Procrastinating Entrepreneur

Before I get into the review itself I think that it’s important that I let everyone know that I am a huge fan (maybe even a “raving fan?”) of Mitch Joel.  I subscribe to his Twist Image blog and his amazing podcast (especially the Media Hacks episodes) and when I heard that he was releasing his own book to say that I was excited would have been a slight understatement.

I don’t think that the term “loitering” is strong enough to explain how much time I spent in my local Indigo after hearing about the books release date.  If Indigo is a follower of Avinash and has any type of analytics on the searches that are performed at store level I bet a few of the folks who are responsible for interpreting that data were left scratching their heads on the sudden and large increase on the number of in-store searches performed on “Six Pixels of Separation”.  Desperate to get a copy I eventually succumbed to Amazon.ca and received the book within a day or two.

Shortly after receiving the book, I twittered, “got my copy of six pixels of separation – it made my Friday adventure enjoyable – chewed through ¾ of it already – great read.”  Not long after writing that, I put the book down.  A funny thing happens when you build something up so much, you can almost guarantee that it will never live up to the expectations you’ve created in your head.  We’re all guilty of doing this on occasion, my girlfriend just laughs at me whenever we see a preview for any new sci-fi flick.  She knows what will inevitably happen – I will watch all the previews, read all the reviews and build it up so much that no matter how great the flick really is, I will be disappointed.   Unfortunately, for Mitch’s book, this is exactly what happened!

You might be thinking, well if you read through three quarters of the book and thought it was great, what happened?  To be honest with you the only thing I can say is that I felt it was not giving me the answers I was after.  Do you remember way back now when you used to see that guy on late-night TV showing you the cheques that he was receiving every month for whatever business he was pedaling?  I used to laugh at those infomercials, but after some reflection I discovered that while I thought that those TV ads were stupid and only “suckers” actually sent in their money.  I had substituted the Internet for the TV and was falling into that trap where I thought that all I needed was a system and that if I could just find the perfect one I was golden.  I read a ton of blogs, some good, some not so good, and what I discovered is that it’s very easy to fall into that “get rich quick” trap.  You know the one I am talking about, it’s the one where you get to sit on your butt all day and the cheques just roll in – I’ll let you in on a little secret, it still does not exist!

Armed with this new revelation, I picked up Mitch’s book and dove back into it head first, and I am glad that I did.  I realized that Mitch wasn’t trying to write a step-by-step guide (like so many other people), but he was trying to create for you a sort of “playbook”, something that you could take away and use to create (or rework) your businesses Internet strategy.  Here’s my advice to you – if you’ve finished the book already, pick it up again, but this time don’t just read it cover to cover.  Read it slowly, with a pen or pencil in hand.  Let the ideas that Mitch is presenting percolate a bit, then fill the margins with your own thoughts on how to translate Mitch’s ideas into something that works for your business.  In short, use this book as a starting point for your own Internet strategy.

So to try and wrap up this meandering review in a few sentences I would say this.  Should this book be in your bookcase? No – it should be in your briefcase or backpack or whatever you carry all your stuff around in, and it should be dog eared and held together by some cheap duct tape by the time you’re actually done with it.  It should be the foundation of your Internet strategy from this day forward!

Tags: No Comments

Related posts

• No related posts