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Q: Euro Disney really took off once you realized that French parents wanted fine wine at the restaurants to get them through the day.
Bob Iger: I know it was an issue.

The Slow-Burning Success of Disney’s Bob Iger

During the weekend I read this article on Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney. He talks about buying Pixar, Marvel and 21st Century Fox, he talks about his way of doing things. Quite an interesting op-ed.

The quote above, though, made me wonder how many small decisions make the success stories though.

I mean, who would think that not having wine in a menu (at a children’s park, especially) would make the place less successful?

Photo via Canva, article via Ben Evans’ newsletter

The question I answered in this video is “Should I start a side business while working a 9 to 5 job?”

To start with the conclusion: if you want to really succeed, I don’t think it’s recommended to start a side business while holding a full time job. A business you can’t focus on most of your time is most likely going to fail.

If you start a hobby or you don’t care about revenues or success of the business, then you can start whenever you want.

Transcript:

Should I start a side business while working a nine-to-five job?

No, I don’t think you should do that. I come from a school of thought that says you should need to focus on one thing and do it really really well. I can understand that your case might be different: you have a family, you have a mortgage, you need money to live. It all means you need the money from the nine-to-five job.

If that’s the case, what I would suggest is that you save money for at least six months or a year of living without generating of revenue.

Cut your costs as much as possible, as much as you can, so that it becomes easier to live off the money that you that you saved and once you’ve done that, bite the bullet and start the company.

If the business doesn’t work, you can always go back and find a job even if it takes a little bit longer. The business will not be a success if you can’t focus on doing just that.

It can’t really work. Yes, there are exceptions to that, but most of the people don’t really make it work. You can start an online business, you can find ways to create a side revenue, but I don’t think that a side revenue from writing for other sites, let’s say, is a side business.

If you really want a business, you need to focus on that, so save some money, cut the costs and bite the bullet and quit your job and start the company.

I’m crazy about Christmas. The thing is, I wasn’t as crazy about Christmas when I was a kid as I’m now, at forty-something.

What happened in between?

Well, as an adult, the holidays season (including Christmas, of course, and New Year’s) is the most quiet period of the year. Nobody sends you emails, nobody wants something urgent from you. Except family, but hopefully you manage/like that part of your life.

Once I understood why I loved the quiet period, I started to associate things with it: Christmas carols, the Christmas tree, Christmas lights… This means that once the summer is over, I want the Christmas feeling as early as possible. So right now I’m negotiating with my fiancée having a Christmas tree starting with October…

I’m also listening to Christmas songs right now. Just because I can.

Starting with January 24th, 2020, we’re gonna see the first new episodes of a Star Trek series with Jean-Luc Picard.

Like many people my age (I’m 41 now), the first Star Trek I’ve ever watched was The Next Generation. Picard, Data, Riker, Worf, Troi, Geordi, they were all names we grew up with and vastly enjoyed watching. For me, in particular, it might be the thing that made me love SF in all its forms: movies, TV series and, most of all, books.

While the new series is not around those characters (with the exception of Picard, of course), some of them will appear in the new series. I’ve seen glimpses of Data, Riker and Troi in the trailer. You can also see Seven of Nine, from Voyager, who seems to be playing a much larger role than the other ones.

This is one of the funniest videos I’ve seen in a while. It shows what you can do if some newsletter doesn’t unsubscribe you when you ask for it.

As a bonus, you can also watch the following video on how to talk with email scammers. It’s the same person (James Veitch) and it’s as funny as the previous one.

Image from Canva

It took me a little bit of time because of some traveling I needed to do, but I finally tried Apple Arcade during the last weekend.

If you don’t know what Apple Arcade is, read this article. The tldr; version is that it’s a new program by Apple where they finance new and high quality games to be launched on all Apple platforms: MacOS, iOS, iPadOS and tvOS. The twist is that you have no in-app purchases. You pay for the subscription and that’s it. The subscription is $5/month and you can try the games for free for the first month, without needing to pay anything.

I’ve been quite excited about it, because I want to have some cross platform games that I can play on TV and on my mobile phone/tablet as well. I use SteamLink, I use Remote Play for PS4, but having native games on all platforms I use is so much better.

Another reason I loved the idea is that, starting with the latest version of the operating systems you can use Playstation’s DS4 controller natively through bluetooth. There were some hacks previously, but now you just connect the controller you want and that’s it. It also works with some XBox controllers, I think, but I don’t have an XBox, so I didn’t test it.

The games I tried yet: “What the Golf“, ustwo’s “Assemble with care” and some OceanHorn 2. I played What the Golf mostly on the iPad, and Assemble with care and Oceanhorn 2 on Apple TV, with the controller.

