No Experience Necessary: Why Betting on Yourself in Your Twenties Is the Best Decision You’ll Ever Make by Ronnen Harary

No Experience Necessary: Why Betting on Yourself in Your Twenties Is the Best Decision You’ll Ever Make is Spin Master co-founder Ronnen Harary’s testament to the importance of believing in yourself when you’re young. It’s a walk through the life of his company—how it started, how he found success, and how all of it was possible because he was just 23 years old when it all began. It’s a call to action for the young people of this generation to trust the feeling inside of them that’s telling them to take a chance.

The book is broken down into three parts: Start, Build, and Reward. In each section, Harary shares stories about how he and his co-founders built Spin Master, stories that very clearly prove his thesis: starting young is the key to success.

For one, you have the most energy you’ll ever have. You’ll never be as healthy—mentally or physically—and it’s during a period of life where you’re still absorbing information every day. It takes a lot of energy to start a business, even more to run a business. Tap into that energy when you’re young, Harary suggests.

For another, you’re in touch with cultural zeitgeists. In fact, you’re part of the group that’s creating and driving these cultural zeitgeists. As Harary explains, it’s important to be able to identify zeitgeists just as they’re emerging—he compares it to surfing. You have to catch a wave at the perfect moment to ride the success, and you’re most able to see these zeitgeists when you’re young.

Harary also discusses instinct. Not the instinct of young people, but rather older people. It is instinct for the older generation to want to pass down their wisdom to the next generation. People will want to take a chance on you when you’re young.

And of course, you don’t have as much to lose. You probably don’t have a family to feed or a mortgage to pay or any of the responsibilities that come with being a grown adult. You can afford to take a risk and if it doesn’t go your way, you can survive the consequences.

The final reason is one that many people—myself included—use as a reason not to start out when you’re young: inexperience. While it’s widely accepted in society that you should wait until you have good experience before starting a business venture, Harary argues otherwise. Your inexperience means you’ll look at something that perhaps an older generation says is impossible, but because you have no experience to call on that would lead you to that conclusion, you go for it. And more often than not, the impossible becomes possible, with great success.

Harary talks through the details of how Spin Master’s greatest toys came to be, starting with their very first products – Earth Buddy and Devil Sticks – through their skyrocket to world notoriety – Air Hogs and Bakugan – to their most recent and largest success yet – PAW Patrol. Through each success story, he points out how each one is interconnected, how the lessons he learned from past experiences influenced the choices he made, and of course, how it all became possible because they started out so young.

He also shares the stories of his failures, talking through the flops of Key Charm Cuties, Don’t Free Freddy, and Tickle Secrets Baby. Whether it was a bad idea or bad execution, Harary explains how each failure only propelled him and his company forward.

His ability to reframe a lot of the learned beliefs you may have about business is eye opening. He talks through alternate definitions of success, failure, risk, doubt, luck, and chance. He essentially explains the mental framework you must adopt in order to find success in business. Much of his book is like this. Harary isn’t writing a how-to book on how to co-found one of the biggest toy companies in the world. He’s telling you how to reframe what you once believed into an attitude and determination that lends itself to success. He’s telling you what he thinks was critical to his success and shows you as much through his own lived experience. He shows you what kind of lifestyle it both costs and affords, and prompts you to look inward and imagine if that could be truly you.

But if you are looking for a how-to guide, Harary does sprinkle in some of his tried and true tips. For one, he never cancels a meeting. “This meeting could’ve been an email” is not in his vocabulary. “If you don’t go, you don’t get,” is, though. Business, at its heart, is all about relationships, and what better way to cultivate relationships than through an in-person connection.

No Experience Necessary is a great read for any young person considering starting out on their own, or for anyone needing a sign to trust their instinct, despite potentially being inexperienced.  At its core, No Experience Necessary is a reminder that sometimes the very things you may think disqualify you from success—age, inexperience, uncertainty—are the very things that make taking the chance worthwhile.