Start From Zero (Dane Maxwell) – Book Summary, Review and Highlights

Start From Zero (Dane Maxwell)

⭐ Review

Rating – 6.5/10

Fluff rating – 8/10 (lots of fluff)

This book is a great high-level overview on how to get started as an entrepreneur from scratch. While other books start off assuming you know some fundamentals of business (i.e. what equity is and why it’s important, what an MVP is etc..), this book assumes very little and takes you through the entire transition from employee to entrepreneur from changing your thoughts to finding business ideas and building a business with no money, time or expertise.

That being said, it’s more of a directory than a comprehensive guide on how to succeed in business. For example, instead of teaching you about the basics of copywriting, the book tells you that copywriting is important, offers some examples and then tells you how you can learn copywriting by Googling stuff and reading salesletters.

Another pet peeve I have about the book is that a lot of the language sets off my bullshit detector and comes off as scammy/”marketing-speak”. Also, I found the psychological exercises just uncalled for – it would’ve been enough to point me to another book to deal with mental health, becoming confident and “liberating my soul” instead of integrating therapy into a business book.

Still, there are a lot of hidden gems about business scattered throughout the book in between all the fluff. In particular, the chapters on the Four Brains and Seven Skills were the highlights of the book for me.

And the examples/case studies Dane uses in the book shed a lot of insight into how businesses, deals and wealth are created. Ideally, you should read these notes and then buy the book just to read the examples since I haven’t included a lot of them here.

🚀 TL;DR – the book in 4 bullet points

  • There are three things to remember to fight against being poor, lazy and stupid: build equity daily, listen to what works/what people want and learn from your jealousy
  • Business in a nutshell is: Customer → Uses a Mechanism → To Get A Result – customers don’t care about the mechanism so you don’t need an idea, money or experience – you just have to generate a result for someone
  • Practise building four brains until entrepreneurship becomes a way of lifesee the world in income streams, find ideas based on people’s problems, build concepts into concrete results and learn how to grow product revenues
  • There are seven essential skills you need to build wealthusing words that sell (copywriting), ownership thinking, being a newbie, thinking in outcomes, building asset-based income, learning from mistakes and investing in yourself

