Schwartz, CEO of the Energy Project, stretches an obvious thesis to the breaking point in his plaint on how the American workplace—theoretically where technology has allowed us to reach for more, bigger, faster—has bred an atmosphere in which workers have become disengaged from their work. We fail to take care of ourselves, he points out, and end up undermining our health, happiness, and productivity.

Of course, because I’m obsessed with sleep and how little we care about doing it well, despite it’s importance, I really keyed in on the sleep chapter. It is probably the single best thing I’ve read on the perils of lack of sleep. Here are some of my favorite quotes arranged into a more readable excerpt:

The consequences [of lack of sleep] include extreme fatigue, compromised cognitive capacity, emotional instability, lower productivity, and greater susceptibility to illness. No single behavior, we’ve come to believe, more fundamentally influences our effectiveness in waking life than sleep.

Nonetheless, sleep is also one of the first behaviors many of us are willing to sacrifice, on the mistaken assumption that doing so will allow us to be more productive. “We all think we have to stay awake to get more done,” says Matthew Walker, the director of the sleep and neuroimaging lab at UC Berkeley. “I think that’s simply not true. In fact, if you have a good night’s sleep, what you’ll find is that you can get more done than if you simply stay awake.”

So how much sleep do we need? The National Sleep Foundation recommends between seven and nine hours. Precious few of us can function well on much less. As Thomas Roth of the Henry Ford Sleep Disorders and Research Center says, “The percentage of the population who need less than five hours of sleep per night, rounded to a whole number, is zero.”

Based on their own estimates, Americans average only 6.5 hours of sleep per night. Even that may be overstated. In a study led by Diane Lauderdale at the University of Chicago, 669 middle-aged adults reported that they slept an average of 7.5 hours a night. But they also wore wrist monitors that allowed the researchers to determine precisely when they actually fell asleep. The average turned out to be 6.1 hours.

People who are sleep-deprived often don’t recognize their own limitations. “It’s convenient to say, ‘I’ve learned to live without sleep,’” explains David Dinges, a sleep researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. “But you bring them into the laboratory and we don’t see this adaptation.” Charles Czeisler, another renowned sleep researcher and chronobiologist at Harvard Medical School, puts it more bluntly: “Like a drunk, a person who is sleep-deprived has no idea how functionally impaired he or she truly is. Most of us have forgotten what it really feels like to be awake.”

Two recent studies of athletes at Stanford University suggest a powerful correlation between sleep time and performance. In one study, members of the swim team maintained their usual sleep-waking pattern for two weeks and then increased to ten hours of sleep a day for six to seven weeks. Once they were sleeping longer hours, they began to report higher energy and improved mood. They also significantly improved their quickness off the starting block, as well as their turn times, sprint times, and kick-stroke rate.

In Dream On: Sleep in the 24/7 Society, Charles Leadbeater summed up the costs this way: “Lack of sleep makes us more inefficient at work and more dangerous behind the wheel of a car. It undermines the quality of our lives and makes us more vulnerable to illness. It is also responsible for making us less able to respond creatively to problems and opportunities, and less original, flexible and divergent in our thinking and thus less likely to generate new ideas.”

Several studies have shown that immune response drops significantly among people who sleep less than seven to eight hours a night. Eve Van Cauter, a University of Chicago sleep researcher, found that subjects who slept four hours a night for six consecutive nights demonstrated not only a lower immune response but also diminished ability to regulate blood sugar, a risk factor for diabetes, and unusually high levels of circulating cortisol, a risk factor for high blood pressure. Among Van Cauter’s most significant findings was that sleep deprivation dramatically lowers levels of leptin, the hormone that signals satiety, and helps us control how much we eat.

Subjects sleeping four hours a night for six nights produced 18 percent less leptin than those sleeping seven to eight hours. This finding, Van Cauter and others believe, goes a long way toward explaining the connection between obesity and sleep patterns. For example, a study of nearly 10,000 people found that subjects who slept five or fewer hours a night were 60 percent more likely to be obese than those who slept seven hours or more.

The Harvard Nurses’ Health Study, which followed nearly 80,000 nurses over twenty-five years, uncovered a strong link between chronic sleep deprivation and increased risk of a range of diseases, including breast cancer, colon cancer, and coronary heart disease. Nurses who averaged five hours of sleep a night, for example, were significantly more likely to develop heart disease than those who got six hours. They, in turn, were at greater risk than those who slept seven hours a night.

