Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Couple Of Book Rec's

Dan Kennedy - Famous Bull Photo

Tim Ferriss lists The Magic of Thinking Big as one of his top book recommendations. In fact he said he read it 5 times in high school or something.

Published 50 years ago, and with several million copies sold it was weird that I had never heard of it.

Anyways it's a decent read - inspirational and full of tips on developing an attitudinal plan for business success: wear nice clothes, be infinitely polite/nice, etc.  Tim's book rec's, and I've read a few of them now, have not been anywhere nearly as good as his own works (4HWW and 4HB).

The other book I read this week I had heard recommended by several big names recently so I concluded it was worth buying (surprisingly, my library network didn't have it).

Dan Kennedy's book How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide was also seemingly dated, published back in 1995.

I found this one to be much better, one of those compelling reads that you kill in a single day and has you lamenting the end of the book. It's chock-full of stories of earthlings who made $hitloads of money in the 80s and early 90s - mostly via infomercial-type products and innovations. Many of the big winners sold *information products* but of course in the pre-internet age the vehicles were different: FAX machines, classified ads, color TV commercials, and toll-free phone numbers. Watching how many people today have cleaned up selling content online and looking back at their forerunners I can't help but in hindsight say, "DUH...of course billions were going to be there for the picking on the web!"

I sure wish I had read this book 15 years ago!!!

What was striking about these little case studies is how banged-up, bankrupt, and thoroughly uneducated the people were originally. Seemingly almost NONE of them even went to college - notably the ultra-wealthy author himself.

So take THAT all y'all college flacks out there!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

With nobody telling them they had anything to lose they went for it and won.

CaptiousNut said...

And they literally HAD nothing to lose!

DA said...

I love this country.

Love 'Merica or git ...