📑 Short summary – the book in 5 minutes

  • On your journey, remember the three little rocks to fight against being poor, lazy and stupid: build equity daily, listen to what works/what people want and learn from your jealousy
  • What you don’t need to start a business
    • You don’t need to be an expert – you want to be an owner instead – being an expert can make you focus on details that aren’t important
    • You don’t need money – there are lots of creative ways to build businesses with no up-front cost i.e. doing it yourself, outsourcing in exchange for equity, pre-selling your product, seeking investors
    • You don’t need 12-hour days – if you focus on the critical actions, you only need two hours a day to start a business i.e. outreach, business development and fulfillment etc
  • Business in a nutshell is: Customer → Uses a Mechanism → To Get A Result
    • The customer doesn’t care about the mechanism – they want a result
    • Therefore, you don’t need an idea, money or experience – you just have to generate a result for someone
  • To build the mind of an entrepreneur, you need to build four brains until entrepreneurship becomes a way of life for you
    • The Surveyor – seeing the world in income streams
      • Build the surveyor brain by applying the Customer → Pain → Solution → Offer framework to existing businesses and learning how they work
      • Because the world is full of income streams, you should obsess over your business model until it takes care of your every need
    • The Tiller – finding ideas based on people’s problems
      • You need to be humble – don’t force your own ideas on the market, but rather listen to what the market wants and what works with an open mind
      • The Five Questions To Find A Problem/Business Idea
        1. Over the last year, what has been your most persistent and present problem?
        2. How do you currently go about solving that problem?
        3. What happens if you don’t solve that problem?
        4. What would your dream solution be?
        5. Would that be worth paying for? If so, how much?
    • The Planter – taking the conceptual idea through the void to the concrete result
      • The 4 States – stripping things away, co-creating with the customer, finding what seems off and helping your customer
      • The 3 Goals – Get product built quickly, with limited financial risk, get results for first users
      • The 8 Distinctions – align product with customer’s desire, prototype product vision, get validation, find experts to create the vision, test concept for results, structure deal for limited financial risk, create communication loops with experts, determine if product meets your goals
      • The 4 Killers – customer doesn’t do activity outside the product, product requires change in behaviour, burden to use the product is high, product doesn’t deliver end result clearly
    • The Gardener – growing the product revenues
      • To grow revenues – get your first customers results as a priority → document the results as case studies → create one focused marketing process using the case studies → promote the case studies using one traffic source in the market
      • Master ONE marketing process and ONE traffic source first
  • Wealth will come naturally to you if you learn these seven skills:
    • Using words that sell – copywriting allows you to speak directly to the deep pains and desire of people e.g. Domino’s tagline – Hot, fresh pizza delivered in 30 minutes or it’s free
      • You can learn copywriting by: finding copywriting formulas online, reading the best copywriting books and reading the best examples of successful ads/sales letters
    • Ownership vs expert thinking – ownership is a safer path to being financially free than being an expert – if you’re trained and knowledgeable
      • Think of ownership as this list of criteria:
        • Does the business income depend on my time?
        • Do I have to be the expert for the business to succeed?
        • Do I have the key metrics in place I can track to ensure the business is operating well?
    • Being a newbie – if you have no product/idea, just facilitate and bring information together
      1. Find an industry and discover their biggest challenges
      2. Find an expert that knows how to solve it
      3. Bring the two together and charge money for value added
      4. Give that value for free to the experts providing it
    • Developing outcome vs process thinking
      • Focus on the core outcome you’re trying to achieve both for your customer and you with the process that fits you
        • e.g. generating $10K a month with <2hrs work per day by helping chiropractors acquire one new patient per month
        • 100 processes can each achieve the same outcome – you don’t want to master 100 different processes, you want the outcome with a process you like
    • Income happiness – every dollar you make is not equal – focus on creating asset-based income (having assets that produce income with little ongoing work)
    • Learning from mistakes, losses and low-integrity moments – never blatantly steal people’s work and always be accountable for your mistakes
    • How to make the biggest leaps – look at what you need at a high level and seek out those who can help (i.e. by buying courses, programs, products, mentorships etc.)
  • There are four growth stages an entrepreneur moves through: Beginner → Minor → Major → All Star
    • Level of action and results – beginners usually have no commitment and are driven by survival while all-stars are all-in and driven by vision
    • Sales mindset – beginners think sales is a negative pursuit and are fearful of competition (thinking you need to be first/in an unsaturated market) while all-stars think sales is about helping people and think the world is abundant and full of opportunities
    • Personal skills – beginners are usually arrogant and don’t really have fun on their journey while all-stars are humble and on the journey to find joy
    • Note – there’s a comprehensive table in the chapter summary outlining the four stages

📕 Chapter summary – the book in 30 minutes

Contents hide

Adventure 1: The Three Little Rocks

These three little rocks are what you need to carry on your business journey to stay focused and fight against being poor, lazy or stupid

Little Rock Number 1 – The Daily Question for Getting Rich & Staying That Way Forever

“Did I build any equity today?”

  • Every day, you must be building equity or working towards having equity if you want to become financially free/wealthy
  • Equity is ownership in something that can produce cash or be sold without your direct time involvement
  • It’s not that hard to build equity – it just takes the right training (similar to how you train to be an employee)

Little Rock Number 2 – The Cardinal Rule of Successful Entrepreneurship

“We do not get to decide what works”

  • Don’t force your own ideas on markets/people – all you have to do is listen to what works and what people want
  • Swallow your pride – don’t guess what works or come up with grand ideas – just listen

Little Rock Number 3 – Handle the Jealousy Trap With Open-Hearted Curiosity

  • Jealousy shuts off creativity, stops you from seeing clearly, learning and moving forward
  • We all experience jealousy but you can avoid it by asking yourself:

“What can I learn from this person, product or business that I am jealous of? What qualities do they have that I actually admire?

I Owe My Life & Self Esteem To Business

  • Business is about so much more than freedom – it’s a place to find yourself and develop your self-esteem by fighting against your own sense of inadequacy

The Most Important Question of All… Easily Forgotten

  • All of Dane’s success started when he was honest with himself and asked himself the single most important question:

“Am I actually happy?”

