Future Proofing You: Twelve Truths for Creating Opportunity, Maximizing Wealth, and Controlling your Destiny in an Uncertain World, reviewed

We look at this topical book by Jay Samit, which is very much a reflection of the times we live in. Future Proofing You is published by Wiley, and you can learn more about the book here.

Future Proofing You: Twelve Truths for Creating Opportunity, Maximizing Wealth, and Controlling your Destiny in an Uncertain World, reviewed

There is a lot of good advice and helpful tips in this book. His concept of taking someone along for the ride is also instructive, and does help Samit to try to advance is proposition that this is more than just a concept. His mentee, Vince Clancy does well from the relationship, though, with all of these rags to riches parables there are always a few loose ends that can niggle sometimes.

As someone else who was born in  probably the same hospital as Samit’s mentee, and who also grew up around ‘the Bush’ area of Shepherd’s Bush, I would question just how ‘ghetto’ this area was. The suggestion that if, not for Samit’s intervention, it would have been drugs, gangs and inevitable early death felt a little over-egged. Sure when we went to watch Queens Park Rangers, at the nearby Loftus Road, there were some hooligan moments, but even as 12 year olds, we managed to safely navigate such ‘life or death’ moments, and get home again safely after the games.

A fair few members of our school year didn’t make it to 30 or even 20, but for a lot of them that was due to dumb choices rather than due to a crushingly oppressive environment. We played sport in the shadow of Wormwood Scrubs, but again there were olympians on the track around us, so there were lots of positive role models around us too. Even if it did turn out that one L Christie probably was taking some growth supplements to help with his sprinting ability.

Either way there are some good takeaways and helpful tips from Samit, and the book is a useful addition for scrappy entrepreneurs looking to grow and build their own self employed empires and companies. One funny thing, was that the final chapter, 14, was about sustainability, in many ways, rather than seemingly an afterthought, it would have been even better if these concepts were mentioned upfront and embodied throughout the whole book, rather than just at the end.

In many ways this is a good metaphor for the whole book, by the end we actually quite liked it, and could see that Samit had a lot of great experience and good advice. For us, and perhaps this is a reflection on being based on this side of the Atlantic, we felt once the book toned down the bombast, it became a really useful book. Maybe they felt they had to go big on selling you the Willy Wonka golden ticket upfront at the beginning of the book, but, once you get past that, this is a smart, savvy, helpful book! Check it out.

More about the book ->

With the right mindset and insight, anyone can become a millionaire.

Are you tired of just paying bills until you die? Are you wasting your life at a job that doesn’t make you fulfilled or financially secure? Then Future Proofing You: Twelve Truths for Creating Opportunity, Maximizing Wealth, and Controlling Your Destiny in an Uncertain World is for you.

In this life-changing book, celebrated author and entrepreneur Jay Samit, who’s worked with such visionaries as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Reid Hoffman, and hundreds of successful entrepreneurs, shares the key understandings and step-by-step process for becoming rich and never needing another job again.  To prove the power of his 12 Truths, Samit also details the journey of how he mentored a broke millennial with these principles and empowered him to go from being on welfare to becoming a self-made millionaire in one year.

Building upon the principles in his internationally acclaimed book Disrupt You, Samit explains:

• How to identify an idea and market to start your business
• How to build a virtual company with little or no capital
• The latest free software tools for managing your business
• Ways to get a piece of a trillion-dollar opportunity bigger than mobile
• How to harness the three primary fears of others to generate more sales
• Strategies for finding the right mentors to accelerate your success
• Techniques to structure any deal for creating recurring revenue and lasting wealth

This book is perfect for anyone who is tired of jobs with no security, hopes to truly realize their professional and personal potential, and is looking for a way to build a better life for them and their family. Future Proofing You also belongs on the bookshelves of entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs everywhere who hope to inspire their teams to become something greater than what they already are.

More about Jay Samit

JAY SAMIT is an author, a former NASDAQ company CEO who held senior management roles at EMI, Sony, and Universal Studios, and is a former independent Vice Chairman of Deloitte Consulting, LLP. Samit is an international keynote speaker and provides disruptive solutions for such corporate clients as Adobe, Coca-Cola, Disney, Ford, Linkedln, Microsoft, Starbucks, Unilever, Visa, and dozens more. He is a columnist for Fortune, appears frequently on ABC, Bloomberg, CBS, NBC, and has been quoted in the New York Times, The Economist, USA Today, Variety, and others. He lives in Los Angeles.

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