At the cognitive level, we don’t think well when we’re tired. David Dinges found that subjects who slept less than six hours a night over a two-week period demonstrated a decrease in performance that was equivalent to that experienced after forty-eight continuous hours of sleep deprivation. More striking still, Harvard’s Charles Czeisler found that averaging four hours a sleep for five consecutive nights has an impact on our memory, attention, and speed of thinking that is equivalent to being legally intoxicated.

Wow, if that last paragraph doesn’t get you to think seriously about your sleep schedule, I don’t know what will.

Last week 37signals released Rework, their awesome new business book. I’ve long been a fan of theirs – I subscribe to their blog, follow David and Jason on Twitter, watch videos of their presentations at conferences, subscribe to their podcast, and have read their self-published web app book Getting Real many times over.

I don’t always agree with the way they do things – just last week I wrote about how our development process differs from theirs – but I really just love their authenticity. Their core business values align with mine. They preach self-funding your business, starting as fast as possible, creating a product that solves your own problems, etc etc. And I have a great deal of respect for how blunt they are with their opinions. They aren’t cocky (at least in my opinion), but they do say what they believe and don’t apologize for it.

The book itself quickly climbed into the Top 10 on Amazon. I had pre-ordered my copy several months before the holidays and was anxiously awaiting it’s arrival. It showed up Wednesday. I didn’t have a chance to pick it up until Friday night. By Saturday afternoon it was done, total reading time only ~1-2 hours. They do an amazing job of getting their point across without any fluff (which aligns with how they build their software). The book is comprised of short 1-3 page essays totaling just under 300 pages, each with original artwork from Mike Rohde. You can read a few of the sample essays to wet your appetite over on Tim Ferriss’ blog.

Having been a fan of 37signals for so long, I wasn’t sure if there would be anything “new” for me in the book. While I had heard many of the stories before, there were several essays that really got me thinking. Many of which were very timely for me, considering we’re working up to the launch of LockerPulse in a few months. The one that really hit home was in the Promotion section on page 173, Out-teach your competition. An excerpt:

Instead of trying to outspend, outsell, or outsponsor competitors, try to out-teach them. Teaching probably isn’t something your competitors are even thinking about. Most businesses focus on selling or servicing, but teaching never even occurs to them. Teach and you’ll form a bond you just don’t get from traditional marketing tactics. Buying people’s attention with a magazine or online banner ad is one thing. Earning their loyalty by teaching them forms a whole different connection. They’ll trust you more. They’ll respect you more. Even if they don’t use your product, they can still be your fans. Teaching is something that individuals and small companies can do that bigger competitors can’t. Big companies can afford a Super Bowl ad; you can’t. But you can afford to teach, and that’s something they’ll never do, because big companies are obsessed with secrecy.

That really hit home. Detailed Image is successful in large part because we teach people how to become great detailers with our content, our email customer service, and with our interaction on forum communities. SportsLizard is successful because it teaches people how to value their collectibles, including pointing out all of the scams out there and how to avoid them. Hopefully, this blog helps our business because I can get a little transparent and share with everyone what works for us and what doesn’t. That’s something we’ll have to keep in mind with LockerPulse and all future ventures – teaching is where small guys like us can get a real competitive advantage.

Anyway, I’m a bit of a fanboy but I really loved the book. I’d recommend it to anyone, but I’d say it’s a must read for anyone in web business. Most definitely something I’ll pick up and re-read often.

A few months ago I received a request to review a new book.  For the most part, I’ve stopped accepting books to review, but this one was different.  Not only did the author himself email me (as opposed to the typical PR firm), but the topic was actually pretty interesting and something that I haven’t seen covered previously:  assuming you work 8 hours and sleep another 8, the premise of the book is that a large part of your success and happiness come from (or don’t come from) the other 8 hours in the day.  Hence, The Other 8 Hours: Maximize Your Free Time to Create New Wealth and Purpose by Robert Pagliarini.

Let’s get this out of the way first:  I’m not the target market for this book.  I can, however, empathize with the intended audience.  In college or during my short engineering career, I would have been.  This book is for the person who is stuck in a rut – either because they don’t have enough time or money or a satisfying job – and wants to change things.  Pagliarini has a financial services background, which I think puts an interesting twist on the book because he talks with knowledge about traditional financial planning and how it fails.

One of my favorite parts was early on where he lists 24 “lifeleeches” – things that waste time and suck the life out of you (TV, gossip, porn, etc). Then it actually gets pretty in depth on how to start your own part time business…if that’s how you choose to spend your other 8 hours.  Overall the book is a really good supplement/compliment to The Four Hour Workweek.  I’d read both around the same time in life – you’re sure you don’t want to work your current job and that you kind of want to start a business, but don’t know where to get started.