Adventure 2 & 3: What You Do & Don’t Need

  • Business in a nutshell is: Customer → Uses a Mechanism → To Get A Result
    • The new entrepreneur obsesses about the shininess/sexiness of the mechanism
    • In truth, the customer doesn’t care about the mechanism – they want a result
  • Therefore, you don’t need an idea, money or experience – all you need to do is generate a result for someone

Chapter 1 – First, What You Don’t Need To Start A Business

  • Why you don’t have to be a genius – entrepreneurs are not better, smarter or braver than you
    • Being an expert can hurt your chances of success – it makes you focus on details that don’t move a business forward
    • You don’t want to be the expert; you want to be the owner
  • Why you don’t need money – there are lots of creative ways to build businesses with no up-front cost i.e. doing it yourself, outsourcing in exchange for equity, pre-selling your product, seeking investors
  • Why you don’t need 12-hour days – if you focus on the critical actions, you only need two hours a day to start a business i.e. outreach, business development and fulfillment etc
    • You can start your business on the side of your full-time job and leave when it’s safe to do so (i.e. your business is earning enough to support you)
  • Why hard work isn’t enough – you’ll burnout very quickly if you try and fight your own false/self-defeating beliefs

  • All you really need is to connect with another human being and listen to them
  • Once you’ve done that, find and put experts in place to solve their problems and share the revenue
    • You’ll always be able to find experts because so many people want to be experts (but not owners)

Chapter 2 – Second, What You Do Need To Start A Business

  • All you need is to develop the right brain/mindset to become a successful entrepreneur
    • If you were given the keys to a $100K per month business, you would probably not be able to run it right now
    • If you could, it doesn’t matter if you owned the business – you could start it back up again
  • Using Hexaco (personality assessment tool) , the top five traits in order of importance to entrepreneurial success were (meanings of high scores in italics):
    1. Creativityactively seeking new solutions to problems
    2. Social Self-Esteembeing satisfied with yourself and considering yourself likeable
    3. Diligence – having a strong work ethic/self-discipline
    4. Fairnessavoiding fraud, cheating and corruption
    5. Altruismbeing sympathetic and soft-hearted towards others
  • The five traits successful entrepreneurs scored the lowest on were (meanings of low scores in italics):
    1. Fearfulnessfeeling little fear and being tough and brave
    2. Anxietyfeeling little-no stress in response to difficulties
    3. Dependencebeing able to deal with problems without help/advice
    4. Greed avoidancethey like showing off their wealth and privilege
    5. Perfectionismbeing able to tolerate errors in work/neglect details
  • Note – this is not how all entrepreneurs are and all the traits listed can be shifted, improved (with therapy/coaching) or even compensated for by outsourcing

Chapter 3 – Deeply Program The Best Thoughts

  • To become financially abundant, you need to adopt a new set of beliefs and challenge your existing ones that you’ve been programmed to believe
  • Example new belief – being an employee is riskier than being an entrepreneur
    • If you stop working for any reason (e.g. something bad happens to you), your income stops
    • You could be fired or let go because of a company merger/other circumstances
    • Your income has a ceiling and someone else controls it
  • Just as you took the time to learn how to be an employee, learn how to be an entrepreneur

Chapter 4 – Inspire Your Own Heart

  • You need to make a declaration of what you want for yourself and write it down
    • Be as honest and unrealistic as possible – it will feel alien and that’s okay
  • Ask yourself “What is it I desire with all my being?”
    • Your answers will be shockingly simple e.g. “To be happy, content, to create something meaningful” – and it’ll feel really good to get it off your chest
    • You don’t need to justify your answers – just accept them – your heart knows what it wants
  • It might take a while to reconnect with your heart if you haven’t listened to it in a long time
    • Just keep an open mind and keep listening

Chapter 5 – Finding Confidence

  • Confidence comes when you’re honest about who you are and what’s important to you
  • If you do things to prove yourself/gain approval, you’ll probably lose motivation/confidence often because it’s not a deep, heart-based desire but a shallow, conditioned one
  • To find the things that honestly motivate/are important to you (your real, deepest desires), use the “What’s Most Important?” framework to uncover your hidden motivations
    • You essentially repeat the question ‘What’s most important to me about [desire]?” until you get to the root desire of the heart
    • Note – you want to ask “what”, not “why” – you’re interested in motivations, not justifications
    • This is an extremely vulnerable process – so be gentle with yourself

