Book of the Week: Do Cool Sh*t

09 Jul 2014

I was browsing books, when I saw Do Cool Sh*t: Quit Your Day Job, Start Your Own Business, and Live Happily Ever After by Miki Agrawal. Not a book that I would go out of my way to read, but since everything I wanted to read was on hold, I wanted to give it a try. I want to do cool shit too. It was also a quick read. Rules and Limits The book is a composed of stories of how she became a successful entrepreneur. Halfway through the book I figured out out why I disliked her. At first I thought it was jealously, because why is she a successful entrepreneur hanging out with Tony Hsieh and I’m not. That wasn’t the case. It is because I’m was brought up in an educational system that taught me to obey the rules. Entrepreneurs break rules. It’s true. The YC application asks about rules that you have broken. I understand why now. She broke the rules and got away with it. In my naïve mind I considered that cheating and unfair. I didn’t like her, because she cheated and got away with it. Hacking in a sense is rule breaking. Hacking involves taking rigid things and bending them so they work together to accomplish a greater goal. After a few more chapters, I couldn’t hold it against her anymore, because she hustled. You have to respect someone who hustles and doesn’t take no for an answer. She did things that I didn’t have the courage to do. Each step she took and I didn’t take was like compounding interest. Over time that builds up. Most limits are self-imposed. That stops people from achieving until someone comes along and shatters the status quo. An example of this is Takeru Kobayashi who developed better ways to eat hot dogs and shattered the world record. He’s not any more predispositioned to hot dog eating than the average Joe. He thought people could do better, so he developed new techniques. Once other people learned his techniques, they also shattered the previous records. If you already have a predefined barrier in your mind, you will only do as well as the barrier. In the real world, there aren’t rules. You do things and other things happen as a consequence. A successful entrepreneur leverages those consequences to accomplish their goals and ambitions. I went from being annoyed to admiration of Miki. I am going to continue doing cool shit.