Jesse Meijers » Reviews

Getting Real – The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application

Jesse Meijers — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:29:33 +0000

A friend of mine recently recommended this book to me. The book discusses the down to earth methods that the people at 37signals used to build their massively popular web applications, used by hundreds of thousands of users world wide. With only three people!

This book outlines the ideas behind 37Signals’ software development, and discusses them in easy to read, bite-size chunks. I found the book very helpful, so I decided to list the main points I got from the book here. There are more things to be discovered by reading this book, but these I found most interesting.

Service – your #1 priority

Don’t be shy; give your customers your cellphone number, they won’t abuse it. The authors have done this and have yet to receive a single call from a customer that can be labelled unnecessary.

Talk a different talk

If your competition talks about certain features, talk about different unique selling points. Don’t focus on undercutting, over featuring or otherwise trumping your competition. Just focus on different aspects that make your application unique.

Broad requirements

Instead of getting all caught up in defining requirements to the last speck, try to focus on the vision of your application. Make broad rules instead of nitty-gritty requirements. A good analogy is a flock of birds which can be modelled by about three rules (don’t bump into each other, stay together, don’t bump into objects). And all the other rules about the shape of the flock will emerge without having to specify them explicitly.

Good is good enough

Never get perfectionist. Good is good enough, you can never make something perfect. The authors of 37signals translate this into ‘just in time decision making‘. They mean that you can make a decision at the latest possible time; i.e. when you run into a problem that needs you to make the decision. Don’t try to figure everything out from the start.

Half, not half-assed

It is better to release half of a kick-ass application than to release a half-assed full application. So when it comes down to deciding between cost versus time versus scope, always choose to scope down and keep time and cost equal.

Feature loops

Beware of feature loops. A feature loop is when one feature that you implement lead to other features being requested or needed. Be very aware of this situation!

Get the book!

If you want to get the book, please use this link below. It helps me keep this website up if you do. Thanks!

Creating Wealth – Robert G. Allen

Jesse Meijers — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 06:00:25 +0000

I recently finished Robert G. Allen’s book ‘Creating Wealth’. This book is simply amazing for people seeking to build wealth and find financial freedom. Robert Allen is a true specialist and gives fantastic advice. Whether you have made your first million already or are just starting out on your road to financial wealth and freedom, this book is a must.

Financial Freedom

Robert Allen writes this book to give you an idea of how he built his financial freedom. He does this by taking your hand through all the stages of building financial wealth. He therefore starts out by illustrating the mindset you must have (or create) to allow you to succeed.

The next part in the book lays out a strategy you can use to get to that point of financial freedom. It is basically a step-by-step guide that you can follow.

Real Estate

Robert Allen has made his fortune in real estate. In this book he explains exactly why he chose real estate and why you should too. He also explains the pitfalls involved, and ways to get around them.

Over several chapters he explains simple ways to get ahead. These are always accompanied by great examples so you’ll thoroughly understand what it is he is talking about. Robert provides many calculation examples, about 20 tax deduction tricks you can use, and many other tips and tricks involved in buying, renting out and selling real estate properties.

The book also explains the different strategies you can use to handle real estate. Whether you want to buy and hold, buy low sell high, buy high and sell low (yes this actually makes you money), or any other strategy you can think of, it is in this book. Each strategy is paired with great examples so you can decide which is the one that suits you best.

Conclusion

I kept this review pretty short for a reason. This book is just awesome. It turned me around completely with regard to real estate. I used to think that it would be extremely hard to make money with real estate. It turns out that this is because I was thinking of using real estate completely in the wrong way.

Having read this book I have decided that real estate is my under current for creating financial wealth. My first priority is of course building my business, but I am making plans together with my accountant to put money into real estate to build my financial wealth.

This book doesn’t offer a ‘get rich quick’ solution. Those don’t exist. What it does do, is pave the way for you to financial freedom. In only a few years you can achieve financial freedom, and you could quit your day job! Go get this book if you want to gain insight into making money with real estate that will last at least a lifetime (and possibly that of your children and their children too!).

If you want to do me a favor, get your book from this link (it helps me support this website):

Share/Save

The 4 Hour Work Week – Tim Ferriss

Jesse Meijers — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 19:21:25 +0000

The Four Hour Work Week (4HWW for short) has been a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, and isn’t doing too shabby worldwide either. This book was recommended to me by a friend when we were working together for a big project of mine. I remember thinking ‘well, sounds lame’ and actually almost forgetting all about it. But I decided to pick up a copy anyway because he so highly recommended it. Well that turned out to be a total winner of a choice!

DEAL

Tim divides his book into 4 sections: Definition, Elimination, Automation and Liberation. Each of these steps brings you closer to the goal that this book defines: automated income and loads of free time. I like the fact that the book first dives into defining what it actually is that you want in life.

D: Definition

This is the first step in Tim’s DEAL process. The idea of definition is actually very good. It is a simpler way to find your Meaning in Life than is presented in books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. This leads to a slightly shallower method than Covey proposes, but it still a good one. The downside is that it is pretty much focused on materialist things, something that Covey transcends in his book.

Ferriss calls his method ‘Dreamlining’. In short, it is goal-setting combined with cost-analysis. So you define your goals and then determine what the costs would be to make those goals become reality. The key to doing this is to let go off all the prejudices you have about this not being possible. This chapter helps you in getting into the right mindset and complete your dreamline. I still use dreamlining today in a slightly different way to set goals for myself and to determine the cost of those goals, it is very useful.

