5 Books Every Entrepreneur Should Read “The road to success is paved by failures” – I’m sure someone has said this before.

It is not easy to become an entrepreneur. Starting and growing a viable business requires intense focus, dedication, and perseverance that few adults, let alone the majority of teenagers, have. Fortunately, becoming a successful entrepreneur while still in high school is both possible and extremely beneficial for your professional development and college applications. Entrepreneurship is a rare skill that is in high demand at competitive universities.

Without further ado, here are the 5 books every aspiring high school entrepreneur must read. Please keep in mind that the order of these books is intentional unless otherwise stated.

1. The Intelligent Investor, by Benjamin Graham.

The Intelligent Investor is a book that aims to help people invest in the stock market while minimizing their economic risks. It focuses on longer-term and more risk-averse approaches. Graham focuses on investments (based on research) rather than speculations (based on predictions)

2. From Idea to Success, Gregg Fairbrothers.

“From Idea to Success,” entrepreneur, professor, and DEN founder Gregg Fairbrothers takes you step by proven step through the DEN approach, showing you how to apply the same principles to make your vision a reality. If you have an idea–“any” idea–from major technology innovations, to consumer products or services, to social enterprises, “From Idea to Success” shows you how to bring it to fruition.

This A to Z guide based on the startup experiences of literally hundreds of entrepreneurs makes the process simple as possible by breaking it down into three distinct parts:

Step 1: Focusing and Refining Your Idea
Define your goals, pinpoint your market, protect your idea, manage the risks in your undertaking

Step 2: Business Planning Best Practices Create a business plan, build your team, learn about the competition, raise finances, get the important legal issues right the first time.
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Step 3: Managing Your CompanyBuild your negotiating, selling, and decision-making skills; manage your finances; correct your course; manage the transition to a healthy, growing business.

Building a vibrant company based on your own creativity and hard work is one of the most fulfilling human enterprises there is. With this book and your own experience you can think and act like a successful entrepreneur from the very start.

3. How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie.

You can go after the job you want—and get it!
You can take the job you have—and improve it!
You can take any situation—and make it work for you!
Dale Carnegie’s rock-solid, time-tested advice has carried countless people up the ladder of success in their business and personal lives. One of the most groundbreaking and timeless bestsellers of all time, How to Win Friends & Influence People will teach you:

-Six ways to make people like you
-Twelve ways to win people to your way of thinking
-Nine ways to change people without arousing resentment
And much more.

4. Good to Great, Jim Collins.

The Challenge
Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning.
But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?
The Study
For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?
The Standards
Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world’s greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.
The Comparisons
The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?
Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness — why some companies make the leap and others don’t.
The Findings
The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:
Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.
The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.
A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.
The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.
“Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, “fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.”

5. To Sell Is Human, Daniel Pink

We’re all in Sales nowParents sell their kids on going to bed. Spouses sell their partners on mowing the lawn. We sell our bosses on giving us more money and more time off. And in astonishing numbers we go online to sell ourselves on Facebook, Twitter and online dating profiles. Relying on science, analysis and his trademark clarity of thought, Daniel Pink shows that sales isn’t what it used to be. Then he provides a set of tools, tips, and exercises for succeeding on each new terrain: six new ways to pitch your idea, three ways to understand another’s perspective, five frames that can make your message clearer, and much more.