Irrational Persistence: Seven Secrets That Turned a Bankrupt Startup Into a $231,000,000 Business

loved it!

It was an excellent story about the passion and hard work it takes to start and grow a business.

There are few things common to many successful companies. The founders worked hard, several moon shots were taken and most of them failed,and some succeeded. It could be the mighty Microsoft or the tiny coffee shop on the strip mall. Behind every successful companies there are too many sleepless nights, stress, headaches, fear, excitement, a sorry face borrowing money from your family and inability to pay back. You might have to work in a dark basement with no heat because you cannot afford a decent place. Worst of all, you might have to drive 27 hours to a customer's place because you cannot afford a plain ticket. Many of them happened to the author of the book as well. This book takes it to extreme level.Here you have two unrelated and unknown middle aged men with families, both bankrupt to the bone, working separately and both abject failures from a perspective of a person with a comfy job. Yet both have a passion for the product they are working on, an aim for perfection , with no guarantees of success. Somewhere along the way they meet become partners and grow the company to over 100 million dollars in ten years.A small snippet from the book :"I was in my mid-thirtees, with a wife and a young son. Well-educated but still paying off my student loans. Hundreds of dollars in debt with a company that had never made money...... I was selling life insurance at night to make ends meet, all the while spending my days breaking eggs in the morning and putting whole cloves of garlic in salad dressing bottles in the afternoon and operating a fortklift in the most miserable weather imaginable"CONS : At the end of every chapter, they have a page of business advice. They are all needless. The story is the message - More powerful than the vague advice. Great leaders create great employees who create great companies. And those leaders tirelessly talk about their employees. Here there is not even a passing reference to their employees or how they treat them or the benefits they get or why they stick with them. Sometimes what is not spoken speaks more than what is spoken.SUMMARY : My kids are in elementary school. Some day they will grow up and will think about "Starting" a business. And if and when it happens, this will be the book I am going to give them as a prerequisite. In a single book, they are going to learn about how difficult life and business can be. What will be the rewards for perseverance and more importantly the high morals and values they have to follow to have a shot at success. Believe me, anyone who is thinking of starting a business needs to read this.Great job guys. Now let me go and enjoy the Salsa !

Sounds like the key to success is find a guy who already has an idea, has brought that idea to market, and then become his partner.

"Irrational persistence" is part business memoir and part business guide. The title alludes to seven secrets of success, which, as mirrored by the chapters, include: summoning the courage to enter the dark room, finding one's place in the world, searching for the holy grail, never selling anything, building a company Woody Allen would be proud of, valuing values, and taking the call if a fortune 500 company calls. This is a very brief book, but I found it interesting to read about the author's personal experiences and the advice extracted. An interesting read for anyone interested in how entrepreneurship works.