There is one book I recommend more than any other, and I'm ashamed to share the name...
I swear to god, this is an incredible, well-written, thoughtful book.
It's called 'How To Get Rich' 🤦♂️
It was written by a magazine publishing magnate named Felix Dennis in 2008...
Ignore the title. Seriously. It's great.
He is a character. In the 90's he blew $100MM+ on alcohol and crack cocaine, then become a full-time poet in the early 2000's.
It encompasses most of the important lessons of starting and operating a large business.
Here's a few bits:
Fish where the fish are:
“If you wish to become rich, look carefully about you at the prevailing industries where wealth appears to be gravitating. THEN GO TO WHERE THE MONEY IS!”
I increasingly believe that the only successful approach to productivity is treating yourself like an addict
If you want to stop drinking alcohol, don't keep it in the house 🙅
Here's how I keep myself productive:
1. Clean Out The Cupboards 📱
I use iOS Screen Time to block all social media, news, and yes, EMAIL, from my phone.
I also remove the ability to install new apps.
My wife set the code, so I don't have any easy way to get around it.
2. Add Guiderails 🚆
On my Mac, I have an automation that quits all apps each morning before I get to work and pulls up OmniFocus on the screen, so it's always the first thing I see when I open my computer and can't go down a rabbit trail.
They often consider investing boring and pay a charlatan to manage their money for an absurd fee.
Most investors are bad entrepreneurs.
They are usually overconfident and have no clue of how to actually operate a business.
Operating a business is hard.
It’s easy to look at a business as a spreadsheet or through the lens of strategy decks and KPIs at a board meeting, but in reality a company is a group of people.
People are hard to inspire and drive towards a goal.
On the flip side...
Investing is hard.
It requires decoding all of the silly finance terms that the world uses to obscure relatively simple concepts so that they can charge huge fees.
It also requires the opposite of entrepreneurship: inaction. Sitting on your hands. Waiting...