In the first month of 2020, I completed reading three books. Two were done by Audible and the other was read in print. All had something in common: living a life of possibility. They also all explored the themes of time. As we begin a new year, we are reminded that time is ticking and time is precious. And there is no time like the present. Below are my reviews of each book.
BOOK 1
The first book I completed in 2020 is Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think by Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis. This book, originally recommended to me two years ago by my friend Ryan Kaldahl, is incredible and will make you more optimistic about the world we are living in and the very near future we have awaiting us. Every day, thousands of people are being lifted out of poverty. This book was written in 2012, but the authors contend that by the year 2035, the world will eradicate ABSOLUTE POVERTY for the first time in human history. Absolute poverty used to be defined by people living under $1.00 a day; now it is defined (as of 2012) as people living under $1.25/day.
The authors define ABUNDANCE as: “not living a life of luxury, but a life of possibility.” When absolute poverty is eradicated, human beings can do more than simply survive. For most of human history, the average life span was about 3 decades. During that time, we reproduced children in our teens and those children reproduced children in their teens, making 3 generations living at the same time, with people dying in their 30s. Over the last century alone, human life has been extended by more than double that; and human beings are living longer every day.
Clean water and access to energy have been the biggest GAME CHANGERS for us to live a longer and healthier life. And the authors stress the continued focus on providing access to clean water and energy for those who don’t have it. When we live longer, we are also given more time, which means a life of more possibility.
“Time is our greatest resource. We spend a lot of time saving time, managing time, making time. We now work a lot less time to accomplish a lot more.” This alone should make us all grateful we live in this time of ABUNDANCE. “Prosperity is simply time saved.”
The authors go through many topics: including feeding 9 billion people; which we will need to be doing in the next 20 years. They talk about the move to DIY (do-it-yourself) methods that are transforming the way we live and work. They go through the future of energy, education, health care, and freedom.
Education is moving towards more virtual and less cost: we are moving away from the traditional classroom model from the early industrial era (see: the Khan Academy as an example they use — free, world class education that is available online on just about any topic). Every student is different and learns differently; virtual education combined with more personalized teaching and coaching is the path forward and will unlock the minds of millions and billions of people like never before.
In healthcare, technological innovation is constantly happening, on almost a daily basis. The main thing we have to be concerned about is the real shortage of health care workers (for those reading this looking for a career — health care seems like it has lots of job security and good pay!) However, one solution the authors go into in detail is robotics. As the population ages, more and more people, including the elderly, will have their own robots that will help from everything from cleaning the house to their health care needs, including maybe even serving as their psychologist. And this is not very far off and will definitely be a part of our life experience in the near future.
Predictive, Personalized, Preventative, and Participatory. Otherwise knowns as P4 Medicine, these 4 P’s are what will define healthcare going forward. And we will have access to better health care on our mobile devices and through virtual care.
This book poured out many statistics and facts and pointed out the amazing improvements that have taken place for humanity as a whole to allow us all to live a life of ABUNDANCE. The authors stress that the youth and youthful attitude always drives innovation. It always has and always will. And so, it is from young people, particularly those in their 20s and 30s where the continued innovation in our world will come from.
And they leave us with this parting thought: OUR PERSPECTIVE SHAPES OUR REALITY. The best way to have a better future is to create it yourself. They did just that with this book! And I completed this one by Audible. It’s worth your time — because we all have a lot more time these days than we ever had before, thanks to the life of possibility that our abundant world provides.
BOOK 2
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams marked to death by Time. That is the life of men.”
That is also the opening paragraph of the famous 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, by the 20th century’s most important African American woman of literature, Zora Neale Hurston. She is also the most famous woman that ever lived in Eatonville, Florida, a predominately historic black community near Orlando.
The novel follows the life of a woman named Janie Starks, as she makes her way from a small town in northern Florida to the Central Florida community of Eatonville, to an area just outside of Lake Okeechobee in Belle Glade. In each of these periods of her life, Janie is married to one of three different men. The first two are successful in their own ways, but Janie is never really fully her own woman with them. She leaves the first husband, and she is widowed by the second. But it is the third husband, much younger than she, who really shows her true love.
“Oh to be a pear tree – any tree in bloom.” That was always her ideal. This novel is not just about Janie and her life, but it is also about the life of black men and women yearning to be free and truly loved in a country that is still in bloom. “For no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way behind you.”
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” And as you turn every page in this novel, lines like this jump out at you. They are remarkable for their transcendence. “She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up.”
