Summary in 100 words or less
Action over perfection—start small and learn by doing. Success doesn’t come from being the smartest, but from solving real problems for real people. Ask boldly, validate ideas early, and build around existing demand. Build your community by helping one person at a time and sharing your journey. Start your email list early—it’s the only channel you truly own. Don’t guess what works; run small marketing experiments, see what sticks, and double down. Design a business that fits your life, not the other way around. Face your fears, support others, and keep going—because momentum matters more than brilliance.
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Commentary
My Highlights
To live well as an entrepreneur, I just needed to stop thinking so much and go get busy. That meant starting small, starting fast, and not worrying about what I didn't know.
Don't base your happiness or your self-worth on being the smartest, the most successful, the richest. Being so focused on the end results sets you up for a major fall because there's always going to be someone who's smarter, more successful, or richer—and every time you see that you've fallen short, it will eat away at your motivation. Defining yourself by the things you do each day (the process) will get you to where you want to be quicker and more joyfully than measuring yourself against others.
To make that dream come true, you first need to choose your Freedom Number.
The thing is, most people don't ask for what they want. They wish for it. they make "suggestions" and drop hints, they hope. But the simple fact of business is that only by asking do you receive what you want. No ASK? No Get. That applies to every part of life. Seriously, every part.
Intentionally developing your ask muscle is a requirement for entrepreneurial success.
It is deadly to build a business without first verifying that there are paying customers.
The better you understand your target group, the better you can speak to them. The more specifically you can speak to their problems, the better and easier you can sell (or test products).
Great ideas come from being a problem solver. Analyze frustrations in your day, including the things that bother you at home, waste your time on your commute to work, or online.
The crucial first step toward entrepreneurship is to study your own unhappiness and to think of solutions (aka business opportunities) for you to sell.
Your job is not to create demand for something that seems exciting, it's to find existing demand and satisfy it.
Often you can distill your offer down to three parts: Price + Benefit + Time. Strung together, they form an offer sentence. Examples:
- For $25, I will teach you how to save an hour a day on your Mac, in just twenty minutes.
- For $69, I will teach you how to write better in two hours.
- For $10, I will send you a PDF with ten mind hacks that will change the way you think in ten minutes.
- For $180, I will provide six moths of tasty jerky to your office this week.
A simple four-question script that flips the no into new knowledge, new ideas, and maybe even new customers:
- Why not?
- Who is one person you know who would really like this?
- What would make this a no-brainer for you?
- What would you pay for that?
A community who already knows you, who follows you, who is rooting for you is one of the most powerful forces in business, and it's created through generosity.
The goal here is to document what you do, not what you think everyone else should do. When you position yourself as someone who is on a journey and document your process and your progress, you become relatable, and that is what audiences long for.
Email is the most valuable channel because it allows you to own the distribution and the communication with your customers, and not be at the mercy of another platform's fickle algorithm.
Whatever you put yourself to, do it 100 times before you even think of stopping. This stops you from succumbing to what Seth Godin calls "the dip," the moment in a long slog between starting and when mastery sets in where you start hating the work and you want to quit.
Before you paddle quickly in the wrong direction, we must quickly try different marketing experiments to figure out which ones we can double down on.
You never know what's going to work when it comes to marketing. To find the thing that does work, what you need is a process of small experiments—based on your best guess of what might work. It's all about prioritizing tactics and ruthlessly testing them!
In a job, you must accept the system you are in. As an entrepreneur, you get to design your own system. The challenge of your business—and your life—is designing a system that optimizes for your overall happiness.
Entrepreneurship is your chance to build your work around your life, not be swallowed up by it.
Great entrepreneurs have great entrepreneurial communities. There's no such thing as self-made. Everyone is team-made.
I always make an effort to connect with ambitious people before they make it. It's so much easier to connect with them, help each other, and build actual relationships.