Anyway, for me, the measure of any book is whether or not I learned something.  There are two really interesting concepts that I picked up from this book.

Boosting

I’ve always suggested getting a non career job to fund your first business.  I usually suggested something simple that can be done on off hours, like bartending. However, this book takes it another level and advocates getting a “boost job where you get paid to show up and do absolutely nothing”.  It has to be:

• Brainless and action-less
• Accommodate your schedule
• Flexible hours
• Pays $8 – $15 per hour
• Is close to home
• Has internet access

Sounds great right?  I’m sure you’re thinking what I was thinking:  how many jobs like this actually exist?  More than I suspected:

• Babysitting
• Security guard
• Dispatch operator
• Computer lab attendant
• Toll-booth attendant
• Gym front desk clerk
• Kiosk worker
• Hotel front desk clerk
• If you’re in college, almost all work-study jobs (this one is mine…at least where I went to school all work-study jobs were brainless and paid $10/hr+)

These jobs are perfect because you get paid AND have time to work on starting a business or learning a new skill.

Chunking

Chunking is the correct way to “multitask”.  Multitasking as most people do it (you know, IM + text messaging + email + trying to work or study) doesn’t work because you’re using your brain to try to do several things at once.  You jump back and forth and get far less done than you would with a singular focus.  Chunking is different – you’re doing two things at once but one is using your brain and one is using your body.  For example, my new habit of listening to podcasts while I drive combines my brain (listening) with my body (driving), and it works.  I never really thought of it this way, but this is something that all successful people I know do well. They don’t waste time.

The book recommends making a list of things you do where you feel like you have dead time (taking out the garbage, cooking, jogging, riding the train, etc) and then make a list of all the things you want to do more (learn a new language, talk to your friends, etc).  Then look for opportunities to pair a head activity with a body activity.  A few examples from the book:

• Learn a language or listen to audio books while exercising
• Go for walks when talking on the phone
• Have meetings while going for a hike
• Keep a book/iPhone/Kindle handy for whenever you have down-time at the doctors office, on public transportation, or while your car is getting serviced.

You get the idea.  The possibilities are limitless.  I just like how Pagliarini made the connection.  There’s really no reason not to chunk your time like this.

I’ve always wondered if I could take it a step further and do my morning email check and day to day tasks while exercising.  I see these people who build laptop trays on their treadmills and bikes.  Imagine starting every day with an hour long brisk walk on a treadmill while you bang out your email.  I certainly couldn’t/wouldn’t program this way, but I think it’s possible to get a good set up where you can read the news and answer email.  It wouldn’t replace any exercise I currently do, but it’d be a great supplement.  I always want to be more active.  It probably won’t happen until I have a more permanent living space, plus can justify the spending on a decent secondary laptop and a nice treadmill.  But it’s kind of always been on my mind and this just re-emphasized how good of an idea that could be for me.

I’ve had a cold the past few days. I’ve only been able to mentally handle a few hours of work per day. I’ve been spending a lot of time sleeping, reading and watching TV (and by TV I mean a little Hulu, some DVDs, and Sports Center).

Lucky for me I’ve been enamored with a new book. More precisely, a free eBook entitled What Matters Now. The book was organized by marketing extraordinaire Seth Godin and can be downloaded on his blog.  The book is a collection of 70 essays from some of the very best entrepreneurial minds. The essays are concise, elegant, and thought provoking.  I highly recommend taking the time to download it and work your way through the essays.

I was shocked to see the list of writers. There were an unbelievable amount of my favorite entrepreneurs, bloggers, and authors. Among the names that stood out to me:  Jessica Hagy, Chris Anderson, Alan Webber, Tony Hsieh, Guy Kawasaki, Gary Vaynerchuk, Chip and Dan Heath, Fred Wilson, Aaron Wall, Gina Trapani, Ramit Sethi, Merlin Mann, Penelope Trunk, Jason Fried, Arianna Huffington, Tim O’Reilly, and of course Godin himself.  It’s a freaking all-star cast.

When I first saw that list I didn’t believe it.  How did he organize this?  It’s seemingly impossible.  A few years ago it probably would have been impossible.  In 2009 though, the very best minds are willing to take time out of their super busy schedules to be a part of something special like this.  Each one of these people truly value giving some of their expertise away for free – no strings attached.  They got nothing more than a link back to their blog, which also gives away free information.

The collaborative environment that we are living in right now is fascinating to me.  It’s awesome.

