YOUTUBE 📚 CREATOR LAUNCH ACADEMY 📚 PATREON

*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.

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

The Personal MBA is a wide-ranging, comprehensive overview of (virtually) 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, no matter who you are), then after that time, you’d have saved $1,040 ($10/hour, for 104 weeks = $1,040, minus your initial investment). So yes, this book can save you a ton of time and frustration, but it also 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 completely free. 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 about these things on your own, without drowning in debt, and this book is an excellent start.

It covers more than 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 absorb these lessons from personal experience in the 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 start learning the hard way.

#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 that generates profits.

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 probably a Zen koan in there somewhere, which you can come up with yourself, 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 - with you. It’s so easy to win here. Everybody else is competing for “average, while the competition for “exceptional” is actually quite low. No one’s really even trying.

Lastly, we’ve got finance, and here we’ll simply 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 to learn as well. If you can create something of value, let people know about it, sell it to them, deliver on your promises, and capture/retain at least 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 literally anything else. 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, never-ending 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 to make a series of small bets about what you can improve on and what your customers will favorably respond to:

What’s working right now? What do customers say 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? How can you make your offer better?

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 to others.

The Drive to Learn: To satisfy our craving to know, our curiosity about the world, our place within it, and our direction. Books, courses, basically 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 but 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.

#4: 10 Ways to Evaluate a Potential Market

The market you decide to enter can make or break your business. There are 10 different factors that Josh Kaufman identifies as being important when considering moving into a specific market, and you need to take all of them into consideration before diving in with what you think is a great idea.

Simply put, you could have the greatest, most wonderful product or service in the world, but if there’s no market for it, then you don’t have a business.

Urgency: This is what kind of pain or discomfort your potential market is currently experiencing and that your solution supposedly addresses. A lack of water in the desert is an urgent need, whereas a neighborhood with 8 grocery stores already isn’t going to desperately clamor for a 9th one.

Market Size: This refers to how many potential customers there are in your market. Just as importantly, it’s also about how many of them you can reach, or your Total Addressable Market (TAM). Even if there are 8,000,000,000 people in the market for water, but you can’t reach any of them, then you don’t have a business.

Pricing Potential: How much can your customers afford to pay for your product or service? Can you charge what the product is worth, and does that number align with what the market is willing and able to pay?

Cost of Customer Acquisition: This is one of the key numbers you need to know for your business. How much does it cost you - in dollars or time - to gain a new customer? By this, I mean your advertising budget, the salary of your salespeople, the cost to produce your ad creative - basically everything that goes into marketing to, selling to, and onboarding a new customer.

Cost of Value Delivery: How much does it cost you - again, in time and money, plus any other resources - to deliver the result you promised to your prospective customer? If you can deliver on your promise, but it eats up all of your available resources with no profit left over for you, then you need to rethink some things about your strategy.

Uniqueness of Offer: This is pretty self-explanatory, but it’s actually quite shocking how many people are just “me too-ing” into the market, without providing anything different, better, more interesting, or better-produced than everything that’s come before. It’s unlikely that your product has “never been seen before” (which would actually be bad, because that means that nobody wants it), but you have to bring something new to the market that isn’t already being done. Such as the same service except in half the time, or with less effort, etc.

Speed to Market: This refers to how fast you can get your business up and running and serving customers. If you need or want positive cash flow right now, but it’s going to take you 3-5 years to prototype a new product, get it developed, get it tested, etc., then you’re much better off abandoning that idea and pursuing something else.

Upfront Investment: Again, this is pretty self-explanatory. It refers to how much you need to invest first, before seeing a positive return on investment (ROI). If you can wait, that’s fine, but cash flow is the lifeblood of a business, and you don’t want to wait too long before you start earning a profit and pay off that initial investment.

