Entrepreneur’s Bookshelf: Lessons from the Library

You’ve heard you are what you eat, well we believe that you are what you read. Teach a CEO presents lessons from our bookshelf on how you can improve and grow your venture. We have taken nuggets from our library and provide them for entrepreneurs and business owners.

• Get Laughed At. When you first enter a marketplace, you'll get laughed at and ridiculed and have tomatoes thrown at you. I'm routinely laughed at for things that I say, because people don't understand my approach to solve problems. It's difficult, but it's the only way to see if your arguments stand up. Over time, you'll continue to be validated by the marketplace – The Startup Playbook
• The best way to recognize an opportunity is to first know what you are capable of. Then keep your eyes and ears open while you market yourself and your service. Look for places where your service is needed. Look in your neighborhood; have your parents look at work. You will often discover opportunities while working for another customer. Customers will mention things that turn into opportunities. – Lemonade Stand Economics
• There are very few legal issues when it comes to allowing comments on your blog because it's unlikely that you'll be held responsible for other people's statements such as claims for defamation. It's unlikely you'll be liable if you weren't the author of the defamatory statement and you didn't know it contained a lie. – The Legal Side of Blogging
• If you overpaid your income taxes because you had too much withheld from your paycheck or your estimated tax payments were larger than necessary, be sure to file for a tax refund. The IRS does not send you a refund automatically. – Your  Income Tax 2013
• One simple thing that we do that connects and grounds us each morning when we are physically in the same place is to spend four minutes together, making eye contact, and chatting casually about what the day's schedule is and when we might see each other again. – Startup Life
• Principles of Mastering Email are (1) Maintain separate work and personal mailboxes (2) Do not surrender today's plans to today's email (3) Use administrative assistance (4) Batch process email by appointment with yourself (5) Process email last in, first serve (6) Make three deliberate passes (7) Delete aggressively (8) Send very few carbon copies (9)Send less email (10) Cut the thread (11) Empty your inbox every day (12) Shut off, or ignore, email alerts. – Unload Email Overload
• It is an engine of innovation that runs on change, truth, communication and vision. Great leaders make a difference in the lives of their people, their organizations and the processes. – The Power of Magnetic Leadership
• The bottom line on all of this is it doesn't matter how a dream gets planted. It only matters you have one, you raise it. If it's to grow, you must set it up for success–it's the only choice. – The Z-Factor
• When you're writing your psots, it's important for you to be aware and distinguish between stating a fact and giving your opinion. You could face serious accusations and repercussions if you inadvertently state something as a fact when you meant to mereley share an opinion such as a lawsuit for defamation. In thise cases what you actually said matters mor thaan what you intened to say. – The Legal Side of Blogging
• Focus on What's Important – We all work hard, We're all as busy as can be. When it doesn't seem like we could possibly get any busier, we do. But if you're not focused on the right things, you'll be the busiest guy on the way to the poor house. You have to focus on the right things in the right order, and you have to tolerate a lack of perfection. – The Startup Life
• If you are going to recruit the right people at the right time and in the right place, here are some things you have to focus on when you are hiring: culture, attitude, self-directed people, other-directed people and competence. – The Power of Magnetic Leadership
• Don't let laziness prevent you from claiming your maximum write-offs. Compare your itemized deductions with the standard deduction for your filing status; then deduct the higher amount. – Your Income Tax 2013
• Link no other time in history, people hire others to do all types of work for them. We live in a service economy. Americans have more money than any society in the history of the world, and what they are buying with it is time. Time has become the new currency. Your time is worth someone else's money. Someone pays you to do what you do best, and you pay someone else to do what he or she does best. It's your job to be the first one standing in line to say, ‘I can do that'–ideally before your potential customer ever asks for it to be done. – Lemonade Stand Economics
• Rejection isn't dismissal. Rejection is the introduction to a six-stage cycle that presents an exclusive opportunity to improve your idea or situation. – The Z-Factor
• The crux of many significant conflicts in an entrepreneurial partnership is time. As an entrepreneur, you may feel that there just aren't enough hours in a day to honor your commitments to your company, your partner, your health, and your self…. Setting limits on technology is an important part of time management for an entrepreneur. You do not need to do just one more email right before bedtime. – Startup Life
• Once you have engaged, empowered, and enriched employees' lives, you have their attention. To have their heart, they need to feel appreciated, rewarded, recognized and valued. – The Power of Magnetic Leadership
• When you want to use a guest blogger, the two of you need to determine in advance who will own the copyright rights in the blog post he creates. – The Legal Side of Blogging
• We live within our cash flow means on a daily basis, but when a big bag of money falls out of the sky, we follow something called the 10 percent rule. We spend 10 percent of what we just got on something extravagant. – Startup Life

The Bookshelf

The Power of Magnetic Leadership by Dianne Durkin “Described as the only leadership reference guide any manager needs, this book provides strategies to increase earnings by energizing the inner powers of an organization. Dianne Durkin, described as a powerhouse that takes vision to reality uses the R.E.A.L. acronym as a guide to segment the book. R = Recruiting the Right people at the Right time in the Right place, and Retaining them. E = Engaging, Empowering, and Enriching Employees for Earnings. A = Appreciating and valuing employees. L = Leadership that expresses Love and builds Loyalty. Combining the above techniques, magnetic leadership will become money magnets.” via Amazon.com