And for what it’s worth, my favorite essay was called Enrichment (page 16) by Rajesh Setty – a entrepreneur, investor, author, and speaker that I had not previously heard of.

Most people won’t put in the time to get a knowledge advantage. Sure, there were folks that worked hard at picking up every bit of information that they could, but we were few and far between. To this day, I feel like if I put in enough time consuming all the information available, particularly with the net making it so readily available, I can get an advantage in any technology business. Of course my wife hates that I read more than 3 hours almost every day, but it gives me a level of comfort and confidence in my businesses. AT MicroSolutions it gave me a huge advantage. A guy with little computer background could compete with far more experienced guys just because I put in the time to learn all I could.

But I’m very selective with what I read. If it sucks, if I’m not learning from it, I put it down. That’s how I judge any book/magazine/blog – did I learn something?

When it comes to blogs, if it goes a few weeks without me gaining anything from it, I delete it from my Google Reader. Two or three bad issues of a magazine and it’s done in my book (Entrepreneur magazine is one that I ditched a while back). If a book just isn’t what I expected it to be, and it’s clear it isn’t getting better, I put it down and move on to another one.

Sort of an updated version of the What I Read post from almost two years ago, here’s a list of the work related blogs, magazines, and books that I currently read. Meaning that I consistently find value in their content. I obviously don’t reread the books in their entirety on a regular basis, but I do find myself constantly referring back to them, so I consider them “must reads” for aspiring entrepreneurs.

(I read a lot more blogs that aren’t listed here, many of which are sports related or fitness related or are blogs written by my friends/family)

Tech Blogs

• Lifehacker
• ReadWriteWeb
• Smarterware
• TechCrunch
• WebWorkerDaily
• SEOmoz SEO Blog
• Get Elastic

Entrepreneur’s Blogs

• BlogMaverick (Mark Cuban)
• GuruGilbert (Adam Gilbert)
• Ma.tt (Matt Mullenweg)
• Nevblog (Neville Medhora)
• Four Hour Workweek (Tim Ferriss)
• Musings of a B-School Professor of Entrepreneurship (Dr. Bill Wales)
• Signals vs. Noise
• Corporatepreneur

Magazines

• Inc.
• Fast Company
• Wired
• Fortune Small Business

Books

• The 4-Hour Workweek – by Tim Ferriss
• Good to Great – by Jim Collins
• The E-Myth Revisited – by Michael E. Gerber
• Getting Real – by 37 Signals
• The Millionaire Next Door – by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko
• All of my programming books

What about you guys?  What are your must read business blogs, magazines, and books?

A while back I reviewed Internet Riches, Scott Fox’s first book.  e-Riches 2.0: Next Generation Marketing Strategies for Making Millions Online is his most recent.  With a strong focus on modern web 2.0 marketing tactics, this book has a much broader appeal than just first-time web entrepreneurs (although Scott has a great way of explaining things so that even the least web-savvy can still understand).  Just a sampling of the topics:

• Email marketing
• RSS marketing
• Social media/social network marketing
• Blogging as a marketing tool
• Twitter marketing
• Web PR marketing
• Video marketing
• Podcasts
• Webinars
• PPC
• Affiliate marketing

It’s a surprisingly exhaustive list of topics, which is what gives the books an almost universal appeal. In particular, I found a few parts very interesting/helpful:

• There is a section on feed driven email, which I find to be an under-discussed topic.  The fact that you can use any RSS feed (most likely published in blog form, but it could also be a Twitter feed or YouTube video feed or millions of other possibilities) and have it automatically converted into a newsletter and sent out is a powerful thing.  Especially considering that services like Feedburner and Feedblitz do it for free.  No cost, no load on your server, and no worries about “whitelisting” your email server with all the different mail services (something we spend a lot of time doing with Detailed Image).  I have an upcoming project that’s going to rely heavily on this model.
• The Facebook/Twitter marketing sections I found to be interesting.  Nothing earth shattering, but we’re planning to launch a big social networking campaign for DI in a few weeks (more to come) so it was good to have our strategy validated by someone else.  Scott definitely has a solid approach to getting the most out of social networking.
• Regarding social bookmarking sites (Digg, Reddit, etc): “If you have extra time or staff to try to participate, social bookmarking sites can be useful for marketing purposes.  They can send a load of traffic to your website.  Unfortunately, the visitors that such rankings bring to our website are often semi-professional web surfers.”  Couldn’t agree more.  Digg users will crash your server and then move on to one of the other 250 sites they’ll visit and leave that day.  You have to have something REALLY unique for social bookmarking to work…in which case it’ll happen anyway without you spending time trying to game the Digg scoring system.
• The book introduced me to HARO (help a reporter out), a great PR tactic that I’ve never tried much of:  become a quote source (help the reporter) instead of just spamming out press releases.  Developing a relationship with a reporter is much easier/better that way.  If and when you do have something newsworthy, you’ll have a real contact to email.

