Kevin’s October Book Reviews
Two books to put on your must-read list
Rules for Renegades
By Christine Comaford
This is a great book for people who want to start their own business or become the “CEO of their job” and are interested in learning the thought process behind the shift from employee to business owner. Renegade entrepreneur and runaway success story Christine Comaford has lived the kind of life most of us can only dream about. From model to monk to multimillionaire, she has always gone after what she wanted—and gotten things done. She’s won, lost, worked, and played, and she’s written her own rules every step of the way.
This book lays out her 10 life lessons that help people make their dreams come true.
Christine has a great sense of humor and never takes herself too seriously in her writing, though as you’ll read, at many points in her career, she has been serious as a heart attack. She is very open about her connections and experiences in business, including dating Bill Gates and Larry Ellison, and the lessons learned from these and other business moguls.
I like this claim of hers:
| I didn't start with any advantages—mega-brains, status, or money, for instance—so if I did it, anyone can. If you simply want to become financially independent, this book can help. If you want a meaningful life full of rich connections, this book can help. If you want to have more self-confidence and self-esteem, this book can help. If you want perfectly toned abs, killer buns, and thinner thighs in thirty days, sorry, this book can’t help. |
I especially like her Rule 2: An MBA is optional, a GSD is essential. Yes, schooling is important, but not as important as being a person who “Gets Stuff Done.” We all know lots of people with all kinds of letters after their names who can’t think themselves out of a wet paper bag. And we know others who are go-to people who get things done. I’ll take the latter every time.
Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:
| To some extent, all first-time CEOs are making it up as they go along. This is what you do with a new job, a new role in life or business, a new community you are joining. You’re declaring yourself to be something you aren’t yet. You are intending it. You are choosing it. You’re declaring victory as you step onto the battlefield. Then you’re doing what it takes—applying the required skills and the hard work—to succeed in this new role. You’re the composite of the five people you spend the most time with. It also gave me a crash course in thinking like a CEO, which is something that all of you, dear readers, need to start doing right away. Train yourself to both look at the big picture and to see that everything is an illusion. And of course, pick one that’s empowering! Many of us fall into a familiar trap: we choose power/money/self-esteem-by-association because we don’t think we can create our own. We think we’ll get a “contact high” from being close to power instead of wielding it ourselves. If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a month, get married. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help others |
This is a fast-moving book that has great lessons about business and success while also being a lot of fun to read. You’ll laugh your way through this book, and I think that mixing humor with content is one of the best ways to teach. Thanks to my friend David Fein for turning me on to this author and book. David, you remind me of Comaford in many ways, and I mean that as the highest compliment.
Love
By Leo Buscaglia
This is one of my favorite books of all time. You just connect with some authors. Leo is in my top three, and he has been for years. In 1969, while a professor in California, he started an experimental course called “Love Class.” He didn’t attempt to be so presumptuous as to teach this subject; instead, he helped the students discover the real meanings of the word. He and his students sought to guide each other closer to an understanding of the delicate phenomenon of human love. He led this class for three years, and it started a groundswell of interest in Leo’s work that has continued to this day.
I could fill many newsletters with quotes and insights from this book, so I’ll try to limit it (it won’t be easy). Here goes:
| Education should be the process of helping everyone to discover his uniqueness, to teach him how to develop that uniqueness, and then to show him how to share it because that’s the only reason for having anything.
You are always the best you. You will always be the second best anyone else. Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself and dares to become involved with experimenting with his own life. Yet, it never seems as obvious to him that if he wants to live in love, he must spend at least as much time as the auto mechanic or the gourmet in studying love. No mechanic or cook would ever believe that by “willing” the knowledge in his field, he’d ever become an expert in it. Everything is taught but seemingly what is necessary for the growing individual’s knowledge of self, of the relationship of his self to others. Living is the process of continual rebirth. The tragedy in the life of most of us is that we die before we are fully born. I would not want to form a partnership with an architect who has little knowledge of building or a broker who has a limited knowledge of the stock market. Still, we form what we hope to be permanent relationships in love with people who have hardly any knowledge of what love is. They equate love with sex, attraction, need, security, romance, attention, and a thousand similar things. Someone in love class once said, “I wish she could love me more and need me less.” So most of us never learn to love at all. We play at love, imitate lovers, treat love as a game. Is it any wonder so many of us are dying of loneliness, feel anxious and unfulfilled, even in seemingly close relationships, and are always looking elsewhere for something which we feel must certainly be there? “Is that all there is?” the song asks. There is something else. It’s simply this—the limitless potential of love within each person eager to be recognized, waiting to be developed, yearning to grow. It’s never too late to learn anything for which you have a potential. If you want to learn to love, then you must start the process of finding out what it is, what qualities make up a loving person, and how these are developed. Each person has the potential for love. But potential is never realized without work. This does not mean pain. Love, especially, is learned best in wonder, in joy, in peace, in living. |
This was the first and is one of Buscaglia’s best books and can be read again and again. Each time, you’ll discover something you either missed the first time or were not yet ready to fully recognize in your loving. As we progress as a society to become a more disconnected group (while often claiming to become more connected) by constantly texting, surfing the Internet, checking our text messages, and being generally oblivious of the people right next to us, I see more and more need for us to study this classic book. If you can implement the messages taught in LOVE while also staying connected in an increasingly integrated virtual society, then you have the best of both worlds.
Published October 10, 2008
Kevin Knebl
Silver Planet Featured Contributor