E: Elimination

In this part Timothy Ferriss shows you different ways to eliminate some things from your life that are keeping you from being effective and efficient. I have described my preferred model for elimination, which relates closely to the methods described in this book. The 4 Hour Work Week just gives you some more practical tips and tricks you can apply to get more time on your hands.

A: Automation

For most people this is the big eye-opener. Basically Tim Ferriss tells you how you can hire people for as little as $4,- an hour (although my experience is that these prices have climbed since this book first went to print). These people can take your calls, handle your e-mail, collect data, write articles, you name it.

There is one small downside to this if you’re not from an English speaking country. They don’t speak anything but English. If you are going to be looking for a similar service in your native language you will probably end up having to pay a lot more. It might be wise to consider really hiring someone then, or working with interns. But this aside, the automation part of the book makes it a great book instead of just an okay book.

L: Liberation

The final part of the book goes into getting free of the burdens of a job or tons of hours of work each week. This sounds too good to be true, I am sure, but if you’ve come this far in the book you’ll have seen how to achieve this insurmountable goal. It is a great addition to what would have been a good book had this part been left out. But this is just the extra icing on the cake.

Critique

There is only one point of critique that I have on this wonderful book. Tim describes how he went from a 9-5 job, which paid $40.000,- a year to a business he operates in a mere 4 hours a week, raking in $40.000,- per month. Now, this sounds great and all, but here’s the caveat: Tim had a product which has customers returning. It is a consumable product which means that if people like it, they’ll return when they’ve run out. This is a very important point that Ferriss doesn’t put too much emphasis on, which I find a fatal flaw in his reasoning.

But fear not, for your fearless reviewer has taken this flaw and found the answer. You see, I figured if it could be done with a consumable, it could be done with information products as well. And I thought that if I was clever enough to think of this, there would have to be some other bloke that had also thought of it. Probably sooner too. And there is, there’s a marketing bloke who has done the whole automation thing with information products. So that puts an end to this otherwise major point of critique.

Go get the book!

I will post a review of a course on doing the whole automation thing with information products soon. In the meanwhile, you can check out Tim’s fantastic book on Amazon:

Share/Save

7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen Covey

Jesse Meijers — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:32:20 +0000

This month I introduce a new category, Reviews. This category will feature a review of the books I have read, seminars I attended and courses I have followed over the past years and in the future. I don’t read any novels, only self improvement books, wealth books, investing books and other books that I feel will give me more of an edge in becoming successful. The same holds for seminars and courses. Forget the technical stuff, I am interested in marketing, accounting, wealth building and entrepreneurial seminars and courses only. But without further ado; the review!

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is the book I would recommend almost anyone to read. Simply put, this is the book of books. Forget the Secret, The Four Hour Work Week and Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Read this first. Actually, forget about this review (you will be forgiven just this once), jump straight to Amazon.com and go order your copy. This book is too important for you to procrastinate for even a second!

Stephen Covey

Stephen Covey reviewed 200 years of success literature and combined what he learned into 7 habits that took the world by storm in 1989. But the beautiful thing is that he learned how success works first hand. Being a researcher, he used to be buried in his books. Here he was, the most knowledgeable person in the world when it comes to being successful, yet he wasn’t successful. That is when it hit him and he started to write his book and give his seminars. The rest is history.

Define Success

If you have been reading my blog for a while, you will have probably read posts about defining success (I call success what you would probably define as ‘wealth’) and finding meaning in your life. Well, I got the idea behind those kind of posts from this book. The first thing that Covey will have you do, is find your purpose in life. Without knowing your purpose in life, how can you ever be successful?

Compare it to throwing a dart. If you are fully blindfolded and have no guidance whatsoever (you don’t even know how far away the board is!) how in the world are you going to be hitting the bull’s eye?! Well, that is exactly what living without knowing your true purpose or meaning in life is. This book will have you figuring this out.

Self Improvement

The next part of the book is about self-improvement. Covey calls this Private Victories, but it is the same thing. If you want other people to find you successful, you will have to change yourself so others can find you successful. Success, like everything else, comes from within. If you are one of those people who blaim everyone and everything in the world (I know many, MANY people who constantly do this), then do yourself a favor. For once in your life, instead of making excuses, go pick up this book and read it thoroughly. It will definately change your life!

Once you have begun the changes from within, wonderful things will happen. You will understand more of how other people act and behave. You will see that by acting in a certain way, you can get others to behave in ways that suit you. It is simply amazing.

Reaping the Success

Once you have mastered the Private Victories, you can go on to the Public Victories. These are actions that influence other people more directly. But they still come from yourself. There are so many little gems in this book that I would find myself simply copying the whole book here if I was going to tell everything that I liked. But I’ll give you this one that influences the way you will think about relations:

A relation is like a bank account balance. The bank account can be positive, meaning you have credit, or it can be negative, meaning you’re in debt. The currency of this bank account is emotional value. You can add emotional value by doing something nice, for example, buy flowers for your spouse. This adds credit to your account. However, there are also actions that deduct from your account. For example, breaking a promise.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

You can get this book in almost any language (I read it in Dutch actually), but the language doesn’t make the book any less of a gem. Here is a link to the English version of the book on Amazon. If you are interested in this book even slightly, do your self a favor and go get it. I promise it will change your life forever, in a good way!

Share/Save