My highlights from the book: 

1. I graduated from high school eighth from the bottom of my class of 1,200. Frankly, I still have no idea how those seven kids managed to do worse than I did.

2. Too many people are mired in the details of their lives. They are stuck down “in" their lives, rather than staying "on" them. They miss the larger picture; they don't face the uncomfortable questions that, once posed, can force dramatic and necessary change.

3. I also have no mechanical ability to speak of. There isn't a machine at Kinkos I can operate. I could barely run the first copier we leased back in 1970. It didn't matter. All I knew was that was I could sell what came out of it.

4. I've found your average street peddler has more business sense than the guy walking past in a suit. They deal with customers in real time and get instant feedback from the market.

5. You had to remember he'd been picking up the best ideas from all around the country.

6. I rented out a small storefront near the university, only 100 square feet. The rent was $100 a month. The place was so small that by the time we needed a second machine we had to lug it out onto the sidewalk—yes, customers made their copies outdoors.

7. The educational system teaches kids they have to be good at everything, or else. Out of the classroom, I've found this just isn't so. Adults have a much easier time. They get to specialize. They pick one thing. It's a whole lot easier.

8. Anybody can sit around in an office thinking about what people are doing wrong. My job was to get out and find out what people were doing right-and exploit it. Then, I tried to spread those practices throughout the Kinkos network.

9. I'm extremely human. I struggle with my temper, my "dark side." The dark side of the Kinkos story is that the company was built, at least in part, on emotional extremes, most of them my own.

10. Building an entirely new sort of business from a single Xerox copy machine gave me the life the world seemed determined to deny me when I was younger.

11. Some of my closest friends in high school and college were social outcasts. Some of them did end up in jail. I could relate to them all.

12. I always told my partners to give the glory and take the money.

13. As soon as I could, I had to turn these tedious tasks over to others and pay well for doing them. I could not let myself get swept under by all the monotonous busywork that comes along with starting a company. I was already vowing to stay “on" my business and not "in" it.

14. I learned to turn a lot of busywork over to other people. That's an important skill. If you don't develop it, you'll be so busy, busy, busy that you can't get a free hour, not to mention a free week or month, to sit back and think creatively about where you want to be heading and how you are going to get there.

15. There's no better way to stay "on" your business than to think creatively and constantly about your marketing: how you are marketing, who you are marketing to, and, always, how you could be doing a better job at it. You'd be amazed what kind of business you can generate by a seemingly simple thing like handing out flyers.

16. I happened to be sitting in my office when the phone rang. It was one of our store managers calling to ask me how to handle a bounced check. I held the receiver away from my face and looked at it, flabbergasted. If every store manager needed my help to deal with a bounced check, then we really had problems. I made up my mind then and there that I wouldn't be picking up my own phone every five minutes. Staying relatively inaccessible was the only way to stay "on" my business.

17. The goal of management is to remove obstacles.

18. I also visited as many competitors as I could since the fact that they existed meant they were doing something right. I wanted to find out what those things were.

19. It's taken me my whole life to figure out that I don't have the answers. All I've ever had was a bunch of questions.

20. The A students work for the B students, the C students run the companies, and the D students dedicate the buildings.