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Our CEO has chosen to take the 52 week book reading challenge.
Every Saturday for all of 2017 we will be posting his notes from the books he reads on the site and also in the "Library" section of the website.
So please feel free to follow along through out the year and if you've read any of the book please feel free to leave your thoughts and comments below his notes.
Notes:
Ten
years of experience in one hour.
(I’m
a student, not a guru.)
What’s
your compass?
You
need to know your personal philosophy of what
makes you happy and
what’s worth doing.
Business
is not about money. It’s about making
dreams come true for others
and for yourself.
Making
a company is a great way to improve the
world while improving
yourself.
Never
do anything just for the money.
Don’t
pursue business just for your own gain. Only
answer the calls for
help.
Success
comes from persistently improving
and inventing, not from
persistently promoting
what’s not working.
Your
business plan is moot. You don’t know what
people really want until
you start doing it.
Starting
with no money is an advantage. You don’t
need money to start
helping people.
You
can’t please everyone, so proudly exclude people.
Make
yourself unnecessary to the running of your
business.
The
real point of doing anything is to be happy, so do only what makes
you happy. Make
a dream come true.
The
key point is that I wasn’t trying to make a big
business. I was
just daydreaming about how one
little thing would look in a perfect
world.
When
you make it a dream come true for yourself,
it’ll be a dream come
true for someone else, too.
A
business plan should never take more than a few
hours of
work—hopefully no more than a few
minutes. The best plans start
simple. This ain’t no
revolution.
Revolution
is a term that people use only when
you’re successful. Before that,
you’re just a quirky
person who does things differently.
If
you think your life’s purpose needs to hit you like
a lightning
bolt, you’ll overlook the little day-to-day
things that fascinate
you. If you think revolution
needs to feel lke war, you’ll
overlook the importance
of simply serving people better.
If
it’s not a hit, switch.
Instead
of trying to create demand, you’re managing the huge demand.
We’ve
all heard about the importance of persistence.
But I had
misunderstood. Success comes from
persistently improving and
inventing, not from
persistently doing what’s not working.
Present
each new idea or improvement to the world.
If
multiple people are saying, “Wow! Yes! I need this! I’d be happy
to pay you to do this!” then you should probably do it. But if the
response is anything less, don’t pursue it.
Improve
or invent until you get that huge response.
No
“yes.” Either “Hell yeah!” or “no.”
If
you’re not saying, “Hell yeah!” about something, say no.
When
deciding whether to do something, if you feel
anything less than
“Wow! That would be amazing!
Absolutely! Hell yeah!” then say no.
We’re
all busy. We’ve all taken on too much. Saying
yes to less is the
way out.
Just
like that, my plan completely changed.
“No
business plan survives first contact with
customers.”
The
advantage of no funding I’m
so glad I didn’t have investors. I didn’t have to please anybody
but my customers and myself. No effort was spent on anything but my
customers.
Necessity
is a great teacher.
Never
forget that absolutely everything you do is for
your customers.
Make
every decision—even decisions about whether
to expand the business,
raise money, or promote
someone—according to what’s best for your
customers.
If
you’re ever unsure what to prioritize, just ask your
customers the
open-ended question, “How can I best
help you now?” Then focus on
satisfying those
requests.
It’s
counterintuitive, but the way to grow your
business is to focus
entirely on your existing
customers. Just thrill them, and they’ll
tell everyone.
Start
now. No funding needed.
For
an idea to get big-big-big, it has to be useful.
And being useful
doesn’t need funding.
Starting
small puts 100 percent of your energy into
actually solving real
problems for real people.
Ideas
are just a multiplier of execution.
To
me, ideas are worth nothing unless they are
executed. They are just a
multiplier. Execution is
worth millions.
That’s
why I don’t want to hear people’s ideas. I’m
not interested
until I see their execution.
Formalities
play on fear. Bravely refuse.
Do
you passionately love the “Terms & Conditions”
and “Privacy
Policy” pages on other websites? Have
you even read them? If not,
then why would you go
putting that garbage on your website?
Never
forget that there are thousands of businesses,
like Jim’s Fish Bait
Shop in a shack on a beach
somewhere, that are doing just fine
without
corporate formalities.
As
your business grows, don’t let the leeches sucker
you into all that
stuff they pretend you need. They’ll
play on your fears, saying
that you need this stuff to
protect yourself against lawsuits.
