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This is a valuable book for anyone who is looking to improve their internal game in order to do better at business. My initial posting recommended it to Dennis: I thought that the book was literally about attracting capital and investment.

It's actually more like "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" in terms of self-help, but minus the hype and the questionable specific advice. I think that a lot of people on this board can use it effectively to at least see what they're doing to themselves.

I'd call Dan Kennedy's book here is almost a "Kohlinar" like regimen for sharpening your senses to your internal dialog about money and success.

Quick summary of the chapters I've read so far (there is FAR more to each chapter than my summary. Just buy the darned book if it doesn't add up.)

1) No guilt - don't believe that wealth or doing well is correlated with one's morality and don't feel guilty for using any advantage you can. Also, knock off the BS that you're deliberately poor with integrity and the like.
2) Belief in abundance - no matter what anyone says about money being "hard earned" there is a lot of money always sloshing around, and claims of poverty by customers are just that, chosen reluctance to spend - people spend when they want to.
3) Break free of fairness
4) Accepting your role and responsibilities - own your failures and successes - no predestination
5) No fear (this speaks to me personally with my own reluctance to cold-call)
6) No excuses - kind of a repeat of (4) but from a different angle
7) Speak money - watch yourself repeating "poverty thinking" mantras to yourself
8- Be somebody - create the image that you want, don't default it
9) Be somewhere - connect with others (difficult for me, I am used to a diet of 17 years of telecommuting and remote work.)
10) Do something - persistence - try things - experiment - do not do nothing

There's lot of depth to his advice and observations. For example, he recommends picking up a few issues of The Robb Report, Millionaire, and Town and Country magazines, and attending events like racing horse auctions, in order to grok the culture of the wealthy.

If you want to argue with me that any of these points are overly idealistic - well, Dan Kennedy would say, and I agree, I should ask what you know about the subject matter. If you aren't rich, I shouldn't listen to you if my goal is to do better than I am currently doing.

I probably shouldn't listen to myself, either, which is why I am reading this book.

The one line item above that made me uncomfortable to apply was to take responsibility for my foray into the computer service business. He even listed a couple of the failure excuses ("people here are cheap" and "nobody understood or appreciated my service") that I used here in explaining it. While I still think that business format is a total loser, I think it would take a lot more effort to earn a lot less money than I am used to at it - I bear responsibility for not conducting better due diligence of the actual prospects for computer repair.

As one example of something from the book that I applied immediately to myself.

Anyway, this book makes me step out of my comfort zone and get used to the idea that there are other economic games around than the commodity-driven crap where you do exactly what everyone else is doing and you're complaining about it the same as everyone else is.

I'll even relate this book to one forumer here. I think David Randolph here channels much of the thinking of this book in his comments.

(BTW, thanks, JM.)

I have encountered no shortage of entrepreneurs and people who are relatively (deliberate emphasis) successful in business - many of whom I have worked for as a contractor - who violate many, if not most, of the principles that Dan Kennedy is setting forth.

I think in the context of this book, people who have poor internal dialogs basically got lucky in life because a) they knew someone who promoted them (promotion by marriage counts for this, as does being given a family business, a type of "promotion") or b) they just stumbled into good fortune.

But the catch is that stumbling into success isn't predictable and it doesn't happen very often. And it doesn't provide a lot of upward momentum.

Those flukes tend to be many of the lower rung stories of success, who are the lower rung successful people that many of us encounter. Those people tend to be hideously poor success models, because they couldn't possibly replicate their success without special external conditions, nor could they explain their success objectively. Most of them think it's purely them.

So, I think this is why the messages in this book may not resonate with a lot of people. We get "success" shoved in our faces by individuals who had one "lucky" break.

IE: I've known cowardly, backstabbing corporate toadies with no integrity who blame everyone else for their failures, and they get promoted because someone else like them. Then they look down on me and everyone else that they rose above.

I have known company owners (several) who lucked into one good selling product, not because they studied the space, but because someone asked them to write an application on contract and the client didn't ask for rights to the IP.

I have known several second generation family based business owners who are basically spoiled brats.

Any of this type will be happy to dispense completely misleading, skewed advice.

I think listening to these types and internalizing their "message" is what leads to intense frustration for most of us who are striving.Basically, most lower tier well off people are poseurs. Lucky.

Dan Kennedy is in the big leagues. I will give his book some space in my head because it's a plausible sounding and holistic approach. It rings truer than most of the crap I've heard from other consultants, most mISVs, most mom and pop biz owners, and most of my clients.

I finished the book over my vacation and the rest of the book is pretty much an extension of the first 10 chapters.

