How I Made It - Book Review

I read a lot so I thought I might include some brief reviews of relevant books as I read them. I read How I Made It recently and while it didn’t exactly take long it was a decent read.

Summary

It’s a book made up of 40 mini biographies of successful entrepreneurs. Some of them are household names like Chris Gorman and Duncan Bannatyne and others are less well known with small but still successful businesses.

Good points

It’s an easy read with each biography just being 3-4 pages long and it’s great to have a such a variety of businesses discussed ranging from florists to oven cleaning. It’s good to find out a bit more about the personality behind the business and the events that led to them becoming successful. Many seemed like they were always going to be in business for themselves with early businesses started in school days while others took till a middle age redundancy jolted them into starting up in business.

I liked the ‘personal philosophy’ quotes especially the following

“The worst thing you can do is hesitate. Get on with things even if you haven’t fully worked out how to do them, because even the worst case scenario may turn out to be better than you expect”

“Work hard but make sure you enjoy life too and always treat people with respect”

Bad Points

The main problem with the book is that the articles on each individual are far too short and you never really get a feel for the businesses they run and why. Summing everything up in a few pages means that it sounds like it was incredibly easy to start the business and there were no real obstacles along the way. I suppose this is to be expected as each entrepreneur could probably fill a book of their own but it meant that there wasn’t much to learn from the book.

Final Word

It’s an interesting read to flick through in 10 minute spells but nothing outstanding.