Chapter 6 – Face Your Mind

  • There are two issues that will sabotage you and your efforts
    • The beliefs you hold
    • Your identity – who you think you are
  • False beliefs and the identity you hold will often appear together e.g. “Business is risky and I’ll lose everything (belief), which will cause people to see me as a worthless failure (identity)”
  • You don’t want to improve/try to change a belief – you want to notice and fully love them (but not believe them) until they fade in influence
  • There is a process for this
    1. Discover and uncover your thoughts about your big desires
      • Ask yourself – “Do I believe anything negative about [heart’s desire] right now?”
    2. Transform one at a time
      • Go through these 6 steps (which is an adaptation of Byron Katie’s The Work process)
        1. Is that belief true?
        2. Can you absolutely know it’s true?
        3. What happens when you believe that thought?
        4. Who would you be without that thought?
        5. Turn the thought around. Is the opposite true or truer than the original thought?
        6. Now go back and notice instead of believing both thoughts
      • Keep the beliefs that work for you or wake up from belief systems altogether – see thoughts and beliefs as a game your mind likes to play that you assign meaning to

Chapter 7 – Align Your Environment

  • We need to structure and align our environment in four areas to help our brain throughout this journey
  • Ask yourself:
    1. What primary thought can I hold to pursue my dream of X?
      • e.g. I am a humble entrepreneur who loves making profits so I can solve more problems and help more people
    2. What primary feeling can I insert to pursue my dream of X?
      • e.g. I am already safe and taken care of
    3. What primary change can I make to my environment to pursue X?
      • e.g. Hanging out with the right crowd so the right people will show up
    4. What primary change can I make to my schedule to pursue X?
      • e.g. be in bed at 8.30pm

Chapter 8 – Dealing With Losing Motivation

  • We can lose motivation when things aren’t and even are working
    • This is because our previous identities/beliefs hold us back when we fail or even succeed
    • “I’m a fat person” can affect you even if you’re fit or not and stop you from exercising
  • Identity is just a thought – they are who you think you are on a deep, unconscious level – they’re not who you truly are
    • Our identities don’t want us to believe them – they just want us to listen and hold them with love – they are real, but not true
  • To troubleshoot your motivation, ask yourself:
    • Is there a belief I’m holding right now that’s causing me to lose motivation?
    • Is there an identity or story I’m holding about myself that’s causing me to lose motivation?
    • Am I just being lazy?

Chapter 9 – Liberate Your Soul By Asking For Help

  • Liberating your potential is about following your soul’s voice with unwavering faith
    • You need to love your ego and let your soul’s voice guide you
  • The previous sections were all about waking up your soul’s voice and honouring it

Adventure 4: The Four Buildable Brains

  • Success involves building four brains until entrepreneurship becomes a way of life for you
  • You don’t need to have all four brains – but having all four will give you massive success

Chapter 10 – The Surveyor

The surveyor learns how to see the world in income streams

  • The fastest way to build the surveyor brain is to apply pattern recognition to existing successful businesses using this framework – Customer → Pain → Solution → Offer
    • Example – Baremetrics
      • Customer – SaaS owners
      • Pain – tracking financial metrics (like churn, signups, MRR etc)
      • Solution – one-click integration with a financial dashboard showing all metrics
      • Offer – starts at $50 per month, ranges up to $300 per month for more
    • If you apply the CPSO framework to 100+ businesses, you won’t believe in scarcity anymore – you’ll see income streams everywhere
  • You should obsess over your business model until it takes care of your every need
    • Don’t set up a business placing your customers ahead of you – create strict requirements for how customers do business with you

Chapter 11 – The Tiller (the most essential brain)

The tiller prepares the ground and finds the profitable seeds to plant

  • Tilling means working with people/markets to find the pain that you’ll solve for them
    • You need to be humble – don’t force your own ideas on the market, but rather listen to what the market wants and what works with an open mind
  • Find the right pain to solve, and the business will grow – the pain is most important
  • The Five Questions To Find A Painful Seed (Problem/Business Idea)
    • Note – start off with some context before you talk to strangers (i.e. “I’m thinking of building [this product] for [this audience]. Can I ask you some questions about that?”)
    1. Over the last year, what has been your most persistent and present problem?
    2. How do you currently go about solving that problem?
    3. What happens if you don’t solve that problem?
    4. What would your dream solution be?
    5. Would that be worth paying for? If so, how much?
  • This process isn’t about manipulating people – it’s about serving and problem-solving for all involved
    • Note – everyone has problems (even successful people – they’re usually the ones with more problems cause of their success) – the world is full of product ideas
  • Challenge – Do this five question process to one person a day for seven days
    • You should end up with 7 business ideas

