One of my pandemic silver linings has been re-establishing a regular reading habit. I plan on recapping my reading in these short overviews, with quick summary information and quotes for anyone looking for their next book.

Published: 2010

Read: March 2021

Publisher Summary: Most business books give you the same old advice: Write a business plan, study the competition, seek investors, yadda yadda. If you’re looking for a book like that, put this one back on the shelf. Read it and you’ll know why plans are actually harmful, why you don’t need outside investors, and why you’re better off ignoring the competition. The truth is, you need less than you think. You don’t need to be a workaholic. You don’t need to staff up. You don’t need to waste time on paperwork or meetings. You don’t even need an office. Those are all just excuses.

Genre: Business

Rating: 8/10

Eric’s Two Cents: It feels weird to categorize this book as a “business” book. I mean, it is, and yet it’s more than that. It’s really a book about re-visualizing the perceived threats and restrictions of life as potential opportunities to be exploited; about defaulting to action and taking command of your own process and outcomes; about how business (and life), when you get right down to it, it actually pretty simple and we’re often deluding ourselves when we think otherwise. This book was published in 2010 and it’s amazing to see how right Fried & DHH were, how so much of their ‘unconventional’ advice is now standard operating procedure more than a decade later.

Who Should Read This?

• Business owners and leaders
• Aspiring entrepreneurs
• Underemployed dreamers

Skimmable? You don’t even need to, you’ll fly through. And it has illustrations!

Notable Quotables:

• The timing of long-range plans is screwed up too. You have the most information when you’re doing something, not before you’ve done it. Yet when do you write a plan? Usually it’s before you’ve even begun. That’s the worst time to make a big decision.
• Think your idea is valuable? Then go try to sell it and see what you get for it. Not much is probably the answer. Until you actually start making something, your brilliant idea is just that, an idea. And everyone’s got one of those…Ideas are cheap and plentiful. The original pitch idea is such a small part of a business that it’s almost negligible. The real question is how you execute.
• When you don’t know what you believe, everything becomes an argument. Everything is debatable. But when you stand for something, decisions are obvious.
• Embrace the idea of having less mass. Right now, you’re the smallest, the leanest, and the fastest you’ll ever be. From here on out, you’ll start accumulating mass. And the more massive an object, the more energy required to change its direction. It’s as true in the business world as it is in the physical world.
• The Price is Right, the longest running game show in history, is also a great example of creativity born from embracing constraints. The show has more than a hundred games, and each one is based in the question “How much does this item cost?” That simple formula has attracted fans for more than thirty years.
• Whenever you can, swap “Let’s think about it” for “Let’s decide on it.” Commit to making decisions. Don’t wait for the perfect solution. Decide and move forward. You want to get into the rhythm of making choices. When you get in that flow of making decision after decision, you build momentum and boost morale. Decisions are progress. Each one you make is a brick in your foundation. You can’t build on top of “We’ll decide later,” but you can build on top of “Done.”
• If you need to explain something, try getting real with it. Instead of describing what something looks like, draw it. Instead of explaining what something sounds like, hum it. Do everything you can to remove layers of abstraction. The problem with abstractions (like reports and documents) is that they create illusions of agreement. A hundred people can read the same words, but in their heads, they’re imaging a hundred different things.
• No one knows who you are right now. And that’s just fine. Being obscure is a great position to be in. Be happy you’re in the shadows. Use this time to make mistakes without the whole world hearing about them. Keep tweaking. Work out the kinks. Test random ideas. Try new things. No one knows you, so it’s no big deal if you mess up. Obscurity helps protect your ego and preserve your confidence…Would you want the whole world to watch you the first time you do anything? If you’ve never given a speech before, do you want your first speech to be in front of ten thousand people or ten people? You don’t want everyone to watch you starting your business. It makes no sense to tell everyone to look at you if you’re not ready to be looked at yet. And keep in mind that once you do get bigger and more popular, you’re inevitably going to take fewer risks. When you’re a success, the pressure to maintain predictability and consistency builds. You get more conservative. It’s harder to take risks. That’s when things start to fossilize and change becomes difficult.
• Inspiration is a magical thing, a productivity multiplier, a motivator. But it won’t wait for you. Inspiration is a now thing If it grabs you, grab it right back and put it to work.