10 LESSONS from 10 BOOKS
1. Charge a premium to need fewer clients and make your life easier.
Once you have validated your product and are set to start production, the next big question often is: Do I want to be high quality or the cheapest guy around?
Answer: You want to be high quality. Always.
Imagine you want to make $4,000/month, and are selling a nutritional supplement, like this one. If you charge $10 per bottle, you need to generate 400 sales per month.
If you charge $40 per bottle, you only have to make 100 sales. The hardest part of making a sale is moving people from not giving you money to giving you money.
The amount of money is very negotiable once they’ve made the decision to purchase from you. I bet you can find 100 people who are willing to give you 4x the money much faster than you can get an extra 300 people to buy from you in the first place.
2 Rich Dad, Poor Dad
— one book that helped me to understand how money works it’s a story of his two dads — his real father (poor dad) and the father of his best friend (rich dad) — and how both men shaped his thoughts about money and investing.
“Money comes and goes, but if you have the education about how money works, you gain power over it and can begin building wealth.”
- Accounting
- Investing
- Understanding markets
- The law
3 The right questions will help you create your Life Plan, which you must set aside an entire day to write.
There are three key questions to reflect on and write about to make your Life Plan:
- What do I want my legacy to be?
- Which things do I value most in life?
- What steps do I need to take to get from where I am now to the life I’ve envisioned?
Let’s explore each of these a little further.
When considering your legacy, focus on how you want to be remembered when you die. This might not seem like a fun thing to think about, but thinking about death can actually make your life better. Imagine what people would say about you at your funeral. Write your own eulogy even.
As you ponder what’s most important to you, set aside what others think you should focus on. Consider just five to twelve components of life, such as relationships or spirituality, to identify as your core values.
When it comes to action steps, think first about what each aspect of your life would look like if it were thriving. Then, ask yourself what you need to do to make each of those things happen.
Writing your Life Plan is so important that it’s worth taking the time to do it right. Set aside an entire day sometime in the next couple of weeks to complete it. Go somewhere new, a place that isn’t work or home, and disconnect from everyone else until you’re finished.
We train the mind to learn through stories.
Being human means that you are fond of stories. This is probably nothing new to you. But why do we get so hung up on narratives?
For millennia people have been inventing various tales to understand the world better. People told legends like the Trojan Horse or flood myths long before recording them in writing. Stories are still primary carriers of ideas today.
Apart from being entertaining, the most memorable ones usually contain an essential message woven between the words. In the biblical narrative of Noah’s Ark, for example, the underlying message is that God protects virtuous people. However, this moral is “smuggled” in the story, without ever being explicitly expressed.
This “smuggling” is precisely why we are unlikely to question a message presented to us in this way. We perceive it, at least to some extent, unconsciously because we are more focused on the events of the story itself. But while our conscious attention remains on the surface of things, our unconscious absorbs that which hides beneath.
4 Habits are a double-edged sword. use it or lose it
the definitive guide to breaking bad behaviors and adopting good ones in four steps, showing you how small, incremental, everyday routines compound into massive, positive change over time.
“Habits are a double-edged sword. They can work for you or against you, which is why understanding the details is essential.”
“Small changes often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold. The most powerful outcomes of any compounding process are delayed. You need to be patient.”
5 Personal brands can be monetized in lots of ways, so you don’t need to create your own product.
When you have a restaurant or brick and mortar store, a personal brand seems like an obvious move. After all, you can use your social media clout to fill the seats or make more sales. But what if you have neither a service, nor something to sell? Well, ask Brittany Xavier from Thrifts and Threads.
Initially, she just documented her life as a young mom for fun on Instagram. Eventually, she noticed similar accounts tagging brands in their posts, so she started doing the same. Soon, those brands began reaching out and once she hit 10,000 followers, she began to charge for advertising them in her posts. Now, Thrifts and Threads is a full-fledged family lifestyle brand, focusing on cheap, yet stylish outfits, decor, and more.
6 Quit work at the same time each day, and stick to it.
Cal has a habit of ending his workday at 5:30 PM, every day. No emails, no internet, no to-do lists, no computer after that. He describes his practice in this 7-year-old blog post, and while his systems develop, planning both work and free time has remained a constant factor.
Your brain needs some space each night to wind down, and it won’t get that if you have an as-much-as-possible work ethic. Limit yourself by quitting work and not checking email, or, even better, shutting down your computer, at the same time each day. This way, you’ll have a fixed slot of free time every day to recuperate.
7 By creating a work or accomplishing some task
Outlining Frankl’s theory of ‘logotherapy’, he argues that human beings cannot avoid suffering in life, but we have the power to give it meaning and thus endure it with renewed purpose. He holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful.
All the more impactful for where it was written, Frankl tells the story of his time spent within Nazi extermination camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Library of Congress found Man’s Search for Meaning among the ten most influential books in America.
- By creating a work or accomplishing some task
- By experiencing something fully or loving somebody
- By the attitude that one adopts toward unavoidable suffering
8 Enjoy the anonymity of being a beginner before the fame hits.
Steal Like An Artist gives you permission to copy your heroes’ work and use it as a springboard to find your own, unique style, all while remembering to have fun, creating the right work environment for your art, and letting neither criticism nor praise drives you off track
- Where you cannot imitate your favorite artists is where you’ll find your own style.
- If you’re an artist, some procrastination is productive.
- Enjoy the anonymity of being a beginner before the fame hits.
Know yourself.
Know thyself. I have attributed the ancient Greek phrase to many sources, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
Nowadays the talk is all about self-awareness, meaning you know what you’re good at, and what you’re not good at.
If you know you can’t even walk with less than 7 hours of sleep, then take the time to get those 7 hours. You don’t know how much sleep you need? Calculate it.
Related to this is your time of day where your most productive. Maybe you are super focused in the morning, but some are night owls.
Extend this idea to all areas of your life, especially the ones that make your body function, like sleep, exercise, and diet, and you’ll soon know all the basics you have to take care of to be productive.
Feeling healthy and fit is one of the biggest determinants of your confidence, which will in turn make you more optimistic. The summary says 95% of our emotions result from the way we talk to ourselves, so you better be nice to yourself.
10 Think of yourself as an eternal student to stay humble.
How could we not start the summary of a book about stoicism with a quote from one of the all-time greats?
“It is impossible for a man to learn that, which he thinks he already knows.” — Epictetus
I’m proud of my attitudes and habits towards life. I’m disciplined, spend very little of the money I’m earning, live a frugal life — I just know I’m going to win in life thanks to these. However, that sometimes leaves me thinking: “There’s not much left I can learn here, I won’t change any of these for a long time.” Every time that thought crosses my mind, I call bullshit.
It might be true that these basic principles won’t change much, but there’s a huge load of things for me left to learn when it comes to making money, writing, selling, relationships, other people. It’s a never-ending process.
