You may have big goals and big dreams in life. You may want to be a successful entrepreneur or a businessman in the USA. Every entrepreneur must be a lifelong learner to achieve success.
Every Year millions of people step on the journey to be successful businessmen but end up with disappointment. Most of the newcomers to the industry fail within the first five years.
according to some of the ex-startup founders, one in four fail within the first year. Starting a business requires the spirit of taking risks, and staying grounded, and you need to face various challenges.
So, here are the best books for starting a business, these books have a greater impact on your entrepreneurship journey and help to shape your interpretive journey.
As an ex-founder of my business, I need to face so many challenges every new day. Also, I have talked to various renowned founders of businesses regarding issues they face during their journey.
I always keep faith in entrepreneur books. So to help you out, here, in this article, I am going to wrap together the 10 best entrepreneur books, you will find something valuable in this list for sure.
Let’s dive into the deep!
1. The Lean Startup by Eric Reis
The Lean Startup deserves the top rank in my listing, and it is a must-read for every entrepreneur. This book is all about how you can turn your startup idea into a sustainable business journey.
This book helps you to build a product, or service that customers want, deserve, and everything with minimum waste of time.
The Lean Startup starts with recognizing your biggest assumptions, including:
- Value assumptions
- Growth assumptions
Key Takeaways and lessons
- The value assumption is all about the belief that the customers will find value in your product or service. On the other hand, the growth assumption is all about how you can profitably attract customers over a period.
- Eric Reis then teaches about the process of converting these two assumptions into testable hypotheses. Then he talks about how you can find quick and inexpensive ways to test and validate that hypothesis including creating a promotional video, landing page, etc.
- These insights and processes help you to eliminate the uncertainty that almost every business faces. Moreover, this book also provides some effective tools that you need to build a lasting, sustainable business.
2. Start With Why by Simon Sinek
Start With Why is one of the best books on setting up a business, it is an A to Z doze on how leaders inspire people to take action. You can apply the ideas and thoughts of this book to attract new loyal customers. It also helps to build a company culture and have a greater impact on the world.
Key Takeaways and lessons
- Sinek has shared all the insights that he gained on discovering the deeper facts of business. He stated that you must discover the underlying purpose of your business, product, service, and brand.
- He stipulates that there are two ways to influence people’s behavior, inspiration, and manipulation. He described that brands that are unable to attract Royal customers rely on manipulation tactics. While these tactics can help you to drive initial sales, Sinek warns that applying manipulation can be less effective over time.
- This tactic will less effectively work on customer relationships, so the customers will not maintain a long-term relationship with your business.
- To help you, he makes a solution to this issue that you can inspire your audience by starting with why. You can clarify and communicate starting with why you are doing, what you do are the keys to inspiring your customers. thus, you can build a long-term relationship with your audience.
3. The Mom test by Rob Fitzpatrick
Rob Fitzpatrick primarily focused on startups that are launching a new product or service in the market. The Mom Test will help you how to talk properly with your customers. Also, it guides you on how you can gain more knowledge from the customers.
Key Takeaways and Lessons
- This book clears all the doubts that you have while starting a new business.
- It starts by teaching you that when you are talking to new customers, you should talk about their lives, not your ideas. On the other hand, when you talk with your friends, family, and potential customers, you can clarify your ideas and thoughts. They will see the passion you have for your business.
- The problem with such conversation is that people will often offer generic support and blind encouragement. According to Fitzpqatriock, if you want to get genuine feedback from them, you can talk to them about their life in the context of the issue you are trying to resolve with your product or service.
- Then, they will reflect on the problem and they would want the problem to be solved. then you can compare what your customers are saying about your idea if the two are aligned. This is just the first idea that Fitzrick covered in this book.
- The Mom Test is one of the best books for starting a new business when it comes to learning strategies and tips to get valuable feedback from customers.
4. Thinking, Fast, and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast, and Slow is one of the best books that almost every entrepreneur can read. This book teaches you how to gain insight into the psychology behind decision-making and judgment.
Key Takeaways and Lessons
Daniel Kahneman breaks this psychology into two systems, including:
- System 1: It operates automatically, and quickly with no effort and no sense of voluntary control.
- System 2: it allocates attention to effortful mental activities including complex computations. The System 2 operations are associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.
- Throughout this book, Daniel has focused on these two systems and how they are different from one another. He explained both these systems in great detail and talked about why and how you make the decisions. How can you identify which system you are using and what should be using?
5. The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris
The 4-Hour Workweek is an effective guide that teaches you how to free yourself from 9 to 5. Ferris started with the key idea is to be effective, not efficient. ferries use the 80/20 rule in this book. This rule is also known as the Pareto Principle.
Key Takeaways and Lessons:
- One of the most interesting insights in this book is that you do not need to become a millionaire to live like one, Ferries describes as The New Rich. he stated in this book that if you want to live a luxurious life, you must focus on flexibility and mobility.
- Throughout this book, Ferris provides you with the tools to accomplish this New Rich lifestyle. These tools include outsourcing tasks to virtual assistants to redefining your approach to work. This is one of the best entrepreneur books for businessmen who are looking to take their passion and turn it into a full-time job.
