Last night, I picked up “The Everything Homebuying Book” at my local library. As a real estate agent, I expected this book to be as dry and mundane as my real estate courses were. But the book was surprisingly to the point with tidbits scattered throughout.

The book covers everything from buying a fixer upper to selecting your town (with consideration to taxes, schools, and community programs) and determining the perfect home and finance strategy. The only thing the book lacked from my opinion was sample paperwork. What does a deed look like? How about a buy/sell agreement or rental contract when I rent out a bedroom?

We have an article on Aridni that might be useful to you, too.

And when you’re thinking of buying a home, this book may be invaluable to you… especially if you can get it for free at your local library, too!

Last week, I found myself critiquing and tisk, tisking the coffee selections at an organic grocery store. I don ‘t even drink coffee!

But I was in the progress of reading, Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time. I picked up the book to learn about fast-growing startups and found myself picking up a few tips on the best roast and coolest coffee house colors from the Starbucks point of view. So what did I learn (besides the perfect foam spread) from “one of the most amazing business stories in decades”?

There is no more precious a commodity than the relationship of trust and confidence a company has with its employees. If people believe management is not fairly sharing the rewards, they will feel alienated. Once they start distrusting management, the company ’s future is compromised.

In daily life, you get so much pressure from friends and family and colleagues, urging you to take the easy way, to follow the prevailing wisdom, that it can be difficult not to simply accept the status quo and do what ’s expected of you. But when you really believe in yourself, in your dream you just have to do everything you possibly can to take control and make your vision a reality. No greater achievement happens by luck.

To any entrepreneur, I would offer this advice: once you’ve figured out what you want to do, find someone who has done it before. Find not just talented executives but even more experienced entrepreneurs and business people who can guide you. They know where to look for the mines in the minefield. If they have thought and acted boldly in their own careers, and proven successful, they can help you do the same.

One of the most fundamental aspects of leadership, I realized more and more, is the ability to instill confidence in others when you yourself are feeling insecure.

Success is not an entitlement. We have to earn it every day. Just because Starbucks has achieved all its goals in the past didn’t mean that we were immune to mistakes. We had to be in a mode of constant renewal and recognize that the future of our company was not based on what we achieved yesterday. We had to preserver, even when our near-term targets seem out of reach.

So would I recommend this book? I ‘m not sure. The first hundred pages were great; I couldn’t stop reading. Of course, I also don’t know if I’ve ever been in an actual Starbucks, so I was seeing the business as more than a conglomerate giant that is consuming America and the world. I saw the company from the personal and passionate vantage point of the CEO. I enjoyed wearing the rosy glasses. And I enjoyed the constant reflections the stuff you and I can gain from in our own lives.

But then the book started to drag on. I didn’t see so much reflection, just a lot of bragging. The rest of the book took me weeks to finish, and I didn’t get much out of it. The last two chapters wrapped up in the typical “we ‘ll keep working to be the best and live happily ever after”. I wasn’t reading Disney, though!

As the cold weather starts to set in, I thought we could all use a few chuckles today. I’m currently reading “The Warren Buffet Way” and got a kick out of this paragraph (pg 89):

Buying an underwear maker [Fruit of the Loom] creates lots of opportunities for corny jokes, and Buffet, an accomplished punster, made the most of it. At the 2002 shareholders meeting, when asked the obvious question, he teased the audience with a half answer: “When I wear underwear at all, which I rarely do…” Leaving the crowd to decide for themselves whether it’s boxers or briefs for Buffett. He pointed out why there’s “a favorable bottom line” in underwear: “It’s an elastic market.” Finally, he deadpanned, Charlie Munger had given him an additional reason to buy the company:

“For years Charlie has been telling me, ‘Warren, we have to get into women’s underwear.’ Charlie is 78. It’s now or never.”

A lot of people ask Todd and me what Aridni stands for. Guy Kawaski, author of the blog, “How to Change the World“, has an explanation for crazy entity names that don’t necessarily mean anything at all…

A remarkable name for your organization, product, or service is like pornography: It’s hard to define, but you know it when you see it.

Here’s some great entrepreneurial creativity from The Book of Business Anecdotes:

When F. W. Woolworth opened his first store, a merchant on the same street tried to fight the new competition. He hung out a big sign: “Doing business in this same spot for over fifty years.”

The next day Woolworth also put out a sign. It read: “Established a week ago: no old stock.”

My boss is angry again today. I don’t know why he’s mad, but instead of helping him along, I am finding myself snapping right back just a little.

Anger raises everyone’s metabolism and decreases enthusiasm. My coworkers and I need to hear his anger sometimes to keep us focused—though the cost this degrading attitude places on my office? I’m not always sure that the aggressive, football player, cream your butt kind of attitude works outside of the playing field.

We hold little control over the attitude of others; we have control over ourselves, though. You can’t make people around you better so much as you can make yourself a better person.

Marshall Goldsmith addresses management through anger in his book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. His book, a bestseller, holds a lot of tips on how to improve yourself, specifically in the office environment. He writes, “We save a special place in our minds for our chronically angry colleagues. No matter what else they do, we brand them as easily combustible. When we talk about them, the first words out of people’s mouths are, ‘I hear he has a temper.’”

I don’t think that you can make aggressively angry people change. You can only change how you respond to their attitude. If you keep your mouth shut, no one can know how you feel, and that’s a good thing. Once you can appreciate the ability to resist a crude comment, the benefits start to roll in. Goldsmith points out that you won’t embarrass yourself. You won’t create enemies. And best of all, you can resist better in the future.