Book Review: The Proven Path to Unstoppable Ideas Better and Faster By Jeremy Gutsche
It’s currently July 31, 2017 9:25 AM and I just got done reading my third book of the month The Proven Path to Unstoppable Ideas Better and Faster by Jeremy Gutsche. I heard the author getting interviewed on a podcast and the book piqued my interest so I decided to go to Amazon and order the same day.
Jeremy Gutsche is a former banker who turned that career into a burgeoning business TrendHunter.com. The website is basically where individuals go to source ideas and keep up with the latest trends across several industries. According to Jeremy, he has worked with several Fortune 500 companies and through his website and thousands of individuals’ help has helped predict trends across all industries. I found that to be very interesting. It immediately caught my attention and I was drawn into the book. I read a couple of chapters in January but I stopped reading it to read The Celestine Prophecy, that’s another post for another day.
The book starts off with Jeremy talking about several people in business who have become wealthy by just following trends and capitalizing on them. He talks about Ray Raymond, the original owner of Victoria’s Secret, Amancio Ortega the founder of Zara, and several other entrepreneurs throughout the book.
There were several stories that stuck out to me. One story includes his sister Kyla Gutsche, a graduate from the University of Oxford who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and given a fifty-five percent chance of survival. The book states that “Determined to achieve her academic goals, Kyla battled cancer while continuing her quest to be an extraordinary professor. Despite the effects of chemo, she’d frequently pull all-nighters to perfect her lectures. The only thing that sank her spirits something an outsider might dismiss an insignificant: her eyebrows.”
The problem Kyla was referring to was her eyebrows. She stated that “…after chemotherapy treatments you can put a wig on your head, but there’s something totally different about losing your eyebrow It’s a reminder that you’re not normal.” Kyla talked to her oncology nurse about options and learned that they did have medically safe tattooing equipment but they were crude and had extreme drawbacks. This problem weighed on Kyla for a while and she chose to leave her post at school to pursue the problem fulltime. She ends up going to several places to look for solutions. She finds the answer to her problems by combining knowledge from several sources from prison tattoo artists, Titian the 16th century painter, and the Yakuza gangsters.
I must quote Jeremy’s ending passage regarding his sister, and her journey. “Though people rarely recognize it, adversity can breed innovation. My sister started by identifying a pain point and then mixed and matched potential solutions until she came up with something incredible. If something bugs you or triggers your curiosity, pay attention: there may be a creative combination of ideas that could turn into a big business idea. And remember that your personal passions and skills could be the rich source of creativity that gets you to that solution faster.”
If you are developing a new idea or business then this book is for you. It will help you look at your business or idea from several angles. It will help you take yourself away from the product and look at what a potential customer wants. The book also is very inspiring because it tells you different stories how other entrepreneurs have started and grown their business. I highly recommend this book to current entrepreneurs and business owners. You will learn from the book I guarantee it.
My biggest takeaway from the book is that for one to succeed you necessarily don’t have to have this groundbreaking, extra technological product. You can capitalize off an existing industry and cater to a niche market and make lots of money. You don’t have to be for everybody, if your market size is good enough to supply your business. One of my favorite words is perseverance. Perseverance is key because without it no individual would succeed. The book picked up on this several times. It states how some individuals didn’t know how they were going to solve the problem, or how it would work out but they decided to just go for it and figure it out on the way. The is the motto I adapted 4 years ago. I have lived by it since the day I quit my job to pursue my own business with no clue how I was going to make it happen. The universe tends to bless those that have a specific vision and are working relentlessly towards getting there.
