nannies in cash. In Reefer Madness the best-selling author of Fast Food Nation turns his exacting eye on the underbelly of the American marketplace and its far-reaching influence on our society. Exposing three American mainstays - pot, porn, and illegal immigrants - Eric Schlosser shows how the black market has burgeoned over the past several decades. He also draws compelling parallels between underground and overground: how tycoons and gangsters rise and fall, how new techonology shapes a market, how government intervention can reinvigorate black markets as well as mainstream ones, and how big business learns - and profits - from the underground. Reefer Madness is a powerful investigation that illuminates the shadow economy and the culture that casts that shadow.

View More about Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market

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I was working with some folks and someone reminded us of Beeker on the Muppets and we decided to check YouTube for some Beeker videos. I love this one where they’re trying to solve a business problem that doesn’t exist.

Good stuff. I then recalled Ali G’s “Ice Cream Glove”. I love his market research and his “Zen” diagram.

Just remember that he put a “C” on all his stuff so you can’t nick it.

May all of your business ideas prove to be useful and ultimately profitable!

At lunch the other day I mentioned mentioned the following books …

Michael E. Gerber

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“A business without a dream is like a life without a purpose.”
—Michael Gerber

Dream • Vision • Purpose • Mission

These words have been defining the life of Michael Gerber, bestselling author and international small business guru. He created E-Myth Worldwide in 1977 to transform the way that small business owners grow their companies. Now he’s created In The Dreaming Room as a place where entrepreneurs and future entrepreneurs come to discover how to make their dreams a reality.

Michael’s Dream: to inspire people to dream by awakening the entrepreneur within them.

Michael’s Vision: to be the authority for helping dreamers everywhere create the small businesses they once could only imagine.

Michael’s Purpose: to transform the lives of ordinary people by providing them with the thrill of creation while creating the means to generate their own and others’ economic freedom.

Michael’s Mission: to create a turnkey system for awakening the entrepreneur within every person who wishes to go into business for themselves, while providing them with the support for doing it.

And he has done it. In Awakening the Entrepreneur Within you are invited into the Dreaming Room, where your own entrepreneurial dreams will come alive and become reality. Michael will help you shape your dream into a viable, economically successful company! As he writes: “It is time to dream. It is time to care about something bigger than you. It is time to imagine something sorely needed in the world—the world you live in—that somebody would pay to have. It is time to look around you and ask yourself, ‘What’s missing in this picture?’”

If you see something missing in your world, it’s time to start dreaming. Let Michael Gerber welcome you to the Dreaming Room.

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Michael E. Gerber

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In this first new and totally revised edition of the 150,000-copy underground bestseller, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business. He walks you through the steps in the life of a business from entrepreneurial infancy, through adolescent growing pains, to the mature entrepreneurial perspective, the guiding light of all businesses that succeed.

View More about The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It

Tim Sanders

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Are you wondering what the next killer app will be? Do you want to know how you can maintain and add to your value during these rapidly changing times? Are you wondering how the word love can even be used in the context of business?

Instead of wondering, read this book and find out how to become a lovecat—a nice, smart person who succeeds in business and in life.

How do you become a lovecat? By sharing your intangibles. By that I mean:
Your knowledge: everything that comes from all the books that I’ll encourage you to devour.
Your network: the collection of friends and contacts you now have, which I’ll teach you how to grow and nurture.
Your compassion: that human warmth you already possess—in these pages I’ll convince you that you can show it freely at the office.

What happens when you do all this?
* You become a rich source of information to all around you.
* You are seen as a person with valuable insight.
* You are perceived as generous to a fault, producing surprise and delight.
* You double your business intelligence in one year.
* You triple your network of personal relationships in two years.
* You quadruple the number of colleagues in your life who love you like family.

In short, you become one of those amazing, outstanding people to whom everyone turns, who leads rather than follows, who never runs out of ideas, contacts, or friendship.

Here’s the real scoop: Nice guys don’t finish last. They rule!

From the Hardcover edition.

