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Book Summary – How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World’s Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs by Guy Raz.

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“Starting a company is like throwing yourself off the cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.” – Reid Hoffman

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One of my favorite podcasts on Entrepreneurship is NPR’s How I Built This with Guy Raz. I have been a fan and ardent listener of the show since 2016. Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world’s best-known companies. The Podcast weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs, and idealists—and the movements they built Through the interviews,

Guy asks the entrepreneurs about their journey, the peaks and valleys, and their entrepreneurial journey’s ups and downs. My favorite part of every podcast episode is the way he can humanize these great entrepreneurs.

 
Award-winning journalist and NPR host Guy Raz has interviewed more than 200 highly successful entrepreneurs to uncover amazing true stories like these. In How I Built This, he shares tips for every entrepreneur’s journey: from the early days of formulating your idea, to raising money and recruiting employees, to fending off competitors, to finally paying yourself a real salary.

“Whatever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it, they will want to come back and see you do it again, and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do.” – Walt Disney

Here are my favourite takeaways from reading, How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World’s Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs by Guy Raz.

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Book Summary – Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships by Marshall Rosenberg.

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Nonviolent Communication (abbreviated NVC, also called Compassionate Communication or Collaborative Communication) is an approach to nonviolent living developed by Marshall Rosenberg beginning in the 1960s.

NVC is based on the assumption that all human beings have capacity for compassion and empathy and that people only resort to violence or behavior harmful to others when they do not recognize more effective strategies for meeting needs.

Nonviolent Communication: a way of communicating that leads us to give from the heart.

Here are my favourite take-aways from reading, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships by Marshall Rosenberg:

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Book Summary – Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell.

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“A coach is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear, who has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you have always known you could be.” – Tom Landry

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Trillion Dollar Coach is a book about Bill Campbell, who was former CEO for Claris, Intuit, and GO Corporation. Bill was former Advertising Executive at J. Walter Thompson, football coach at Colombia University, and executive business coach for Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Sundar Pichai at Google, Susan Wojcicki at YouTube, Steve Jobs at Apple, Brad D. Smith at Intuit, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, John Donahoe at eBay, Marissa Mayer at Yahoo, Jack Dorsey and Dick Costolo at Twitter, and Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook.

Trillion Dollar Coach is the Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell. The book reveals that to be a great manager, you have to be a great coach. After all, the higher you climb, the more your success depends on making other people successful. By definition, that’s what coaches do.

Based on interviews with over eighty people who knew and loved Bill Campbell, Trillion Dollar Coach explains the Coach’s principles and illustrates them with stories from the many great people and companies with which he worked. The result is a blueprint for forward-thinking business leaders and managers that will help them create higher performing and faster moving cultures, teams, and companies.

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Book Summary: Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos.

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“Smart people are a dime a dozen and often don’t amount to much. What counts is being creative and imaginative. That’s what makes someone a true innovator.” – Walter Isaacson

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In Jeff Bezos’s own words, Invent and wander highlights the core principles and philosophy that have guided him in creating, building, and leading Amazon and Blue Origin. Jeff Bezos is one of my favorite entrepreneurs not only because he is the richest man in the world, but because of his long-term view of business and life.

In this collection of Jeff Bezos’s writings—his unique and strikingly original annual shareholder letters, plus numerous speeches and interviews that provide insight into his background, his work, and the evolution of his ideas. Spanning a range of topics across business and public policy, from innovation and customer obsession to climate change and outer space, this book provides a rare glimpse into how Bezos thinks about the world and where the future might take us.

Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos is a very great book that shares the fascinating and inspiring story of Jeff Bezos, how he started Amazon, his obsession to create the most customer-centric company in the world, his core philosophical frameworks such as It is always day one, regret minimization, disagree and commit among others.

Here are some of my favorite takeaways from reading, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos:

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Book Summary – Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg.

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We learn writing by doing it. That simple. We don’t learn by going outside ourselves to authorities we think know about it.

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In Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, Natalie Goldberg explores the concept of writing as a Zen practice.  Natalie offers suggestions, encouragement, and solid advice on many aspects of the writer’s craft: on writing from “first thoughts” (keep your hand moving, don’t cross out, just get it on paper), on listening (writing is ninety percent listening; the deeper you listen, the better you write), on using verbs (verbs provide the energy of the sentence), on overcoming doubts (doubt is torture; don’t listen to it)—even on choosing a restaurant in which to write.  Goldberg sees writing as a practice that helps writers comprehend the value of their lives.

