Every day I bring you an item on Amazon that I personally use or has been purchased by many members of the audience and I have researched enough to recommend.

Today’s TSP Amazon Item of the day is the book, My Life & Work by Henry Ford & Samuel Crowther.  This book can be had in soft cover, hard cover, kindle and audio.  It is also available for Amazon’s service called “WhisperSync for Voice”.  This allows you to switch back and forth between reading on Kindle and listening with the Audible App. (more about WhisperSync here) I have never done this but the jist is you buy the Kindle book and then get a big discount on the audio.  Then when you resume in either app the app syncs to just a bit before where you left off.

In any event I have been on a new self improvement regiment since the workshop.  One thing I do in it is read every morning in addition to my regular times.  So when I wrapped up my last book which was Dan Brown’s, The Secret of Secrets I moved on to something more business specific.  A bit of research into older books every entrepreneur should read led me to this.  All I can say is holy crap was Ford an amazing man and spot on to problems and solutions.  More that the problems in 1922 were much the same as they are 103 years later in 2025.  Also his solutions would all be better than much of what we do today.

As would be expected there is a lot in this book on how the Ford factories were developed and the processes were refined.  However, even those parts have huge lessons for any entrepreneur from something mechanical all the way to say tech companies.  The process is indeed the thing!  That said what really amazed me is how many things Ford thought, did and acted on for the betterment of humanity.  One of the best known capitalists of all time was also one of the most effective humanitarians as well.  He also did it with truly lifting people up vs. giving them charity as we see it today.  Once you read this book you will quickly understand why the only thing they teach you about Ford in school is that he created the Model T and well, he didn’t really invent the automobile.

Ford didn’t invent the automobile and never claimed otherwise.  At this point I feel academia implied that he did without directly saying so only so they could then through shade on his achievements.

Here are just a few things that stand out in Ford’s book outside of building cars…

• Ford hated the central bank and hated bankers (actions) in general.  He was a fan of “sound money” but also considered the gold standard of the time predatory and favoring the wealthy.  He hated that bankers and financiers saw factories and industry as a way to make money vs. a way to make things.
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• Ford’s philosophy of the best way to lift up society was to do three things really well.  Grow things, make things and move things with high efficiency.  His belief matched Rich Dad’s in Robert Kiyosiki’s book.  That prices should go down not up in a “well ordered and run society”.  In fact his goal was to lower the price of his products every year.  A goal he often met while raising both wages and quality of product.
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• Ford built a school that was exaclty like what many in the TSP community think we should have today.  This school made his factory in Michigan a classroom.  Children did one week in class room then two working.  They came out with a great general education.  Additionally though they had work discipline that made them marketable to many trades.  They were skilled craftsmen and had jobs waiting for them with Ford Motors if they wanted one.  They were both paid and forced to save a portion for a start in life.  The school made no profit but the work they did was good enough that even with rejected work the acceptable work paid for the school in full.  No tuition, no tax dollars.  Yes play, exercise and other recreation was part of the day.  No it was not “slave child labor”.
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• Ford built a hospital that he ended up owning because he donated money to its founding.  The people behind it were inept and cost ran over.  So they went back to the donors to ask for more.  Ford felt that people to stupid to know how much money they needed before starting were not likely to do a good job.  So he bought the project and invested 9 million dollars into it.  The hospital was one of the best run and most affordable of the time.
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And it just goes on.  I have rewound, relistened and then paused this book dozens of times to make notes about the insights in it.  My only comfort in having not read it until now is how many things Ford says that I say all the time.  How many things I came to on my own in life and business that I consider “original thoughts”.   It did allow me to live it and hence learn it.  That said you do not have to do that.  A TV show I like called Landman recently had a minor character say, “you don’t have to live it to learn it”.  Indeed learn from others who lived it if you can and add that to your own experience.

This book is a must read for any entrepreneur.  It is a must read for any and all libertarians and any and all flavors of anarchists.  Ford was not an anarchist and never uses the word.  He did hate socialism and found it to be a scurge on humanity.  His philosophy on government was simply stay out of the way and the market can fix most things.  He saw government as only a “negative force” meaning it could aid by removing barriers or impede by adding them but not much else.  In other words before anyone used the term, Ford was “based” and I would say based AF!

So check out My Life and Work Henry Ford & Samuel Crowther today in the format of your choice.  One thing I do love about the audio though is the voice and tone of narration.  The narrator is named Traber Burns and his voice perfectly fits the time.  He sounds much as you’d expect an orator of the 1920s to sound, which fits Ford’s writing style perfectly.   In fact other then a few upset Social Justice Warriors the only real negative comments in the reviews are about the writing style.  Okay, well, hello!  This is how people spoke and wrote 100 years ago.  And I must say it was at a higher level in many ways than how we write and speak today.

* Remember you can always find all of our reviews at TspAz.com

P.S. – This book would make a fantastic inexpensive Christmas gift for the entrepreneur or budding entrepreneur your life.  And while there are ways to gift audio and kindle books.  That said if your person is the kind to keep books on a shelf in a collection I’d recommend the Hard Cover as it is still only 16 bucks.