Bottom Line – who should read it and who shouldn’t?

If you’re approaching web marketing for the first time, I’d say this book is well worth your money. This includes both first time business owners and also long time entrepreneurs who are just getting started on the web. Scott has a very good perception of what is worth your time and what isn’t, and everything is geared toward the individual starting a business without a ton of money to spend.

Unless you’re an online marketing expert that does this stuff all day long (I’m not), the book is definitely worth a skim read. Like I did, you’ll probably pick up a handful of very helpful pointers that will make your time/money investment well worth it.

I’ve definitely slowed up on reading business books, but Young Guns: The Fearless Entrepreneur’s Guide to Chasing Your Dreams and Breaking Out on Your Own by Robert Tuchman really caught my eye because it was geared towards young entrepreneurs. I breezed my way through it in about two nights, which is often the sign of a good book (I’m not afraid to put a book down that sucks and never pick it up again…why waste your time right?).

I think there are two types of books you should read before diving in to starting a business: at least one general business “how to” book that talks about the legalities of running a business, choosing partners, etc and sort of acts as a checklist of things to do so that you don’t miss anything important, and at least one “mental” book that attempts to prepare you for the grind ahead. Barry Moltz’s books are perfect examples, and so is this one.

Tuchman (who graduated college in 1993 and is roughly 37) , is the founder and president of Premiere Corporate Events, a company that provides premium sports related corporate outings (such as trips to the Super Bowl or athlete appearances).  He started his company in 1996, only a few years after college, which is something I can certainly relate to.

By all measures he’s had a ton of success, but that doesn’t mean that it was always easy. He does a great job of telling it like it is.  He tells the story of how a ticket broker broke contract on Super Bowl tickets just days before the event and cost his company $300,000 to ensure his clients all still got tickets, all that they had in the bank at the time. Which leads me to my favorite part of the book about your “gut check moment”. Tuchman writes:

I don’t know anything about you.  I don’t know anything about your business idea.  And I don’t know anything about the customers you are trying to reach.  But I definitely know this:  There will be a “gut-check moment” early on in the life of your business, and if you don’t know why you are doing what you are doing, you will make the wrong move and you will miss out on an opportunity.

The real point at which you start your company doesn’t happen when you give it a name or sign some legal papers.  The real moment comes when you know why your business is worth taking a “punch to the gut” for – and you act on that knowledge.

When I think back, I’ve had several “gut check moments”.   About 10 months after quitting my job, when iPrioritize and SportsLizard were growing but not making any money and I had to decide whether to get a job or not, I decided not to because I believed in my ability to build a successful business.  In early 2008 when we moved into the warehouse and launched Tastefully Driven all within a few months, we had to take no salary for a few months to fund the expansion.  During those same months, we also fired our accountant just before taxes were due, had our server crash during our peak season, and cut a major revenue stream when we stopped doing client work.

But it’s all worth it if you believe in yourself and what you’re doing.  I never had a doubt in my mind that our team couldn’t get to where we are today.  At times, I wondered why things had to be so hard, but over time you come to realize that it’s hard for everyone starting  a business and that anyone who tells you otherwise is full of shit.

There are plenty of other great topics covered in the book: why it’s an advantage to be single when starting your business, why it’s important that your business helps others, why all you need is a one page business plan, why you should fund your start-up yourself, and many more.

Should you read this book? If you’re considering starting a business, this book will make you think about whether or not this is a career path you want to take. There’s no fluff in here, nor does he embellish his points – from my experiences everything he talks about is true. Personally, I’ve already settled into being a business owner. It’s a very normal thing to me because it’s what I do. This book really re-energized me and made me remember just how cool it is to start your own company and just how lucky my partners and I are.

(Oh, and also, it doesn’t hurt your credibility either to have endorsements from Clyde Fraizer, Bill Walton, and freaking Mike Eruzione on the back cover!)

In my quest to become healthy, happy, and productive, I’ve become fascinated with sleep over the past few years.   I always exercise regularly and for the most part I eat very healthy, but a good nights sleep eluded me for a long time.  The problem started in high school where I routinely got less sleep than I needed, and then just sort of continued into college and the workforce.  Like most of us, being sleep deprived became the norm.