Upsell Potential: This basically refers to whether or not you can sell something else to someone who has just bought from you, or whether the transaction/relationship is essentially completed when that first sale is done. Upsells are when you sell them more of what they just bought (say, a monthly recurring supply), and cross-sells are when you sell them something different that complements the original purchase. For example, a realtor could cross-sell home insurance, interior decorating, lawn care, etc.

Evergreen Potential: This is all about ongoing client relationships, and how much work you’ll have to put in after the initial sale is done. Authors wouldn’t really have to worry about this (buy my book, read it, wait for the next one), but personal trainers would. They would keep meeting with clients for the duration of their contract, costing them time and attention each session. Thinking about how much additional time and effort you’ll have to devote to each new customer after the sale is an important consideration to make before you launch a new business, product, or service.

#5: The 12 Standard Forms of Value

Another list! This one is all about the different forms of value that you create or provide to your customers. You’ll instantly recognize most or all of them, but it’s interesting to look at them this way, as distinct forms of value that differ in certain key respects.

Products: These are, you know…things. Staplers, cars, toasters, books, etc. Anything material that you create and sell to someone else.

Services: Again, this is one that virtually everyone is intimately familiar with. We’re talking haircuts, personal training, executive coaching, lawn care, etc. Anything that you do for someone else that makes their lives easier, stress-free, or more enjoyable.

Shared Resource: These can include gyms, coffee shops - basically anything where diverse groups of people gather to share the same space, but aren’t necessarily interacting with one another.

Subscription: Examples of subscriptions include The Reading Life, Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc. Anything that renews monthly or yearly (usually), and that customers use often.

Resale: Retail stores fall under this category, where a manufacturer will create something like a t-shirt or a washing machine, and another store, acting as a distribution center, will then sell it to the people who frequent that store.

Agency: Athletes and movie stars need agents, but you could also include realtors here as well, and lawyers, etc. Basically, anyone who acts on your behalf as a recognized expert in an area where most people remain ignorant of dangers and best practices.

Audience Aggregation: Social media companies like Facebook and Instagram cash in on this kind of value, profiting from the attention that they’re able to command across their platforms. It’s “the attention economy,” and we’re all living in it.

Loan: If you have access to capital, and other people want or need access to that capital, then you can provide that to them and create value that way. Car loans, mortgages, etc.

Lease: Similar to the above, when you lease a space, a car, etc.

Option: This category includes movie rights and licensing rights to, say, a song or another creative work. You sell the rights to someone else, thereby giving them permission to use it, and you profit from the transaction that way.

Insurance: Again, most people are familiar with this. Homeowners insurance falls under this category, car insurance, health insurance, etc.

Capital: Angel investors taking a calculated risk on a business in return for equity fall under this category. Wherever you deploy your capital to recoup your investment later on for a profit is included here.

#6: The 9 Factors Involved in Buying Decisions

A lot goes into deciding whether to make a purchase or not. Josh Kaufman identifies nine separate factors that come together to inform those decisions, and they are:

Efficacy: Is this going to work? What is the likelihood of success, the likelihood that this product is going to work for me, this service is going to benefit me, etc.?

Speed: How fast is this going to work? Is there another product out there that can do the same job in a fraction of the time? Remember earlier that we said that one of the best business models in the world is to take something that everyone needs done anyway and to do it in half the time.

Reliability: Is this going to break down at the worst possible time, or is it going to last me for years and years without giving me any issues? Am I likely to need a replacement soon, or can I depend on this product to “get me where I need to go,” so to speak?

Ease of Use: This is pretty self-explanatory, along with the first three. Does this thing require a level of specialization, knowledge, or ability that I don’t have? Or am I going to be able to use it quite easily? Will it take me a long time to figure out, or can I likely start using it right away?

Flexibility: Do I need to use this in one specific way, to solve one specific problem, or to make one specific task easier? Or can I use this product for various uses, and in different situations, and have it still perform reliably?

Status: What do other people think of the fact that I own this? If people see me using this, or see that I have this, what will they think? Will it elevate my status, or will it lower me in their eyes? This is a more important consideration to many people than is immediately obvious. Once you do see it, though, you start seeing it everywhere.

