Books to be inspired in your entrepreneurship

Starting a business is no easy venture and, in all cases, requires some tried and tested advice. These books are popular with budding entrepreneurs as they inspire, educate and encourage readers to follow their business goals and advise them on how to do it successfully. Discover inlea’s selection of some of the most inspirational books to create your startup.

‘Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action’ by Simon Sinnek

This book draws on real-life inspirational experiences to show readers the skills needed to become a strong leader and inspire others along the way. It highlights how success can be achieved again and again.

Sinek starts with a fundamental question: Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty from customers and employees alike? Even among the successful, why are so few able to repeat their success over and over?
The book shows that the leaders who’ve had the greatest influence in the world all think, act, and communicate the same way and it’s the opposite of what everyone else does. Sinek calls this powerful idea The Golden Circle, and it provides a framework upon which organizations can be built, movements can be led, and people can be inspired. And it all starts with WHY.
Find de book here.

‘Becoming’ by Michelle Obama

Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations and whose story inspires us to do the same.

In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her, from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world’s most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it, in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations, and whose story inspires us to do the same.
Find the book here.

‘The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses’ by Eric Ries

Most startups are built to fail. But those failures, according to entrepreneur Eric Ries, are preventable. Startups don’t fail because of bad execution, or missed deadlines, or blown budgets. They fail because they are building something nobody wants.

Whether they arise from someone’s garage or are created within a mature Fortune 500 organization, new ventures, by definition, are designed to create new products or services under conditions of extreme uncertainly. Their primary mission is to find out what customers ultimately will buy. One of the central premises of The Lean Startup movement is what Ries calls “validated learning” about the customer. It is a way of getting continuous feedback from customers so that the company can shift directions or alter its plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than creating an elaborate business plan and a product-centric approach, Lean Startup prizes testing your vision continuously with your customers and making constant adjustments.
Find the book here.

‘This is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn To See’ by Seth Godin

Real marketing isn’t about racking up clicks and tweets; it’s about connection, empathy, and making a difference.

This book teaches you how to identify your smallest viable audience; draw on the right signals and signs to position your offering; build trust and permission with your target market; speak to the narratives your audience tells themselves about status, affiliation, and dominance; spot opportunities to create and release tension; and give people the tools to achieve their goals.
Find the book here.

‘Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration’ by Ed Catmull

“What does it mean to manage well?” From Ed Catmull, co-founder (with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter) of Pixar Animation Studios, comes an incisive book about creativity in business, sure to appeal to readers of Daniel Pink, Tom Peters, and Chip and Dan Heath.

Creativity, Inc. is a book for managers who want to lead their employees to new heights, a manual for anyone who strives for originality, and the first-ever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation, into the meetings, postmortems, and “Braintrust” sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made. It is, at heart, a book about how to build a creative culture, but it is also, as Pixar co-founder and president Ed Catmull writes, “an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible.
Find the book here.

We hope you find something new to read on this list and something that will inspire and motivate you to be better, and help you become more successful.