“YOU have no enemies, you say? Alas! My friend, the boast is poor; He who has mingled in the fray Of duty, that the brave endure, Must have made foes! If you have none, Small is the work that you have done. You’ve hit no traitor on the hip, You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip, You’ve never turned the wrong to right, You’ve been a coward in the fight.”
“It’s important to clarify what emotion is not and what it is in the context of business planning. Emotion is not impulsive, irrational, melodramatic, temperamental, or hot-blooded. Emotion is passionate, obsessed, maniacal, relentless, powerful, and purposeful. The words for what emotion is not describe the people who have chosen the wrong enemy. The list of words for what emotion is describes the audacious few who become unstoppable.”
“If I talk about what to do before I talk about why to do it, I lose people.”
“The 12 Building Blocks are: Enemy and Competition; Will and Skill; Mission and Plan; Dreams and Systems; Culture and Team; Vision and Capital.”
“The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”
“New mistakes are okay. Old mistakes are not.”
“Let no one rob me of a single day who isn’t going to make a full return on the loss.”
“The minute you break your word to yourself, you have sabotaged your entire year.”
“Plan like Japan; execute like America.”
“A static business plan is a losing business plan.”
“She goes out of her way to talk a big game so others will doubt her.”
“What you should be doing is playing people who are beating you as much as you can tolerate.”
“Choose enemies that give you energy, not drain your energy.”
5 Unworthy Enemies:
Companies trailing you in the marketplace.
People you have surpassed in your business or on your career path.
Relatives who put you down because they are jealous of your success.
Toxic people who try to pick fights and bring out the worst in you.
Small thinkers with a victim mentality.
“Identify all the competitors and underestimate none.”
“For private colleges, their competition isn’t just other private schools and lower-cost public schools. It’s also changes in student loan policies, a recession, and, maybe more importantly, a shift in how people view education.
The moment the narrative shifts and people stop believing that a college degree is required for career success, the value proposition gets destroyed. Taking a broad view of your competitors doesn’t mean stressing out about what could go wrong. It means being deliberate about identifying your competitors to see how they will go after you and poking holes in your own business model.
Once you see this, you have to adapt your key differentiators to meet the needs of your customers. For the top universities, online education started out looking like a threat, but once these schools realized they could create their own online courses and degrees, it became an additional revenue source.”
7 Indirect and Unseen Competitors:
Interest rates.
Changes in customer behavior.
Technology that can make you obsolete.
The economy and economic trends.
Legislation and lobbyists.
Companies that meet customer needs in different ways.
Paradigm shifts that impact your value proposition.
“You can hire all the research firms and consultants you want, but the best approach is to research the competition yourself.”
“I’ve done this for every job I’ve ever had. When I started with Morgan Stanley in 2001, I’d call Smith Barney and TD Waterhouse and make up a good story. I knew what would qualify me as an ideal prospect, so I would say that I recently inherited money.
Then I would ask, ‘What’s different about you? Why should I trust you with my aunt’s hard-earned money?’ I would listen and take notes.
Then I would say, ‘My brother has a friend who works at Morgan Stanley, and he thinks we should pick them.’ They would start talking, and I would start writing! I wanted to know exactly how they sold against us.
And guess what? With my detective skills, they never outsold me again.”
“I realized in that moment that, for all my faults and mistakes, I had done two things right. I had chosen my enemies wisely, and I had chosen my life partner wisely. The enemies propelled me, and my wife supported me.”
“Don’t be surprised if your enemies come back to you. You know that expression, ‘Hustle until your haters ask if you’re hiring.’ It’s happened to me dozens of times, and I’ve hired many of them. Some of my enemies even became allies who helped me fight bigger enemies. And that can only happen if you treat your enemies with the compassion and mutual respect the moment calls for.”
“Take a broad view of your competitors and assume they wake up every day with the goal of putting you out of business. Studying the competition and choosing the right enemies will continue as long as you care to have a business. Choose wisely.”
“You have to train your mind to be stronger than your feelings or else you will lose yourself.”
“Enemies light the match. Will keeps the fire burning.”
“The word ‘want’ has zero weight behind it.”
“Going forward, there’s no place for your wants. Imagine for a moment that, no matter how bold an idea, you knew you couldn’t fail, and no one could hear this thought but you: What would you declare? If you’re committed to your vision, tell me what you will do.”
“When you improve, your business improves.”
“The current version of you doesn’t have the skills to execute your audacious plan.”
“When buttons get pushed, we act differently. That’s why your job is to figure out how to push your own buttons.”
“Train people well enough so they can leave; treat them well enough so they don’t want to.”
14 Things to Look for in an Inner Circle:
Confidentiality: what’s said stays in the inner circle.
Zero tolerance for games: manipulation leads to loss of trust, and trust is the foundation of the inner circle.
Accessible: easy to get a hold of.
Opportunity magnet: good attitude.
Lacks drama: doesn’t see themselves as a victim.
Someone who gives insight (constantly teaches): shares insights on new books, interesting articles, and new ideas.
Pays attention to details: special touch and goes above and beyond.
Strong Rolodex and high credibility: they know people, and because of their credibility, these people take their calls and respond to their proposals.
Respect in their approach: the way feedback is given; the way they deal with others.
Defends you: tells you what’s said about you behind your back; protective of the relationship and your credibility.
Dependability: you can bank on their word.
Exchange of value: not one-sided; picks up their share of the checks.
Fun and humble: zero tolerance for arrogance.
Presentable in appearance: never sloppy.
“If you want to be a part of the audacious few, you must start with audacious dreams.”
“If the dream excites you, you’ll work as much as you need. Thinking about what you want is the dream. The emotion comes from picturing what your life will look like when you achieve your goals. If the plan is clear, you and your team will know how to create systems to direct your energy and accomplish tasks.”
“He didn’t do one thing to celebrate. The next month, his income went from $72,000 to $5,400. Because he hadn’t rewarded himself the previous month, his subconscious was wondering, Why am I busting my tail for nothing?
By sitting in the bank, that money didn’t create any emotion. His problem was that he hadn’t experienced the emotions from the reward that would drill into his subconscious the value of hard work.
Most people are very good at rewarding themselves when they make money, and more often than not, they overdo it. But every once in a while, it’s the complete opposite.
Both you and your family have to see the reward of your working as hard as you are, or else what’s the point? Why would you keep putting in the effort? Thinking about how you will celebrate makes your dreams come alive.”
“Goals are the specific outcomes we aim for on our way to achieving our dreams. Dreams direct our energy; goals take that direction and create a laser focus. When goals are specific and measurable, giving us deadlines and putting rewards in place, they work.”
“A powerful dream becomes a future truth.”
“Trust in God, but lock your car.”
“I simply couldn’t outwork bad systems.”
Especially if you’re going to drive people hard, they’d better feel five things:
They are part of something.
They are cared for and supported.
They are making a difference.
They are having fun and celebrating success.
They are being recognized for their contribution and feel needed.
5 Benefits of Hiring a Rock Star:
Sets the tone.
Raises the bar and brings out the best in others.
Shows what’s possible.
Elevates performance.
Expedites results.
“To hire rock stars, you must be a rock star.”
“During the hiring process for every company I lead, we assign a book for each candidate. They are required to read it and come back with a one-page paper. It’s a great filter for our culture. Better to know sooner rather than later if they are readers who are committed to learning. Based on that one assignment, we learn a lot about coachability and reliability.”
“Vision is what makes people never want to stop. You may see some similarities between dreams and vision. But the biggest difference is that dreams are more personal and have a timeline. You can fulfill a dream. A vision extends beyond you and your family. It’s for the people you lead and the world at large, and it never stops. It’s transcendent and will outlast even you.”
“Be stubborn on vision but flexible on details.”
“The moment you start fighting for something bigger than yourself - a true vision - you’ll be introduced to a version of you that you’ve never seen before. No superpower matches this. None.”
“Why are we treating ourselves like the underdog? Why can’t we see ourselves as killers who are just getting started?”
Patrick Bet-David's 10 Business Principles:
Never compromise our non-negotiables.
Micromanage until there is trust.
What brought us here won’t take us to the next level.
No one has 100 percent job security, including the founder or CEO.
Create positive peer pressure by challenging one another.
Beat your prior best.
Treat the company’s money like it’s your own.
Be radically open-minded but not easily persuaded.
Fight any temptation to lower expectations and standards.
Create an environment where our team is taken care of financially and professionally.
“I declare my dream as a future truth and will live in the present as if it has already become a reality.”
“The only way for you to succeed is to be at your best - in terms of attitude, skills, organization, and energy.”
“It’s taking the time to look ahead in your life, to visualize both success and regret. You have to dream and tap into your imagination by constantly saying, ‘Imagine one day if…,’ and then create the habits to make it a reality, all the while inspired by the visuals that are constantly in front of your eyes.”
“I’ve said over and over that a business plan first has to move you. Without being moved, without getting emotional, you won’t follow through.
The emotional current that lives inside you is a constant reminder of why you are working so hard. By knowing how to ask questions that tap into your deepest desires (just as Pelley did for Musk), your plan takes on an entirely new meaning.
I also believe that emotion alone isn’t enough. Musk, like all of us, needed a logical plan that precisely detailed how to channel that emotion.
Emotion is the why. Logic is the how. It leads you to specific actions that are required to start a business, scale a business, and put all the pieces together to design your dream life.”
“You are prepared to have your best year ever. Your best year brings you one step closer to your best life.”
“My why is impact. My why is hope. My why is using business to solve the world’s biggest problems. It all started for me twenty-one years ago when I chose the right enemy. If you’re ready to build a multigenerational business, there’s only one thing left to do: Choose your enemies wisely.”
There's always a way to succeed in life, no matter who you are or where you come from, but you're never going to find it by following the herd. If the herd knew how to achieve success and get everything they ever wanted, you wouldn't need this book.
Sample Quotes from the Book:
“Give up forced ‘positive thinking’ or ‘motivation’; instead, build a solid foundation of strong self-image, well-defined goals, practical plans, and know-how that naturally produce positive expectancy, initiative, and follow-through. Cultivate REASONED optimism. Have something tangible to believe in and to be excited about - not just excitement itself.”
“In fact, some excellent career or business advice is to pick endeavors because of the type of person the endeavors will force you to become.
An early mentor used to urge people of very limited financial means to commit to the goal of becoming a millionaire, not so much for the money, he explained, but because of the people they would have to become, the positive characteristics and behaviors they would have to develop in order to achieve the financial benchmark.
He was widely misunderstood on this point and perceived by some to be a preacher of greed. What he meant, simply, was:
Big commitment to big goals build big people.”
“College graduates, on average, out-earn non-college graduates by six figures to, at most, a million dollars, lifetime. That IS an argument in favor of a college education, although a million dollars divided over 40 to 60 years of active work is not as gigantic as it sounds stated as a lump sum.
Look closer and here is what you will discover: If college actually prepares you for anything, it is for a job. College does not prepare you to be entrepreneurial, and it certainly does not prepare you to get rich.”
Read the Full Breakdown: No B.S. Guide to Succeeding in Business by Breaking All the Rules, by Dan S. Kennedy
In this book, the eccentric entrepreneur Dan S. Kennedy shares the extreme time management strategies he uses personally to run his multimillion-dollar company, all while successfully safeguarding his schedule and his sanity.
Sample Quotes from the Book:
“There’s a reason why you can’t find a wall clock in a casino to save your life - those folks stealing your money do not want you to be aware of the passing of time.
And that tells you something useful right there: you want to be very aware, all the time, of the passing of time. It is to your advantage to be very conscious of the passage and usage of minutes and hours.”
“Just as the person who cannot tell you where his money goes is forever destined to be poor, the person who cannot tell you where his time goes is forever destined to be unproductive - and, often, poor.”
“This tells you a lot about what you must do in order to achieve maximum success, derive maximum value from your time, and lead the happiest possible life:
You must systematically, aggressively divest yourself of those activities you do not do well and do not do happily, or you must find routine, so as to systematically invest your time (and talent, knowledge, know-how, and other resources) in those things you do extraordinarily well, enjoy doing, and find intellectually stimulating.
I have just described for you a formula for peak personal productivity, as a specialist. And you ought to note that, in every field of enterprise, specialists out-earn generalists ten to one.”
Read the Full Breakdown: No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs, by Dan S. Kennedy
Almost everything you're doing now is a distraction preventing you from making a 10X leap - in revenue, leadership ability, significance, and more. Exponential transformations are actually easier than these small little 2X improvements, and Dr. Benjamin Hardy will prove it to you here in this book.
Sample Quotes from the Book:
“Going 10x means you’re living based on the most intrinsic and exciting future you can imagine. That 10x future becomes your filter for everything you do, and most of your current life can’t make it through that 10x filter.”
“In all aspects of life, the competition is highest for average goals. Not only is the competition highest, but the excitement is lowest and the pathway forward is dramatically more complex and confusing with small and linear goals.
With unrealistic, impossible, or ‘10x’-level goals, the competition is lowest, the excitement is highest, and the pathway forward becomes simple and nonlinear. You stop following the crowd. You shift toward quality rather than quantity and stop competing with anyone.”
“To make a goal effective, you’ve got to test its outer-limits. Push it out as far as you can. Only once you make your goal impossible will you stop operating based on your current assumptions and knowledge.”
Read the Full Breakdown: 10X Is Easier Than 2X, by Dr. Benjamin Hardy
The quality of your questions determines the quality of your life. That's also how you get the absolute most out of any book that you decide to read:
You ask great questions the whole time - as though the book was on trial for its life.
Here in this section are a few questions that can help guide and stimulate your thinking, but try to come up with your own additional questions, especially if you decide to read this book the whole way through...
“Why do you want to defeat this enemy? What will it feel like when you defeat this enemy? What reward will you give yourself when you defeat this enemy?”
8 Key Questions About Competitors:
Who are your direct competitors?
Who are your indirect competitors?
What competitors aren’t so obvious but still need to be monitored?
Who are you underestimating? The people who get underestimated the most are those without much experience. They have nothing to lose.
Where are your opponents strong? What markets/areas will you concede?
Where are your opponents weak? What markets/areas will you attack?
Who can you acquire? What strategies will you employ to acquire them at the lowest valuation? (Weaken them to drive down the price.)
Who could acquire you? What strategies will you employ to get acquired at the highest valuation?”
“In what ways do people improve by associating with you?”
“Why will next year be different?”
“How many lives have you changed positively in the past year?”
“Have those around you made more money than they ever have?”
“How does your plan incorporate making others around you wealthy?”
“What do you want your top leads/sales reps to make in the coming year?”
“What benefits, both financial and nonfinancial, do others derive from being around your best self in the upcoming year and decades that follow?”
"Judge a man by his questions, rather than by his answers."
So you've finished reading. What do you do now?
Reading for pleasure is great, and I wholeheartedly support it. However, I am intensely practical when I'm reading for a particular purpose. I want a result. I want to take what I've learned and apply it to my one and only life to make it better!
Because that's really what the Great Books all say. They all say: "You must change your life!" So here, below, are some suggestions for how you can apply the wisdom found in this breakdown to improve your actual life.
Please commit to taking massive action on this immediately! Acting on what you've learned here today will also help you solidify it in your long-term memory. So there's a double benefit! Let's begin...
#1: Mine Your Past for Motivation
If you take the time to look back over your life so far, you'll be able to locate the best enemy you have to help you achieve everything you've ever wanted.
Your "best enemy" could be someone you've forgotten exists, or they could be someone who won't get out of your face (or your mind) right now, but they're there. You can find them, and you can use them to help you win. You just have to look for them.
Many of the questions that Patrick Bet-David asks in the book can be helpful here, many of which are reproduced above. Who hurt you? Who said that you weren't good enough? Who told you that you'd never make it? Even today, who still doesn't believe in you? There. You've just found some potential enemies.
#2: Select Your Most Useful Enemies
Not all enemies are created equal. Like we've covered in the Key Ideas above, there are some people who won't make a "useful" enemy for you, for various reasons. Either they still make you too angry to stay focused on executing your logical plans, or they don't provide enough of a psychological impulse to get you moving.
So you're going to have to go through your list of enemies from Step One above and narrow it down. Ideally, you'd select a few enemies, but probably not more than 3-5 of them. You're looking for people who push you into action, who you're driven to prove wrong, and who can keep you going when apathy sets in, or when the journey towards your goals gets too comfortable and you start to slow down.
#3: Know Your Enemy Better Than They Know Themselves
Study the competition thoroughly, and enter the conversations that are already happening inside their own heads. Find out what drives them: what their motivations are, what kinds of challenges and threats they face, and what kinds of opportunities they have access to.
Find out how they talk (to themselves, to their employees and coworkers, to their customers), and dissect their business models. Find out everything you can about them. You're probing for weaknesses, soft spots in their strategy and operations that you can exploit. Spy on them. Know them better than they know themselves.
#4: Raise Your Standards
Once you've selected the proper enemy, you'll see exactly who you have to beat, and you'll know exactly what level of excellence you have to reach in order to beat them.
Selecting the proper enemy gives you insight into what it takes to win, and whether you're actually willing to go that hard. You may not be! But at least knowing your enemy gives you a baseline, a benchmark that you need to hit.
What you'll find, though, is that raising your standards is its own reward. Yes, it'll help you compete at higher levels - it'll even help you dominate your enemies. But perhaps the greatest thing that raising your standards will do for you is show you the potential that was always there within you, just waiting for you to call it out.
#5: Define Your Success Criteria
Don't turn this into a "forever war." Know when to stop. Decide how you'll know that you've won, and once you've reached that point, have an exit strategy. Picking fights can be an excellent success strategy, but it's not a lifestyle.
With that in mind, define your success criteria, and make them explicit. Tangible. For example, when you hit $1,000,000 in revenue, commit to reviewing your list of enemies and see if they still carry the same emotional weight.
That teacher in high school who said you'd never make it will have to stop yapping once you're a millionaire, wouldn't they? Once you've won the war, lay down your arms.
#6: Add Logic and/or Emotion to Your Business Plan
Your business plan is likely deficient in either logic or emotion - or perhaps both! So determine where you're weak, and make sure to compensate for where you're falling short.
If there's no logical rhyme or reason to your business strategy, your plan of attack, or what you're even trying to achieve in business or how, then you need to spend some more time on the logical side.
If, on the other hand, you've got a clean, fancy, and superbly formatted business plan that just doesn't raise your heart rate even a little bit, then you need to add some emotion to it.
You could have the perfect plan, an amazing product, a team of rockstars, great marketing assets and more, but if, when you wake up in the morning you just...do not care, that's a problem. Fix it now.
#7: Select Your Inner Circle
Examine the list above (in the Book Notes section) and assemble your list of rockstars. The quality of your life is greatly determined by the quality of the books you read and the people you associate with, so do not skip this step! It's critical.
Decide who's worthy of being closely associated with you, and also, just as importantly, resolve to make yourself worthy of the best company. Rockstars only want to hang out with other rockstars. A-players only want to work with other A-players. So if that's not you, that's going to hold you back.
You can build a stacked network of absolute killers (and I mean that in the best possible way), but you have to earn your own place in that network, and you have to keep earning your place every damn day. As they say, if you want to fly with the eagles, you can't scratch with the turkeys.
#8: Conspire to Make Your Allies Successful
One of the guiding principles of my life (one that I learned from Zig Ziglar) is that you can get anything you want in this world, just as long as you help enough other people get what they want.
Yes, select useful enemies and commit to absolutely dominating them, but your allies? Plot and plan and strategize and conspire to make them as successful as possible. It all comes back around.
For this step, what you're going to do is make a list of all your "allies" or partners in business and in life, and take note of what they want in life.
Where are they going? What are their goals? What can you help them achieve? Keep this list handy and refer back to it often. Whenever there's an opportunity for you to make a key introduction, pass along a key resource, or really just help them out in any way, you'll have this list that you can keep coming back to. Again, it all comes back.
#9: Declare Your Dream as a Future Truth
In this final step, you're going to do exactly what it says here: Declare your dream as a future truth. You're going to visualize your desired future (intensely, vividly, utilizing all five senses), and you're going to make a self-promise that you're going to make it real...no matter what.
The future needs to already exist within your own mind. Everything is created twice: first within your consciousness, and once again in the external world. You need to see it, feel it, hear it, smell it, and taste it. It has to be real and inevitable.
What's also going to help you tremendously is to make a list (yes, another list!) of every single benefit that's going to come to you once you've externalized this inner reality, this future vision.
Every single good thing that you're going to receive, feel, and experience needs to be made tangible to your consciousness, and you need to revisit this visualization as often as possible. Ideally, every single day.
This sounds all metaphysical, but it's really not. Your brain literally can't tell the difference between a real experience and a vividly imagined one, and so for all intents and purposes, what you envision becomes real to your conscious and subconscious minds.
You're still going to put in the work. The visualization is really just the beginning, despite what all those "positive thinking" charlatans want you to believe. But once you've declared your dream as a future truth and committed yourself to its external accomplishment, there's not an enemy on Earth who will be able to stop you.
"The path to success is to take massive, determined action.”
Patrick’s amazing story starts with his family immigrating to America when he was 10 years old. His parents fled Iran as refugees during the Iranian revolution and were eventually granted U.S. citizenship.
After high school, Patrick joined the U.S. military and served in the 101st Airborne before starting a business career in the financial services industry. After a tenure with a couple of traditional companies, he was inspired to launch PHP Agency Inc., an insurance sales, marketing, and distribution company – and did so before he turned 30.
PHP is now one of the fastest-growing companies in the financial marketplace. Patrick is passionate about shaping the next generation of leaders by teaching thought-provoking perspectives on entrepreneurship and disrupting the traditional approach to a career.
Patrick speaks on a range of business, leadership, and entrepreneurial topics including how and why to become an entrepreneur and the importance of learning how to fully process issues.
From a humble beginning as a young immigrant escaping war-torn Iran with his parents to founding his own company, Patrick has gained a first-hand understanding of what rags-to-riches means and how it is fueled by freedom and opportunity – the core tenants of the American Dream.
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OK, that’s it for now…
More excellent book recommendations coming your way soon!
With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your week!
Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
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