Start Something That Matters Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

Brief Summary

It is important to overcome your fears when you decide to start a business. Even without any experience or a lot of resources, it is possible to get started and be successful.

At the same time, it is important to have like-minded people around you who can not only lift you up and support you but who is also there to help you build your business.

It is important to be passionate about your product and have employees who are also passionate. Get creative with your business and remember that mistakes happen, but you can use those mistakes to grow and succeed.

About the Author

Blake Mycoskie is an American entrepreneur, author, and philanthropist. He is the founder of TOMS Shoes. He attended Southern Methodist University on a Tennis scholarship but left during his sophomore year after an Achille tendon injury ended his tennis career. He launched his first business, EZ laundry, an on-campus dry cleaning service.

He focused on SMU to get his clientele and expanded to $1 million in sales. After college, he founded Mycoskie Media, an outdoor billboard company focused on country music. It was later sold to Clear Channel nine months after launch.

He competed in the second season of The Amazing Race and finished in third place.

He co-founded a cable network, Reality Central with Larry Namer, a founder of E Entertainment Television. For the company, he raised $25 million from venture capitalists. The network failed in 2005 after Rupert Murdoch launched the Fox Reality Chanel and outbid Reality Central for advertisers and programming.

Mycoskie then launched DriversEd Direct, an online driver’s education service, which offered behind the wheel training in hybrid and sport utility vehicles, He created Closer Marketing Group, a marketing firm based in Santa Monica to promote the company.

After seeing the poverty in Argentina, he founded Shoes for Better Tomorrow, a for-profit business that gave new shoes to poor children. For every pair of shoes sold, the company donated a new pair of shoes. By 2013, the company had donated over 10,000,000 shoes to people in need. The shoes were sold around the world in more than 1000 stores.

His book, Start Something That Matters, is a New York Times bestseller. 100% of the royalties from the book provided grants to entrepreneurs. For every copy of the book sold, Blake Mycoskie promised to give a copy to a child in need.

In 2014, he launched TOMS Roasting Co, offering coffee sourced through direct trade efforts in Rwanda, Honduras, Peru, Guatemala, and Malawi. Mycoskie pledged to donate a week of water to people in need in supplier countries for every bag of coffee sold.

In 2014, Blake Mycoskie sold 50% of TOMS to Bain Capital. He now serves as Chief Shoe Giver. He pledged to donate 50% of profits from the sale to help with social entrepreneurship and other causes.

He is married with one son.

Topics

Entrepreneurship Career & Success

Start Something That Matters Book Summary Preview

By Blake Mycoskie

Key Insights

If you are looking to start your own business, then this book has the advice you need to make that happen. And the only way to get started is to overcome any fears you may have.

Even without a lot of business experience or resources, with Start Something That Matters, Black Mycoskie delivers insight into how to start a company, while also overcoming your fears.

Whether you want a small business selling handmade crafts or something on a more global scale, Mycoskie looks at the fears that hold many of us back and offers advice for overcoming these setbacks and handling any challenges that come your way.

By starting his own company, Blake Mycoskie has been able to put together practical knowledge that shows people how to “recycle” another person’s business card, why even making a mistake is worth rewarding an employee for, and why it is okay to let bad things happen.

Fear is natural, but letting it go unchecked can be damaging

We all get scared at times, and while it can make us feel ashamed or embarrassed, it is a natural emotion. Typically it is an emotion we experience when we come across a situation for the first time or run into a new experience.

Fear of failure can make us so uncomfortable that we miss out on potential opportunities. However, talking about our fears and being willing to confront them is the only way we can push forward.

To overcome a fear, you must first be able to identify that fear

The best way to overcome one’s fear is to face it head-on. Do whatever it is that inspires fear in you and let what happens, happen.

Fear might be one of the most powerful emotions we deal with, but once we confront our fears, we tend to find that they are actually quite minor and we can overcome it with ease.

The author has faced his own fears in business, including when he wanted to start his business, TOMS, in Argentina. At the time, he did not have a lot of experience or even resources, and this left him with the temptation to scrap his business entirely.

Instead, he started by making a list with one side being what he was afraid of and the other being the worst-case scenario. By writing down his fears and the possibility of what could happen, he was able to see that while it may still be scary to try something new, it really wasn’t as bad as he had made it out to be in his head.

You can’t predict the future, so don’t let it hold you back

New business ventures are the easiest thing to fear, especially for people who are doing this for the first time. This fear stops many people from even making the first step towards a new business.

However, much of the fear comes from the belief that we need to have a ton of experience going into this venture. This is not actually the case.

No one can predict the future and therefore...