However, since I started working for myself a few years back I’ve been able to experiment with what makes me operate at my best.   On 1/1/2008 I became an early riser.  It wasn’t easy, but I’ve become much more productive hitting the ground running at 6 AM as opposed to starting lethargically at 8:30 or 9.

But there was a problem.  The trouble started in the spring when the Detroit Red Wings – my favorite hockey team – won the Stanley Cup.  For two straight months I was up until midnight watching games and it often took me an hour or two to wind down after a game.  I began napping during the day to make up for the lost sleep, but for the most part I was lethargic all of the time.

After the finals were over, I was happy to try to get back on my 10 PM – 6 AM sleep schedule.  While in theory it worked well, I felt like it wasn’t realistic to always have to sleep those same 8 hours.  Sometimes I need more sleep than just 8 hours.  Sometimes I’m out late and only get 6 hours of sleep.  I needed a way to nap productively.

So based on a recommendation from Lifehacker, I picked up Take a Nap! Change Your Life. By Dr. Sara Mednick, the leading nap researcher in the world.  I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to be more productive, whether you think you sleep good or not.  Napping tends to get a bad name and is associated with “lazy” people, but it’s really the opposite.  Among other things, here are the key things I learned from the book:

• Studies have shown that people are naturally biphasic sleepers, meaning that people prefer to sleep twice per 24 hour day.  In a laboratory setting, people tend to sleep 8 hours at night and then take a short nap during the afternoon.  This is consistent with siesta’s that were common in all cultures until about 100 years ago.
• The benefits from just a 20 minute nap are HUGE. Short naps give you a dose of Stage 2 sleep, which drastically improves alterness and motor skills, much more so than a cup of coffee does.
• Along those lines, all naps are beneficial, whether 5 minutes or 2 hours.  If you happen to wake up during Stage 3 or 4, you’re likely to feel a bit lethargic.  This doesn’t mean the sleep didn’t help.  A splash of water to the face or a small dose of caffeine should take care of it.
• Your body spends more time in different sleep stages depending on what time of day you nap, giving you different benefits.  (see Dr. Mednick’s nap wheel).
• Naps don’t hurt your night time sleep.  In fact, people who nap regularly have an easier time sleeping at night.

However, the most important thing that this book taught me was that it’s OK to nap.  And not only is it OK, it’s very beneficial for your health and productivity.  That got rid of the mental block I had that napping was somehow lazy or unproductive.  The book also gets into how to get rid of the “nap stigma” at work/school so you can work napping into your lifestyle (something rather easy for me).

Armed with this information, I’ve been able to tweak my sleep schedule so it works for me.   For the most part I’ve never been productive in mid-afternoon, so I’ve begun working a daily nap into my schedule between 2 PM and 5 PM, depending on how my schedule shakes up for the day.  If I got my 8 hours of sleep the night before, I take a 20 minute nap to refresh myself.  If I didn’t get enough sleep, I try to sleep a full sleep cycle (roughly an hour and a half).  It takes me about 10 minutes to fall asleep, so I factor that in when setting my alarm.

If you don’t have time to read the book, I definitely recommend watching Dr. Mednick’s presentation she gave to Google employees last year:

So, exactly one year later, I no longer feel like I’m going through life sleep deprived.  I feel like I’ve laid the groundwork for a lifetime of healthy sleep.  This was one of the hardest things I’ve ever accomplished, primarily because old bad habits are really really hard to break.  I’d imagine it’s much the same way that procrastinators have a hard time getting on top of their work, or that sedentary people have a hard time sticking to a new exercise routine.

It was a good lesson for me because things usually come pretty easy to me.  Sometimes things that come naturally to other people are hard for you.  That doesn’t mean you can’t make changes in your life that you want to make, provided you’re willing to put the work in, make a few sacrifices (like giving up going out on the weekends until 4 AM in my case) and don’t give up easily.

I thought all four were very intriguing in their own right.  Each is a completely different flavor, but you can’t go wrong picking up and reading any of these books.  So if you need a good book to read this Fall, I suggest any of the four below.  You probably just don’t want to pick up and read all four at once

The Accidental Entrepreneur – by Susan Urquhart-Brown

What it is: written by a business owner and business coach, this book is a short, readable guide that covers the entire spectrum of knowledge needed to start a business.  Questions to ask yourself before you start a business, traits of successful entrepreneurs, how to structure your business, marketing, motivation, and more are all covered with very solid information.  The short chapters make it a very quick read relative to the amount of information in it.

