
The Only Entrepreneurship Lesson You Need, with Do/Don’t Reading List - becewumuy
https://medium.com/startup-grind/the-only-entrepreneurship-lesson-reading-list-you-need-105d9e3bcf5a#.8fessbxhw
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samsolomon
I love the DO NOT READ list in this article.

> Delivering Happiness: It’s solid, Tony’s a smart dude, but light on real
> tactics and not truly relevant to most startups. More for a corporate crowd
> I think.

I didn't feel like I learned anything from Delivering Happiness. People have
looked offended when I tell them it was a poor book.

> Anything by Gary Vaynerchuck: Gary’s a really nice guy and really smart, but
> I feel like most of his stuff is rah-rah inspiration and energy. It’s for
> people who haven’t started, or are trying to find that courage. Not totally,
> but 80% of it is geared towards those people, not directly operating
> entrepreneurs.

Spot on. I like Gary, but his books are mostly cheerleading.

> The Fountainhead: Or Atlas Shrugged. Or any Ayn Rand book. I am not even
> going to make a comment on her philosophy — I don’t care. But I promise
> there is nothing in here that will ever help you actually start or build a
> business. It will help you fantasize…which doesn’t help build. And it’s no
> mistake that the largest concentration of Radians are in politics and
> finance — two industries built on destruction and taking, not on building.

