Book Review: Bounce by Barry J. Moltz

Barry Moltz is… a master of failure.  From the inside cover of the book:

Barry J. Moltz has founded and run businesses with a great deal of success and failure for more than fifteen years.  After successfully selling his last operating business, he founded an angel investor group and an angel fund, and…. 

… and it goes on to tell about all the cool stuff Barry does.  The emphasis on “with a great deal of success and failure” is a great description of what he’s gone through to get to the point where we could so passionately write a book about… failure.

Or, perhaps, how to react to, or deal with, or bounce back from failure.

Bounce.  That’s where the name comes from.  The image on the front of the book is a rubber band ball… you know, the ball you make by putting on more and more rubber bands?  The one you could toss around, and it bounces, almost like a rubber ball?

Bounce is a book about the rubber bands… Barry shares 10 things which become YOUR rubber bands to help you bounce back from… well, life.  He talks about the idea that we think our career and success trajectory is always up-and-to-the-right, but in fact, it is quite variable, and we need to learn how to deal with the variables/variety.

I LOVE this book for the hundreds (it seems like hundreds) of examples of people who succeed, people who fail, and people who have a nice mixture of failures and successes.  

It’s a book that helps our paradigm shifting, gives us tools to manage, and inspiration to keep on doing things.  I’m not going to put all the 10 bands, but I’ll put the last one:

Whatever our goals are, making better decisions leads to more success.  The final building band is to value action – almost any action.  Active decisions will lead to a bounce and natural flow of your business life.  Anything that gets in the way of a person making better decisions should be tossed overboard.

I put that band on my bounce ball a long time ago.  Leaving it off leads to analysis-paralysis.  

You can check out Bounce on Amazon – it’s about $17 right now.