What the Golf

This is a weird and funny game. I can’t really tell you too much without spoiling some things, so if you have the time, play it. It’s… a golf game. Sort of. It’s really great to play on your phone during travel, among other things.

Assemble with care

This one is more of a story rather than a game. Yes, it is a bit of a puzzle game, but it’s more in the vein of Firewatch, rather than Monument Valley, another game made by ustwo. You learn the history of some people in a small city through repairing their old stuff (watch, camera, statue aso).

I’ve finished the game in about 2 hours, I think. I played it on the Apple TV, with the remote. While the controller worked in the menus, it didn’t work in the game.

I think it’s a nice, reflective game, that you can play when you’re feeling nostalgic. The voice acting is good and the graphics, the colors, make it like a living painting. I liked it.

For a more complete review, read this article.

Oceanhorn 2

It’s a game similar, in looks, to Nintendo’s Breath of the Wild. I played for about 30 minutes, but I remembered I didn’t really like Breath of the Wild anyway, so I stopped there. The controller works really well on the Apple TV, but this is not the kind of game I enjoy playing.

I’m looking for other games to play, so stay tuned, I might actually write more about Apple Arcade. I actually looked for a reason to learn to stream for a long time, so this might be the moment.

TL;DR: I want to buy some websites. See below for more info.

Years ago, before I started MavenHut, I was building content websites. Mostly blogs about different things. One about cars, another one about motorcycles. I sold all of them to support MavenHut in the early stages.

At the beginning of this year, though, I started to look into investing money in websites. I took a course about it that was an eye opener. I might write about what I learned at some point, who knows.

Any way, the idea is that I’m looking to buy websites. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t updated them in a while or you write daily, it doesn’t matter if it’s making no money, a little bit or a lot, just let me know. Even if I don’t buy them, I know people that might be interested.

Some guidelines of what I’m looking for:

• English content
• Need to be at least 2-3 years old

If you have these type of websites, fire an email to websites @ bobbyvoicu.com. If you can put the URLs in the first email, the better. If you want more information, just ask in the email.

Last week I sent an email to the email list (you should subscribe, by the way). I was talking about Basic advice and how important it is that, from time to time, someone reminds you how important it is to focus on the basics. My definition of basic advice is this: advice that’s really easy to understand, without too much explanation.

Chris, one of the people on our list, asked for more examples of basic advice.

What a great idea, I thought. Why don’t I make a list, while I’m at it and update it whenever I have more advice?

By the way, you can help. If you have more suggestions, make a comment below and I’ll add it to the list, along with your name. I’ll also add your link, if it’s not what I consider to be a spammy site :D

So, without further ado and in no specific order, here is the

MEGA LIST OF BASIC ADVICE (BUSINESS AND PERSONAL)

Initially, I was gonna do just a business advice list, but I was thinking of more and more personal advice, so I added that to the list as well. This means that the list is split in two: Business and Personal. Scroll down for the “Personal” section.

Business Basic Advice

1. Watch your costs

Most of the business go down because they spend too much.

2. Don’t hire too fast

Hiring creates lots of complexity in the business and it tries to sort a problem by throwing more resources at it. Most of the times it doesn’t work

3. Fire fast

Once you decided to fire someone, do it fast. Don’t postpone it, because it impacts your entire company/team.

4. Get a lawyer as fast as possible

Someone needs to read all those contracts and make sure they’re ok.

5. Get an accountant as fast as possible

The easiest way to break the law is by not paying taxes. Don’t fall into that.

6. Don’t send an email when angry

Write the email as draft. Wait 24 hours. If you feel the same, send it. If not, rephrase it. Anger rarely solves anything.

7. Raise more money than you need

There are lots of potential pitfalls on the way. If you raise money, try to raise at least 20-30% more than you think you need.

8. Raise money before you need to

Raising money takes a long time. Start raising money at least 9-12 months before you estimate you will run out of money. I would start 18 months before, frankly.

9. Read books about your industry

I’m biased here, since The CEO Library is about reading books. Still, I think that long form puts some things into perspective a lot better than articles online. No matter how many articles you read, nothing will make you feel the pain of firing people as much as The Hard Thing about Hard Things will make you feel. If you want to know how to read more, here’s a really good article on our site about it (Cristina, my cofounder at The CEO Library, wrote it).

10. Grind every day

Most businesses just need to survive to be successful. Do your work everyday, even if it’s boring during some days.

11. Don’t break the law

You really can’t run a legitimate business from jail.