Interesting thing I learned: The one page business plan, page 59.  I’ve long been a fan of ultra-short business plans (unless of course you’re raising money).  The author recommends five components:  vision, mission, objectives, strategies, and action plans.  I will definitely be using this model in the future.

Who should read it: anyone thinking about going into business, or anyone who has just started a business.  I think I may start recommending this book over the now slightly outdated big blue book as a go-to guide for everything for new business owners.

Who should skip it: anyone who has been running a business for a while.  If you’ve been at it a few years like I have, you’ve already tackled most of the important things covered in this book.

Finding the Sweet Spot – by Dave Pollard

What it is: a guide to finding meaningful work where “your gift, your passion, and your meaning” intersect.  The book takes you through a six step process:  identifying your gift, passion and purpose, finding the right partners, researching unmet needs, imagining and innovating solutions, continuously improving, and acting responsibly on principle.

Interesting thing I learned: I find the companies profiled in the book – dubbed “natural enterprises” by the author to be especially fascinating.  Mostly because we sort of fit the bill without realizing it.  These companies aren’t measured in terms of short term revenue growth and ROI (as almost any company with investors is), rather they create their own form of measurement.  It’s nice to see other companies out there like this.  Revenue is surely important to us, but so is creating a flexible work environment, providing stable jobs, giving back to the community, etc.

Who should read it: anyone struggling to figure out what they want to do as a career.

Who should skip it: anyone who loves what they do and isn’t looking to change.

Prepare for the Worst, Plan for the Best – by Donna Childs

What it is: a book about disaster planning for small businesses.  I have never seen a book (or really even read an article) on the topic, so this book piqued my interest as soon as I heard about it.  The book covers IT strategy, how to handle natural disasters, how to protect workers and their families, and the best way to ensure your insurance policies minimize damage.

Interesting thing I learned: the shear volume of information on IT data disaster planning, which is clearly the most potentially devastating to us and most likely to strike us at any moment.  I think we do a good job, but the book has over 30 pages about human error, equipment failure, third party failure, environmental hazards, fire and other disasters, terrorism and sabotage, and more, all with in depth advice on what to do and how to do it.  I now have it on my to-do list to revisit all of our data security and backup plans.

Who should read it: anyone who owns a business or is responsible for disaster planning.

Who should skip it: anyone who doesn’t own a business or isn’t responsible for disaster planning.

The Age Curve – by Kenneth Gronbach

What it is: “Why generation size matters to marketers”.  The book breaks down five age demographics and goes in depth on how businesses are impacted by the size and buying patterns of each.

Interesting thing I learned: Gen Xers have been unfairly branded as unresponsive consumers and “slackers” in relation to their parents, but in reality there are simply just fewer Gen Xers than Baby Boomers by 11%.  That difference is what accounts for the significant difference in spending.

Who should read it: anyone interested in business and the future of business, especially if you are developing a product or service targeted at a specific age demographic.

Who should skip it: business owners pressed for time who only want to read books that directly impact them.

Back in 2006 when I reviewed Barry Moltz’s first book, You Need to Be a Little Crazy: The Truth About Starting and Growing Your Busines, I said the following:

I often say how much I love unique blogs. Well, the same goes for books. Most entrepreneurial books paint pretty pictures of the fantasy land of running a business, which we all know is far from the truth. When I was handed a copy of You Need to Be a Little Crazy: The Truth About Starting and Growing Your Business by Barry Moltz, I could tell that it wasn’t going to be one of those “typical” rah-rah books.

It certainly was one of the more unique books I’ve encountered when it comes to business and entrepreneurship, which is probably why I’ve revisited it several times since that review.   When I learned that he had a new book coming out, I was excited to get my hands on an early copy to read and review.  Unfortunately I was backed up by a few books and it took me longer to get to it than I wanted to.  Once I did however, it definitely didn’t disappoint.

The easiest way to explain what bounce! is all about is from the description on his website: “Conventional business wisdom tells us that there is always something to learn from failure. Not true—sometimes it just stinks! Failure that offers no real learning value becomes a big jolt to the basic business belief system. Both success and failure are simply outcomes in the lifecycle of business where repetition is inevitable and overall process matters far more than any single event or outcome.”

The book is an in depth overview of what Moltz calls the “Ten Building Bands for True Business Confidence”.  There were a few that really struck a chord as important for first time business owners.  If you haven’t figured it out already, you’re going to fail…a lot.  You can either go into an emotional rollercoaster each time something doesn’t go right (in which case you’ll probably drive yourself insane) or you can deal with it using Moltz’s “bands” as the foundation for dealing with failure.