Basically, if you want to become a good writer, you need to do three things. Read a lot, listen well and deeply, and write a lot.

“Talk when you talk, walk when you walk, and die when you die.” Write when you write. Stop battling yourself with guilt, accusations, and strong-arm threats.” – Zen Saying

Here are my favourite takeaways from reading, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg:

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Book Summary -Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean by Kim Scott.

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“Radical Candor” is what happens when you put “Care Personally” and “Challenge Directly” together.

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Kim Scott earned her managerial experience working with great teams and individuals at Google and Apple. Radical Candor draws from her first-hand experience working with titans such as Larry Page (Google), Sheryl Sandberg (Google), Dick Costolo (Twitter) both as a direct report, manager, and coach.

Radical Candor draws directly on her experiences at these cutting edge companies to reveal a new approach to effective management that delivers huge success by inspiring teams to work better together by embracing fierce conversations. She draws on her wealth of experience to expand on the concept of radical candidness with insights on hiring, firing, providing guidance, obnoxious aggressiveness vs ruinuous empathy, running meeting among other tools that makes someone become a great boss, have tough conversations and not lose your humanity in the process.

Kim identified three simple principles for building better relationships with your employees: make it personal, get stuff done, and understand why it matters. “Radical Candor” is what happens when you put “Care Personally” and “Challenge Directly” together.

Here are my favourite takeaways from reading, Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean by Kim Scott:

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Book Summary – Radical Acceptance: Awakening the Love that Heals Fear and Shame by Tara Brach.

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“Only when we realize we can’t hold on to anything can we begin to relax our efforts to control our experience.”

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In Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach explores in depth how Buddhist teachings can transform our fear and shame. Through meditation, mindfulness practices and fully understanding the healing power of compassion, we can discover the very real possibility of meeting imperfection in ourselves and others with courage and love – and so transform our lives.

Radical Acceptance does not mean defining ourselves by our limitations. It is not an excuse for withdrawal.

Part of the practice of Radical Acceptance is knowing that, whatever arises, whatever we can’t embrace with love, imprisons us — no matter what it is. If we are at war with it, we stay in prison. It is for the freedom and healing of our own hearts, that we learn to recognize and allow our inner life.

According to Brach, there are two wings of radical acceptance: seeing clearly (Mindfulness) and holding our experience with compassion (Self Compassion).

 We suffer when we cling to or resist experience, when we want life different than it is. As the saying goes: “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.

Here are my Favourite take-aways from reading, Radical Acceptance: Awakening the Love that Heals Fear and Shame by Tara Brach:

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Book Summary: You Don’t Have to Be a Shark: Creating Your Own Success by Robert Herjavec.

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“The World Owes You Nothing—Except Opportunity”

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Shark Tank is my favorite Business Reality TV Show and Robert Herjavec is my favorite shark. I have been a fan of the show since 2011 and I find the show to be both entertaining and educational. In You Don’t Have to Be a Shark, Robert transcends pure sales techniques and teaches “non-business people” what they need to know in order to sell themselves successfully. The book’s theme:

Great salespeople are made, not born, and no one achieves success in life without knowing how to sell.

No matter what you want to achieve or who you want to become, the ability to sell anything—including yourself—is one of the most rewarding talents to acquire in life. Why? Because it is universal. It is difficult to imagine any aspect of life that would not benefit from knowing and practicing the skills of making a sale.

Here are my favourite takeaways from reading, You Don’t Have to Be a Shark by Robert Herjavec:

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Book Summary – Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder by Chip Conley.

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“In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy, sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.” – Edith Wharton

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At age 52, after selling the company he founded and ran as CEO for 24 years, rebel boutique hotelier Chip Conley was looking at an open horizon in midlife. Then he received a call from the young founders of Airbnb, asking him to help grow their disruptive start-up into a global hospitality giant. He had the industry experience, but Conley lacked in the digital fluency of his 20-something colleagues. He didn’t write code, have an Uber or Lyft app on his phone, was twice the average Airbnb employee’s age, and would be reporting to a CEO young enough to be his son.

Conley quickly discovered that while he’d been hired as a teacher and mentor, he was also in many ways a student and intern. What emerged is the secret to thriving as a mid-life worker: learning to marry wisdom and experience with curiosity, a beginner’s mind, and a willingness to evolve, all hallmarks of the “Modern Elder.”

