The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future

you can join the $100 Startup community in our campaign for clean water in Ethiopia by visiting charitywater.org/​aonc. You can also sign up with groups, such as Kiva.org and AcumenFund.org, that provide loans (usually very small ones) to help people start microbusinesses in their own communities.

Remember that most core needs are emotional: We want to be loved and affirmed. Relate your product or service to attractive benefits, not boring features.

There was usually a story behind the affirmative answer, and the story often related to a particular day, event, or moment when they knew their business was going to work.

Finally, if you enjoyed the book, feel free to let me know. You can write in directly from chrisguillebeau.com, where I follow the model outlined in

Find out what people want, and find a way to give it to them. Give them the fish!

There’s an old saying about the combined knowledge of the pope and a peasant being greater than the knowledge of only the pope.

First and most important, the quest for personal freedom lies in the pursuit of value for others. Get this right from the beginning and the rest will be much easier. Always ask, “How can I help people more?”

And every time someone gave him a reason he couldn’t succeed in what he had set out to do, he made another note in his “non-planning” folder: merely one more obstacle to overcome.

A key rule for all these activities is to initiate, not respond. Doing this for just forty-five minutes a day can bring huge rewards even when everything else is crazy and you spend the rest of the day putting out fires.