My favorites:

• “In failure, give up the shame.  Grieve failures and wallow if you need to, but let go rather than absorb shame, and deflect shame coming at you from others.  Find new words to define a poor outcome”.   The first time you fail at something, you’ll get a lot of “I told you so’s” from people.  Maybe they won’t say it directly, but you’ll get that feeling from people.  Who cares.  Call it a learning experience and move on.  YOU aren’t a failure because something you did failed.
• “Failure Gives a Choice.  It provides an escape hatch to find a different choice.”  Totally overlooked, but huge in my book.  Use failure to pursue new and (hopefully) better opportunities rather than hanging on too long and making yourself miserable.  Long time readers of this blog have seen me do this on several occassions.
• “More effective risk taking.  Improve your decision making by examining the risks.  Take only the risks that you want, and avoide the ones that could prove fatal”.  Another overlooked one in my book.  Sure, I’ve taken a lot of risks, but in every instance I’ve been able to accept the possibility of failure and the situation that failure would leave me in.  If you aren’t comfortable with where you’ll be after failing, don’t jump…or better yet, find a way to take a more calculated and less risky jump.   Perfect example:  you want to start a fitness company.  You could either bankrupt yourself trying to open a gym or start with personal training services, an online store, and a blog.  Both can make you money, but only the former can leave you broke.  The web has made it possible to almost eliminate all upfront risk with a venture.  You can almost always prove your business model for less than $1k prior to investing more.
• “Process trumps outcome.  We are too focused on the binary outcome:  success or failure.  Business is all about cycles, and we need to focus on the process more than the outcome for better decision making that will improve our chance of success.”  There are a few different ways I interepret this, but this chapter really got me thinking about why I really am a business owner.  At the end of the day, the money is to help me live, not to make me happy.  Our company stock is nice, but I don’t do it for that either.  You could take that away from me and I’d still love the process.  I love the experience of being a business owner.  It’s fun, fufilling, and rewarding.  I think that helps me make better decisions because I don’t worry about how “rich” I am.  No decision is really fatal as long as I can continue to have the awesome experience of running a company.
• “A measurement system of our own.  Money doesn’t buy happiness.  With what, besides money, will you measure your success.”  Doing something I love, making a positive impact on the world, and doing it with people I love is more important to me than being rich.  If being rich is a by product of that, so be it.  If not, I’ll be happy as long as I can pay the bills.
• “Value action.  Stop reading this book and see what comes next.”  Love this one.  Reading is important, but action is more important.  Make sure you’re portioning your time accordingly.

Like his previous book, what makes this book great is that it makes you think.  It’s not a pain-free read.  And what I mean by that is that you’ll find yourself deep in thought while reading it.  I’d imagine if you read this prior to starting a business, you’d be seriously asking yourself if the entrepreneurial lifestyle is something you truly want to do.   I spent about half of the book nodding my head and thinking “that’s exactly what it’s like but I’ve never seen it verbalized in quite this way” and the other half wondering why running a business hasn’t destroyed my health and personal life like it does to many of the people profiled.

The best answer that I can come up with is that this book made me realize that I naturally deal with failure very well.  We’ve already been through so much.  We’ve grown our revenue to a point where I don’t think many small businesses ever get.  So I don’t think I can really say that it’s because I haven’t been a business owner long enough or haven’t dealt with enough failure or haven’t had a large enough company.  When I really thought about it I sort of realized that I make decisions quickly, learn from failure if there’s something to learn from it, then move on.  Sometimes there’s really nothing to learn – failure was due to total shit luck or variables that were impossible to account for.   I tend to shrug my shoulders and move on.  I’ve never lost a night’s worth of sleep over a failure.  As a team, we tend to have a meeting, come up with a plan, and move on.  Failure generally doesn’t linger because we’re already too busy pushing towards something new.  I never really thought about it until now, but this is probably the reason that I’m still running a business and didn’t flame out after a few months of leaving my job.

Oh – I also don’t want to forget to personally thank Mr. Moltz.  He and I have exchanged several emails regarding the book.  I’ve read and reviewed quite a few books, and it’s rare to have anyone beyond a publicist contact you.  In addition to being easy to contact, he’s also been very patient with me.  This book and this review took longer than they should have due to my busier than normal schedule lately.   Oh, and he also autographed the inside cover and wrote me a short personal message. I’m sure he does it for everyone, but it still makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside nonetheless.

The book flows great, cites solid resources, uses a ton of great real-life examples, and contains a lot of material that’s very motivating.  But don’t read it for that reason – read it because it really makes you think.  Books like bounce! and authors like Moltz are few and far between.