Part manifesto and part playbook, Wisdom@Work ignites an urgent conversation about ageism in the workplace, calling on us to treat age as we would other type of diversity. In the process, Conley liberates the term “elder” from the stigma of “elderly,” and inspires us to embrace wisdom as a path to growing whole, not old. Whether you’ve been forced to make a mid-career change, are choosing to work past retirement age, or are struggling to keep up with the millennials rising up the ranks,

“If wisdom were offered me on the one condition that I should keep it shut away and not divulge it to anyone, I should reject it. There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with.” – Seneca

Here are my favourite take ways from reading, Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder by Chip Conley;

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Book Summary – Anger: Taming a Powerful Emotion by Gary Chapman.

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“Anyone can become angry—that is easy, but to be angry with the right person at the right time, and for the right purpose and in the right way—that is not within everyone’s power, and that is not easy”. – Aristotle

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Anger can be a powerful and positive motivator, useful to move us toward loving action to right wrongs and correct injustice—but it also can become a raging, uncontrolled force. Gary Chapman shares some very great insights on the very powerful emotion: “Anger” with lots of examples and learnings from the Christian scripture.

The dictionary describes anger as “a strong passion or emotion of displeasure, and usually antagonism, excited by a sense of injury or insult.” Although we normally think of anger as an emotion, it is in reality a cluster of emotions involving the body, the mind, and the will. Anger is a response to some event or situation in life that causes us irritation, frustration, pain, or other displeasure. Thousands of events and situations have the potential for provoking anger.

“The greatest remedy for anger is delay.” – Seneca

Here are my favourite takeaways from reading, Anger: Taming a Powerful Emotion by Gary Chapman:

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Book Summary: Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s by Ray Kroc.

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“As long as you’re green you’re growing, as soon as you’re ripe you start to rot.”

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Ray Kroc was a quintessential salesman with a bias for action before turning McDonald’s into a household name; Ray worked various jobs selling paper cups, as a real estate agent, sometimes playing the piano in bands, milkshake mixer salesman, among other gigs. The 2016 movie, “The Founder,” starring Michael Keaton as Ray Kroc, portrays the story of his creation of the McDonald’s fast-food restaurant chain. 

The title “Grinding it out” brings to mind the long apprenticeship of over thirty years during which Ray Kroc worked for others as a salesman and sales manager and later in his own small business. For the great opportunity of his life did not come until 1954 when he was fifty-two, an age when some executives are beginning to contemplate the greener pastures of retirement.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures. —Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

After World War II, Kroc found employment as a milkshake mixer salesman for the foodservice equipment manufacturer Prince Castle. When Prince Castle Multi-Mixer sales plummeted because of competition from lower-priced Hamilton Beach products, Kroc was impressed by Richard and Maurice McDonald who had purchased eight of his Multi-Mixers for their San Bernardino, California restaurant, and visited them in 1954.

By the time of Kroc’s death, the chain had 7,500 outlets in the United States and 31 other countries and territories. The total system-wide sales of its restaurants were more than $8 billion in 1983, and his personal fortune amounted to some $600 million.

McDonald’s is the world’s largest restaurant chain by revenue, serving over 69 million customers daily in over 100 countries across 37,855 outlets as of 2018. McDonald’s is the world’s second-largest private employer with 1.7 million employees (behind Walmart with 2.3 million employees). The $100 billion in sales generated by McDonald’s company-owned and franchise restaurants in 2019 accounts for almost 4% of the estimated $2.5 trillion global restaurant industry.

Here are my favourite takeaways from reading, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s by Ray Kroc:

Everyman makes his own happiness and is responsible for his own  problems.

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Book Summary – The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World by Jacqueline Novogratz.

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“Hope is a path on the mountainside. At first there is no path. But then there are people passing that way. And there is a path.” -LU XUN

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Jacqueline’s story is an inspiring and refreshing story on starting a sustainable nonprofit organization. She takes the reader on a journey of persistence, adventure across Africa, understanding poverty & world views, becoming passionate about your project, delivering a new model for empowering and funding sustainable projects. She shares heartwarming stories about forming a long-lasting bond with the community she was trying to serve, the need to listen, and determination to get things done against all odds.

Jacqueline Novogratz founded Acumen, a non-profit global venture capital fund whose goal is to use entrepreneurial approaches to address global poverty.

