Category — Inspiration

Steven Pressfield

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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.

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John Battelle

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springq.com says: When Google launched at the very end of the 90’s, people thought they were crazy because the search problem was “already done”. Well we know how the story ended; this is a great account of how it happened.

How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek Bestseller
Finalist for the Goldman Sachs/FT Business Book of the Year Award

What does the world want? According to John Battelle, a company that answers that question in all its shades of meaning can unlock the most intractable riddles of business and arguably of human culture itself. And for the past few years, that’s exactly what Google has been doing.

But The Search offers much more than the inside story of Google’s triumph. It’s a big- picture book about the past, present, and future of search technology and the enormous impact it’s starting to have on marketing, media, pop culture, dating, job hunting, international law, civil liberties, and just about every other sphere of human interest.

BACKCOVER: The Search is a superb story, well written and feverishly researched. Whether you are a student, techie, business executive, budding visionary or just enjoy pop culture, this is a book not to be missed.
USA Today

John Battelle is Silicon Valley’s Bob Woodward. One of the founders of Wired magazine, he has hung around Google for so long that he has come to be as close as any outsider can to actually being an insider.The result is a highly readable account of Google’s astonishing rise.
The Economist

It’s a fascinating story, and Mr. Battelle tells it well.
The Wall Street Journal

A surprisingly gripping storyThe Search yields impressive results, pairing a reportorial eye for detail with an evangelical zeal to help readers understand the import of the search revolution.
Wired News

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Michele Moreno

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Guy Kawasaki, CEO of garage.com and former chief evangelist of Apple Computer, Inc., presents his manifesto for world-changing innovation, using his battle-tested lessons to help revolutionaries become visionaries.

* Create Like a God *

Turn conventional wisdom on its head-create revolutionary products and services by analyzing how to approach the problems at hand.

* Command Like a King *

Take charge and make tough, insightful, and strategic decisions-break down the barriers that prevent product adoption and avoid “death magnets” (the stupid mistakes just about everyone makes).

* Work Like a Slave *

Get ready for hard work, and lots of it. To go from revolutionary to visionary, you’ll need to eat like a bird-relentlessly absorbing knowledge about your industry, customers, and competition–and poop like an elephant–spreading the large amount of information and knowledge that you’ve gained.

Filled with insights from top innovators such as Amazon.com, Dell, Hallmark, and Gillette and rich with hands-on experience from the front lines of business, Rules for Revolutionaries will empower you–whether you’re an entrepreneur, engineer, inventor, manager, or small business owner–to turn your dreams into reality, your reality into products, and your products into customer magnets.

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Jessica Livingston

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“All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever.” —Steve Wozniak, Apple

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.

Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover?

Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful startup, to learn how it’s done.

But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businessesdo—create value—more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.

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Dan S. Kennedy

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an amazon reviewer says:

Do you want to be successful? Read this book.

I recommend this book to business owners that don’t want to learn from the School of Hard Knocks, (which may be too late) but want to stimulate their minds and actually figure out what opportunities would sell their products.

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Gina Smith

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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.

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Guy Kawasaki

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SpringQ.com Says: Guy Kawasaki’s great book on starting anything … but particularly a business. This book is worth the money for Chapter 11 alone: “The Art of Being a Mensch”

Amazon.com Editorial Comments:
What does it take to turn ideas into action? What are the elements of a perfect pitch? How do you win the war for talent? How do you establish a brand without bucks? These are some of the issues everyone faces when starting or revitalizing any undertaking, and Guy Kawasaki, former marketing maven of Apple Computer, provides the answers.

The Art of the Start will give you the essential steps to launch great products, services, and companies?whether you are dreaming of starting the next Microsoft or a not-for-profit that?s going to change the world. It also shows managers how to unleash entrepreneurial thinking at established companies, helping them foster the pluck and creativity that their businesses need to stay ahead of the pack. Kawasaki provides readers with GIST?Great Ideas for Starting Things?including his field-tested insider?s techniques for bootstrapping, branding, networking, recruiting, pitching, rainmaking, and, most important in this fickle consumer climate, building buzz.

At Apple, Kawasaki helped turn ordinary customers into fanatics. As founder and CEO of Garage Technology Ventures, he has tested his iconoclastic ideas on real- world start- ups. And as an irrepressible columnist for Forbes, he has honed his best thinking about The Art of the Start.

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Duane Packer

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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.

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