Book Review: Knowing Isn’t Doing

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Full disclosure, I worked with Rod on Knowing Isn’t Doing like his two previous books. Those books were excellent, but they were for men and women in commercial real estate. This book is different. It’s for independent workers. If that’s you, whether you’re just starting out or you’ve got 40 years on like me, this book will show you how to improve your business and your life.

Is This Book for You?

Knowing Isn’t Doing is for you if you answer “yes” to the following four questions:

1. Do you control your own work?

2. Do you pay your own taxes?

3. Do you intend your independent work to be your primary source of income?

4. Do you want your independent work to give you more than a subsistence income?

If I had this book when I was starting out, I would have been more successful more quickly. After several decades as an independent worker, I still found lessons in this book that were helpful. I was putting some of them into practice as we pulled the book together.

Looking Back to My Early Days

The title of the book is, Don’t KID Yourself, Knowing Isn’t Doing. Boy, would that have helped me early on. I thought that because I was smart and I understood things, I would be successful. I thought I would be successful because I had good ideas and worked hard.  It took me a long, painful while to learn that success comes from putting good ideas into practice, keeping the good ones, and ditching the others. Knowing Isn’t Doing.

The subtitle’s important, too: Build the Business and Life You Desire. I loved my work. I enjoyed working hard. I bought into the idea that I would get successful at business and that would be followed by success in life. It didn’t work for me. It hasn’t worked for anybody else, either, as far as I know.

I had to learn something that Rod makes the core of this book. He calls it “margin.” Margin is how you make a profit in a financial sense. But margin as Rod uses the term is time you gain from working smart to spend on family, friends, and fun. If you want a happy and successful life, you need margin.

What’s in This Book for You?

Knowing Isn’t Doing gives you a process to use. Everything works together.

There are tons of how-tos. There are specific recommendations about actions to improve your sales, marketing, money management, people management, and operations. There are many specific suggestions, and forms and checklists to help you put ideas into action. After all, “Knowing isn’t doing.”

In A Nutshell

Knowing Isn’t Doing has everything you need to create a better business and the margin for a better life.

This is the book I wish I had when I was starting out.

I’m buying several copies for people I know who are just starting out and others along the way.

This will be a book you read and then buy for friends who are independent workers.

This is a book that you won’t read and put on the shelf. You’ll read it and use it. Reading isn’t doing.

-o0o-

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