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Act Like a Success Think Like a Success is a mix of autobiography and self help book. It’s very inspirational since Steve really started from low and relatively late.

Bullet Summary

• Find what you’re good at and build your career around it
• Commit to your gift and work hard at it
• Embrace failure

Full Summary

Steve Harvey’s book is very inspirational. He dropped out of school, worked factory job until he was fired, stayed homeless for almost three years and didn’t get serious about success until he was middle age.
And yet there he did it.

Find Your Gift

You should build your career -and possibly your life- around what you’re good at.
To know what you’re good at, you need to know yourself and you need to be brutally honest (love reality, says Ray Dalio in Principles).

Steve says you can turn any passion into a well paying job.
I don’t fully agree here though. You can turn many passions into high paying job as millionnaires gamers can tell you. But similar to Seth Godin in Linchpin, I believe some passions are harder to monetize.
So you might at least want to think about that. Just don’t let that stop in your track. Countless “unmonetizable” businesses made millions.

Commit to Your Gift

To reach success, you must not only find your gift, but fully commit yourself to it.

My Note: fully committing to a gift not only is crucial for success, but will also heighten your passion for the gift. Read Grit by Angela Duckworth for more.

Failure is Your Friend

The need to embrace failure is a constant refrain in the self-help literature.
However, Act Like a Success Think Like a Success provides some very motivating real life examples that back up the talk with the walk.

People laughed at Harvey when he quit his job to pursue comedy. And he lost every comedy competition he entered. He had some terrible performances in front of big crowds. And he was scared before any big major event.

His took some big lessons learned from his failures though. He started keeping tabs on his jokes. He scored based on the crowd’s reaction and used that feedback to decide what could stay and what should go.

Snub Haters

Steve Harvey recommends you don’t find any time for the haters. When you respond and entertain them, you give them power.
And you waste your precious time.
Keep climbing instead, and they will be so far down the ladder you won’t even hear them anymore.

Other Advise

• Remove excuses
• Avoid negative thoughts and negative people
• Only share goals and visions with a selected few
• Write a vision and constantly look at it (put it somewhere you see it every day)
• Don’t be afraid to ask for help
• Know your worth and ask for equivalent compensation
• Success doesn’t come overnight: start small and build your way up
• Learn to say no: Decide your value and refuse what doesn’t support them

Review

Act Like a Success Think Like a Success is a mix of biography and self help book. The self help part has advise that are rather popular and well known in the self help literature (read best self help books).

But the mix of theory plus real life stories makes it better than most self help books. Contrary to some, Steve Harvey isn’t trying to make money selling the advise, he’s already made it to a successful position and then giving advise.
Since Harvey did start from very low and he did start late, Act Like a Success Think Like a Success was also very inspirational for me.

I would recommend it first and foremost to anyone who likes Harvey, to people who start from humble beginnings and those who’d like to become comedians.

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