Aesthetic Appeal: Does it look pretty? Does it look good? Is it going to look good in my house or on my body?

Emotion: This can be seen in a few different lights. First, there’s the emotion when it comes to the buying decision itself: whether people will buy something impulsively, in a moment of weakness. Alternatively, it can also refer to how people believe they will feel after they have bought it - what kind of emotional states they will experience if and when they incorporate this product or service into their lives.

Cost: Finally, there’s the price. This is a huge topic as well, and we cover it in one of the other Key Ideas below. Basically, some people just want to pay the lowest price, and they want to find the best deal possible. These people are usually not your best customers, because they’ll likely be trickier to deal with, and they won’t be very loyal either, always looking to jump over to some other product or service if they can get it for cheaper.

There’s another class of customers, however, that want to pay more, and, more importantly, have other people know that they’ve paid more. You know these kinds of people; they usually make themselves known, whether you want to hear from them or not!

Another consideration that has to do with the price is the fact that paying more for something increases the perceived value of the thing you just bought. We value more highly that which we paid more to get (in time, money, etc.), or that which was more difficult to acquire. Thus, it’s easier to “sell” the purchase to yourself, and convince yourself that it was the right decision, if you ended up paying more for it.

#7: Critical Assumptions

Critical assumptions are those statements that need to be true in order for your business idea to succeed. In effect, what you’re saying is: “There’s a market for what I’m building, I have the skills and resources necessary to bring it to market, and if I do so, I will be able to attract enough customers via sales and marketing in order for me to be successful and sustain my business.”

More specifically, critical assumptions could include:

“There aren’t enough reasonably-priced childcare facilities located in this area already. I should start one.”

Or:

“There are more than enough people in this area who are both looking for a home to purchase, and who are able to buy one at the price I need to sell at for me to make a profit.”

There are any number of other examples you could come up with, but field testing is going to be your friend here. You need to field test your critical assumptions and see if they stand up to scrutiny. A great way to do this is with an MVP or Minimum Viable Product, or with pre-orders.

With an MVP, what you’re doing is building something with the bare minimum of features and functionality for actual customers to go out and want to purchase it. You’re not building some completely perfect thing and hoping that people want it; you’re building something rudimentary, then improving it over time, once you know that it’s something people are likely to be interested in.

What you can also do is take pre-orders before you even create anything! Just make it clear to potential customers that they are buying something that isn’t quite ready yet. How many preorders you need depends on what you’re selling, but if you get, say, 100 people preordering a book or a course, etc., then you can go ahead and actually make the thing, without wondering whether it’s something that people really want.

And if not that many people preorder it, or if you realize that it’s not actually going to work? You just refund the money to the people who already bought, shut down operations for a while, and go to work thinking up something else instead.

#8: The Cardinal Sin of Marketing

If you can’t even get your dream customers’ attention, your business is doomed to fail. The first rule of marketing, however, is that your potential customer possesses limited attention. You need to find a way to break through the noise, and so the cardinal sin of marketing is for your approach to be boring.

You basically need to operate under the assumption that people are hopelessly preoccupied, and that you need to give them an especially strong reason to stop what they’re doing and pay attention to you instead.

People are always filtering their perceptions, which means they are constantly deciding what to pay attention to and what to ignore. You need to find a way to get around their filters, and one of the most effective ways of doing this is with what’s called a hook.

In social media marketing and content creation, a hook is what appears in the first 1-30 seconds of the video in order to entice a viewer to keep watching. In the context of business, a hook may also refer to a single phrase or sentence that describes your offer’s primary benefit.

Apple’s tagline for the iPod was “1,000 songs in your pocket,” and obviously, that was an incredibly effective hook for them. My favorite eBook service, Everand, is sometimes called “Netflix for books.” That’s another great one because it’s catchy and memorable, and you don’t have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what it is. It’s Netflix except, you know…for books! That’s a solid hook.

