PREFACE

You hold in your hand a book. But what is a book? Is it something you BUY or something you BECOME? To many authors and publishers, a book is 75,000 words on 300 pages held between two rigid covers that measure 6 by 9 inches. Or, it’s 75,000 electronic words that can be resized, customized, read, and annotated by the user.

Every book is both container and content. The container is what gets made, advertised, sold, and distributed. If it looks like a book, feels like a book, and downloads like a book, it must be a book.

But what about the content? What if some people view a business book not as a trophy on their bookshelf but as a step change in their career? What if some people—and here I mean you—want the most inspiration in the least number of hours?

In that case, a book needs to have the least number of words, not the most. It should be designed to stay in your mind, not in your hand. It should get you out from the covers and into your projects as fast as possible. And it should reveal its deeper wisdom reading after reading. This is the book I tried to write. It’ll require two hours of your valuable time, which I don’t take lightly. But if it’s the book you need, it’ll pay you back for years.

—Marty Neumeier