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📚 Hey, let’s talk about business school and why to skip it.

In today’s book, you'll get a world-class business education for about $200,000 less than the cost of going to business school.

You'll learn the universal principles behind every successful business, then be able to use these ideas to make more money, get more done, and have more fun in your life and work.

All for $0 plus late fees at your local library :)

The book is called The Personal MBA, by Josh Kaufman, and it’s added more to my bottom line and my knowledge base than almost any other business book I’ve ever read.

I also published a new YouTube video (finally!) and if you’ve ever wondered how to pronounce Palahniuk, Nietzsche, Borges, Camus, or various other famous writers with difficult and somewhat confusing names, this video’s for you. 

But let’s say you just want to start a business (or grow the one you already have), you don’t have $200k to toss away by going to business school (not to mention years of your life), and you want to learn damn-near everything they’ll teach you in class anyway, all in one book that you can read in just a few hours.

Or, even a book breakdown that you can read in 44 minutes.

If that’s a “value proposition” you can get behind, you may wanna check out…

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This Book is For:

*Students who are thinking about pursuing a career in business, but aren't quite sure yet whether business school is the right move for them, or if there's another way to meet their same goals.

*Anyone who doesn't have $200,000 lying around to spend on business school, but who wants to expand their knowledge of crucial business skills, learn about best practices, and set themselves up for a career in business without saddling themselves with unmanageable debt.

*Mature entrepreneurs who want a top-level refresher course on the fundamentals of business success, and who want an expert overview that they can keep within arm's reach and access whenever they're faced with a critical business decision that they need to get right.

Summary:

The legendary entrepreneur Derek Sivers called this book a “masterpiece,” and he says it’s now the one “START HERE” book he recommends to everybody interested in business.

The Personal MBA is a wide-ranging, comprehensive overview of everything you need to know to succeed as a business owner, and there’s a reason it’s sold more than a million copies. Fun Fact: Derek actually asked Josh Kaufman to be his personal coach and mentor after he finished reading it!

Not only that, but it also passes the “Investment Test” with flying colors. Ask yourself: If you were to trade 10 dollars and 10 hours of your time, and in exchange, you’d save one hour a week for the next two years, would you take that offer?

If you value your time at, say, just $10/hour (a gross underestimation, in my opinion), then after that time, you’d have saved $1,040 ($10/hour, for 104 weeks = $1,040, minus your initial investment).

Yes, this book can save you a ton of time and frustration, but it goes much deeper than that, considering the exorbitant cost of business school today!

Attending one of the top three business schools (in America) will saddle you with around $150,000 worth of student debt, but you’ll also lose $100,000 or more (as an estimate) in lost salary or opportunity costs because you were in school “learning” when you could have been out in the real world earning.

At the time of this writing, there are eight different US business schools where the cost of an MBA exceeds $300,000. This book? The Personal MBA?

You can get it for free from the library, for just a few dollars at a used book store or on Amazon, and this breakdown is included in your membership to the Stairway to Wisdom.

Total savings for you? Nearly $400,000!

The fact is that MBA programs don’t have a monopoly on advanced business knowledge. You can learn these things without drowning in debt, and this book is an excellent start.

It covers over 200 basic to advanced business concepts, explains them simply, with easy-to-understand examples, and links back to Josh’s website, where he goes into them more deeply.

The Personal MBA is an invaluable reference manual that deserves to be found on every serious businessperson’s bookshelf. Ironically, it’s even been used as a textbook for business courses at Stanford University, New York University, Howard University, and Portland State University!

Josh's research has directly saved prospective business students millions of dollars in unnecessary tuition, fees, and interest by publishing this extremely high-level book, which covers:

*The 5 Core Processes of a Business

*The 5 Fundamental Human Drives

*10 Ways to Evaluate the Potential of a Market

*The 12 Standard Forms of Value

*The Only 4 Methods Used to Increase Revenue

*And so much more...

Honestly, the only thing better than reading this book would be actually going out and starting a business; learning by painful trial and error until you learn these lessons in the harsh real world.

You’ll have to learn them anyway, so you may as well arm yourself with as much business knowledge as you can - basically for free - before you head out and learn the hard way.

READ THE FULL BOOK BREAKDOWN HERE

Key Ideas:

#1: The 5 Core Processes of a Business

According to Kaufman, there are five core processes of a business, and they are, as he shows, interdependent. Each part impacts the other core processes, and when they all function well together, you have the makings of a wildly successful business.

The first part is about value creation, which we’ll discuss in the next Key Idea. Every business produces or provides something of value to a market of customers that values it.

If you don’t create something that other people value, then your venture is essentially a hobby. It can be done purely for its own sake - if you find value in it - but it won’t be a good business idea.

Next comes marketing, which is just as essential as having a valuable product. If you’ve created something of value that fills a need, but nobody knows about it, you don’t have a business. There’s a Zen koan in there somewhere, but you get the idea.

Third is sales. You need to sell the value you create, and if you don’t, you’re basically running a nonprofit, giving away your great product for free.

You can do that, and perhaps as a form of lead generation, giving away something for free can be a great idea, but in order to have a business, you eventually have to sell something at a price that people are willing to pay.

Value delivery comes in at number four, and that’s absolutely critical as well. You have to deliver on the value that you’ve promised to deliver, or your business isn’t going to be around too long.

In fact, the bar is so low here, that it’s quite lonely along the “extra mile.” We used to notice service when it was bad, but now we notice it when it’s good! 

Average is everywhere, so value delivery is one area where you can really set yourself apart by going above and beyond for the people who’ve placed their trust - and their cash - in you.

Lastly, we’ve got finance, and that’s simply to say that a company that doesn’t bring in enough money - or lets enough of it slip through the cracks and disappear - will eventually close. You have to be good at the finance side of things, and that’s where systems (checklists, procedures, etc.) can play a big part.

Also worth mentioning is the fact that any skill related to those five core processes is always going to be economically valuable for individuals as well.

If you can create something of value, let people know about it, sell it to them, deliver on your promises, and capture some of the value that you’ve created, then you will be rewarded financially in today's business world.

#2: How to Create Value

The above quote is one that most people would do well to have pasted onto their bathroom mirror or on the dashboard of their car so they can see it and think about it every single day. It really is the essence of business: solving problems for people who are in need of solutions.

In fact, if you say that you can’t find a good business idea, what you’re really saying is that the world is perfect and needs nothing.

Alex Hormozi, the business mentor I’ve personally learned the most from over the last year, uses a very simple “value equation” to create offers that people would feel stupid saying no to. The equation basically goes like this:

[Dream Outcome] + [Likelihood of Achieving It] / [Time Delay + Effort]

What this means is that you paint a vivid picture of what their “Dream Outcome” looks like, or what their life will be like after they’ve bought, consumed, and implemented your solution.

You also show them that your solution is the right vehicle to bring them to the solution and that it won’t take nearly as much time or effort as the other possible solutions on the market.

If you can satisfy those four demands, you’ve created an extremely valuable offer. You also win by satisfying an extremely acute need, such as, for example, the need for water in the desert. A person suffering from dehydration in the middle of the Sahara will be willing to pay more for a bottle of water than they’d be willing to pay for a diamond ring or something.

The value increases in direct proportion to the need or desire.

Valuable offers also satisfy one or more of a customer’s core human drives, which we’ll be discussing in the next Key Idea.

What you always want to be focusing on, though, is increasing the value of the offer, and not necessarily increasing your own personal profit. The latter is a natural byproduct of solving big, important problems in the lives of your customers. Business is inherently unselfish, despite what Ayn Rand may want us to believe!

Alex Hormozi’s and Josh Kaufman’s approaches come together in their discussion of the “hassle premium” as well, which is basically when you charge to remove some level of inconvenience from your customers’ lives.

