If you dream of a life where you’re in control of your time and your life, entrepreneurship is a great way to achieve that. Building your own business, being in control of your life and investing in your future with every investment you make into your business is a great way to live. Being an entrepreneur is an incredibly difficult way to live, but like anything, if you enjoy it, it won’t seen as difficult as working for someone else’s future while sacrificing your own dreams and goals.
The entrepreneur books on this list are the best resources for anyone who wants to build a future where they are in control, and a future where they’re willing to put in the hard work to build the life that they want, not the life they are expected to have.
Entrepreneurship: 10 Books Every Budding Entrepreneur Must Read
Entrepreneurship #1. How to Win Friends and Influence People – Dale Carnegie
The book primarily deals with how to build good relationships between people, how to sell t0 people without selling to them, and how to get people to do what you would like them to do. The primary focus of this book is not necessarily business, but it would facilitate any business person to increase their performance.
Entrepreneurship #2. The 4-Hour Workweek – Tim Ferriss
This highly acclaimed book is less about starting a business than it is about not getting trapped inside of it.
Entrepreneurship #3. The Lean Startup – Eric Ries
Most startups fail. But many of those failures can be prevented. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. The Lean Startup is filled with good information, but also interesting stories that back up the author’s beliefs.
Entrepreneurship #4. The Art of the Start – Guy Kawasaki
The Art of the Start is a quick read, and gives a no-nonsense set of recommendations for how and why to start a company.
Entrepreneurship #5. The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur – Mike Michalowicz
This entrepreneurship book is incredibly applicable to any small business. It’s very motivating and is very easy to read. The author does a great job of hammering out details that you can implement quickly. Business books are often too full of “strategies” and not enough practical advice on how to actually do things. This book breaks that down.
Entrepreneurship #6. The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It – Michael Gerber
This is one of the few books you must read if you want to go into business. It’s called The E-Myth because it addresses the entrepreneurial myth. The book starts off by telling you what a business is not. Having done so, the book goes on to tell you what a successful business is all about.
Entrepreneurship #7. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking – Malcolm Gladwell
Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant-in the blink of an eye that actually aren’t as simple as they seem. Blink reveals that great decision makers aren’t those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of “thin-slicing” the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables.
Entrepreneurship #8. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t – Jim Collins
The author of this book studied the qualities that could turn a good company into a great company, and his book has become a manual in how to run a business in the right way. Even if you’re running a one person operation, there’s a lot you can learn from Jim Collin’s research and advice.
Entrepreneurship #9. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die – Chip and Dan Heath
How do you make an idea unforgettable? By becoming a storyteller with a creative narrative. The authors highlight six principles (simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions and stories) that will help you to create an idea with staying power, or to revolutionize your current idea into something unforgettable. This book is full of examples and quick lessons from teachers, scientists and more. Made to Stick is still one of the most popular and widely recommended business and marketing books, four years after its original release.
Entrepreneurship #10. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen R Covey
As the title of the book implies, Covey describes the seven habits of highly effective people and techniques for adopting the seven habits. Covey makes clear that an individual must make a paradigm shift before incorporating these habits into his/her own personal life.
