Category — Creativity

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

Our Rating:

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
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

[/SHAMELESS AFFILIATE LINKS]

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!

Paulo Coelho

Our Rating:

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
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.

View More about The Alchemist

David Heinemier Hannson of 37Signals and creator of the web framework Ruby on Rails, gave a great talk at Paul Graham’s Startup School this weekend. In the same way that he and his 37Signals comrades defy conventional wisdom on developing technology, he presents his unconventional ideas on business (at least unconventional compared to the VC-ish and We-Want-To-Get-Bought-Out-By-Google crowd that probably attended Startup School).

Some highlights:

• Comparing over-fearing terrorism to over-hoping to be the next billion+ dollar Facebook or MySpace
• Targeting the “Fortune 5,000,000″
• Charge REAL MONEY for your product/service! *GASP*
• You don’t have to be the best Italian restaurant, there’s room for LOTS of excellent ones in the world
• You don’t always have to have a super original or creative idea … Zappos.com created a great business selling shoes online for godsakes! They just do it great with extraordinary customer service.

Anyway, watch the video, it’s well worth your time (and check out the always interesting comments on this over at the Signal vs. Noise blog when you’re done):

Tim Ferris’s Four Hour Work Week is an unconventional and inspirational book … a must read, even if you don’t desire constant adventuring nor VERY minimal working hours.

Tim presents the following “Core Four” books as MUST READS:

David Schwartz

Our Rating:

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:

Millions of people throughout the world have improved their lives using The Magic of Thinking Big. Dr. David J. Schwartz, long regarded as one of the foremost experts on motivation, will help you sell better, manage better, earn more money, and — most important of all — find greater happiness and peace of mind.

View More about The Magic of Thinking Big

Dan S. Kennedy

Our Rating:

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
In this book, Dan Kennedy provides many examples on how to turn an idea into cash. The examples are from the real world and are drawn directly from his experience as a highly paid consultant. An easy read and well worth the investment.

View More about How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur’s Guide

Michael E. Gerber

Our Rating:

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:

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

Rolf Potts

Our Rating:

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:

Vagabonding is about taking time off from your normal life — from six weeks to four months to two years — to discover and experience the world on your own terms. Veteran shoestring traveler Rolf Potts shows how anyone armed with an independent spirit can achieve the dream of extended overseas travel.

View More about Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

Steven Pressfield

Our Rating:

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
DO YOU:-+dream about writing the Great American Novel?-+regret not finishing your paintings, poems, or screenplays?-+want to start a business or charity?-+wish you could start dieting or exercising today?-+hope to run a marathon someday?If “yes,” then you need#133;THE WAR OF ARTNow, in this powerful, straight-from-the-hip examination of the internal obstacles to success, bestselling author Steven Pressfield shows readers how to identify, defeat, and unlock the inner barriers to creativity. THE WAR OF ART is an inspirational, funny, well-aimed kick in the pants guaranteed to galvanize every would-be artist, visionary, or entrepreneur.Steven Pressfield enjoys great international success as a bestselling novelist.But in order to reach the top he had to do a lot of work to fight the inner demons that told him he couldn’t make it.THE WAR OF ART is his challenge to creative block, and his succinct, straight-from-the-hip style will help every reader unleash their personal ambitions, be they literary, artistic, or business-minded.According to Pressfield, the internal obstacle to success is Resistance.Resistance is the difference between the life you lead and the life you want to lead, and can take many forms.Pressfield shows readers how to identify and defeat Resistance at every turn and challenges them to change their amateurish, unsuccessful habits into a professional attitude that can get the job done. Finally, Sun Tzu for the soul!Inspirational, funny, and a great kick in the pants, THE WAR OF ART is the perfect book for anybody who had a goal circumvented by life and circumstance:which is to say, you and everybody you’ve ever met.

View More about The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles

Bruce Judson

Our Rating:

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
springq.com says: I read this book right when it came out and it was great; I think that I am going to re-read it now as I am going to start a new venture. For some reason, I’ve never heard much buzz about this book, but I think that it deserves to be grouped with some more popular entrepreneurship books.

