I found out about this through the recommendation by Dan Martell.
As I’m subscribed to his newsletter and often find value in his posts, I decided to follow his advice on books.
I wasn’t disappointed!
Love Is The Killer App by
Tim Sanders discusses why it is important to read books, how to do it and then
how to put the acquired knowledge to use in everyday life.
Intangibles to share: Knowledge, Network and Compassion.
Author defines these three as “intangibles” - something that each of us owns and can share it with others without
losing it. In fact, more successfully we share more we receive in the return.
I love this point of view and found it helpful in understanding how to develop meaningful interactions through
providing value, both in personal and professional relationships.
Knowledge is in books
Books give you knowledge. The news gives you awareness. The latter is a measurement of today.
Knowledge is a measure of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Awareness is finite. Knowledge is forever.
This quote (and the whole chapter) argues fact-based knowledge vs. understanding-based knowledge. While news
provide most recent facts, they are not meant to be a source of ideas and inspiration. This is where books step
in - although the facts may be outdated (this book was published in 2003), the concepts and lessons in it hold
for much longer.
Also, people by nature enjoy to share what they know with others and get a sense of accomplishment and earn credibility for it. But, in fact-sharing business the competition is much larger because facts are so
easy to find and it’s only a matter of luck from whom you will find out the result of last night’s game.
It is more valuable to listen first, and then share ideas that people can apply in their specific
situations, to provide them with a new perspective that they haven’t thought of before.
To help them help themselves.
Develop a reading system
I found it interesting how author puts a lot of focus on developing a reading system that helps him to be more
aware of what he is learning, and think this is a good idea.
He developed his own system that he calls “Book Cliffing” - what he does is he tags the parts he finds useful and
also writes a mark in the front blank page about it.
The end result is a short summary of the whole book which is useful if you want to quickly remind yourself of a
certain takeaway.
Since I’m mostly reading books in electronic format this technique is not directly applicable in my case, but I
love the idea of writing down key takeaways with purpose of fortifying acquired knowledge and storing it for later
use. This is actually the reason I write these posts, but I’m also looking forward to further
developing my reading system.
Network and Compassion
There are two more chapters about Network and Compassion, but I mostly focused on the first one as
it was the most innovative for me. While the other two also offer great ideas and insights into
old-fashioned corporative way of thinking, I feel they are being much more promoted nowadays,
especially in the startup community so I was more familiar with them from the start.
How to apply all this to blog posts?
As another great source of knowledge and actionable ideas I find blog posts, particularly in the area of
self-development and entrepreneurship. Their peculiarity is in that each blog post from a certain series
(e.g. Groove’s Startup Journey
or Nathan Barry’s ConvertKit story) can act as a
stand-alone piece of content and it’s hard to summarize what is already pretty much summarized by itself.
The whole concept is also very interactive and “lean” since readers immediately provide their feedback and point
what they would like to learn more about.
There is a ton of awesome blog posts on various topics and I would love to have a way to
systemize that knowledge and keep a track of what I read and what I’ve learned from it.
I found out about this book while watching the recording
of the talk on the same topic, given by Frank Rimalovski at Lean Startup Conference.
I found the talk interesting, and liked the example-rich way Frank used to deliver points to the audience. At the end he
announced that everything he presented and more can be found in a newly published book
Talking To Humans, which is also completely free to download!
This is not the first time I’ve heard about customer development - I’ve actually been very actively involved with it on the projects
I’m currently working on.
Still, reading this book made me reevaluate and reinforce my knowledge - going through chapter by chapter I could pinpoint things
I was missing on and better understand their importance.
If you want to learn about customer development, here are some great resources I can recommend:
A series of Customer Discovery videos (each is a few minutes long) by Steve Blank - awesome
points and examples
All in all, this was fun and easy to read material, and here are my main takeaways:
Do. Observe. Ask.
I like how the author divided customer dev process into these three components. I used to associate it only with the
“Ask” part, in other words interviewing people. Having read this, I realized I’m already doing a lot of observing, just didn’t think
of it that way.
For example, I like to collect the examples of how people currently deal with the problem we’re trying to solve. That way I
gain understanding of what is important to them, and also why. At the same moment I identify the potential early adopters - if they are
dealing with the problem, it must be important to them.
“Do” means trying to experience the targeted problem yourself, and later also using the solution yourself. I think this is really
important, and would love to practice this more.
Ask for referrals.
As the author says, make it happen - this is one of the secrets of “growth” in this stage as you are much more likely to get a
response, opposed to sending a cold mail. That’s so both because you’ll get an introduction, so your contact won’t be cold anymore,
and because your referrer will do her best to connect you with the people who are truly interested in what you’re doing.
Here’s an example of how I do it:
I find it very beneficial to learn about this problem from a different perspectives. Could you recommend anybody else to whom I could
talk to?
If you already have a value proposition or even a product that you’re testing, you could go with something like this:
Do you know anybody else who might find our solution beneficial? I find it really valuable to talk to the experts like you and learn
how to improve our product.
Focus on early adopters first.
Note to myself:
New founders tend to obsess about their mainstream customer. However, by definition,
the mainstream is waiting for proof from early adopters before they trying. If you cannot
get early adopters, you cannot move on.
And here’s the definiton:
Early adopters are usually folks who feel a pain point acutely, or love to try new products
and services.
I also think about early adopters as of people who could not only benefit from the solution you’ll develop,
but are also truly excited about it, and interested in how you’re going to solve it.
I’ll leave you with a great 1-minute video by Steve Blank
who makes a point much better thank I could say it:
These are the people who see your product even better than you do. They see the finished product 18
months from now, even though you didn’t show it to them - because they’ve been thinking about solving the
same problem for themselves for years, and then you showed up.
Last week I finished reading The Zen Programmer by
Christian Grobmeier.
As the author states himself, it is about how to apply Zen to your daily work, with a lots
of examples related to the programming practice.
I enjoyed reading Christian’s personal story about him becoming a web developer, and
how he constantly works on improving the quality of his life.
These are my takeaways:
Do not focus solely on the end goal, but also enjoy the journey.
If we are always in the “waiting” mode, suffering until we finally reach our holy grail, we
may never reach it at the end. In fact, we may not realize that we already have.
Less noise.
There is a tremendous amount of noise in our lives nowadays. Constantly checking Twitter or Facebook
will not make us happier nor wiser. It’s hard to fight it, but I think it’s worth it to focus on
less but higher-quality content.
We spend too much time debating about nonsense.
A lot of stuff we spend our energy on is not actually that important and just not worth it.
It’s hard to focus on things that really matter, when there are so many fun details just waiting
to be sorted out.
At the end, here is the quote that I liked:
We need to defeat our mind, which often acts like a monkey or a horse.
The monkey’s mind jumps from one topic to another, without control.
The horse’s mind has a horse’s will, and moves forward no matter what. Without monkeys and horses
in our mind, we can have a Zen mind.