7 Great Books to Feed Your Inner Entrepreneur

I’ve been reading a lot lately and it’s been inspiring me to refocus my efforts on improving my business. I’ve learned new ways of thinking, creative approaches to managing my time, and I’ve gained confidence from the books I’ve read. It is so interesting to learn about the inner journey of others and see many parallels to things I am working to solve.

I thought I would take a moment to share some of my favorites along with a bit of information about why they resonated with me. I hope this provides some help to you as you look for ideas, support, and strategies to nurture your entrepreneurial dreams.

Zero to One - Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel is well known from both his actions as a VC and his history as one of the founders of PayPal. He brings an interesting perspective in Zero to One. He is essentially breaks down two models. One model is growing something that already exists, taking it from 1 to n. This is where most companies play. The other model is creating something of value that didn’t exist before, taking something from 0 to 1. A lot of the focus is on how to be a company or an entrepreneur that builds new things. He includes some thoughts on how to evaluate ideas and what is likely to scale quite large. 

The $100 Startup - Chris Guillebeau
In this book, Chris gives many, many examples of people who started a side-hustle and grew it into something amazing. You can’t help but be inspired by all the creative individuals and their success. It not only inspires, but it gives you tons of ideas and frameworks to apply to your business or idea. It helps reframe how you think about success and how to define it on your own terms.

Shoe Dog - Phil Knight
This was the very best story I’ve read in a long time. I found it refreshing how transparent the story spoke to both successes and failures. I think it might be the lowest ego CEO biography I’ve ever read. It covers the early days before the company was called Nike all the way through the period of massive success and Phil retiring. I plan to read it again just for the pure entertainment value. The transparency of failures or near failures provides a lot of lessons you can take to your own business.

Creative Confidence - Tom Kelley, David Kelley
I was very excited when I saw this book. Tom and Dave are the brothers that founded IDEO - the world renown design and innovation firm. They are also major factors behind the establishment of the D School at Stanford. What it really drove home to me is that we are all creative. We all have big ideas and we can all act on them. To get there, we need to find ways to stop censoring ourselves and let it rip. Lots of examples on how to build creative confidence.

The Lean Startup - Eric Ries
To be honest, I went into this one a bit of a skeptic. I’ve worked at a number of companies that realy like to talk about being lean, but it is lip service. I was expecting a buzzword heavy book without a lot of substance, boy was I wrong. I found the validated learning framework to be very helpful and was impressed by the depth of thought Eric puts into his recommendations. This one will really help you think about what you learn and how to pivot while you are bringing a new idea to market.

Crushing IT - Gary Vaynerchuk
I went into this one knowing that I didn’t want to create a massive personal brand, but I was curious what I might learn from those who are building their personal brand. One key lesson was not overthinking content strategies. Even just documenting my journey (I.e. like what I read) was a great way to authentically connect in an interesting way. I also took away the focus on creating value and really helping others as a key to success.

Digital Body language - Erica Dhawan
Roughly half of all email is misunderstood. Over the last decade or so we’ve gone from communicating mostly face to face to mostly digitally. Lots of great lessons here on how to build strong teams across distance that I think can apply to things like customer relationships and more.

Happy reading.

What did I miss? I’d love some more great suggestions that you like so I can continue my reading journey. Comment with your favorite books.