With the holiday season upon us, there is no better time to relax, unwind and pick up a good book. If you are looking for some book suggestions that aren’t just entertaining, but that can actually teach you a thing or two, here are some of the best business books to consider reading over the holidays. These books can give you some valuable lessons that you can utilize as you start 2017 off on the right foot.
1. Tools of Titans
This book by Tim Ferris a great read if you are looking for a book with straightforward tips that you can start utilizing. This book is also filled with different insights on habit forming and what habits today’s most successful titans have. This book is a great read and extraordinarily comprehensive.
This book takes a detailed look at different businesses that both succeeded and failed and why they succeeded and failed. This is an easy and entertaining read that looks at the importance of capitalizing on changing trends in order to stay relevant in the market.
This book by Randal Jones, the founder of Worth magazine, details his “twelve commandments of wealth.” It is super straightforward and talks about the different habits he has and how they have helped him create a great deal of success. If you want to hear first hand from a very wealthy individual what it takes in order to build that wealth, this the book for you.
Read the rest of the story HERE.
Entrepreneur -- You don’t become an entrepreneur because it’s easy or convenient. You decide to start your own business because you want your life to be meaningful, because you want to feel like your life has a purpose, because you are trying to build something bigger than yourself.
What does that feel like? How does it feel to chase -- and achieve -- your dream? How do you know that you are heading in the right direction?
Finding your purpose doesn’t always come with a parade and a champagne celebration. Sometimes it appears as a quiet, simple moment. That’s how it was for Adrian Gradinaru, co-founder of New York City-based boat rental marketplace Sailo. The website allows people to search, compare and book boats online.
Earlier this summer, Gradinaru was heading home one night this summer, walking through New York City after a long day at work, when he realized he truly was doing work that provided him a sense of purpose. “I felt this interior calm that was sort of amazing,” says Gradinaru. “It’s not about money, it’s not about profit, I feel like we are providing a service that people are actually using and they are enjoying it.”
Read the rest of the story here: http://www.entrepreneur.com/video/249691
Entrepreneur -- You don’t become an entrepreneur because it’s easy or convenient. You decide to start your own business because you want your life to be meaningful, because you want to feel like your life has a purpose, because you are trying to build something bigger than yourself.
What does that feel like? How does it feel to chase -- and achieve -- your dream? How do you know that you are heading in the right direction?
Finding your purpose doesn’t always come with a parade and a champagne celebration. Sometimes it appears as a quiet, simple moment. That’s how it was for Adrian Gradinaru, co-founder of New York City-based boat rental marketplace Sailo. The website allows people to search, compare and book boats online.
Earlier this summer, Gradinaru was heading home one night this summer, walking through New York City after a long day at work, when he realized he truly was doing work that provided him a sense of purpose. “I felt this interior calm that was sort of amazing,” says Gradinaru. “It’s not about money, it’s not about profit, I feel like we are providing a service that people are actually using and they are enjoying it.”
For one of the other co-founders, that moment of clarity came in the form of a phone call.
“One of our customers called us, this was somebody we didn’t know, and they just told us that they had had the best day [of] their life. And we had created a company that provided the best day of people’s lives and that’s ultimately why we started it,” says Delphine Braas, another co-founder of Sailo.
Cofounder of Launch Academy. Dan has been building web apps & tech teams since 2004 and has a passion for mentoring aspiring developers.
May 23, 2016, Forbes -- As an entrepreneur with a growing business, you’re probably clamoring to maintain control as things change — I know I was with my own young company. Unfortunately, in my quest for control, I was actually doing my business and team a disservice. One of our core values at my company Launch Academy is to elevate everyone around you. Yet even as a co-founder I was stuck in the weeds and getting in the way of the talented people we hired to get the job done.
As I struggled with this problem, I was given a few pointers from a golf coach on my backswing (I used to tense up, grip the club too tightly, and slice the ball off course). He instructed me to loosen my grip and not tense up in that critical moment — leading to a better and more consistent shot. It’s counterintuitive, but this advice has given me both a better golf swing and a more effective way of working with my team.
So here are the five rules I’ve set for myself as I set out to really put this into practice in my business.
Don’t Try To Fix Everything At Once
As a founder or executive of a growing company, you’re likely overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of problems you see — I certainly was. Personally, I pointed out problems left and right, distracting my team from focusing on what really mattered. I was trying to fix everything at once, instead of fixing one issue at a time.
Focus On The Urgent And Important
When I get overwhelmed, I use the Eisenhower Box to ask myself: What is both urgent and important? I focus on that one thing and rally the team around it. This provides clarity and eliminates the cost of confusing priorities and context switching.
Read the rest of the story HERE.
Entrepreneur -- You can tell a soon-to-fail entrepreneur by the tired, haggard look in his eyes. Like extras from "The Walking Dead," they stumble around looking not entirely alive.
Because they aren’t.
Despite covariance in the rate of startup failures with overworked CEOs, the problem persists. Some founders are fanatical when bragging that they work 60 to 80 hour weeks. Their sense of building “sweat equity” blinds them to the sacrifices they make -- to their health, to their marriages, to their families and communities. What they mistake as a successful lifestyle is actually a massive failure.
Related: Here's Why the 8-Hour Workday Doesn't Work
Personal fatigue.
People are not designed for 80-hour work weeks, at least not over the long term.
Various studies show that we humans operate efficiently for maybe 10 hours a day, and that is if you sleep well, eat right and exercise regularly. As you will quickly see, attempting to work more than 10 hours is an exercise in diminishing returns, as it keeps you from being at your peak performance for those 10 top hours.
Most people need a solid eight hours of sleep to rejuvenate. This leaves 16 waking hours in a day. A fair amount of that time is spent in maintenance: eating, bathing, brushing teeth, walking dogs and other mundanities. Subtract also from these 16 available hours the minimal family interaction and duty time (driving kids to school), special events (seeing your doctor for that chest pain that has been nagging you), your commute time (which for most people is non-productive). Pretty soon, you may only have 10 hours in a day to do real work.
The only ways you can do more is to either work seven days a week (and that only buys you a maximum of 20 extra hours of productivity) or you skip doing those things called life. You ignore your spouse, miss your kid’s soccer game, renege on volunteer work, avoid the gym and live on fast food since you don’t have time for real food. With this lifestyle you soon won’t have a spouse, won’t see your kids because they live with your ex, are mutually ignored by people in your community -- and you will be found dead of a heart attack with a McDonald’s sack clenched in your fist.
Related: Working Long Hours Could Kill You
Why entrepreneurs work too hard.
Impatience is a universal trait with entrepreneurs. They have a vision and want to achieve it before the weekend. They also lean toward perfectionism, and pay close attention to the myriad of details in their business. Between wanting it done now and wanting it done right, they often choose to do it themselves. All of it.
But life doesn’t work that way. You don’t scale that far. Yet you start down the road of overworking yourself because you make many of the common entrepreneur mistakes:
- You don’t prioritize: Not everything is equally important, and you let B’s get in front of A’s.
- You don’t tackle "Tough Things First": Dread of big problems and distasteful tasks keep you from launching important initiatives.
- You don’t delegate: Fear of other people not performing tasks the way you think they should be done causes you to micromanage or otherwise add to your workload.
- You obsess over unimportant details: You cannot get your head out of the weeds long enough to see that the grass needs mowing.
- Read the rest of the story HERE.
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