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Timothy Ferriss

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What do you do? Tim Ferriss has trouble answering the question. Depending on when you ask this
controversial Princeton University guest lecturer, he might answer:

“I race motorcycles in Europe.”
“I ski in the Andes.”
“I scuba dive in Panama.”
“I dance tango in Buenos Aires.”

He has spent more than five years learning the secrets of the New Rich, a fast-growing subculture who has abandoned the “deferred-life plan” and instead mastered the new currencies—time and mobility—to create luxury lifestyles in the here and now.

Whether you are an overworked employee or an entrepreneur trapped in your own business, this book is the compass for a new and revolutionary world. Join Tim Ferriss as he teaches you:

• How to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want
• How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs
• How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of a forgotten Italian economist
• How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and freuent “mini-retirements”
• What the crucial difference is between absolute and relative income
• How to train your boss to value performance over presence, or kill your job (or company) if it’s beyond repair
• What automated cash-flow “muses” are and how to create one in 2 to 4 weeks
• How to cultivate selective ignorance—and create time—with a low-information diet
• What the management secrets of Remote Control CEOs are
• How to get free housing worldwide and airfare at 50–80% off
• How to fill the void and create a meaningful life after removing work and the office

You can have it all—really.

View More about The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

Paulo Coelho

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SpringQ.com says: The Alchemist is about having the courage to first open yourself up to listen for your true calling and then having the courage to follow your “Personal Legend”. While The Alchemist is not categorized under entrepreneurship, there are many life and business lessons to be learned from reading this book.

Treat yourself to an uninterrupted full morning or afternoon to read The Alchemist and then put it’s lessons into action!

From Amazon.com:

My Heart Is Afraid that it will have to suffer,” the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky.”Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams.”

Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever. The Alchemist is such a book. With over a million and a half copies sold around the world, The Alchemist has already established itself as a modern classic, universally admired. Paulo Coelho’s charming fable, now available in English for the first time, will enchant and inspire an even wider audience of readers for generations to come.

The Alchemist is the magical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure as extravagant as any ever found. From his home in Spain he journeys to the markets of Tangiers and across the Egyptian desert to a fateful encounter with the alchemist.

The story of the treasures Santiago finds along the way teaches us, as only a few stories have done, about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, learning to read the omens strewn along life’s path, and, above all, following our dreams.

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Pete Blackshaw

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springq.com says: Credibility is the lifeblood of all great organizations! Read all about Pete Blackshaw’s six critical credibility drivers:

1. Trust
2. Authenticity
3. Transparency
4. Listening
5. Responsiveness
6. Affirmation

In today’s Internet-driven world, customers have more power than ever. Through what interactive marketing expert Pete Blackshaw calls “consumer-generated media”—blogs, social networking pages, message boards, product review sites—even a single disgruntled customer can broadcast his complaints to an audience of millions. Blackshaw shows managers, marketers, and business leaders how to establish and maintain credibility for their brand by being authentic, listening and responding to customers, and forming relationships built on openness, transparency, and trust.Filled with stories based on his experience working with Fortune 500 brands such as Toyota, Dell, Nike, Sony, General Motors, Hershey, Unilever, Nestlé, Lexus, and Bank of America, Blackshaw offers a clear strategy to sustain a competitive advantage by creating enduring, loyal relationships with today’s consumer.

View More about Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000: Running a Business in Today’s Consumer-Driven World

Craig Stull

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Tuned In argues that the key to business success lies in understanding and connecting with what consumers and markets want most. Being tuned in to the needs of buyers, whether those needs are expressed outwardly or not, is the ultimate secret to creating and marketing products and services that people want to buy. For anyone who markets a product, service, or ideas in any business, industry, or organization, Tuned In delivers a simple six-step process for discovering real and deep insights into any market: finding unsolved problems, understanding buyer personas, quantifying impact, creating breakthrough experiences, articulating powerful ideas, and establishing sustainable connections. Tuned In shows readers how to stop guessing what consumers need and stop wasting time and money building, marketing, and selling solutions that the market doesn’t value. This insightful book shows readers how to connect with their market in order to create products and services that truly resonate with people.

View More about Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs