A useful, informative startup primer blending nuts-and-bolts knowledge with cleareyed motivation.
Learn both the specifics of setting up a hair-sales business and the larger ethos of entrepreneurship in this self-help book.
Moran, co-host of the Hair Biz Radio podcast and founder of Private Label Extensions, a wholesaler of wigs, extensions, and cosmetics, offers advice to people planning to open a retail hair-sector business and anyone else with the startup bug. Much of the guide covers basic mechanics, including legally establishing your business, opening bank accounts, registering a domain name, and building a website. The author also discusses higher-level business issues, such as whether to carry inventory and deliver products yourself or farm those tasks out to drop-shipping companies, the niceties of crafting a name and logo—avoid eccentric spellings that potential customers won’t remember, he cautions—and which advertising platforms to use. (Facebook ads are “the only advertising worth paying for” when your business is starting out, he asserts.) And he reminds readers of the importance of consistent performance, especially in communicating and engaging with consumers. He recommends handwritten thank-you notes to customers and massive blogs with weekly 1,000-word posts to keep readers returning to your website. Moran goes on to explore some deeper mental and emotional aspects of starting a business. He suggests that budding entrepreneurs closely observe and analyze other businesses and constantly ask, “How did they do that?”—whether “that” is an eye-catching display or an attractive lighting scheme. Most of all, he contends, startup entrepreneurs need to set actionable goals, make detailed plans, have realistic expectations—anticipate endless hours of work before you even quit your day job—and learn to live with and overcome the inescapable fear of doing something new and risky. The author brings a wealth of hard-won experience to the subject from his own business successes and failures, and he deftly conveys it to readers. His prose is lucid, straightforward, and replete with aphoristic distillations of wisdom. (Those seeking feedback on their businesses’ performance from friends and family should “be careful of false validation, the tendency of people to shield those they love from uncomfortable truths.”) The result is a lively and judicious how-to that will give readers a superb introduction to the rigors of the marketplace.
A useful, informative startup primer blending nuts-and-bolts knowledge with cleareyed motivation.Pub Date: April 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-54-452008-7
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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