Book Review

I was given this book by my friend Tony Alvarez. Once I started reading it I finished it in 3 days. The author has a very "readable" style and I liked the fact that he was able to bring real life examples from his time with the Coca Cola company and not just catchy sayings. (although there are lots of those too)


As the name implies there are Ten commandments for business failure but you also get a "bonus" Eleventh commandment which is "Lose your passion for work/for life." This chapter ties the whole book together with the following quote from George Bernard Shaw, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. All progress therefore, depends upon the unreasonable man."


What I have found throughout my entire real estate investing career is there has never been a shortage of people that wanted to tell me just how wrong I was for doing what I was doing. These people were usually the ones stuck doing something they didn't like for someone they couldn't stand. Of course they call themselves "realists" but like to call them cynics. I have a real passion for what I do and I think it is obvious to those that work with me.



Commandment three-Isolate Yourself. It can be really easy to get some success underneath you and think you are at the top of the food chain. When that happens the tendency is to stop paying attention to what got you there in the first place. To me that means making sure that you stick with the basics and don't get stuck trying to run your business from the top down but from the bottom up. As a real estate investor I NEED to be on the front lines talking with prospective sellers and buyers everyday. They have to be able to reach me.



Commandment six-Don't take time to think. Time to think is not a luxury. It is a necessity. It only takes one bad buy to wipe you out in the real estate game. The game changes so fast and sometimes I have seen investors "hoping" so hard that they try to make a marginal deal out of a nightmare. This can work the other way too. Once you have thought it through then take the right action to make it happen.



I definitely enjoyed this book. If you read each chapter and try to apply it to your business it should help give you some insight. It helped me do just that.