Chapter 12 – The Planter

The planter plants and grows seeds into profitable products

  • Planters take the conceptual idea through the void to the concrete result
    • The idea means nothing until it is fully realised and demonstrated
  • The planter brain can be broken down into:
    • The 4 States:
      • Stripping things away – What can be removed?
      • Co-creating with your customer – What does the customer think about this feature?
      • Finding what seems off and coming into alignment with it – What wants to happen?
      • Helping your customer – How can I stop proving myself and serve instead?
    • The 3 Goals
      • Get product built quickly
      • With limited financial risk
      • Get results for first users
    • The 8 Distinctions
      • Align product to sweet spot desire of customer (C → P → S → O)
        • Ask the Five Questions or find a pain (using the previous Tiller brain)
      • Prototype vision for the product (i.e. a sketch, basic design, concept)
      • Get buy-in, yes or money (validation) – before starting, show your prototype/product idea to your target audience and see if they want to pre-buy it or say yes to the idea
      • Find experts to create the product vision
        • This means hiring developers, authors, experts in the problem field etc.
        • You can usually do a 80%/20% split with them in exchange for handling the entire business and them building the product (i.e. they get the 20%)
      • Test concept for results or build if confident
        • Testing means hacking a version (MVP) together for one customer to see if it works before building a full-on system
          • Testing could even mean doing your service manually without software
      • Structure the deal for limited financial risk
        • You can ask your customers to fund your project (i.e. via buy-ins, pre-sales) or investors to fund, or any number of creative ways to limit your own financial risk
      • Create a communication loop (with your devs/experts) so you’re informed
      • Does this product meet your goals/needs as well as the customers?
    • The 4 Killers(desired answers in brackets)
      • Does the customer currently do the activity outside of the product? (Yes)
        • You want to make the things the customer already does easier – not give them new things to do
      • Does it require a great change of behaviour to use? (No)
      • Is the burden to use the product high? (No)
      • Does it deliver the end result clearly? (Yes)
  • Note – check out the book for a lot more concrete examples on all the above points

Chapter 13 – The Gardener

The gardener grows revenue streams like a garden

  • The simplest path to growing product revenue is focusing on the following:
    1. Get the concept/product tested or built
    2. Get it into the hands of your first customer
    3. Get that first customer a result (give them your attention/focus as a priority)
    4. Repeat with your next few customers
    5. Get all of your customers’ results
    6. Document the results as case studies
    7. Create one focused marketing process using your case studies to convert paying customers
    8. Promote the case studies within the niche market (master a single traffic source first before expanding)
  • You don’t need a great website or complex funnel to grow product revenue:
  • You just need to spend time helping customers get results and using the results as stories in a single marketing channel funneled into a single marketing sequence – KEEP IT SIMPLE

Adventure 5: The Seven Buildable Skills

Once you understand all of these skills, wealth will naturally come to you

Chapter 14 – Using Words That Sell

  • Copywriting (or using words that sell) allows you to speak directly to the deep pains and desire of people (whether they’re your customers, people you want to hire or even meet)
    • You need to understand people and touch on every pain with words and ensure you solve their pain while conforming to their objections
  • Using just a few words and a powerful formula, companies can grow to humungous sizes
    • Formula – [End Result a Customer Wants] + [In a Specific Period of Time] + [Addressing Objections]
    • Examples
      • Domino’s – Hot, fresh pizza delivered in 30 minutes or it’s free
      • Weight Watchers – Lose 10 pounds in a week, or your money back
      • Real estate agents – Your home sold in 90 days or I’ll buy it!
  • To learn copywriting:
    • You can find a large collection of copywriting formulas online (Google copywriting swipe files, top copywriting formulas/headline examples)
    • To learn on a deeper level, read books: Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz, Scientific Advertising by John Caples and My Life In Advertising by David Ogilvy
    • Learn the language, patterns, frameworks and looking at the best examples you can find
      • Read successful examples of top converting ads and look for patterns
      • Read one new ad/sales letter a day for a month and it’ll begin to sink in to your brain
        • Here’s a sample schedule of recommended letters
          • Day 1 – “The Wall Street Journal Sales Letter”
          • Day 2 – “Burn Disease Out Of Your Body” by Eugene Schwartz
          • Day 3 – “Do You Have The Courage to Earn $500,000 A Year” by Eugene Schwartz
          • Day 4 – “Cage Fighter Ad” by John Carleton
          • Day 5 – “They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano” by John Caples
          • Day 6 – “Beverly Hills Formula” by Gary Halbert
          • Day 7 – “Million Dollar Smile Ad” by Gary Halbert