If it takes too much time, and too much effort to achieve a positive result, and involves an extra layer of confusion, complexity, uncertainty, etc., then you can work that into your price, and customers will still be willing to pay it.

People pay for ease and convenience, and that’s an important part of the value as well. For example, it’s said that the greatest business idea in the world would be just to take something that people need to do anyway and do it for them in half the time.

Also important here is constant, neverending improvement - iteration - over time. You want to be constantly on the lookout for ways to improve your product and your offer and to increase the amount of value you’re delivering for the price that you’re charging. This is how you win in business.

The key is to do this quickly and make a series of small bets about what you can improve on and that your customers will respond favorably to:

What’s working right now? What do customers say that they like or don’t like about your product? What can you add or remove that will increase the amount of value they’re getting?

Implement what you learn as quickly as possible, release that next iteration, and then gauge customer reaction and feeling.

If they like this new version, you can make additional tweaks or execute other ideas to add value. As long as you’re keeping track of what you’ve tried before, how customers have responded to it, and what you have planned for the future, you’ll be on the right track.

#3: The 5 Basic Human Drives

Theories and models meant to describe innate human drives vary in complexity, truth, and understanding, but many of them cover the same ground, and all successful products and businesses cater to at least one or more of them.

As far as Josh Kaufman is concerned, they fall under five distinct categories, and they are:

The Drive to Acquire: To accumulate material objects and possessions, and also intangible things like status, influence, and power, to name just a few. We like to get stuff and to have other people know that we have that stuff. Porsche satisfies the drives (no pun intended) of their customers to acquire.

The Drive to Bond: To feel valued, loved, needed, and respected. Social media satisfies (and sometimes frustrates) this desire, as well as any product or service that makes us feel attractive, desirable, liked, and/or connected.

The Drive to Learn: To satisfy our craving to know, our curiosity about the world, our place within it, and our direction. Books, courses, all of academia, etc. They all satisfy this drive.

The Drive to Defend: To feel safe, to protect ourselves and the people we care about, and to maintain our property and possessions. Home security systems satisfy this drive, as well as self-defense classes and courses, etc.

The Drive to Feel: To experience new sensory stimuli, have intense emotional experiences, feel pleasure and/or excitement, anticipation, etc. Disney Land, Hollywood, Netflix - all these products, places, services, and experiences help satisfy this drive.

That’s Josh Kaufman’s view on the basic human drives. But, as I mentioned above, theories and models differ. For example, Tony Robbins has it that humans have six needs, being Certainty, Uncertainty/Variety, Significance, Connection/Love, Growth, and Contribution.

I have a lot of sympathy for Robbins’ formulation as well, but there’s, of course, Abraham Maslow, the pioneering work of Scott Barry Kaufman, Ken Wilber’s "Theory of Everything," and also the subconscious fear of death, as described in Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death.

Humans are complicated, okay? We have many different competing - and complementary - drives pushing and pulling us in all these different directions, and we’re strongly, subtly influenced by all of them each and every day. Kinda makes it hard to plan your day, doesn’t it?

For our purposes, however, it’s important to understand that all of these drives coexist, and successful businesses satisfy these drives with their products and services.

If you can add value in any (or many) of these areas, and deliver that value efficiently and effectively, you’ll be extremely well-rewarded in the global marketplace.

READ ALL THE KEY IDEAS HERE

Book Notes:

READ ALL THE BOOK NOTES HERE

Action Steps:

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...

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#1: Question Higher Education

There are plenty of fine reasons for going to business school (networking, credibility, access to mentors, etc.), and plenty of reasons why it may not be the best choice for you.

For one thing, it’s an awful lot of student debt to take on, simply to learn the few important things that Kaufman doesn’t cover in his book. Seriously, most of what you need is in that book, and you can get it basically for free.