The Z Factor: How to get the Life You Dream of With the Law of Extrodinary Effort Unlike the Law of Attraction by Edwin J. Sprague, “The Z Factor is anything but elusive or indescribable. “Z” is the extraordinary effort ordinary people can generate to turn dreams into reality. Is it time to finally be what you dreamt you'd be when you grew up? If so, it's time to harness the absolute power of Z. No affirmations here–just humorous, motivating, and gritty stories about: (1) Why too much learning can kill your dreams, and how Tactical Ignorance keeps them alive. (2) Raising your ZQ (ballsy [ball-zee] quotient) and introducing your ideas to life's realities. (3) A Perpetual Motion Machine and the 10 tactics that'll take you to the next level–repeatedly. (4) Landing a whale (QVC), Feeding the Tuna Mayo, N.Y. Jets Meat, Professor Backwards, It Ain't Easy Being Seven at My Age… and much more!” via Amazon.com

Lemonade Stand Economics by Geof White “teaches high school students how to work for themselves and graduate from college without student loans. Learn to make $15, $20 or even $50 per hour working for yourself and pay for college one semester at a time. It’s not hard if you know what to do, but that's the problem. As a high school student you just don't know where to start. Lemonade Stand Economics shows you what you do… and where to start. There is a problem in America – some say an epidemic – called student loan debt. High school students want to attend college but most don’t have the money set aside to pay for it. Most take out student loans for four years, graduate, and start off their adult life in debt. Often times starting their adult lives with massive debt. These students are not stupid or lazy, in fact they are quite smart and energetic, but they don’t know where to start or what to do to earn enough money to pay for college. They don’t need that job slapping sandwiches together for minimum wage and going home smelling like bologna and pickles. That’s not going to pay for college!” via Amazon.com.

Unload Email Overload: How to Master Email Communications, Unload Email Overload and Save Your Precious Time by Bob O'Hare “Email steals too much of your precious time, doesn't it? Processing email takes way too much time because we never learned to manage it effectively. We are constantly interrupted, invest countless hours in it, re-read emails that languish in our inbox, store email we don't need and suffer from email overload. Don't you agree? This book provides what you need to manage email, eliminate the overload and save your precious time. It will help you minimize interruption, overcome indecision and empty your inbox. It will help you organize priorities and manage time, so you can get your work done-at work. You can give up doing email at dinner and in bed. Good idea?” via Amazon.com.

Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur by Brad Feld & Amy Batchelor “In Startup Life, Brad Feld–a Boulder, Colorado-based entrepreneur turned-venture capitalist–shares his own personal experiences with his wife Amy, offering a series of rich insights into successfully leading a balanced life as a human being who wants to play as hard as he works and who wants to be as fulfilled in life and in work. With this book, Feld distills his twenty years of experience in this field to address how the village of startup people can put aside their workaholic ways and lead rewarding lives in all respects.” via Amazon.com

Your Income Tax 2013 by J.K. Lasser Tax Institue “For over half a century, more than 39 million Americans have turned to J.K. Lasser for easy-to-follow, expert advice and guidance on planning and filing their taxes. Written by a team of tax specialists, J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2013 includes all the outstanding features that have made this book the nation's all-time top-selling tax guide. It covers some of the most important topics associated with your taxes, from what must you report as income and strategies that will save you on taxes to how much tax do you actually owe and what deductions can you claim. via Amazon.com

The Startup Playbook by David S. Kidder “According to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, more than 565,000 new businesses were created in 2010 in the United States alone—each one of them hoping to strike gold. The Startup Playbook will help them succeed. Going insider to insider with unprecedented access, New York Times bestselling author and Clickable CEO, David Kidder, shares the hard-hitting experiences of some of the world's most influential entrepreneurs and CEOs, revealing their most closely held advice. Face-to-face interviews with 40 founders give readers key insights into what it took to build PayPal, LinkedIn, AOL, TED, Flickr, and many others into household names. Special sections include topics ranging from how to select the right idea to pursue to finding funding and overcoming inevitable obstacles. In an economy demanding change, The Startup Playbook is the go-to for entrepreneurs big and small.” – via Amazon.com

The Legal Side of Blogging: How Not to get Sued, Fired, Arrested, or Killed by Ruth Carter “Fans of Erika Napoletano will appreciate Ruth Carter's ability to give bloggers the direct answers to legal questions — without the excessive fluff! Having a blog is awesome.
Having the cops or Joe the Process Server show up on your doorstep is not. Bloggers put themselves at legal risk with each and every blog post. Yes, you have freedom of speech but that doesn't mean you can't get sued. In this book, licensed attorney and passionate blogger Ruth Carter tells you how to stay out of legal hot water — with your boss, the cops, and the courts. Copyright, trademark, privacy, defamation… it's all in there. And it's written in an easy-to-understand style expressly for serious bloggers.