If time allows it, I try to update my business knowledge with a couple of books. I was never that much into fiction and rather spending time reading business-related books.
Today I want to share a couple of books I’ve read this year and give you a brief summary on my conclusion on each.
Table of Contents
The minimalist entrepreneur
This is the book from Sahil Lavingia, the founder of Gumroad. He’s one of the people I always looked up to on the internet, and it was kind of obvious to read his book.
While I enjoyed reading the origin story of Gumroad, it was a bit hard to get many benefits from this book, to be honest. It’s more dedicated to larger companies and not so much to Solopreneurs like me. I really enjoyed some of the marketing insights from the early days of his entrepreneurial journey.
I would still recommend it if you are new to bootstrapping and you haven’t read books like Company of One.
The Mom Test
The book is small (126 pages in total), but I had so much fun with this book. It’s just a joy to read it, and there is more than one place I had to laugh about my own bad habits regarding interviewing clients.
I highly recommend this book to everyone, not just entrepreneurs. Once you finish it, you will absolutely avoid common pitfalls in talking to people about your business, project, or just a hobby you are passionate about. Asking the right questions and not suggesting the desired answer to the person you are talking to is so important.
I have like 3 new business ideas per day, and I tend to showcase all of them to friends, my girlfriend, and family members it’s just insane how much more value you get by just asking the right questions and not getting too hyped about the idea itself. I’m sure this book has saved me countless hours of building something no one would ever buy.
The One Thing
I’m kind of late to the party reading this one. I always avoided it as it looked like just another book for Solopreneurs and small businesses telling the same focus on one thing story you maybe have read countless times. It’s not.
The book is quite good and is getting a lot deeper into the topic than I had imagined. The idea of having a centralized focus question and building your master plan around it is awesome.
It also doesn’t fall into the same trap that the “One Thing” needs to be exactly one product – your one thing is the answer to your focus question, and you may never reach it (and that’s good!). It’s also not about just your business. Instead, it covers all areas of your life.
Hooked
Often recommended, I’m having a hard time finishing this book and extracting the information valuable to me.
Maybe I’m too late to the party as most of the information in this book is kind of obvious to me, but UX has learned so much in the last five years, and usability testing is getting more common these days.
Maybe this book greatly impacted the psychological aspects of products and formed the path to today’s UX.
Building a Second Brain
I’m currently reading a Second Brain. I’m almost halfway through, and I will update the review here. I like it.
While I’m not a big fan of Notion, the advice shared here is adaptable to pretty much any kind of personal note software.
The theory of brain-dumping raw information into a tool, taking some time to bring it into a logical order, and using it efficiently later is something I struggled with for some time.
It’s funny, given the fact that I have a university degree in Information Science, and that is one of the main takeaways and skills you should get by completing it 🙂
I’m not doing anything affiliate, and to make that even more clear, I did not include any links in this article. You can easily find all of the mentioned books via Amazon or your favorite bookstore.