12. Follow-up on email after every call or meeting

It took me a little bit of time to get into this habit, but following up on email after every call or meeting you have is the essential. This gives you a “paper trail” of the discussion and lets all people involved remember what you talked about. Also, if someone forgets something, there’s always someone to point that out.

If you have more suggestions for business basic advice, please add it in the comment section below.

Personal Basic Advice

13. Wash your hands

Really. You know how many people I see leaving toilets without washing their hands? Now, that I told you, you will never NOT see it.

14. Breathe

Sometimes, that’s all you need to go through the day. One breath at a time.

15. Don’t send a message when angry

Really, don’t. If you are angry with someone and want to clear the air, talk face to face. Or at least on the phone. It will give you some time and it’s a lot more difficult to say stupid things face to face or on the phone.

16. Clean your living place

Really, clean your place. I’m not saying you should be Monica from Friends, a cleaning freak, but don’t keep weeks old food on the sofa.

17. Read books

I feel that long form reading activates parts of your brain you don’t normally use. Especially fiction. I imagine so many things when I read Science Fiction, I dream entire worlds after that.

18. Exercise/Go out and walk

I’m not the best in keeping up with this, but I still walk as much as I can. The best life I’ve lived was when I was working out constantly.

19. Get some sunlight

Really. Go out and take a walk. Get some distance from your life for a bit.

20. Sleep

I’ve been sleeping 7-8 hours a night in the last few months and I’m seeing such a big change in energy and productivity. Cristina wrote a while back about sleep in our newsletter, so give it a read here.

21. Eat well

I need to remind myself this every day. I’ve been eating really bad food lately and I can feel it in the level of energy I have in the 1-2 hours after eating. Eating well improves your well being and productivity.

22. Don’t stop learning

Read new things, find interesting courses, watch videos, go to physical courses. Never stop learning.

23. Do things in moderation

Even the good things can be too much and they can lead to burnout if you overdo them.

If you have more suggestions for personal basic advice, please add it in the comment section below.

Asking questions is probably one of the most underrated skills in the world. I mean, everybody can ask questions, right? A toddler asks questions. And, oh, my God, they do ask a lot.

As you know, though, it’s not that simple.

I grew up in communist Romania. School was a serious matter and you didn’t ask stupid questions. Or, even better, don’t ask anything. Take everything the teachers give you, learn it by heart and become the perfect little communist. Of course, I’m generalizing, because I was fortunate to have some great teachers, but they weren’t the rule. This continued through college, even if it wasn’t as obvious as it was in the first years of school.

I was also lucky to have parents that encouraged my curiosity, but that almost bit them in the a$$ when I told people at school that my parents were listening to Voice of America radio, which was banned in Romania. My family was lucky that my third grade teacher heard me and sent me home to talk to my parents. Otherwise, the results could’ve been dire.

Anyway, as I got older, asking questions seemed a sign of weakness. I mean, my first “real” job was in a Government institution, that had its ways. And I was working with a lot older people, that had THEIR ways. And it was “obvious” how I should do things. What, I was hard in the head, couldn’t I see on my own? Where the hell did I grow up?

After about 1 year of working there I continued on my entrepreneurial track. And finally, asking questions seemed a lot easier and more accepted. Especially since I was so interested in new technology. This meant that all the people I knew had bits of information they could share so I started asking LOTS of questions. And, for the first time in my life, they didn’t seem like an annoyance to anyone. OK, OK, I had a good friend that ALWAYS made fun of me for asking “stupid and obvious questions”, but I learned a lot from him during those early years.

Now, I ask questions all the time (really, I do). Even if I seem slow or stupid. I want to know things, so I’m ok with that.

Here are the tips to ask good questions:

1. Don’t worry about being annoying

It’s worse being annoying because you don’t know something and execute badly, rather than being annoying by getting right what you need to do.

2. Ask specific questions

Don’t ask general questions: how can I make money is a general question. It’s better if you ask “How can I monetize my mobile app?”. But the even better question is the one that asks “What is the biggest issue you had with monetizing your app with subscriptions?”. Of course, based on your relation to the person you ask, you can start with the general ones and get to the more specific questions as time goes by.

3. Understand time limitations/specific situations

You are at a conference and you want to ask a speaker something. There’s no Q&A session at the end, so you wait for the presentation to finish and you go and talk to the speaker. And you ask one question, then another, then another. You can see the speaker looking around, trying to escape, but you don’t stop. There’s a queue of 10 people behind you waiting to speak to that person, but you ignore them. At this point, you are annoying. VERY annoying. Ask one question, get the answer and, if you have follow-up questions, ask for an email address to ask a little bit more.

