Book review: The $100 Startup

Isn't it that one of the most serious deterrents for setting up your own business is related to money, or rather the lack thereof? Well, if you are brave enough to have $100 available, do something smart and get a business licence or buy the supplies for delivering your first order.

The first thought of someone helping and consulting and writing about smart startups: 'If I needed money, I learned to think in terms of how I could get what I needed by making something and selling it, not by creating costs elsewhere or working for someone else'. Let's the party begin! It is a part of smart people, not only in love with what they are doing, but ready to share their experience with the community and to add value to the community. Even if you do your work with passion, you should not forget that this passion may offer a source of revenue for you, and eventually for your family. Hence, do not forget to evaluate the right price for your service. (This one of my mistakes when working as a freelancer, as I did not asked always for the right price for my work and sooner or later I accumulated a lot of frustration, despite making my employer happy due to the wonderful balance between quality and price). 

What you will learn while reading the $100 Startup is that you should never give up the dedication and the hard work, but that you can do it only for you. As we are living in the best time for businesses, thanks to the amazing development of mobile communications and Internet, it is easier to reach a decent - or more than decent - financial level, while on the road, portioning the time spent between family and the administration of a business. The book offers a lot of practical examples and thoughts by people on the startup boat for years and still on the right track. We can be happy easier than decades ago - the Internet as we know it is less than 20 years old - and it is a pitty not to use our full potential to be one of the happy members of the global startup nation. 

As someone working both as a freelancer and as a full time employee, this book was the perfect boost for a new start. I have a lot of ideas in my hectic mind and the desire for financial freedom and full enjoyment of my time was always there, but the more you read about other people in a similar situation succeeding, the more you would like to emulate them. 

No wonder why in the next days I will be not so active blogging. My brain is boiling startup ideas!

Tell your Time: How to Manage Your Schedule So You Can Live Free

I am a passionate reader of books about time management, but even more passionate to practice various recipes - personal or borrowed - of how to efficiently use my time. In the middle of writing a new book - about communications and customers service a project I have in mind for at least 5 months, but wasn't a pro manager of my writing time - I decided to have a look in my Kindle for useful resources.

Amy Lynn Andrews' book: Tell your Time: How to Manage Your Schedule So You Can Live Free helped me to better organize the coming weeks of writing when I need to juggle with the housework obligations, a very challenging new job where I need to be very active and an impressive amount of social obligations. Add to this some other equally important spiritual requirements and you have an impressive mosaique of a hectic life. 

My lessons learned from the book:

- planning, planning and planning

- The confirmation of my old feeling I live with since early childhood: 'Any significant change in our lives will require patience and sacrifice'.

- When you have your priorities set, you can enjoy the freedom of organizing the daily and weekly blocks of time in a flexible way. For instance, if today the domestic chores can be finished in 10 minutes, you dedicate the rest of the time assigned for such activities for writing or volunteering. 

- We are always in control of our own time, and we should make the right choices for a balanced time schedule. But in order to achieve this, we should establish what our roles are - wife, mother, businesswoman, consultant, teacher, writer etc. - what are our main objectives in each case and what are our daily tasks. 

- Write down your objectives and set up the Excel/Google doc with your set-up activities: both the negotiable and non-negotiable ones. 

The conclusion: you have a dream? Work for it punctiliously, hard, with a bit of sacrifice but at the end of your journey, most likely it will turn into reality.