Confessions of a Serial Entrepeneur by Stuart Skorman

A large ego is not just good for an entrepreneur, its necessary. 

The essence of an entrepreneur is the diehard belief that we are the only ones able to make things happen. 

In business you can't accept the status quo. When something doesn't add up you have to delve deeper in search of an answer.

The more ambitious you are the more help you'll require. (Mentors)

One mistake business owners make is thinking they know best...listen to the audience. Objective market research. 

If you want to earn a living you must be paid by someone who values your services. 

When creating a new business design it to attract publicity from the beginning. The name should elicit strong reactions. 

I knew I could vastly improve the video store status quo. 

A strong brand comes from one person's clear vision. 

Get to know your customers. 

I didn't want to call them, I wanted them to call me. I sought out and landed a cover story in...the nations biggest trade magazine. 

Three rules to business and poker: be aggressive, play tight, hone opportunism.

Amazon.com = buy a sales list from the world's biggest bookstore, put it online, and advertise as the world's biggest bookstore. 

Do's and Don'ts for choosing a business:

Base your decision on logic, not emotion

Stick with the familiar

Prioritize fun

Choose a business within your grasp. A stepping stone.

Enter an established field. 

Know your risk tolerance. 

Focus on short term goals. 

You better have a plan to make a profit. 

You need to foresee potential problems, not just the good things. 

"I'm not sure I have time to take any free classes, but I will shop in the store because of them."

When you start a business you need to focus on profit. Pick a model where helping people is profitable. 

Never ever underestimate technology. 

Seek out business owners with similar likes, dislikes, and lifestyles. 

Buy-ology by Martin Lindstrom

Consumers memory of a product...is the most relevant, reliable measure of an ad's effectiveness.

We have no memory of brands that don't play an integral part in the storyline of a program. Coke and Cingular are interwoven with contestants/judges (American Idol) lives and their day to day, where Ford is "just" commercials. We have no emotional engagement with it. 

Mirror Neurons - they fire when an action is performed and also when that same action is being observed. When we watch someone do something active our brains fire up as if we are performing these activities ourselves. Its as if seeing and doing are one in the same. 

Its unfortunate irony that as a result of government bans, tobacco companies have fast forwarded into the future and moved into alternative media, methods, and mediums as a way to drive their business. In effect, cigarette companies were forced to develop a whole new set of skills. 

Rituals help us form emotional connections with brands and products. They make the things we buy memorable. 

The mere suggestion that a sweater had been worn by a killer makes people shy away. We ascribe similar power to objects such as a lucky coin, wedding rings, and so on. 

Collecting something gives children a sense of mastery, completion, and control; while at the same time raising their self esteem, elevating their status, and just maybe compensating for earlier years of difficulty.

Every religion has ten common pillars underlying its foundations:

- a sense of belonging

- a clear vision 

- power over enemies 

- sensory appeal

- storytelling

- grandeur

-evangelism

- symbols

- mystery

- rituals

So do major successful brands: Apple, Disney, Nike, McDonalds

Somatic Markers: cognitive shortcuts, bookmarks in the brain. Since they are typically associations between two incompatible elements, they are far more memorable and lasting than other associations we form throughout our lives. Which is why advertisers aim to create surprising or shocking associations between two wildly disparate things. 

Fear...spreads faster than anything else. 

Sensory Branding: smell and sound are substantially more potent than anyone had ever dreamed of. 

Controversy - even more than sex - sells. 

Sex in advertising is all about fulfillment; about planting dreams inside consumers' brains. 

When fear based advertising plays less on our generalized anxieties and more on our insecurities about ourselves, it can be one of the most persuasive and memorable types of advertising out there. 

Rules for Revolutionaries by Guy Kawasaki

Great leaders are paradoxical. They catalyze, rather than control, the work of their teams. 

A good starting point for revolutionaries is to find fault with existing products or services and do something BIG to change them.

Sometimes you have to "hear" what people would say of only they knew better.

