Book Highlights - Frankl, Startup, Ziglar
Two new books worth of highlights for you this week! Zig an autobiography by Zig Ziglar and Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
Two quick stories for you about books, success and the millionaires club.
Story 1:
When my wife's grandparents passed and the belongings to the house were sorted through, we all had the chance to look through the book collection of her grandfather.
He was a very successful guy that built an incredible financial adviser business, owned multiple properties, invested in other businesses and took care of his family very well. I shouldn't have been surprised, but his bookshelf was COVERED with biographies, books on business, books on leadership and history. Some of which were the same that I have in my own library. I couldn't believe it. This copy of Zig Ziglar's autobiography came from that shelf.
The point: Readers are leaders. The ROI to reading books of this kind is almost too big to quantify. Even 10 pages a day will change your life more than you could ever imagine. But you already know that, that's why you're here ;)
Story 2:
I just had my oldest kindergarten back to school night and one of the biggest messages of the night was how important it is to read to them. Who knew right 😉
To support that message, they run a challenge with the kids every year called the Millionaires Club reading challenge. As your child completes a book, they mark them off and acquire points. SUPER cool. But what I love most this is the name. Associating reading with success is HUGE. Reading is cool and amazing things come from having a love of books.
While reading is not necessarily a direct CAUSE of becoming a millionaire, I believe there is a correlation.
So, as you go about your next week, just think; by you picking up a book to read, it might lead you AND your kids to the millionaire club… literally.
Happy reading!
Books Of The Week
- Zig By Zig Ziglar
- The Lean Startup By Eric Ries
- Man's Search For Meaning By Viktor Frankl
- The benefit of reading the life stories of our heroes is to understand and apply, take a thought and make it an action—then you will truly have understood Zig’s story.
- My story is proof that you can start anywhere and get to where you want to go. I hope you see through my story that life is a great teacher, that failure is only an event, and that regardless of what happens to you along the way, you will eventually come to understand that everything that occurs teaches and prepares you for the next stage of life.
- On the rare occasions when Papa was going to be home for an entire day, he’d get up early, and when we asked him why he was getting up so early on his “day off,” he would say, “If I’m not gonna do anything, I’m sure gonna get started early!”
- Kids will do what they see their parents and other adults doing. They are natural mimics.
- The decision to pivot is so difficult that many companies fail to make it.
- Once you have found success with early adopters, you want to sell to mainstream customers. Mainstream customers have different requirements and are much more demanding.
- Pivots are a permanent fact of life for any growing business.Even after a company achieves initial success, it must continue to pivot.
- “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.”
- Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.
- “Don’t aim at success -the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say! —success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.”
- Only the man inside knows.
Until next time... Readers are leaders,