As a big fan of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, I was interested in this book. 70 years after it was published, I still see people recommending it, so I had high hopes.

Sadly, the book fell short of my expectations. When I read How to Win Friends and Influence People, every chapter felt relevant and useful. In contrast, only about 20% of How to Stop Worrying and Start Living felt useful. Most of the book is personal anecdotes that failed to connect with me and mental exercises that didn’t appeal to me.

Highlights

• TinyPilot’s EU distributor is on track to begin sales by the end of August.
• I’ve freed up time by delegating responsibilities to my teammates.
• I miraculously became unstuck on two tasks that have been blocking work for months.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Get my EU partner ready to begin sales by the end of August

• Result: We’re on track to begin sales by the end of the month.
• Grade: A

This went well. By next week, my distributor should have all the parts and instructions he needs to begin assembling his own TinyPilot Voyager devices. He’s on track to begin sales by the end of this month.

Highlights

• I’m struggling to get unstuck in two areas that have stalled for months: hardware development and hiring.
• I’m partnering with a distributor in Germany to begin selling TinyPilot within the EU.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Publish a new release of TinyPilot

• Result: Published TinyPilot 1.5.1
• Grade: A

This release went well and came out on schedule. It didn’t have any especially exciting new features, but we polished existing features and paid down technical debt.

The Goal is an attempt to reevaluate business management from first principles. The book explains Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, which states that in any business, the sole determinant of output is the bottleneck resource. To grow, a business has to identify its bottlenecks and reorganize business processes to address them. It sounds simple and perhaps obvious, but the lessons helped me to think about my own business.

Highlights

• Despite $30k in monthly revenue, TinyPilot barely covers costs.
• I’m exploring options to get big companies to pay more for TinyPilot.
• I need to come to terms with the fact that managing people is a real job.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Increase TinyPilot’s revenue to $33k

• Result: Increased TinyPilot’s revenue to $39k
• Grade: A

TinyPilot had a huge spike in sales following a big review from ServeTheHome, one of the top blogs / YouTube channels for IT hardware.