The Personal Investment Test: In exchange for 10 dollars and 9 hours of your time, you’ll save one hour a week for the next two years - would you take this offer? If you value your time at 10 dollars an hour, you make a profit of approximately 900 dollars. Of course you should take this offer if you have a small amount of disposable income and time.

Investment in one’s personal growth has an immense potential to lead to future benefits. To that end, I’ve engaged in a long-term project to see what insights that I can glean from self-help books.

The book that I finished most recently is: The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business by Josh Kaufman.

This book passes the personal investment test with flying colors. Any one of the insights that I’ve gleaned from this book is worth the investment and there are at least 10 different things that I’ve learned from this book.

While the Personal MBA markets itself as a MBA in a book, the volume covers more ground. I’ll summarize the book and the main points that I got out of it, and how it will impact my decisions in the future.

One important note is that this book draws materials from a number of other books that I’ve read recently. While these insights are great, to avoid repetition, I’ll cover these points in more detail in my posts about said book that contains the original insight.

Book Summary

  • Introduction: Why read this book?

This chapter argues why this book is useful to read. As I already accept the premise of reading the book, I don’t have much to say here.

  • Chapter 1: Value Creation

Understanding my role as a value creator for other people is an important lens through which I will now view my interactions with others. This chapter enumerates the different types of value creation and the ways to test if the product or service that you want viable. As a bit of an inside, the idea of relative importance testing will be a useful tool for my future interactions.

  • Chapter 2: Marketing

So you have a product, but you need somebody to buy it? How do you do that? This chapter gives an overview of the fundamental marketing principles. As I continue to build my professional brand, I believe that a number of ideas are important here. One of the key concepts in this chapter is advertising your product in a way that is cognizant of the psychology of the buyer. A salient quote from the book sums this up ‘People want to buy holes not a drill.’

  • Chapter 3: Sales

While the previous chapters focused on creating value and telling people about it, you don’t have a business unless you close sales. Like other sections, selling to people involves people. The most important insights of this chapter are best described in a subsequent book that I’ll be reviewing. If you ever find yourself in a position to sell something, this chapter is worth reading.

  • Chapter 4: Value Delivery

What is the infrastructure that you need to set-up to deliver on the value that you’ve promised to your customers? The chapter focuses on how to become more efficient and amplify the value that you create. Imagine compound interest applied to your life.

  • Chapter 5: Finance

This section hits on the major calculations that you do in finance. While I didn’t find this section as immediately relevant to my current situation, the insights here would be crucial if I were to start a business. The key idea is to use numbers to understand the effectiveness of your business. The chapter discusses different types of calculations that you’d want to do.

  • Chapter 6: The Human Mind

While this chapter isn’t what I’d traditionally think of as business, the insights here are essential. The chapter beings by discussing how we understand many people’s behaviors as trying to keep in equilibrium. My favorite insight of the book comes from this chapter. In short, we have a limited amount of willpower and we need to structure our lives as to use our willpower as efficiently as possible.

  • Chapter 7: Working with Yourself

This section reads a bit like a laundry list of principles to understand how you (and others) think while trying to accomplish things. This chapter is definitely useful to read, but it is hard to summarize in a sentence or two.

  • Chapter 8: Working with Others

The best insights in this chapter come from a book that I’ll review later.

  • Chapters 9, 10, 11: Understanding, Analyzing, and Improving Systems

While it is important to understand systems in general, I felt that the book lost some momentum by this point. However, I might be a bit biased because I build complex systems (as a researcher) and so I am familiar with many of the concepts in this section from studying software engineering.

Conclusion:

The value of any of these books is the extent to which I integrate the insights of this book into my day to day life. I have already been doing so. If I start a business in the future, I’ll be sure to revisit this book. This book is totally worth the read if you are interested in investing a small amount of time into your future success. Also if you haven’t read many self-help books before, this book will serve as a good starting point to introduce you to other good books.