Atlas Shrugged is among my favorite books, but definitely nothing applicable
to people building a business.

~~~
hga
_Atlas Shrugged is among my favorite books, but definitely nothing applicable
to people building a business._

Well, it does give you a number of "don't do this!" or "watch out for this
sort of person" or developments lessons, and the bit on laws for a society at
our level of "development" is priceless:

 _" Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr.
Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a
bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know that this is not the
age of beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were
pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's
no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to
crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one 'makes'
them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for
men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens?
What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can
neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted-and you create a
nation of law-breakers and then you cash in on the guilt. Now that's the
system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be
much easier to deal with."_

But, yeah, little positive that'll tell you what to do, the "invent a _much_
better mousetrap" and, ahem, connect up with a market that needs it would seem
to be a lesson is so obvious it hardly needs to be taught. But it does, as the
author emphasizes, and there are many many books now that are really focusing
on that.

------
mooreds
Hard to argue. However, he could have just short circuited the entire post and
linked to
[http://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html](http://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html)

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smoyer
That's a pretty brutal opinion of Guy Kawasaki!

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blueprint
I posted this as a reply to Tucker's post:

Tucker — I’m glad to finally find a writer who calls out the uselessness of
ideas and the importance of problems. Everything in this world operates by one
fundamental principle plus the problems, just like in math. Answers are made
by the problems/questions, and that means it’s actually impossible to get an
answer without having the problem. That makes answers without problems not
only useless but harmful. They make society become darker over time in that
it’s harder or impossible for people to judge right and wrong, and everything
becomes ambiguous when the problems are not visible. But this essential
information is totally missing from modern education.

If you don’t mind two pieces of minor feedback I would like to see if I can
contribute to you and your audience somehow.

Re: start with good people. We can judge whether a thing is good or bad based
on whether it has a good or bad result. But what are the concrete criteria of
good and bad? How can we distinguish the good people from the bad? I have
learned the answer, but I’m afraid to say it here as it’s hard for the
majority to understand and to accept due to its nature. The criteria of good
and bad is how true it is. If a person is more truthful, let’s say 51%
truthful, then they are able to recognize 51% of cases they encounter
correctly, and will be able to act knowing things correctly rather than
through ignorance. I have heard the percentage of the results they come to get
in life is directly and exactly proportional to and a function of the
percentage of truth in their consciousness versus falsehood, i.e. their degree
of truthfulness. One big problem nowadays is how we can distinguish truth from
falsehood. We not only do not know our own degrees of truthfulness but humans
can’t really distinguish good, true teachings from bad teachings. It requires
a truly Enlightened Being (i.e. a Buddha) or an individual with an extremely
high level of truthfulness to be able to tell true from false when they see
the matter. That brings me to my second point.

You quoted D.T. Suzuki about Buddha’s teaching. The problem is that it has
been thousands of years since Gautama Buddha came to this world. Have you
heard of the game of telephone? Or seen what happens when a photocopy is taken
of a photocopy? When Buddha appeared he told people the truth that he could
see with his own eyes at the time. However, those who heard what he said had a
huge gap in level of consciousness between them and him. So they couldn’t see
and understand the truth precisely and couldn’t transmit it precisely. As a
consequence they changed the meaning slightly and lost or deteriorated some of
the truth. Over thousands of years, the Truth Buddha taught has been changed
or deteriorated significantly. But one big problem is that before we learn
what Buddha’s teaching actually is we don’t realize why the existing Buddhism
is quite different than his real teaching. A second big problem is that it’s
really quite impossible for people who believe in a lie (who have falsehood in
their consciousness) to be able to understand Buddha’s teaching correctly. So
this is a barrier and it is why I was initially anxious about posting this. I
want to tell you that meditation, the five precepts, the eightfold path, and
the four noble truths are not Buddha’s actual teaching. His teaching can be
summarized in only two parts — very simple things actually–but throughout all
of the thousands of meetings I’ve had with Buddhist monks they have never been
able to answer what Buddha’s real teaching is. Firstly, Buddha never claimed
he was enlightened through meditation, which makes sense because it’s not
possible to produce enlightenment through meditation, itself. It would be like
saying a tree could produce seeds by making leaves but no fruit. Meditation
throughout all of history has never produced an enlightened being. Real
enlightened beings can see and say the truth or answer any kinds of questions
on the spot with totally concrete answers that can be verified. However people
who rely on meditation alone can only give answers without problems. Secondly,
the precepts. Buddhist monks can’t keep the precepts even from the moment they
wake up in the morning. The precepts all generally have in common the theme
“don’t lie”. Yet, they claim they know Buddha’s teaching and/or they claim
they are doing their diligence to find it out and to inform it correctly to
society. The reality is different. They not only don’t know Buddha’s teaching
but they really don’t want to know either. What is the difference between
their teachings and Buddha’s real teaching? Look at the four noble truths and
the eightfold “path”. The Noble Truths don’t actually have the truth in them.
For example, life is not suffering, itself. Life has every way in it. If you
live knowing life, life can cause itself to be pleasurable. If you live
without knowing life, life exhausts itself. The noble truths also talk about
the “end” of suffering. They say that’s Nirvana. However every living creature
receives influence from its environment and every living creature suffers —
even those who have experience Nirvana many times. Nirvana means that the
individual finishes/ends all of the agony and illusions. But when the Buddha
went to a cold environment he still felt cold. When he didn’t eat, he felt
hungry. When he went to a hot environment he still sweat. These things feel a
certain way and constitute what he called suffering. How about the Noble
Truths’ “way” to end suffering, the Eightfold Path? This one is funny. There’s
literally no way in the eightfold path because they are all answers without
problems. The way starts from the causes that exist in the problems and goes
to the answers. But without teaching being based in problems/questions there
is literally no way of life to follow in those teachings and they can no
longer be used for the purpose of a living being. They are only useful for the
dead.

I have too much to say about the above. But I wanted to tell you the fact that
Modern Buddhism is very, very different from what Buddha actually taught.
Monks just put what they wanted into the scriptures. These days how can we
verify the difference between monks’ words and the words of the Enlightened
Being? We can’t, really, and Buddhism these days has devolved into nothing
more than a religion. As a result they’re involved in causing society to
deteriorate. Seeing this reality, who could possibly agree with me? And which
monks would want this truth to come out? They rely on people for donations to
survive. That’s one reason they recommend meditation. If someone sponsors them
to meditate enough maybe they will be Enlightened? But it’s nothing more than
deception.

If not meditation, how can people experience Nirvana and how can they attain
Enlightenment? Gautama Buddha didn’t explain much about this. However he kept
pointing out “what exists” (facts) and how the world operates and told people
to learn it. That’s because he knew that “what is” is the way to make people
be Enlightened. The problem is that people can’t recognize “what is” before
they’re Enlightened. And without an Enlightened Being to reveal facts as they
are, who or what can we learn from without pure trial and error, much like
Gautama did?

Your article, having been able to distill success into three steps/aspects,
reminded me very strongly of the answer to that question which I got from a
man who claims that he attained a Perfect, supreme Enlightenment some 30–40
years ago in 1984. He has since passed away but he left his teachings for
free. I wanted to share his short explanation of the four steps by which
Enlightenment can be achieved, here. I hope you can read and enjoy it and that
you can get something great out of it. — -

First, ”To achieve Enlightenment you must first be free from lies.” That is,
truth must appear. Having to get rid of lies to achieve Enlightenment means
having to open your eyes to truth.

Second, ”You have to see ‘what is’ ” Where is right and wrong?

Right and wrong don’t exist in words, they are appearing through ‘what is’.
When a good thing occurs its a good thing and when a bad thing occurs it’s a
bad thing. No matter how good we say something is, if we don’t know ‘what is’
it’s difficult to make something good happen. So you have to see what is. You
have to know how ‘what is’ comes to be. You have to know how the law of cause
and effect is making ‘what is’ better or worse. You have to know the meaning
inside it. Third, ”There must be conscience and courage.”

I constantly emphasize that there is nothing as difficult or as lonely as
revealing ‘what is’ in the world. The lives of the saints in the past was like
that and we can also see that in our society there were many people with the
correct way of thinking who tried to make the world better who were like that.
If you want to make the world better you have to teach ‘what is’ but those who
tried to teach ‘what is’ properly were all abandoned in the world. So it means
that if there is no conscience and courage, no matter how much they have
opened their eyes to ‘what is’, they can’t do anything about it.

Fourthly, ”There has to be endless love inside oneself”

There has to be endless love to go to others and teach them. There has to be
conscience and courage to endlessly want to go to others and teach them. It
won’t happen if either one of these two are absent.

[https://tathagatablog.wordpress.com/2008/11/01/the-way-of-
en...](https://tathagatablog.wordpress.com/2008/11/01/the-way-of-
enlightenment/)

------
hga
Let me add my favorite book of war stories in finding product-market fit,
reaching/educating users for whom the product is a sufficiently new thing they
need that, in pursuing a business model that worked (do the numbers!), etc.
This one is about a specific company, so it's a concrete and very real history
vs. perhaps some of these recommended books more focusing on the theory,
principles and applications, it could help reify those sorts of books.
Disclaimer, I _really_ like history and think you _can_ learn from it ^_^:

 _Walking the High-Tech High Wire: The Technical Entrepreneur 's Guide to
Running a Successful Enterprise_ ([https://www.amazon.com/Walking-High-Tech-
High-Wire-Entrepren...](https://www.amazon.com/Walking-High-Tech-High-Wire-
Entrepreneurs/dp/0070004684)). Pretty cheap used.

------
tlogan
This article should be on "Don't reading list".

"Start With Great People" is wrong advice. If you knew who are great people
you would be rich anyway. Also "Make Something People Want" is stupid - maybe
one of worst advices. You will know "what people want" is only and only after
you succeed.

The only and only thing which matter is: "do build it". Right now. No books,
no reading blog posts, no HN will help you. And if you are reading this post -
you already failing. :-)