“There is an epidemic of unhappiness in the American workplace. A full 70 percent of workers in the United States report that they are disengaged from their jobs. When asked, “”Do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?”" only 20 percent of nearly 2 million employees said yes. It is no wonder that 56 percent of all Americans dream of starting their own business. So why don’t they do so? Because starting one’s own business is seen as difficult, expensive, and risky.

In this extraordinary book, successful Go It Alone! entrepreneur Bruce Judson explains that the conventional wisdom about starting your own business is stunningly wrong. Using the leverage of technology — e-mail, the World Wide Web, and the remarkable array of off-the-shelf business services now available — it is dramatically easier to start your own business. Magnified by these new services, it is also possible to create, for the first time, a highly focused business.

Bruce Judson shows you the practical steps that will allow nearly any individual to create a business, often using job skills that seem to require an entire corporation for support. It is no longer necessary to spend time on the tasks that don’t add value. It is now possible to stay small but reap big profits. Go-it-alone businesses allow the individual the freedom to concentrate on their greatest skills. After reading this book, your motto will be “Do What You Do Best, Let Others Do the Rest.”

View More about Go It Alone!: The Secret to Building a Successful Business on Your Own

Gina Smith

Our Rating:

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
springq.com says: iWoz doesn’t have a ton of great business advice, but it is a great read and shows that you can be very successful on your own terms and have lots of fun doing it.

The mastermind behind Apple sheds his low profile and steps forward to tell his story for the first time.

Before cell phones that fit in the palm of your hand and slim laptops that fit snugly into briefcases, computers were like strange, alien vending machines. They had cryptic switches, punch cards and pages of encoded output. But in 1975, a young engineering wizard named Steve Wozniak had an idea: What if you combined computer circuitry with a regular typewriter keyboard and a video screen? The result was the first true personal computer, the Apple I, a widely affordable machine that anyone could understand and figure out how to use.

Wozniak’s life—before and after Apple—is a “home-brew” mix of brilliant discovery and adventure, as an engineer, a concert promoter, a fifth-grade teacher, a philanthropist, and an irrepressible prankster. From the invention of the first personal computer to the rise of Apple as an industry giant, iWoz presents a no-holds-barred, rollicking, firsthand account of the humanist inventor who ignited the computer revolution. 16 pages of illustrations.

View More about iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It

Renée Mauborgne

Our Rating:

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
Winning by not competing: a fresh approach to strategy Since the dawn of the industrial age, companies have engaged in head-to-head competition in search of sustained, profitable growth. They have fought for competitive advantage, battled over market share, and struggled for differentiation. Yet these hallmarks of competitive strategy are not the way to create profitable growth in the future. In a book that challenges everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne argue that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves spanning more than a hundred years and thirty industries, the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors, but from creating “blue oceans”: untapped new market spaces ripe for growth. Such strategic moves—which the authors call “value innovation”—create powerful leaps in value that often render rivals obsolete for more than a decade. Blue Ocean Strategy presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any company can use to create and capture blue oceans. A landmark work that upends traditional thinking about strategy, this book charts a bold new path to winning the future.

View More about Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant

Duane Packer

Our Rating:

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
SpringQ.com says: This book, while at times is a little too new-agey for our tastes, it’s still a great inspiring work on doing what you want and creating abundance.

Amazon.com Editorial Comments:
This book is a course in manifesting and creating abundance in your life, Section I, Creating Money, is a step-by-step guide to the art of manifesting. You will learn how to discover what you want, drawing things to you that will fulfill and satisfy you, that are even better than what you ask for. You will learn advanced techniques of manifesting and how to work with your own energy and the power of magnetism to draw things into your life in the fastest, easiest way possible.

The second section of this book, Developing Mastery, will help you learn to work with and move through any blocks you may have about allowing abundance into your life. The third section, Creating Your Lifes Work, will help you learn to make money and create abundance through doing the things you love. You will learn many simple energy techniques to draw your ideal job to you, discover your life’s work, and do what you love for a living. The fourth section, Having Money, is about having and increasing money and abundance in your life. You will learn how to create joy, peace, harmony, clarity, and self-love with your money, letting it flow and increase.

View More about Creating Money: Keys to Abundance (Roman, Sanaya)