The most basic rule of product development: design what you would like to use. 

Is the new product or service as big of a leap as: banana leaves to plastic bags; slide rules to calculators; MSDOS to Macintosh; Caterpillar to Butterfly; Crumbled leaves to toilet paper?

Improve your product for people who are already buying it, not those who aren't. 

Or even better, create the bandwagon and enable other revolutionaries to jump on yours. 

Selling = evangelism

Develop a multi-appeal approach or evangelism pitch, explain it briefly and then observe what resonates because people will tell you how they want to be evangelized.

Sow many seeds and let a thousand flowers bloom. Let people use and abuse your product in ways you never envisioned. 

Always search for the cause of something unexpected.

Don't ask, just watch. People don't tell the truth about what they think. But they behave truthfully. Actions speak louder.

Re: accumulating information. Don't worry about your files, worry about your perceptions. 

The more inevitable your type of product or service is, the more you should strive to establish a standard, make less money per unit and make the big money on volume. 

A virtual community:

- community before commerce

-communication comes next

-community's interests first

-tolerate criticism

- encourage personalities

...their approach is not acquiring market share but capturing the lions share of the customers ongoing lifetime business.

The great role that life can bestow upon you is to be a revolutionary. 

First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung

I realize brothers are all the same. Their whole purpose for being is to pick on you and provoke you. 

They're not nice people. Look at their shoes. They wear sandals made from car tires...it shows that these people are destroyers of things. 

Entering the woods at night is a haunting experience, especially for someone with a vivid imagination. 

I do not care why or how the Angkor plans to restore Cambodia. All I know is the constant pain of hunger in my stomach. 

The chief told us the Angkor would take care of us and would provide us with everything we need. I guess the Angkor doesn't understand that we need to eat. 

It is the best thing in the world to have someone love you. 

I hope she won't be reincarnated here. 

We are starving to death. Many people are dying in the village. Yet the government trades our crops to buy guns to kill more people. 

His government has created a vengeful, bloodthirsty people. Pol Pot has turned me into someone who wants to kill.

Underneath the plastic sheet covered in fish, I enter Vietnam. 

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

Its not use waiting for things that only appear at a distance and...a spirit of adventure will usually suffice. 

One has only a life of one's own. 

I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow white conscience. 

Africa: the animal kingdom making hay in the kingdom of glory. 

Father does approve of contingencies. For it was God who gave man alone the capacity for foresight. 

So Noah cursed all Ham's children to be salves for ever and ever. That's how come they turn out dark. 

It is true I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people as nearly as I can tell. 

Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes. Its hard to say which is worse; seeing it run out and waste the water or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes. 

All evildoers in the bible are spectacularly dumb.

Here, bodily damage is more or less considered to be a by-product of living. 

If God amused himself inventing the lilies of the field, he surely knocked his own socks off with the African parasites. 

I can understand a wrathful God...and I can understand a tender unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. 

Curiousity killed the cat, I know, but I try to land on my feet. 

While little boys ran around pretending to shoot each other and fall dead in the road, it appeared that little girls were running the country. 

I could see that the whole idea and business of childhood was nothing guaranteed. it seemed to me, in fact, like something more or less invented by white people and stuck onto the front end of grown up life like a frill on a dress. 

Missionary work is a great bargain for Belgium but it is a hell of a way to deliver social services. 

Adah feels no obligation to have good thoughts on behalf of her mortal soul in the hereafter, or even the here and now. She can simply watch without caring. 

Admission to heaven is gained by luck of the draw.

The lonely look down upon the hungry, the hungry look down upon the starving. The guilty blame the damaged. Those of questionable righteousness speak of cannibals, the unquestionably vile, the sinners, and the damned. it makes everyone feel much better. 

You know things are bad when a woman without legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you. 

The gods who you do not pay are the ones that can curse you the best. 

Bible: God's word brought to you by a crew of romantic idealists in a harsh desert culture eons ago, followed by a chain of translators two thousand years long.

