Don't Look Down!
The Improbable Adventures and Battle-Tested Lessons of a Serial Entrepreneur
Don’t Look Down! is a lively memoir–cum–entrepreneur’s guide that illustrates the benefits of pursuing every opportunity with gusto.
Entrepreneur Bob Campana’s lively memoir–cum–leadership guide Don’t Look Down! draws on his experiences as a landscape designer, developer, and restaurateur to deliver lessons on persistence, adaptability, and the determined pursuit of a vision.
Beginning with Campana’s family roots, the book covers his youthful global travels, helicopter flying adventures, and experiences making social connections before discussing his efforts to start various businesses. He discusses the process of identifying and cultivating each opportunity in an illustrative step-by-step manner. Further, each venture-focused chapter ends with a tidy recapitulation of the lessons he derived from the experience. These cover topics including growth, goals, and personal fulfillment: “Profit may be the ultimate goal, but steady cash flow sustains growth,” Campana notes. Elsewhere, he reminds audiences, “Ventures rarely move at the pace you’d like; they run on their own time.”
Campana’s business philosophy is also centered, though it includes some familiar principles. He encourages people not to be fooled by luck masquerading as skill; he discusses the importance of having long-term goals. There are tips related to delegating, deciding what to focus one’s energy on, and scaling a business in a sustainable way too. Entrepreneurs, Campana claims, always seek the next challenge, considering potential prospects even when they are on vacation. Broad social observations, as with those regarding the isolating effects of superficial contact on social media, make the book feel too discursive at times, though, as does its off-the-cuff pontificating on pet subjects.
More distinctive are Campana’s personal tales, as on why he soured on both the Rotary Club and the Chamber of Commerce. He recounts missteps and fumbles with refreshing candor, placing each experience in greater context so that it might be instructive to others. References to world events result in additional perspective, as with Campana’s notes on what made hot tubs “hot” in certain social circles in 1980s California. Dishy details appear, as on what it was like to live next to Gallo vineyards, as do offhand stories about Campana faking it as a tour guide while chaperoning his daughter on a trip to New York City—an illustration of how far a person can go with “chutzpah and showbiz.”
A motivational memoir–cum–entrepreneur’s guide, Don’t Look Down! draws on stories of success across a number of industries to inspire others to achieve their own goals.
Reviewed by
Joseph S. Pete
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
