“You can’t make positive discoveries that make your life better if you never try anything new.”
Josh Kaufman is the author of two international bestsellers, The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business and The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything… Fast!, and is one of the top 100 business authors in the world, as ranked by Amazon.com. Josh conducts independent ongoing research in business/entrepreneurship, skill acq
Josh’s unique, multidisciplinary approach to business mastery has helped millions of readers around the world learn essential business concepts on their own terms. Josh’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The BBC, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Time, BusinessWeek, Wired, Fast Company, HarvardBusiness.org, and Bloomberg TV. The widely-acclaimed Personal MBA manifesto and recommended reading list has been downloaded over 1.28 million times from ChangeThis.com.
The Personal MBA has sold over 150,000 copies worldwide to date, and has been in the top 0.1% of all business books sold on Amazon.com since its publication in January, 2011. On publication, the international edition of The Personal MBA was the the #1 bestselling business book in the United Kingdom, and remained #1 for two consecutive months. The Personal MBA has also been used as a textbook for business courses at Stanford University, New York University, Howard University, and Portland State University.
PersonalMBA.com has been visited over 2 million times by readers all over the world since its founding in 2005. Josh’s work has directly saved prospective business students millions of dollars in unnecessary tuition, fees, and interest by providing an effective, affordable, and debt-free method of learning fundamental business principles.
Josh’s second book, The First 20 Hours, details a universal method of rapid skill acquisition designed to help readers pick up rewarding new skills in record time. Used by readers to learn everything from piloting airplanes to sumo wrestling, The First 20 Hours helps readers pick up useful and rewarding new skills as fast as humanly possible.
JoshKaufman.net was named one of the “Top 100 Websites for Entrepreneurs” by Forbes in 2013.
Prior to becoming a full-time author/researcher, Josh worked in brand management for Procter & Gamble’s Home Care division, where he lead multi-million dollar projects that encompassed P&G’s entire value chain, from new product development to delivering in-store marketing campaigns for key customers like Walmart, Target, and Costco. Before leaving P&G, Josh spearheaded the development of P&G’s global online marketing measurement strategy.
Josh’s current projects involve online training programs, live training programs, and ongoing research in business and skill acquisition. His brain is insured by Lloyd’s of London. [From: Joshkaufman.net]
“Business schools don’t create successful people. They simply accept them, then take credit for their success.”
Books
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The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast!
Forget the 10,000 hour rule— what if it’s possible to learn the basics of any new skill in 20 hours or less?
Take a moment to consider how many things you want to learn to do. What’s on your list? What’s holding you back from getting started? Are you worried about the time and effort it takes to acquire new skills—time you don’t have and effort you can’t spare?
In The First 20 Hours, Josh Kaufman offers a systematic approach to rapid skill acquisition— how to learn any new skill as quickly as possible. His method shows you how to deconstruct complex skills, maximize productive practice, and remove common learning barriers. By completing just 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice you’ll go from knowing absolutely nothing to performing noticeably well.
Kaufman personally field-tested the methods in this book. You’ll have a front row seat as he develops a personal yoga practice, writes his own web-based computer programs, teaches himself to touch type on a nonstandard keyboard, explores the oldest and most complex board game in history, picks up the ukulele, and learns how to windsurf. Here are a few of the simple techniques he teaches:
Define your target performance level: Figure out what your desired level of skill looks like, what you’re trying to achieve, and what you’ll be able to do when you’re done. The more specific, the better.
Deconstruct the skill: Most of the things we think of as skills are actually bundles of smaller subskills. If you break down the subcomponents, it’s easier to figure out which ones are most important and practice those first.
Eliminate barriers to practice: Removing common distractions and unnecessary effort makes it much easier to sit down and focus on deliberate practice.
Create fast feedback loops: Getting accurate, real-time information about how well you’re performing during practice makes it much easier to improve.
Whether you want to paint a portrait, launch a start-up, fly an airplane, or juggle flaming chainsaws, The First 20 Hours will help you pick up the basics of any skill in record time . . . and have more fun along the way. [From: Goodreads.com]
“Every time your customers purchase from you, they’re deciding that they value what you have to offer more than they value anything else their money could buy at that moment.”
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The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business
Master the fundamentals, hone your business instincts, and save a fortune in tuition.
students are shuffled off into middle management to find out how business really works.
Josh Kaufman has made a business out of distilling the core principles of business and delivering them quickly and concisely to people at all stages of their careers. His blog has introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to the best business books and most powerful business concepts of all time. In The Personal MBA, he shares the essentials of sales, marketing, negotiation, strategy, and much more.
True leaders aren’t made by business schools-they make themselves, seeking out the knowledge, skills, and experiences they need to succeed. Read this book and in one week you will learn the principles it takes most people a lifetime to master. [From: Barnesandnoble.com]
Kaufman, a former middle manager at Proctor & Gamble and founder of personalmba.com, argues that those interested in business would be better served by skipping the M.B.A. and focusing on the critically important concepts that really make or break a business. According to the author, much of what is taught in business schools is outdated; you’re better off saving the expense and finding other ways to learn about these core principles–which Kaufman synthesizes–in such areas as value creation, marketing, sales, and finance. He also explores the psychological side of business and examines how consumers take in information, make decisions, and decide what to do or not to do. Acknowledging the panoramic overview his approach necessitates, he includes a fairly lengthy list of sources to seek out if more information is needed. While Kaufman’s rallying call will not eradicate the need or desire for M.B.A. degrees, he does provide a surprisingly solid alternative full of information that even those already in the workplace will respond to. [A Review from Publishersweekly.com]
“The best thing that can happen to a human being is to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears.”
Now Watch His Video:
How to Learn Anything… Fast – Josh Kaufman ; TIME 23:20
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