Book Highlights - The Lean Startup, The Alter Ego, The Donut King
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
The Alter Ego by Todd Herman
The Donut King by Ted Ngoy
I'm often reading several books at once and this week is no different. 🤷🏻♂️
I just couldn't wait until I finished the next book before sending you the highlights. Instead, I compiled highlights from the first few chapters of each of these 3 books for you as a teaser of whats to come.
When I finish each one I'll send the entirety of the highlights, and I promise they wont disappoint. Each book is SO good!
- The grim reality is that most startups fail. Most new products are not successful. Most new ventures do not live up to their potential.
- Startup success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Startup success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.
- Why are startups failing so badly everywhere we look? The first problem is the allure of a good plan, a solid strategy and thorough market research. In earlier eras, these things were indicators of likely success. The overwhelming temptation is to apply them to startups too, but this doesn’t work, because Startups operate with too much uncertainty. Startups do not yet know who their customer is or what their product should be.
- The Lean Startup asks people to start measuring their productivity differently. Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn’t matter much if they do it on time and on budget. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build-- the thing customers want and will pay for-- as quickly as possible. In other words, the Lean Startup is a new way of looking at the development of innovative new products that emphasizes fast iteration and customer insight, a huge vision, and great ambition, all at the same time.
- This isn’t a motivational rah-rah book filled with cotton-candy ideas plucked from other cotton-candy self-help books that riddle the bookshelf and e-readers. This isn’t a book with an “easy button” buried inside it. There is no treasure map to a pile of gold coins. This book is for real people doing hard things. This isn’t a book to remove the challenge of life. It’s to take the part of you that shows up when you least expect it, and show you how to get it to show up when you most need it.
- An Alter Ego is a useful tool to help you, me, and others handle the adversity of life with more resiliency. Explore our creative sides, while protecting a fragile self. Be far more intentional about who we’re trying to be on the Fields of Play.
- Many of us have ambitions buried inside us that are difficult and challenging, and demand something we’re not quite sure we can fulfill, so why not use an Alter Ego?
- A recent University of Minnesota study of four- and six-year-old children found that to teach kids perseverance, parents should teach children to pretend to be like Batman or another favorite character- because it creates psychological distance,’ the very thing my clients like lan talk about, and what I’ve observed happens when people create Alter Egos.The study split kids into three groups. The researchers put a toy in a locked glass box and gave the kids a ring of keys. The catch? No key worked. The researchers wanted to see how to improve the children’s executive functioning skills and were interested in seeing how long they would try to unlock the box and what they would try. To help the kids, the researchers gave them what they called strategies. One strategy was to pretend to be Batman. The kids could even wear a cape! Dora the Explorer was a choice, too.Researchers found that the kids who worked the longest were the ones who impersonated Batman or Dora, followed by children who just pretended, and, finally, the kids who remained in the first-person perspective.? The kids impersonating Batman or Dora were more flexible thinkers, they tried the most keys, and they were calmer. One four-year-old even said, “Batman never gets frustrated.”
- From a young age, I understood that being the long shot-the man who has nothing and therefore nothing to lose-can be an advantage. When you are the long shot, you allow yourself to take chances. And success in life favors those who take chances.
Until next time...
Readers are leaders,