~~~
hga
_" Start With Great People" is wrong advice. If you knew who are great people
you would be rich anyway._

Totally disagree, especially since there can be _great_ value in putting
together a team of "great people", even if you do little else besides give
them the tools they need to "get shit done", which is how he boils down the
selection criteria.

I myself did that in starting up a student run computer center back in 1980,
when computer resources were dear; I myself didn't have much time to
contribute to it due to Real Life putting me in a full time job, but having
procured everything (machine and peripherals, room, a few dollars for the
needed electrical work) they did almost all the rest. Similarly I've saved at
least one company by recognizing a "human resource" need and finding and
selling the position to that person (LMI was the first example).

This stuff doesn't self-organize, especially since we're not talking about the
domain of rent seeking.

And there's a whole technique of customer development that you evidently are
not aware of that at least gives you a fighting chance to "succeed". Without
following something like it, it's pure luck, often just being at the right
place at the right time (think Jobs, SV and the dawn of more polished
microcomputers, or, heck, Ken Olsen being a grad student working on a
Whirlwind successor).

You say "do build it", but do you have _any_ inkling "it" is anything anyone
wants??? If it's something that requires more talent or time than you can
devote to it, how do you get others to lend you their time and/or money to
"build it", and if you have no idea if anyone wants it, how can you morally
justify wasting the resources of others?