Chapter 15 – Ownership vs Expert Thinking

  • Ownership is a safer path than being an expert – if you’re trained and knowledgeable
    • An expert sets out to learn skills they can use to exchange their time for money
    • An owner sets out to create or buy assets earning money while they sleep
      • Think of ownership as this list of criteria:
        • Does the business income depend on my time?
        • Do I have to be the expert for the business to succeed?
        • Do I have the key metrics in place I can track to ensure the business is operating well?
  • Saying “I can’t afford to be an owner of [whatever you dream of owning]” is not the right way to think if you want to be an owner
    • Instead, ask “How can I afford being an owner?” – get creative – use other people’s money, negotiate great deals, take government grants, eye out opportunities in the environment
    • Just one great deal where you have equity can set you up for life – JUST ONE
  • How Dane likes to approach ownership:
    • Set up businesses in the beginning with the ability to walk away from them
    • Make sure the business income is not dependent on my time/expertise
      • Outsource to other experts and get them to solve your customer’s problems
    • When business revenue hits a point you’re comfortable with, pass it off to someone you trust to run as CEO and keep 25% of profits (give the rest to team/CEO)

Chapter 16 – Become a Newbie

  • To become a newbie – you facilitate and just bring information together (i.e. you have no product or idea)
  • The meta-pattern for being a newbie is:
    1. Find an industry
    2. Find their biggest challenges
    3. Find an expert that knows how to solve it
    4. Bring the two together
    5. Charge money for value added
    6. Give that value for free to the experts providing it
  • Do this for free in the early stages until you’re confident charging people for the value you added!
  • Example – asking companies if they want to be featured in a book on solving a particular common challenge in the industry that you’ve identified
    • Example email you can send: Subject – can we feature you? Hello, your [company] looks excellent online, and that’s why we’re writing to you. Would you like to be featured in our upcoming book: [Book Title]. We are writing a guide on [Guide Topic] and we really liked what you’re doing and your online reputation. It looks like you have it together from what we see online. We were wondering if you’d like to be featured in this upcoming book by sharing what you do to maintain a successful studio? For your participation, we’ll give the book to you free when it’s ready and promote your studio in the book! If you’re interested, we just need to conduct a phone interview with you. We would turn the phone interview into a transcript, then show that to you for verification of course. Reply back and let us know if you have any questions, and we can chat further [Your name]

Chapter 17 – Outcome Thinking vs Process Thinking

  • Focus on the core outcome you’re trying to achieve with the process that fits you
    • 100 processes can each achieve the same outcome – you don’t want to master 100 different processes, you want the outcome with a process you like
  • Not being clear on your desired outcome results in burnout and overwhelm
    • Everything you do must be checked/aligned with your outcome
    • Cut away all the things that don’t align with your outcomes and build in the things that do
  • Example – how you can use outcome based thinking
    • Outcome for you – generate $10K a month business in less than 2 hours of work a day
    • Outcome for your customer (e.g. chiropractors) – help chiropractors acquire atleast one new patient a month
      • If chiropractors are willing to pay $100 per patient you bring in, you’d need to bring in 100 new patients per month (to earn $10K per month)
      • 35 million people see chiropractors annually (or 3 million per month)
      • You can probably figure out how to grab 100 of those 3 million to a network of chiropractors to achieve your goals

Chapter 18 – Income Happiness

  • Income happiness is money you don’t have to work for
    • It’s not passive income (since truly passive income is a myth) – it’s better to call it asset-based incomehaving assets that produce income with little ongoing work
  • Every dollar you make is not equal – assets that produce income with near-automated levels are much better than assets that require a lot of work from YOU
    • So, outsource, build software and automations and build equity and be happier!