#9: The Four Ways to Price an Offer

Price is how much you’re charging, and value is whatever someone is willing to pay. When these align in a way that’s favorable to both parties in a transaction, then everything just works.

The Pricing Uncertainty Principle states that all prices are arbitrary and malleable - it’s an executive decision, and you can charge whatever you want - but your prices have to be justified to a potential buyer before any sort of transaction can take place.

Josh Kaufman lays out four pricing methods here in The Personal MBA, and they are:

Replacement Cost: Usually, this takes the form of a “cost-plus” value, which means the total cost of making or replacing something, plus the markup that allows you to make a profit on the deal.

Market Comparison: This price is arrived at by looking at similar products on the market and pricing yours relative to them. This can be tricky, though, because if you just try to compete on price, eventually, your competitors are just going to sell for cheaper and cheaper, and you eventually turn yourself into a “commodity,” rather than something of really high value. This “race to the bottom” usually isn’t all that profitable for anybody except the clear market leader. Even then, it’s a tough way to make a profit.

Discounted Cash Flow/Net Present Value: These are the sorts of terms that make people’s eyes glaze over, but all it really means is how much something is worth if it can bring in money over time. If something will generate ongoing cash flow, like a business, you can sell it at a larger upfront cost because the buyer knows (or at least believes) that they will recoup their investment, and then some, over time.

Value Comparison: This is, according to Kaufman, usually the best way to price something, and it means to set a price relative to the value it has to the specific buyer. For example, if your customer believes that taking your online course is going to result in their earning an extra $10,000 this year in side income, then they’re going to be willing to pay at least $1,000 (or more) to take that course. Whereas some other customer who doesn’t believe that your course can help them earn any additional income isn’t going to be willing to pay anything close to $1,000 for that same course.

I also highly recommend Dan Kennedy’s book on price strategy, and in Josh’s words:

#10: How to Increase Revenue Dramatically

There are only four ways (4!) to increase revenue. Every other tactic, strategy, etc., can be boiled down to one of these four things:

Sell to More People: Increase the number of customers you serve, and the number of people consuming your products. This is known as scale.

Sell More to Each Person: Increase the average size of each transaction by selling them more of the same stuff, or by selling them other stuff (upsells and cross-sells, etc.).

Sell to Each Person More Times: Increase the frequency of transactions per customer, by selling to them more often. So, instead of someone eating at your restaurant once a month, you convince them to eat there twice a month, etc.

Raise Your Prices: An obvious one here. Basically, you find customers who have more disposable income, you increase the perceived value of your product, etc.

That’s really it. Everything you could possibly do to make more money involves one or more of those four things. You should also remember the Customer Lifetime Value, or LTV, which means the total value of a customer’s business over the lifetime of their relationship with you. When you know the LTV of your prospects, you can then start to budget for exactly how much you’re able to spend to acquire new customers.

For example, if you know that every new customer spends an average of $300 with you over the course of their relationship with your business, you can theoretically spend up to $299.99 in advertising and marketing and still turn a profit.

#11: The 4 Methods of Completion

In the beginning, you have to do pretty much everything yourself. You’re the one doing the outreach and the marketing, writing the sales copy and the blog posts, publishing on social media, interacting with customers, etc. However, as your business expands, if you keep insisting on doing everything yourself, you’re going to burn out eventually.

Not only that, but you’re often not the person best suited to perform particular tasks anyway! For everything that you hate to do, there’s someone else out there who either loves to do it, is much better at it, or possibly both.

So to get more done, Josh Kaufman recommends dividing your entire task list into four separate categories.

Completion: These are the tasks that only you can do, or that you do particularly well. Things like setting the overall direction of the company, managing your relationship with top clients, etc. Sure, you could hand these off to someone else, but you’re the one best suited to do it. It’s important not to mislead yourself here and tell yourself that there’s no one else in the entire world who could possibly do as good a job as you can, because, honestly, that’s probably not true. Tasks in this category reside in your “zone of genius” and are tasks that literally only you could do.