They’ll scare you
with horrible worst-case scenarios. But those are
just sales tactics. You don’t need any of it. The
strength of many little customers.
When
you build your business on serving thousands
of customers, not
dozens, you don’t have to worry
about any one customer leaving or
making special
demands. If most of your customers love what you
do,
but one doesn’t, you can just say good-bye and
wish him the best,
with no hard feelings.
Proudly
exclude people.
You
need to confidently exclude people, and proudly
say what you’re
not. By doing so, you will win the
hearts of the people you want.
When
CD Baby got popular, I’d get calls from record
labels wanting to
feature their newest, hottest acts
on our site. I’d say, “Nope.
They’re not allowed here.” The record label guys would say, “Huh?
What do you mean not allowed? You’re a record store! We’re a record label.” I’d say, “You can sell anywhere else.
This is a
place for independents only:
It’s
a big world. You can loudly leave out 99 percent
of it.
Have
the confidence to know that when your target
1 percent hears you
excluding the other 99 percent,
the people in that 1 percent will
come to you
because you’ve shown how much you value them.
This
is just one of many options
You
can’t pretend there’s only one way to do it. Your
first idea is
just one of many options. No business
goes as planned, so make ten
radically different
plans.
You
don’t need a plan or a vision don’t
think you need a huge vision. Just stay focused on helping people
today.
“I
miss the mob.” “When
the mafia ran this town, it was fun. There were only two numbers that
mattered: how much was coming in, and how much was going out. As long as there was more in than out, everyone was happy. But then the whole
town was bought up by these damn corporations full of MBA weasels micromanaging, trying to maximize the profit from every square foot
of floor space. Now the place that used to put ketchup on my hot dog
tells me it’ll be an extra twenty-five cents for ketchup!
Never
forget why you’re really doing what you’re
doing. Are you helping
people? Are they happy? Are
you happy? Are you profitable? Isn’t
that enough?
How
do you grade yourself?
How
do you grade yourself? It’s important to know
in advance, to make
sure you’re staying focused on
what’s honestly important to you,
instead of doing
what others think you should.
Care
about your customers more than about yourself.
You
should care about your customers more than
you care about yourself!
Isn’t that Rule No. 1 of providing a good service? It’s all about
them, not about you.
Any business that’s in business to sell you a cure is
motivated not to
focus on prevention.
Tao
of business: Care about your customers more
than about yourself, and
you’ll do well.
Act
like you don’t need the money.
Banks
love to lend money to those who don’t need it.
People
fall in love with people who won’t give them
the time of day. It’s
a strange law of human behavior.
When
someone’s doing something for love, being
generous instead of
stingy, trusting instead of
fearful, it triggers this law: We want to
give to those
who give.
It’s
another Tao of business: Set up your business
like you don’t need
the money, and it’ll likely come
your way.
Don’t
punish everyone for one person’s mistake.
One
employee can’t focus and spends his time
surfing the Web. Instead
of just firing or reassigning
that person to more challenging work,
the company
installs an expensive content-approving firewall so
that
nobody can go to unapproved sites ever again.
It’s
important to resist that simplistic, angry,
reactionary urge to
punish everyone, and step back
to look at the big picture.
You
should feel pain when you’re unclear.
Writing
that e-mail to customers—carefully
eliminating every unnecessary
word, and reshaping
every sentence to make sure it could not be
misunderstood—
When
you make a business, you’re making a little
world where you control
the laws.
But
please know that it’s often the tiny details that
really thrill
people enough to make them tell all their
friends about you.
Little
things make all the difference.
If
you find even the smallest way to make people
smile, they’ll
remember you more for that smile than
for all your other fancy
business-model stuff.
Even
if you want to be big someday, remember that
you never need to act
like a big boring company.
Over ten years, it seemed like every time
someone
raved about how much he loved CD Baby, it was
because of one
of these little fun human touches.
It’s
OK to be casual.
My
hiring policy was ridiculous. Because I was “too
busy to bother,”
I’d just ask my current employees if
they had any friends who
needed work. Someone
always did, so I’d say, “Tell them to start
tomorrow
morning. Ten dollars an hour. Show them what to
do.” And
that was that.
The
thought was that it’s almost impossible to tell
what someone’s
going to be like on the job until he’s
actually on the job for a
few weeks.
Prepare
to double.
It’s
about being, not having.
The
day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote.
Delegate
or die: The self-employment trap.
Trust,
but verify.
Delegate,
but don’t abdicate.
You
make your perfect world.
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