6. Zero To One by Peter Thiel
Legendary entrepreneur and investor, Peter Thiel explained in Zero To One why you should focus on businesses and create something new. He teaches you about how many of today’s businesses are focused on creating or improving existing products, moreover, how many of today’s businesses are moving the world from 1 to N.
Key Takeaways and Lessons
- In this book, Peter is calling the new entrepreneurs as well as the existing ones to take the world from zero to one, as the name suggests. He teaches entrepreneurs to find completely new solutions and products that can create more value.
- Then, he breaks it down further into actionable tips on what you should do and not do before creating your solution and product. Undoubtedly, it is one of the best solutions for your business and is well worth to read this book.
7. Crossing The Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore
Crossing The Chasm is one of the best books for starting a business because it is all about how to market and sell disruptive products to the mainstream market. It focuses on any new product or service that asks the customers to change their behavior in a significant way.
Moore starts this book by describing what he calls The Technology Adoption Lifecycle. He categorizes people into five groups and how each group adopts disruptive tech solutions. These include:
- The Innovators (2.5% of Customers)
- Early Adopters (13.5% of Customers)
- Early Majority (34% of Customers)
- Late Majority (34% of Customers)
- The Laggards (16% of Customers)
Key Takeaways and Lessons
- Each group responds to disruptive products in different ways. For example, an innovator will be interested in knowing about a new launching product, so they will intend to buy a new one. You can think about the first people who purchased the Apple AirPods. innovators want to be the first for the sake of the first.
- innovators are different from the early adopters. They look for new technology that will provide them with a strategic and competitive advantage in their daily life and work life.
- the early majority are customers who are looking for evolution and revolution. They will adapt to new technology when they observe it has become a new standard. A great example of this is the majority of people using the Blackberry until they saw that iPhones were becoming a new standard.
- Throughout the book, Moore provides details about all these groups. however, critically, the book focuses more on “crossing the chasm” between Early adopters, and the Early majority & late majority.
8. The Hard Thing About Hard Things By Ben Horowitz
The Hard Things About Hard Things is one of the most popular books that every young entrepreneur must read. This book is all about how hard it is to run a business. The author of the book was very much conscious that he didn’t want to write another management book.
He felt that something was missing in the market of business books for businessmen. He noticed that no one is writing about what happens when everything goes wrong. According to Ben, it is all on your shoulders to fix the issue.
Key Takeaways and Lessons:
- He starts the book by writing his own story and he gives you a glimpse behind the curtain.
- The latter half of the business book is all about actionable advice on how you can effectively run your business. What makes unique this book is how Horowitz manages the real problems and challenges that entrepreneurs face.
- In the book, he mentioned many questions he asked his mentors and solutions he faced himself. Additionally, Ben described how you can control your psychology and how to keep your demons in check as a CEO.
9. How To Win Friends and Influence People By Dale Carnegie
Dale Carnegie describes a series of techniques for navigating relationships and influencing people around you. In How To Win Friends and Influence People, Carnegie brings up the idea that you can not win an argument, so you must avoid these arguments at any cost.
Key Takeaways and Lessons
- He stated that almost nine times out of ten, both parties end up believing that they are perfectly right. He also describes that even if you win an argument, even then you can lose. As you have hurt the pride of the opposite person. so, you should not say that the other party is wrong.
- Instead, you can collaborate with them with a series of questions to reach the bottom of why they think they are right.
- This way can go a long way in influencing people towards your way of imagination and thoughts. these are two insights that Carnegie has described throughout the book, that make this book unique from the others.
- The book is full of actionable tips including why you should ask people to do the things instead of giving them orders.
10. The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People By Stephen R. Covey
The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People brings you a series of behaviors that will make you more effective. Stephen takes an integrated solution for entrepreneurs to improve their personal and interpersonal development.
Key takeaways and Lesson:
he designed this book in such a way that each habit will help you to achieve your full potential. These include:
- being proactive: do not react to the outside world, instead make some changes in your life.
- beginning with an end in mind: visualize your ideal future, and you design a roadmap to get there.
- putting first things first: prioritize what brings you closer to your vision of your dream in life.
- Thinking Win-Win: You should build positive relationships that accelerate you toward an ideal future.
- seeking first to understand, then to be understood: First, learn to listen and then learn to speak
- Synergizing: You should look for a way to harmonize with both others and yourself so that you can achieve more.
- Sharpening the saw: You can make sure that you find time,e to recharge so that you can be effective in the long run
The first three habits are designed to develop “self-mastery”. Then four to six habits help you to focus on teamwork, communication, and cooperation. Then the seventh habit will teach you how to balance and renew the preceding habits.
This is an ideal entrepreneur book for those looking to improve their daily habits to become more effective in their personal and professional life.
Conclusion
New challenges appear every day and as an entrepreneur, you need to solve and overcome those issues. Reading some of the best entrepreneur books must be a daily habit for you as you can find some effective ways to solve the issues.
Here, I have wrapped together 10 best entrepreneurs books, these are recommended by some of the ex-startup founders. You can pick one or more books from the list and go through it. Hope, my article will cover you in every possible way to resolve your business issues.
