Bounce! – A Must Read
“If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging” – Will RogersThere are hundreds of great entrepreneurial books out there. The problem is they are buried under millions of others.
Quite frankly, many books can be boiled down to a couple content rich pages. Very few are good enough to merit a page by page read. And even fewer are perfectly timed for the events of today. I recently came across one of those exceptional books that is content rich and perfectly timed. It’s called Bounce! by Barry J. Moltz.
Let’s agree on one thing first: the economy sucks right now. I am hearing of layoff after layoff. I have seen people lose their homes after twenty years of living there. I have friends who are struggling to get started again. Moltz’s book opened my eyes to the natural cycle of the entrepreneur’s AND the employee’s business ups and downs. The key is to bounce back from the down times by recognizing when you are in that part of the cycle, appreciating you’re there, and moving forward. In this book, I learned techniques on how to do all three. I learned how to bounce.
I’m not here to blog about a summary, you can get all that stuff at the Amazon listing. Instead I want to share the pages I found most valuable (just in case you want to condense your read – but I suggest you don’t):
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Page 29-30 – The Roulette Wheel of Success – Too many of us (I’m guilty) feel that life is like a roulette wheel. Even though we may hit the same color a few times in a row, the odds of having a new number come up on the next spin is equally as great. The odds are 50-50 (minus the intentional house odds of the two green). This analogy is accurate for gambling, but is NOT right for our careers. The fact is that every failure and every success in life changes our course, so that odds on the next event is never 50-50.
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Page 46-49 – Laws Affecting Business Reflect Cultural DNA – If you are an American reading this, it opens your eyes to how much US bankruptcy laws favor entrepreneurs. If you are in another country, this is your opportunity to encourage law change. Otherwise, move to America.
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Page 93 – Skip the Logo Design, Take a Step - Too many people wait for the right time to get started on a new course. Nothing will ever be perfect and you will never be fully prepared. The only thing assured is that if you don’t take action, you will not move.
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Page 172-175 – Patient Dreams – This is a hard lesson to learn, and unfortunately many of us never do. Sometimes an overnight success takes 20 years. Sometimes it takes a lifetime. Unfortunately, today’s electronic society is all about now. To properly bounce, you need to know that now may not actually happen until later.
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Page 198 – Small Is The New Big Success Story – All you need to do it read the title of this section and believe it. If you have a small business, how can you make it a huge success at its current size? A big business that’s losing money is not a bounce forward, it’s just digging the hole deeper. Be a big success, as the small guy.
Be sure to also check out the biographies of the business people in the back. It isn’t your typical list of big names and archetypes. Instead it is a list of the real people that you don’t hear about, but all, in their own way, have bounced. Plus there are little tidbits hidden in there. Make sure you check out the line about ensuring your product line was… “all dressed in the same room.” [Hint: it’s under Rick Mazurksy’s section]. Enough reading. Go bounce!
Posted by Mike Michalowicz
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Reply #2 on : Sat June 14, 2008, 16:31:27
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Reply #1 on : Fri June 13, 2008, 09:41:01