If you’re involved in a startup, you know how hard it is to find the time to sit down and read a book, especially one that isn’t about some new scripting language. Here at Eluciv Knowledge we get much of our reading done through our feed readers. Still, it’s important to step back on occasion and get involved in a deeper discourse, and reading good books can help you achieve new heights with your venture and re- frame your thinking. We’ll be reviewing lots of great books for the entrepreneur, and we’re getting started with The Monk and the Riddle, by Randy Komisar.

The Monk and the Riddle

Although written during The Bubble, The Monk and the Riddle is a surprising clear-headed and inspiring read on the nature of entrepreneurship and the pursuit of the Next Big Thing. In fact, if you’ve read it before it’s worth a revisit (as I just did) in light of the current “frothiness” in the Web 2.0 space. It’s an easy going read that, thanks to its storytelling nature, can be accomplished in a few hours.

Randy Komisar, an accomplished tech CEO, entrepreneurial adviser and now partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers weaves a fictional story about Funerals.com (”we put the fun back in funerals!”) with elements from his own career journey. Throughout these accounts, he questions why most of us operate on the “Deferred Life Plan”: work hard now so later on we can do the things we really enjoy. For those of you who have read The 4-Hour Workweek (we’ll review that one in the future) this might sound familiar, but while Tim Ferris is focused on reducing work to make more time for play, Komisar is talking about involving yourself in work now that you are deeply passionate about instead of waiting for some indefinite time in the future (that, with the DLP, will likely never arrive).

The most insightful statement in the book for me was “it’s the romance, not the finance, that makes business worth pursuing”. Looking around the web today, you can see a lot of bright people being driven by the promise of monetary reward to focus their energy on things like ad placement optimization. The problem is, when the going gets rough (as it likely will be with the arrival of a recession) money is not enough incentive for entrepreneurs to pull through the hard times. You need passion. Passion is what keeps us going when everything else says “run away”! I don’t know about you, but I just can’t get too passionate about ad placement optimization (though I bet you know someone who seems to be :-) ).