When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every day. 

To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. 

Where does she think home is? Where you are happiest.

When push comes to shove, a mother takes care of her children from the bottom up. 

But hasn't our life together meant more to the world than either of us could have meant alone? 

Democracy and dictatorship are political systems. Capitalism and communism are economic systems. 

All human odes are essentially one. My life = what I stole from history and how I live with it. 

You can't just sashay into the jungle aiming to change it over to the Christian style without expecting the jungle to change you right back. If it were as easy as they said it was going to be, why, they'd be done by now and Africa would look just like America with more palm trees. 

They declined to invent the wheel because it looked like nothing but trouble in this mud. 

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Is there cowardice in being glad you lived?

Not leaving: an act of trust and love, often deciphered by children.

There only thing worse than a boy who hates you: a boy who loves you. 

What someone says and what happened are usually two different things. 

Just remember, the enemy here is not in front of you...its all around. 

There were people everywhere on the city street, but the stranger could not have been more alone if it were empty. 

Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die. 

The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them there wouldn't be any of this. Without words, the Fuhrer was nothing. 

...the human race...I wanted to ask he rhow the samething could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words do damning and brilliant. 

Alexander (Books 1 - 3) By Valerio Massimo Mandredi

For him the monarchy is simply a form of government typical of certain communities rather than others...I think my son is interested in knowing the world for what it is rather than establishing a series of principles that the world should conform to. 

He was still too young to be able to understand just how big the world is. 

Macedonian excesses in drinking, eating, and lovemaking during their feasts, which reguarly deteriorated into orgies were similarily scorned. 

I wanted you to know that there is a price to be paid for everything. 

The throne belongs to whoever is able to defend it. 

i am not afraid of death, Mother. The power and the glory of a King can only be justified if he is ready to give his life, whenever the moment comes. 

His natural body temperture was higher than normal, which meant that his face was never marked with the sorts of skin problems typical of adolescence.

Now, when mankind freed itself from the darkness, attempts were made to organize life into communities and in essence three way of doing this developed: with one person only in command...with more than one but only a few in command...and then the system by which all citizens exercise power, known as democracy. And this is the greatest manifestation of what it means to be Greek.

In Eqypt, Persia, and Macedon too. There is only one free man - the King - the rest are slaves. 

Today's man is a political animal. 

In a society like this the shame lies not in being humble and poor, but rather in doing nothing to improve one's condition. 

No, just as their will never be a loom that weaves cloth on its own. When this is possible, then a world without slaves will be possible, but I don't believe that will ever happen. 

I am not afraid of fighting. But I prefer to do it when the chances of winning are higher. 

Regarding Cynics: nothing that is natural can be judged obscene. 

If he was afraid of anything, he was afraid of such hatred. 

Today, however, the Macedonians are the strongest of all the Greek peoples and it is only right that they should be leaders and enjoy hedgemony. 

To know ourselves is the most difficult of enterprises because it involves not reason alone, but our fears and our passions too. If we are capable of truly knowing ourselves then we will be able to understand others and the reality that surrounds us. 

If Aristotle were here he would say that prophecies can actually make the future come true rather than predict it. 

His actions originated in some murky affair of male love - the most dangerous of all loves. 

He felt as if he were lying with a goddess, and no mortal can ever ask anything of a goddess, he canonly ever be grateful for what he recieves from her. 

Regarding religion: The thing that matters is what the people want to believe. And the people need to believe and need to be able to dream. 

Moments like this are reserved for the gods alone, but we are gods, for as long as this night lasts. 

He always wondered why Greek art, so sublime, depicted so many scenes of violence against women. And he decided that it must simply have been fear, the same fear that made them keep their women segregated in the harems and meant that for social occasions they had to turn to the participation off companions. 

There will never be peace for as long as there are borders and barriers, different languages and customs, different gods and beliefs. You should join me. 

There is either a solution to the problem and therefore it is pointless to worry about it, or there is no solution and it is pointless to worry about it.