4. Try to find the answers on your own first

You have a phone in your pocket that has most information than most people had access to during our history. Use it. Google things before asking, read Wikipedia articles. If you can’t find your answers, by all means, find someone to ask. The advantage, though: you will ask really specific questions.

There’s more to asking good questions than these 4 tips. Practice will make you better. Ask questions, challenge people. If someone doesn’t like you because of this, maybe you shouldn’t care.

What I’m reading now

I got really interested in American Football lately. I’m a fan of Carolina Panthers, just so you know.

I actually went to Atlanta for Superbowl 53, to see what I thought would be Tom Brady’s last champion ring. I’m fascinated by the business/sports machine that is New England Patriots.

Right now I’m reading two books about New England’s coach, Bill Belichick:

The Education of a Coach – David Halberstam
Belichick – Ian O’Connor

Both are about Bill Belichick’s life and career. The first one is gentler with the coach, because the author had access to him personally. It also has only the first two Superbowls, because it stops in 2003. This means the writer didn’t know about the 2 biggest scandals that involved Belichick: Spygate and Deflategate.

I’m still reading the second book. It’s more agressive and it doesn’t pamper Belichick’s image. It talks about his mistakes more and in a less understanding light. This makes the book a little bit more balanced, but with less insight from the man himself. The writer talks about the scandals involving Belichick at length, as well.

Additional Reading

Here are some things to read from around the web and The CEO Library:

1. Book talk with Brian Burkhart

Things to take from the interview:

• the books that dramatically changed his career path
• how he really improved his presentation skills
• how you should use “reverse engineering” and do what you love
• why is gratitude important
• find out about how to build a brand people authentically love

2. Why are rich people so mean?

Is meanness necessary to become rich or is it a learned trait, that you gain as you make more money?

3. Is Amazon unstoppable?

Great write-up on how powerful Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, are. Really eye opening.

4. List of Basic Advice

Following my email last week, somebody asked for more examples of Basic Advice. And I made a list.

5. The Best and Worst Thing About Financial Independence

I have a soft spot for the Financial Independence movement. Maybe because, without knowing it, I looked for this all my life. What I didn’t realize until several years ago when I finally achieved financial independence is that it can make you miserable. This article is better at explaining my feelings.

I have a weird obsession with libraries and book stores. I really enjoy visiting them, no matter how old or modern they are.

One of the buildings that intrigued me when I was first starting to visit Europe by car was Melk Abbey. You could see it from the highway while driving from Romania to Germany. It took me about 7 or 8 years before I could stop and visit one the oldest libraries in Europe, which is hosted in the Melk Abbey, but I’ve done it! And then, I got crazy by visiting two other abbey libraries around Europe in the same trip: Admont, St. Gallen. I visited one more on that trip, but I can’t really remember which, I need to take a look at the photos.

Of course, since I lived in Ireland for several months, I visited Trinity College’s library and, being in Portugal right now, I’ve seen the “Harry Potter Bookstore”, at Livraria Lello in Porto. This is actually a list of the other places I’m gonna write about in the upcoming weeks. Or months.

After all these old libraries, you would be right to believe that Carturesti Carusel Bookstore is another abbey library. Well, you would be wrong. Carusel is really modern and new, actually. And, even better for me, it’s in Bucharest, the city I lived in for more than 20 years.

When Cristina was still involved with The CEO Library, one of the places where we would often meet was Carusel’s top floor bistro. I mean, what better place to talk about books other than a bookstore or a library, right?

It was a really inspirational and motivational place for us. It also helped that we could sit at a table and have some tea or a Coca-Cola. You could see people walking around the floors, looking at the books, picking them to read, there or at home. We would stay there for hours, just talking and enjoying the atmosphere.

I really like the airy structure of the building as well. It has a huge interior space and the books are all around the walls, with warm colors all around. The big windows and the thought-out lighting makes it a desirable place to stay and spend some hours there.

The history of the building is quite interesting, as well. It used to be a bank since the beginning of last century, then it was confiscated by the communists after the second World War and used as a general store for a long time. It fell into decay at the end of the millennium and it was rehabilitated by 2015 and opened as a bookstore (source: Wikipedia).

Anyway, if you ever get to Bucharest, take the time to visit the Carturesti Carusel. It really is worth it spending an hour or two in the building. You can find a short video of a tour below or, if you prefer, some really good photos.

These photos aren’t mine, I got them from Dreamstime. I’m not a good photographer, so I prefer to use better photos than the ones I take, if possible.

You can see how open and cozy the library is, right? You understand why it was our preferred place of meeting, right? :)