On the way to 1000 books – A questionable goal

One of my goals is to read at least 1,000 books in my life time.

The following books I read completely or partially or consumed as audiobook:

Top Books:

Unscrippted
The Manual

Biographies/Motivation:

1 Total Recall
2 Like a Virgin
3 Trump: How to Get Rich
4 Sam Walton
5 Bloomberg

Business:

6 The Millionares Fastlane
7 Seeking Wisdom from Darwin to Munger
8 The 4hour Work Week
9 Poor Charlie’s Almanack
10 The 10X Rule
11 The 7 Day Startup
12 UX for Lean Startups
13 Lean UX
14 Remote
15 Running Lean
16 Choose Yourself!
17 Zero to One
18 The Millionare Next Door
19 A few Lessons for Investors and Managers
20 The Year Without Pants
21 The 100$ startup
22 The Lean Startup
23 The E-Myth Revisited
24 Good to Great
25 Never eat alone
26 Teach and grow rich
27 The Compound Effect
28 Managing Oneself
29 Working Together

Health:

30 The Ultra Mind Solution
31 The China Study

Marketing:

32 Dotcom Secrets
33 Crush it
34 Ask
35 Invisible Selling Machine
36 Made to Stick
37 The 12-Month Millionare
38 Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook
39 The Thank You Economy
40 Traction
41 Crossing the Casmn
42 Hooked
43 Swtich
44 Made to Stick
45 Pitch Anything

Mindset/Motivation/Growth:

46 Awaken the Giant within
47 Think and Grow Rich
48 7 Habits of highly effective people
49 The One Thing
50 The Magic of Thinking Big
51 Hunting the Shadow
52 Doing the Impossible: The 25 Laws for Doing the Impossible
53 Antifragile
54 Grinding it out
55 Stop saying you’re fine
56 Falling forward
57 Screw it let’s do it
58 The Flinch
59 Social
60 Rich Dad Poor Dad
61 Rich Dad Poor Dad – Cash Flow Quadrant
62 The War of Art
63 Mastery
64 The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level
65 The 6 Pillars of Self-esteem
66 Social
67 12 Weeks in Thailand
68 Re-Create Your Life
69 23 Anti-Procrastination Habits
70 The Willpower Instinct
71 The Power of Habit
72 Life Without Limits
73 Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins
74 The War of Art
75 So Good They Can’t Ignore You
76 The Power of Broke
77 Where Good Ideas Come From
78 Coherence

Others:

79 The Lessons of History
80 The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time
81 Don’t Make Me Think
82 The Wealth and Poverty of Nations

Psychology/Typing:

83 Influence
84 How to win friends and influence people
85 Thinking Fast and Slow
86 Please Understand Me II: Temperament, Character, Intelligence
87 The 16 Personality Types: Profiles, Theory, & Type Development
88 Pre-Suasion
89 The Paradox of Choice
90 The Small Big
91 The Female Brain
92 How to Get People to Do Stuff
93 Nudge
94 Methods of Persuasion
95 The Mind and the Brain
96 The Male Brain
97 Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery
98 My True Type: Clarifying Your Personality Type, Preferences & Functions
99 The INTP

Relationship:

100 The Art of Loving
101 The Game
102 The Way of the Superior Man
103 Attached
104 Sex at Dawn
105 The Physical Game
106 The rational male
107 The Honeymoon Effect
108 Dollars and Sex
109 The 5 Love Languages
110 Models

Spirituality/Conciousness/Philosophy:

111 Seneca shortness of life
112 Osho: Ego
113 The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
114 The Happiness Hypothesis
115 Focus
116 Emotional Intelligence
117 Social Intelligence
118 Happiness
119 Civilization and Its Discontents
120 Osho: Courage
121 To have or to be?
122 From having to being
123 A Guide to The Present Moment
124 Finding Your Element
125 Hardwiring Happiness
126 Flourish
127 The Silva Mind Control Method
128 Die Ebenen des Bewußtseins
129 Osho: Intuition
130 Osho: Meditation
131 The Power of Now
132 The Relaxation Response
133 The Holotropic Breath

System Thinking:

134 The Fifth Discipline
135 Thinking in Systems

New Books:

