The Go-Giver

In 2012 I attend­ed a week-long Entre­Lead­er­ship event where they sent atten­dees home with a num­ber of books (the ​“Entre­Lead­er­ship Library” as they called it). One of those books was The Go-Get­ter, a short sto­ry about a WWI vet who has to over­come a num­ber of obsta­cles to become suc­cess­ful and accom­plish his tasks and work. I enjoyed the short read and nat­u­ral­ly thought The Go-Giv­er was some type of exten­sion of the idea. Well, it wasn’t real­ly. It was a sim­i­lar for­mat — sim­ple prin­ci­ples told through a sim­ple sto­ry. But it was still quite dif­fer­ent from The Go-Getter.

The nice thing about this book is that it’s short and easy to read. Even short­er than the book is the actu­al meat to the book. I didn’t take any notes while read­ing because it can tru­ly be summed up in a bul­let list that’s even part of the book itself. The book called it the Five Laws of Stratos­pher­ic Suc­cess. The name seems a bit reach­ing, but can be inspir­ing nonetheless.

The laws are demon­strat­ed through the main char­ac­ter, Joe’s, last week of the third quar­ter in a year. He’s try­ing to meet a sales quo­ta after miss­ing the pre­vi­ous two quarter’s quo­tas. He spends a week learn­ing these laws and apply­ing them dai­ly. The end of the sto­ry has Joe, rough­ly a year lat­er, as a part­ner in a world­wide com­pa­ny. The ​“how he got there” part was slow­ly being built up through the pre­ced­ing sec­tions and char­ac­ters in the book. In short, it had to do with net­work and self­less­ness. It’s cheesy, but short enough to not both­er me.