Jacqueline Novogratz left a career in international banking to spend her life on a quest to understand global poverty and find powerful new ways of tackling it. From her first stumbling efforts as a young idealist venturing forth in Africa to the creation of the trailblazing organization she runs today, Novogratz tells gripping stories with unforgettable characters. She shows how traditional charity often fails, but how a new form of philanthropic investing called “patient capital” can help make people self-sufficient and can change millions of lives.

“If you don’t like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it. You just do it one step at a time.” -MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN

“Poverty won’t allow him to lift up his head; dignity won’t allow him to bow it down.”-MADAGASY PROVERB

Here are my favourite takeaways from reading, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World by Jacqueline Novogratz:

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Book Summary – Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin.

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In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is failing. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.

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Purple Cow by Seth Godin is one of my favorite business marketing books, the key concept in the book is very simple: to convert people to become raving fans in our fast-paced world, you need to create something remarkable worth talking about.

Cows, after you’ve seen one, or two, or ten, are boring. A Purple Cow, though…now that would be something. Purple Cow describes something phenomenal, something counterintuitive and exciting and flat out unbelievable. Every day, consumers come face to face with a lot of boring stuff-a lot of brown cows – but you can bet they won’t forget a Purple Cow. And it’s not a marketing function that you can slap on to your product or service. Purple Cow is inherent. It’s built right in, or it’s not there. Period. 

Here are my favourite takeaways from reading,Purple Cow by Seth Godin:

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Book Summary – The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes by David Robson

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Perhaps the best analogy of intelligence is a car. A faster engine can get you places more quickly if you know how to use it correctly. But simply having more horsepower won’t guarantee that you will arrive at your destination safely. Without the right knowledge and equipment – the brakes, the steering wheel, the speedometer, a compass and a good map – a fast engine may just lead to you driving in circles – or straight into oncoming traffic. And the faster the engine, the more dangerous you are.

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The Intelligence Trap Book is about why intelligent people act stupidly – and why in some cases they are even more prone to error than the average person. The book focuses on the strategies that we can all employ to avoid the same mistakes: lessons that will help anyone to think more wisely and rationally in this post-truth world.

The Intelligence Trap by David Robson is a great read that sheds light on many cognitive biases we all have; David shares some great strategies for identifying them and some insights on working on them. It is not what we know that gets us into trouble; it is what we think we know for sure that ain’t so. The author gives various examples of how brilliant people make seemingly stupid mistakes.

Intelligence can help you to learn and recall facts, and process complex information quickly, but you also need the necessary checks and balances to apply that brainpower correctly. Without them, greater intelligence can actually make you more biased in your thinking.

Here are my favourite take aways from reading, The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes by David Robson:

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Book Summary- The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind by Jonah Berger.

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“People change when they … Hurt enough that they have to, Learn enough that they want to, and Receive enough that they are able to.” – John C. Maxwell

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The Catalyst by Jonah Berger is a great and transformative book for me personally as I have tendencies of wanting to change people (Messiah Syndrome); for example, whenever I finish a book, watch a documentary, or get exposed to new information, I want to share it with everybody but have come to realize people are at different levels and period in their lives (they change when they are ready). Anytime I want to get frustrated with people and change, I remind myself that first: I might be wrong and I remember the words of Author John C. Maxwell on Change:

“People change when they … Hurt enough that they have to, Learn enough that they want to, and Receive enough that they are able to.” – John C. Maxwell

Berger shares a great framework called REDUCE (Reactance, Endowment, Distance, Uncertainty, and Corroborating Evidence) for effecting change, and I absolutely love it.

The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind introduces a revolutionary approach to change. Successful change isn’t about pushing harder or exerting more energy. It’s about removing barriers. Overcoming resistance by reducing friction and lowering the hurdles to action.  Discover the five hidden factors that impede change, and how by mitigating them, you can change anything.

Books Theme:

How to overcome inertia, incite action, and change minds—not by being more persuasive, or pushing harder, but by being a catalyst. By removing the barriers to change. Identifying what is blocking or preventing change. And eliminating these obstacles to action.

The book is about finding the parking brakes. Discovering the hidden barriers preventing change. Identifying the root or core issues that are thwarting action and learning how to mitigate them.

Here are my Favourite Takeaways from reading, The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind by Jonah Berger:

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