Chapter summaries:

11) Follow up - focus on opportunity rather than outcome, in other words, don't just let the "big score" happen - use good fortune to position yourself for later. And focus on "process" rather than "incident" - make a habit of follow up rather than cashing the customer's check and saying you're done.
12) Integrity - doing exactly what you claim is good (for) business, not just good ethics.
13) Ask - ask for favors; ask for exposure; ask for testimonials; ask for partnerships, collaboration, citations, etc.
14) Domino opportunity - "pimp" an opportunity for exposure to new prospects or to new business for all it's worth. Examples include a voice coach who was brought in to coach contestants for The Apprentice TV show and capitalized on this with her own media blitz referencing the gig.
15) Passion - as he puts it, passion by itself is nothing. But so is doing something you hate. Find the intersection of your passion with a genuine market need.
16) See what isn't there - look for market voids - either niches in undiscovered businesses, or underserved positions in established niches at the bottom, the top or in the middle.
17) No boundaries - do not limit your business to the local area - avoid provincialism.
18) Clarity - make clearcut plans and formulate clear business goals and objectives. Even if you miss by a large margin you will be better off that if you don't do so.
19) Independence - avoid debt, avoid being, thinking and acting needy, and avoid business expansion that renders your business dependent and which creates a bad mental framework that forces you to compromise your goals.
20) Think value, not time - focus on factors that truly increase your worth to others, and not on "marking time" and thinking like a blue collar laborer type who expects to be "rewarded" for multiple years of employment.
21) Think equity, not income - introduces the idea of the building value in your business.
22) Marketing prowess - he says that you absolutely have to become good at marketing yourself and/or your business in some effective way in order to be successful. You cannot be cowed into being demure, you have to be unabashed.
23) Behavioral congruency - model your attitudes and your on individuals achieving results that you want.
24) Act wealth to attract wealth - he says to literally throw your money around and to spend money in certain worthwhile or beneficial ways. Do this to stop thinking "poor."
25) Energy from people - mercilessly jettison professional acquaintances, employees, etc who drag you down and who inhibit progress toward your goals. Cultivate the people and associates who want to help you succeed.
26) Courage - to trust your own judgement, to act, to make demands, to set rules and boundaries, etc.

The rest of the book is mainly worthless chapters from "guests" and most of them are advocating some kind of pre-2008 housing meltdown real estate arbitrage.

Some bottom lines that I perceive from the good parts:

I don't really think that most of what Kennedy teaches here is going to benefit most IT contractors. We have to accept standards of practice and conduct (like dealing with borks and with commodity driven pseudo-employment practices) that don't allow a lot of leeway to imaginatively leverage your time or market yourself or your work product.

In like manner, employment and work culture - contractors aren't really immune to it - is quite contrary to almost all of the points that Kennedy makes in his book. It would take most of us a lot of work to transcend the self-serving "hypnosis" that employers, clients and brokers have subjected most of us to in IT contracting.

As he notes, dedication to passion alone is overrated and is dangerous to your economic pursuits. He pretty much says what I thought - find something that people will pay you for that is close enough to the kind of work that you want to do, and make that work your passion.

#16, "see what isn't there", is kind of the mantra of most IT product businesses and SaaS. If there is one lesson in this book that most mISV aspirants grok, it's that.

#18 - we're all bad at this.

#19 - the key problem shared by most wage slaves and many contractors. How many near-bankrupt guys do we have here? And most people I've worked around in offices are always, without exception, leveraged up to their eyeballs, somehow. Well, you can't accomplish anything if you're in fire fighting mode all the time.

#20 - I think most of us who understand market dynamics that run squarely against IT contractors have internalized this message and most of us expect no or even negative recognition for our work and our merit. For heaven's sake, DON'T assume that just because you have worked for 10+ years in the field that you are "better" than a new guest worker being hyped as your replacement.

#22 - marketing prowess - I always say that middle class people are trained to be bashful about self promotion, and we tend to jeer at it when a peer does it. We really shouldn't do either (except - I say it's OK to jeer when someone obviously doesn't deserve any success. Ok, I kid.)

#23 - "behavioral congruency" - probably one of the best lessons in the book. Model yourself on someone who is doing great things, don't drift along doing the same crap that every other wanna-be is doing.

#25 - "energy from people" - I have already implemented this. I have no use for idiots and for detractors in my own circle.

#26 - "courage" - basically, act on it, even if it feels wrong and others are telling you "no".

ALL IN ALL:

This book is a great, easy read and is quite eye-opening and "consciousness raising". I have nothing bad to say about it, only good.

4.5 out of 5.

You come in and yell like we're all supposed to just agree. You're stating "absolute" laws of physics as you see them, anyway.

Do you even intend to start a dialog? I get the idea that I'm now supposed to close the topic because pm4hire told us what we need to know.

I posted this review to show anyone who is interested that there is a different way of looking at business, and life.

If you want to take the position that people here are not worth helping, then why post anything?