The Personal MBA

The Personal MBA will save you a few hundred grand by outlining everything you really need to know to get started on a thriving business, none of which is taught in expensive colleges.

Have you seen The Wolf of Wall Street? There’s a scene where Jordan Belfort asks one of his employees to sell him a pen, who then uses a clever trick to make it an easy sale: he asks him to sign a napkin. Of course Jordan hasn’t got a pen, but luckily, the solution is right in front of him.

Any sale is easy, as long as you’re addressing your customer’s primary need in the current situation. A thirsty hiker in the desert would pay anything for even the shittiest bottle of water and car collectors will happily wire $3 million for a car, simply because it’s limited to 10 units.

But to address those needs with your marketing tactics, your product needs to be something that takes care of those needs. Josh says there are four core needs most products serve:

Our desire to collect things. Our wish to bond with other people. Our need to learn and satisfy our curiosity. Our need to fight for our survival and protect our loved ones.

The next time you strike up a business idea, ask yourself which of these four needs it’d serve first. Only if you can definitely assign it to at least one category, move on with the next step.

Here’s a big one no one thinks about in their marketing: the way you choose to communicate your message in matters just as much, if not more, than what you actually say.

As Gary Vaynerchuk put it years ago: Content is king, but context is god.

Yes, what you say has to matter. It has to be remarkable, different, memorable, all of that stuff. BUT, if you screw up the timing, the platform and the tone of how you address your audience, none of that matters, because no one will listen.

For example, Four Minute Books runs on weekly emails I send out with new summaries. Imagine instead of one longer email newsletter I’d send out a new email every day, that’s just as long as a tweet. No one would open them and people would be gone in a jiffy.

Why?

Because everyone has an overloaded email inbox already. Nobody wants more email. Plus, if I could say everything I needed to say in 140 characters or less, why wouldn’t I go to Twitter right away?

Think hard about the medium and channels you choose for your marketing, they make all the difference.