Brad West

Considering where Keith Ferrazzi came from, he’s built one of the world’s largest networks. And his book, Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time, details how he built his network and how you replicate his process if you want to build a network of your own. The Mind-Set The book opens with a story of Keith employed as a caddie in a wealthy town adjacent to his boyhood home. During this time carrying clubs, he watched as the country club members found each other jobs, invested time and money in one another’s ideas and helped each other’s kids get into the best schools, get the best internships and the best jobs. “Before my eyes, I saw proof that success breeds success and, indeed, the rich do get richer” says Ferrazzi. “Poverty, I realized, wasn’t only a lack of financial resources; it was isolation from the kind of people that could help you make more of yourself.” “To achieve your goals in life,” Ferrazzi realized, “it matters less how smart you are, how much innate talent you’re born with, or even, most eye-opening to me, where you came from and how much you started out with.” What matters most is realizing, you [...]

I looked for other reviews on this book before writing my own and was surprised to find so many positive reviews on other blogs. I couldn’t find a negative review on the first few pages of Google results. And while I didn’t hate the book, I had a feeling the whole time that I was being setup for something else. It felt like those “free” seminars where they sell books, CD’s or training courses at the back of the room. A more appropriate title might be The Ultimate Overview. While this is a good introduction to the Kennedy System of writing sales letters, it’s just that, an introduction. But even though it was an overview there is still some insight to be gained. The Ultimate Sales Letter, written by Dan Kennedy, is “organized” into parts, chapters and steps. I’ve used a modified version of the steps to guide the below summary, as the parts and chapters make no sense to me and confuse the organization of the material. Get “Into” the Customer The advice in this step is more for professional copywriters. Probably you are very aware of what your customers are into, what magazines they read, what websites they [...]

I read an article by Micheal Ellsberg called 8 Steps to Getting What You Want… Without Formal Credentials when it was first published in September of 2011. At the time it didn’t have much affect on me. A few weeks ago a friend recommended the article and I read it again. This time I was ready to hear Ellsberg’s message. The book reviews on bradonomics are largely from the advice he gives in that article so I thought it fitting to read and summarize his book. If you’re already on the “college-isn’t-the-best-use-of-time” bandwagon, you can skip the book. It does have a lot of good stories about people finding their way without a university degree but the article above outlines the core of Micheal’s approach to educating yourself without the sales pitch that university isn’t all it’s cracked-up to be. The book, The Education of Millionaires, is broken into seven success skills. Success Skill #1: How to Make Your Work Meaningful and You Meaning Work I’ve read a lot of follow your passion literature and never found much of it helpful. I’ve done exercises to learn what your passion is and read about how to turn that passion into a career. After every [...]

Ryan Holiday works as the Director of Marketing at American Apparel. While working at American Apparel is his day job, he also advises many bestselling authors and multi-platinum musicians, people like Tucker Max and Robert Greene, in the art of media manipulation. Holiday has written a new book titled Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. The book is split into two sections, the first about how Ryan exploits the media—blogs in particular—to get press and the second, a more detailed view of of these exploitations and his change of heart in using these tactics. For a basic understanding of how Holiday exploits the media, think of a chain where each link represents a media outlet. At the top are BBC and CNN and the bottom are bloggers for local websites. Ryan starts at the bottom with the bloggers who will do little fact-checking and once the story has run there, he calls the next media outlet up the chain. In a process he calls “iterative journalism” each subsequent contact assumes that since it’s run on the other sites it must be true and verified, so they also run the story without fact-checking. Using this process he’s able to create [...]