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Comment by yigitcakar | Hacker News Reader

The answer depends on why you want to grow a business sense. What are you trying to achieve with your business skills?

If you want to understand the business world, the management aspect of it, I suggest reading Peter Drucker's Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices.

If you want to get better at networking, I would suggest reading Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.

If you want to understand marketing, I would suggest, Marketing: An Introduction by Philip Kotler

Peter Thiels' book Zero to One might be a good starting point to understand the start-up world.

But for a general instinct about business, you have to stay curious and learn how people think and behave. Being curious about anthropology, psychology, economics, news, trends, sociology are key.

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> What are you trying to achieve with your business skills?

To be blunt, I mostly want to escape the world of wage work and make money. Not an obscene amount, but perhaps more than I would otherwise.

This is the same reason people play the lottery.

If money is all you are passionate about you are going to have a very hard time.

The people that succeed as entrepreneurs are passionate about what they are doing regardless of whether they succeed.

In fact most all entrepreneurs do not succeed at first. It usually takes a long string of serious failures until you find your footing, and the only thing that will carry you through is the passion you have for your project.

You've got a long road ahead, if you're still wanting to go down it, start by focusing on what you are passionate about, find other people to talk with, build your knowledge and network and find a way to solve a problem better than the competition.

Good luck!

If that's your goal, being an entrepreneur is not the way to go. Especially start-up entrepreneurs work an obscene amount of time and most of them fail at making money.

For your purposes, you don't need business skills, you need investment skills and you have to save money. Save as much as you can, don't get into debt, reduce spending and save your money in assets that will generate regular revenue. I have trained professionally about finance. I don't know many non-academic books regarding finance and personal finance for a beginner. Maybe our friends here can share their favorites.

If you haven't read it, Tim Ferriss' four hour workweek might give you some ideas though.

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