Still, it’s important reflect on your true motivations. Do you want to be a consultant, a banker, or to work on Wall Street? If so, then you’re probably best served by going to business school. At least, it wouldn’t be the worst idea.

But if you’re still just “figuring things out,” then $200,000 is a pretty hefty price tag for something like that.

There’s nothing "wrong" with taking time to sort out your priorities (indeed, people don’t do enough of this kind of long-range thinking!), but if you already know that you want to start a business, crippling debt is the last thing you need.

#2: Seek Out Ways to Deliver Value

Every problem is also a business opportunity. Nobody’s life is perfect, and until everyone’s is, we’ll still need entrepreneurs, businesses, and solutions to life’s inevitable problems. Entrepreneurs provide those valuable solutions, and to the extent that you can add value to people’s lives, you will be rewarded financially.

So, constantly be on the lookout for problems you can solve, and for ways that you can make the lives of the people around you better. There is a business opportunity hidden within every difficulty, and a customer within every sufferer.

#3: Develop Economically Valuable Skills

If you recall the five core processes of every business (Key Idea #1), you’ll see that the people who can make each of those processes run more smoothly and efficiently possess economically valuable skills that the market will reward them for deploying.

Within the value creation, marketing, sales, value delivery, and financial processes making up every company are the highest-paid earners in our economy.

They have developed economically valuable skills - talents and abilities that the market desperately needs - and so they are paid more than most people.

You can develop these skills too. You don’t need to develop all five at once, but if you have at least one, or maybe even a unique combination of two or more, then you will be rewarded extremely well.

READ ALL THE ACTION STEPS HERE

"The path to success is to take massive, determined action."

-Tony Robbins

About the Author:

Josh's research focuses on business, entrepreneurship, skill acquisition, productivity, creativity, applied psychology, and practical wisdom. His unique, multidisciplinary approach to business mastery and rapid skill acquisition has helped millions of readers around the world learn essential concepts and skills on their own terms.

Josh has been featured as the #1 bestselling author in Business & Money, as ranked by Amazon.com, and his books have sold over a million copies worldwide.

Josh's TEDx talk on The First 20 Hours is one of the top 25 most-viewed TED talks published to date, with over 22 million views on YouTube.

Josh's research has been featured by The New York Times, The BBC, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Fortune, Forbes, Time, BusinessWeek, Wired, Fast Company, Financial Times, HarvardBusiness.org, The World Economic Forum, Inside Higher Ed, Lifehacker, MarketWatch, The Independent, Bloomberg TV, PBS Next Avenue, CCTV, and CNN's Sanjay Gupta MD.

JoshKaufman.net was named one of the "Top 100 Websites for Entrepreneurs" by Forbes in 2013.

Additional Resources:

Josh-Kaufman.net | Main Website

The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List

The Personal MBA - Josh Kaufman | Talks at Google

The 5 Parts of Every Business | YouTube Breakdown

How to Read a Book (High-Value PDF) | Paul N. Edwards

The 12 Core Human Skills | How Many Do You Have?

This Book on Amazon:

The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business, by Josh Kaufman

If You Liked This Book:

The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything...Fast!, by Josh Kaufman

How to Fight a Hydra: Face Your Fears, Pursue Your Ambitions, and Become the Hero You Are Destined to Be, by Josh Kaufman

Principles: Life and Work, by Ray Dalio

Your Next Five Moves: Master the Art of Business Strategy, by Patrick Bet-David

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, by Peter Thiel

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, by Eric Ries

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't, by Jim Collins

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, by Tim Ferriss

Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way, by Sir Richard Branson

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OK, that’s it for now…

More excellent book recommendations coming your way soon!

Again, the rest of the above breakdown is absolutely free (for now!), and you can find it right here.

What you see in this email is less than half of what you get at the Stairway to Wisdom. I left out most of the Book Notes, all the Questions to Stimulate Your Thinking, several of the Key Ideas, etc.

So there’s a lot more for you left to read if you enjoyed what you read in this email!

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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