My 4 Hour Workweek

Occasionally, I find that my motivation falls asleep or disappears, and sometimes needs a little spark to get going.  There’s only so much I can do to internally motivate myself – sometimes I need to read about someone else’s success or action to get myself pumped up.

It’s been awhile since I’ve done any kind of  compilation post, but here’s a collection of some things I’ve read lately that I found to be really motivating…Enjoy.

Read more…

November is almost here (my birthday month!), so it’s time for another reading list.  This month, I’m going to go with a couple suggestions that were in the comments of last month’s post.  Also, I’ve decided to add a short summary (taken from Amazon) for each book, in case you don’t feel like heading over to Amazon’s product page.

Here they are:

1) The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

• “The best-selling author of The Big Switch returns with an explosive look at technology’s effect on the mind. “Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply?

2) What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

• “In a book that’s one part prophecy, one part thought experiment, one part manifesto, and one part survival manual, internet impresario and blogging pioneer Jeff Jarvis reverse-engineers Google—the fastest-growing company in history—to discover forty clear and straightforward rules to manage and live by. At the same time, he illuminates the new worldview of the internet generation: how it challenges and destroys, but also opens up vast new opportunities. His findings are counterintuitive, imaginative, practical, and above all visionary, giving readers a glimpse of how everyone and everything—from corporations to governments, nations to individuals—must evolve in the Google era.”

If you’ve read or are currently reading any of the books listed here, please share your comments.  I’d love to see what everyone else thinks about these books, especially before I read them.  If you have suggestions for next month’s reading list, please share those too!  As always, you can check out my past reading lists by clicking the Reading link on the top menu.

It’s been awhile since I last gave away a book, so I thought now would be a great time to give away a book that I actually have more than one copy of!  It’s a book you may be very familiar with (and it’s the inspiration of this blog):  The 4-Hour Workweek: Expanded and Updated.

Many of you have probably already read it, but for those who haven’t (or if you don’t own the book and you want it), I’m giving away a brand new copy!  All you need to do is follow me on Twitter and retweet this post using the button above.  Be sure your retweet includes “@My4HWW” so that I can see that you retweeted the post.

I’ll select a random winner on Monday and ship it out to that person (sorry, I can only ship to those who live in the U.S.).  I’ll tweet @ the winner, and then I’ll need you to direct message me your shipping address.  I’ll also update this post with the winner’s Twitter name.

Good luck!

UPDATE: The winner is @bobmantooth!  Congrats! Please send me your mailing address via the direct message feature on Twitter (so that I know it’s coming from you).

Another month is almost in the books (pun intended)!  With the weather getting colder (at least here in Chicago), I’m finding myself indoors a lot more, so hopefully that means I’ll have time to get through more books soon.  With that said, work is still busy, and unfortunately reading always takes a back seat to my work (both my “9 to 5″ work and my work that I discuss here on this blog).

Like September’s reading list, October’s is also fairly light.

Here are a couple books I hope to read this month:

1) Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by Chris Brogan

2) The Knack: How Street-Smart Entrepreneurs Learn to Handle Whatever Comes Up by Norm Brodsky

If you’ve read or are currently reading any of the books listed here, please share your comments.  I’d love to see what everyone else thinks about these books, especially before I read them.  If you have suggestions for next month’s reading list, please share those too!  As always, you can check out my past reading lists by clicking the Reading link on the top menu.

Wow, I can’t believe the end of August is around the corner with the summer quickly coming to an end.  Fortunately, fall and winter generally bring better reading conditions for me.  I don’t know about you, but when it’s sunny and warm outside, I try to limit how much time I spend indoors.  While it’s nice to read outside when the weather is nice, I find that I’m more likely to read indoors when it’s cold and rainy or snowy.

Enough about the weather.  September’s reading list is very light (this is the lightest reading list I’ve had so far on the blog) because I’ll be wrapped up in another tax season from now (it started a couple weeks ago) until October 15th.  Unfortunately, my reading time will suffer.

Here are a couple books I hope to read this month:

1) The New Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz (this was recommended to me by Maren Kate)

2) Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink

If you’ve read or are currently reading any of the books listed here, please share your comments.  I’d love to see what everyone else thinks about these books, especially before I read them.  If you have suggestions for next month’s reading list, please share those too!  As always, you can check out my past reading lists by clicking the Reading link on the top menu.

With July nearly all wrapped up, it’s time to see what kind of literary wonders await on deck.  If you didn’t seen my reading list for July, you can check it out here.  In case you haven’t been following these lists, I started creating monthly reading lists due to a few e-mails I received from readers asking me about other books I recommend or am considering reading.

In July, I focused a lot on marketing and sales, but now I think I want to get back to the basics of entrepreneurship.  I’m going to try something a bit different this month, and open the list up to your ideas. In other words, between now and the end of July, I’ll leave this post “open.”  If you have any good suggestions, leave them in the comments between now and July 31st, and if I think I want to read them, I’ll edit this post and add it to the list (and give you props, of course!).

Below are a few books I will aim to read this month, time permitting (as always):

1) The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur by Mike Michalowicz

2) The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael Gerber

3) The Art of Innovation by Thomas Kelley

If you’ve read or are currently reading any of the books listed here, please share your comments.  I’d love to see what everyone else thinks about these books, especially before I read them.  If you have suggestions for next month’s reading list, please share those too!