Chapter 19 – Learn From Mistakes & Breaks of Integrity

  • Never ever steal someone’s work blatantly – you can always use “swipe files” or examples of things as inspiration – but never blatantly copy
    • It’s never worth it – you’ll lose the respect of yourself and others
  • The world needs more uniqueness, not more of the same
  • But even if you do something wrong, it will be okay and you can still succeed
    • Just make sure to learn from and be accountable for your mistakes

Chapter 20 – How To Make The Biggest Leaps

  • The key is to look at what you need at a high level and seek out those who can help
  • You need to invest in yourself (e.g. by buying courses, programs, products)
    • It just takes one big idea from a course to get your value back and the people you get to meet from a great course is well-worth it

Adventure 6: The Four Levels of Entrepreneurship

  • There are four growth stages an entrepreneur moves through:
    • Beginner
    • Minor
    • Major
    • All Star

Level of action and results

BeginnerMinorMajorAll-Star
ActionLittleInconsistentConsistentLeveraged
ResultsLowSomeGreatUnlimited
FreedomLowLowBuildingUnlimited
Primary StateDriven by survivalOften stressedResults drivenAligned Flow
Potential weaknessLack of desireFocusing on personal flawsLosing their identity in resultsLosing vision
CommitmentNoneWeakStrongAll-In
  • The biggest lever you can build for action and results is getting clear on your commitment and going all-in
    • Commitment release all the energy you possess – when you set a one-pointed intention and refuse to allow obstacles to stop your attention, you’ll have the power of the universe in your hands
    • Issues with commitment often stem from lack of trust in yourself rather than a fear of failure

Sales mindset

BeginnerMinorMajorAll-Star
View of salesNegativeAfraidFunNoble
Salesmanship“I don’t sell”Sloppy (no process)Solid (follow a process)Moves people to action
Crafting offersNo offers to craftChosen ignoranceConfidentExpert
CompetitionFearful – only one idea is allowedFearful, obsessed with competitionReady – many competitors allowedGrateful for competition
MindsetOnly one idea can be producedCompete on priceCompete on resultsCompetes with self
  • You have to view sales as noble if you want to get anywhere – sales is not about being manipulative or pushy – it’s about listening to people and matching them with the help they need
  • You also shouldn’t believe that you need to be first or in a market with few competitors – a fear of competition usually arises from thinking you’re inadequate
    • The business world is so abundant that you can compete in any market

Personal skills

BeginnerMinorMajorAll-Star
Unconscious humilityArroganceHidden pride“I’m the best”“I need help”
View of the worldLuck and chance“I’m missing something”Endless possibilitiesHere to serve
Self identityWhat others sayHow others respond“I get results”Steward to the vision
ConfidenceLowFalse bravadoHighVery high
EmotionsLostFear/anxietyExcitedPure potential
IntuitionListens to othersFear-basedKnowledge-basedHigher vibration based
WhyUnknownInauthenticSelf-basedValues based
FocusAll overThe next thingResultsThe vision
Responsibility takenBlames othersBlames circumstanceHighAbsolute highest
Clarity of visionNo visionFuzzy or weakSelf-based clearLegacy based clear
Saying noCan’t say noHard timeDecentComfortable
Level of funNoneMildStrongInner Joy
When discouragedBecome paralyzedSlows downKeeps movingAdjust with data and resets
PrioritiesDo it tomorrowComfortable thing firstHighest monetary value firstHighest values first
Negative emotionsRun from themBlame othersTry to removeListen to
Personal healthToxicGetting byVibrantExceptional
Personal wealthPossessionsBetter possessionsAchievement and approvalFrom being itself
  • It’s okay to need and ask for help – you need to be humble to succeed in business
  • You should also get a feel for deeply understanding your own intuition and trusting yourself
    • You always know what you need to do right now in this moment

  • Revisit these tables and reevaluate yourself regularly

Adventure 7: The Halls of Transformation

  • This section provides examples of people who succeeded using Dane Maxwell’s Start From Zero courses – it shows their businesses, journeys, personality traits,
    • The diversity of these stories highlights that you should become an entrepreneur to be more of yourself and not someone else
  • You can read all the examples by getting the book

If you found this summary useful and want to give back in some way, consider buying me a book (or coffee/beer) or buying the actual book via the affiliate links at the top – appreciate any support 🤝