Delegation: In this category are tasks that are still important, but for whom there are people who can do them at least 80% as well as you can. They still need to get done, but they don’t need to get done by you. So delegate them to someone else and get right back to your zone of genius.

Deferment: These are non-critical tasks that are also not time-dependent. Maybe they should probably get done eventually, but the tasks in the first two categories need to be done first before you can even think about these ones. These can wait.

Deletion: This category is reserved for those busywork tasks that don’t need to get done at all. Business owners and entrepreneurs spend a lot of time re-designing their websites and researching new SEO strategies for social media (ask me how I know), but that’s probably not going to make much of a difference - if any. You’re better off just deleting these unimportant and unnecessary tasks and getting on with your life.

Another helpful term to remember is MIT or Most Important Task. Myself, I typically set three MITs at the beginning of each day (and ideally, the night before) and make sure that I attack these before I do literally anything else. 

These are the “80/20” tasks that make the absolute greatest difference in what you’re trying to achieve. To identify them, it helps to ask, “If I did only this one thing today (or these three things), would I view today as a success?”

#12: Key Performance Indicators

Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, are the measurements of the most critical parts of your business system. Their main function is to help business leaders and team members avoid wasting time, attention, and resources measuring things that don’t actually matter all that much to the business. You could measure Facebook likes and Instagram followers, but it’s much more effective to measure revenue.

The types of KPIs - the things that you’re going to want to measure and keep an eye on - are going to change within and between businesses, but they usually manifest across the following areas:

Value Creation: Measurements of how quickly your business is creating value in the marketplace and your current levels of inflows.

Marketing: Measurements of how many people are paying attention to your offer and your ad creative, and how many potential customers are giving you permission to contact them later with more information (for example, by giving you their email address, etc.).

Sales: Measurements of how many potential customers are becoming actual customers, and what their Lifetime Customer Value is, which we’ve covered in a previous Key Idea.

Value Delivery: Measurements of how quickly and effectively each customer is being served, plus anything having to do with customer complaints, returns, feedback, etc.

Finance: Measurements of your profit margin (how much is left over in profit once your costs are covered), how much purchasing power you have, whether the company is financially solvent, etc.

Of course, you can have multiple KPIs, but if everything is a Key Performance Indicator, then nothing is. Just like you can’t have more than one priority, not everything can be “key.” A healthy limit would be to have about 5 KPIs and adjust from there, but of course it depends on the nature of the business. Just don’t fall into the trap of collecting so much data that you can’t figure out the story that’s being told.

#13: Structuring Your Own Personal MBA

Josh Kaufman has compiled a truly spectacular reading list of business books that you could use to structure your own personal MBA curriculum. However, he says that even though there are thousands of great books about business on the market, not every book is right for The Personal MBA.

On his website, Josh lists four criteria that were used to select the books featured on his list:

1. Valuable, Action-Oriented Content. Does the book contain a lot of useful, practical information about how business works, how you can add value, and why the material in the book is important? Is the book based on scientific research or direct personal experience? Does it contain tools, ideas, and concepts that can be put to use immediately in the real world?

2. Acceptable Time Commitment. Is the book a good educational value for the amount of time invested? Can you get the key points of each book quickly?

3. Self-Learning Friendly. Is this book designed to keep the reader’s mind engaged? Does the author present the material effectively and make the learning process enjoyable?

4. Reference Value. Will this book be a valuable resource to turn to when you need information on a specific topic? How does the book re-read? Is it a book worth keeping for many years? For any business-related question, does at least one of these books provide useful guidance and insight?

I’ve been taking detailed notes from every single book I’ve ever read since 2014, and they’re all here on my Patreon for just $1.

They’re updated monthly (sometimes twice a month), and by supporting me on Patreon you’ll also be able to keep up with everything I’m reading and learning, and get my best notes, takeaways, and summaries from every book that I finish.

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