136 Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work
137 The 33 Strategies of War
138 Expert Secrets
139 Unscrippted
140 Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type
141 Sapien: A brief history of humankind
142 Homo Deus: A brief history of tomorrow
143 Connative Connection
144 Finite and Infinite Games
145 Power vs Force
146 Psycho-Cybernetics
147 Beyond E-Myth
148 The System Mindset
149 Work the system
150 F.U. Money
151 Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You’ve Got
152 Rocket Fuel
153 Trump: Think Big
154 Trump: The Art Of The Deal
155 Scale
156 The Sticking Point Solution
157 Joint Ventures: From Mediocrity to Millions
158 Your First 100 Million
159 Who Moved My Cheese
160 It’s who you know
161 The Advertising Solution
162 The Introverted Entrepreneur

I have been cutting down on reading and focusing more on implementing and taking aciton.

163 The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
164 Hacking Growth
165 Outwitting the Devil
166 Skin in the Game
167 Buy then Build
168 The Sedona Method
169 What to say when you talk to yourself
170 Personal development for smart people
171 The consuming instinct
172 Speaking being
173 Die Furcht vor der Freiheit
174 Joy: The Surrender to the Body and to Life
175 The Way to Vibrant Health
176 Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway
177 The Artist’s Way
178 Atomic Habits
179 How to be a stoic
180 The courage to be disliked
181 The courage to be happy
182 The Manual: What Women Want and How to Give It to Them

Good stuff on youtube:

Strategic Coach: Dan Sullivan
Academy of Ideas

Russel Ackoff (#1)
Russel Ackoff (#2)

Jim Rohn

The E-Myth revisited – Why Most Small Businesses Don’t work and What to Do About it

17.08.2014

This weekend I started working through this excellent book by Michael E. Gerber. I am thinking constantly about starting my own business and already took some steps towards it. I realized that I have to become more conscious about the start-up process and what it means to be an entrepreneur. So far this book transformed my view on my current job and the company I am working at.

Key concepts:

  • You have three rival bosses in your head: The Entrepreneur, the manager and the technician
  • The Entrepreneur is the visionary. He lives in the future, craves control, needs change and sees opportunities.
  • The Manager solidifies the base of operation. He lives in the past, craves order, clings to the status quo and runs after the entrepreneur to clean up his mess.
  • The Technician makes the product. He lives in the present and is happy working on one thing at a time.
  • Gerber delivers a mental framework for looking at a company from the entrepreneurial perspective. It is a top-down approach focusing on the company and how the business has to work, not on the actual products/services produced. First you invision the company in its final stage and then derive the different components. The business is viewed from the customer perspective, what are his problems and how can the business fix these problems. The business is the solution for these problems.
  • The business is a refelction of yourself and a bridge between you and the world. It is your own small world where you dreams can be turned into reality. It can also be seen as a dojo, where you go to train every day to enhance your skills.
  • The Business Develeopment Program, is a 7steps top-down approach to create a clear vision/plan of a company. It starts with the primary goal, asking yourself what you want to achieve for yourself with the company. Basically you ask yourself what your ideal life would look like. Then you form strategic goals (e.g. revenue) which your company has to fulfill in order for you to achieve your primary goal. Futher layers map out the organizational, management, people, marketing and systems strategy.

Cool quotes:

The typical small business owner is only 10% entrepreneur, 20% manager and 70% technician.

It’s easy to spot a business in Infancy – the owner and the business are one and the same thing.

If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business-you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!

Update: 30.12.2017

Life is good now 🙂 I had my entrepreneurial seizure in mid 2015, 1 year after reading this book for the first time and like Gerber talks about in his book, I first used my technical skills to generate money. One year later mid of 2016 I started creating online courses still being mainly in the technician mindset, but it seems that I could finally detach my ego from being the technician and start being more and more the entrepreneur that I am destined to be. I am feeling comfortable now to delegate and outsource work and not doing everything myself, but to rely on ofter experts. I love working on and not in the business. My next development step in 2018 is to successfully implement lead generation and lead conversion systems and to scale up.

Update: 05.03.2019

I haven’t been able to successfully implement leadgen on a big scale in 2018, but I am about to take another swing at in soon. Stay tuned 😉