In the last part of this novel, Janie and her third husband, Tea Cake, had made their way to Belle Glade and were very successful and enjoyed good living even amid the frontier-like conditions of Old Florida. “Work all day for money, fight all night for love.”
There’s a lot to learn about racial tensions during this time, including tensions among blacks themselves. “Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshiped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.”
Then they experienced one of the worst (real-life) hurricanes in Florida’s history, one that affected much flooding near Lake Okeechobee. This reminded me a little bit of a similar story of the hurricane that hit in the late 1920s in the novel, “A Land Remembered” (which was written several decades after this book).
While they anticipate the storm, Janie reassures Tea Cake that even though he feels guilty for bringing her out of Eatonville and into Belle Glade where they are now experiencing the storm, that he was the best thing that ever happened to her, no matter what happens to them now. “If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don’t ker if you die at dusk. It’s so many people never seen de light at all. Ah wuz fumblin’ round and God opened de door.” For her, that door was her lovely marriage to Tea Cake.
And as the hurricane wreaked havoc on them, “they seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.” They barely escaped from the floods and made their way to Palm Beach, where there was much destruction and some anarchy and some law and order being enforced, including some that wasn’t particularly great for blacks.
Throughout the novel, Janie experiences love lost, love found, and loved ones lost by life’s end. “Love is like de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still in all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.”
And, by the end of this novel, we are reminded: “Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh themselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ for theysleves.” In Their Eyes Were Watch God, Zora Neale Hurston takes us through the experience of one black woman from a Florida community in the early 20th century and then gives us a glimpse over the horizon of the things that are possible.
BOOK 3
In his book, The HyperLocal HyperFast Real Estate Agent, my good friend Dan Lesniak walks us through how he first entered the market as a real estate agent in Arlington, VA starting around 2011 and how he quickly became wildly successful. Today, he and his wife Keri boast the most successful real estate team in all of Virginia. While the success appeared to come quick, it didn’t come easy. He put a lot of hard work and persistence. He also localized and personalized his strategy and outreach to potential clients.
In the book, Dan walks us through his STP strategy: Segmenting, Targeting, and Positioning. He segmented his market by targeting people in a specific geographic area, price point, and occupations. This helps him craft a message and strategy to many people within those parameters. He also developed his unique selling proposition. For him, that was mostly that he was local. He owned a condo in a building where he started selling condos. He then expanded out to different buildings and neighborhoods, but always had a unique selling proposition that he was local and knew the local area.
Dan is also a lifelong learner and emphasizes that to be successful in this arena, one must always be reading and studying and learning. That’s part of the reason I picked up his book in the first place. I read a lot of books on a lot of subjects. I made a goal in 2020 to try to put more business books into my reading list. While I also read many leadership and self-help type books, I now want to start incorporating some more “how to” technical books in the business field. While Dan has plenty of education from the Naval Academy and the University of Maryland (where we first met back around 2003), his story proves that another degree is not necessary to learn this trade.
Dan’s book on how to become a real estate agent and dominate your local market is also illuminated with real stories from real people he helped. He brings the “how to” to life with example after example. His writing made the book fun to read and almost wants to make me jump into the real estate business myself as you easily feel a part of the story.
Dan give a lot of tips away too. When I had him on my Agents of Innovation podcast a few years ago to talk about his company, Orange Line Living, and his new book, I had asked him if he was giving away all his strategies to his competitors. He said his biggest competitor was the “for sale by owner” type of prospective client. He also said he didn’t care about giving away his success tips because he knows he can be successful with this strategy and wants to help others learn this trade and also be successful. That’s true leadership – not to mention confidence!
Some of the tips he offers throughout the book, are also laid out nicely in the appendix. They include: marketing and advertising; listing homes as “coming soon” to get early attention and make potential clients feel like they are learning about a home before it comes to market; using hand-written notes, referrals, and the human touch – including “love letters” about the home and about the real estate agent; using technology like YouTube videos to market homes and Facebook ads to segment and target; how to win and properly participate in bidding wars with other buyers and sellers; the important role of follow-up; explaining to potential clients why selling their home is important to you; getting the appearance of the home right before showing it; and the effects of price and presentation.
I read this book as an Audible book. I was unsure if that was the best way to go, but the narrator reads it really effectively (with intros read by both Dan and his wife). The appendix is also read but I might go seek out that appendix in print and really study it if I ever wanted to actually go down the road of real estate that Dan inspires. This book gives me a lot to think about, including a fresh approach to the power of using your time and skills wisely to dominate a local market.