ENTREPRENEUR NIALL Harbison’s new book Get Sh*t Done has caused quite the stir in the social media world.
Harbison is the proprietor of food website Lovin’ Dublin - which was recently the subject of online controversy – and image library PR Slides, both of which he founded after selling his PR firm Simply Zesty.
The book is sitting on top of the Irish bestseller list, had a fancy launch party in the Button Factory, and has been supported by a slew of media appearances.
So what are the best of Harbo’s anecdotes? Not the actual life advice – that stuff has been widely reported – but the little factoids?
We read it and found out.
1. He wrote parts of the book on the toilet. All as part of an entire chapter on going mobile, which he wrote entirely on his smartphone. (If that doesn’t count as Getting Sh*t Done, we don’t know what does.)
2. He keeps a screengrab of negative comments about him in a folder marked ‘Haters’. ”[At first] I didn’t know what I was going to do with them, but as my next business, Simply Zesty, grew I looked at them often as I worked late into the night,” he writes. “The haters drove me on.”
He also writes: “I find ongoing negative feedback to be one of the biggest indicators that you have something good”, because it shows you’re not average.
3. Bono once ordered him to cook 36 full Irish breakfasts. It was while he was the chef on a billionaire’s yacht – Bono found out the cook was Irish and insisted that everyone eat a full Irish after a late party. Harbison’s reaction was understandable: “‘The annoying little bastard,’ I thought to myself.”
4. He never does any Christmas shopping before midday on Christmas Eve. ”Store managers will tell you the 24th is actually the quietest day in December.”
5. He doesn’t have a Facebook page. ”I stopped using Facebook at the end of 2013 and deactivated my account, simply because it was taking up too much of my time and inhibiting me from doing real work and getting shit done.”
6. He discovered YouTube for the first time while the Red Hot Chili Peppers were playing a private gig 200 yards away. No biggie. He was on a luxury yacht at the time and everyone else had gone out on the lash. “Somebody had to stay behind to mind the boat and I’d volunteered to do it.”
7. He ‘hacks his life’ by renting out his house on AirBNB. When somebody books it, Harbison looks up the cheapest Ryanair flight he can find, books a room in that city, and works from there for the week at a tidy profit. In his example, he makes €2,000 and spends a week in Oslo for €400.
8. He has a mystery beef with a “well-known blogger and online type”. This man targeted Simply Zesty staff with “pointed online attacks” as they were setting up, so Harbison made a vow to “trample him so far into the ground that he’d be sorry he’d ever heard of us”.
9. He has a life-size portrait of his hero Ayrton Senna in his sitting room. “To remind me of what he achieved I keep him close at all times”.
10. He made himself write the book by tweeting that it was going to be huge. “Without having more than a seed of an idea in my head, [I] wrote: ‘I am publishing a book, it will be in shops in nine months, and it will be a bestseller’,” he writes. “The simple little action forced me to write this entire book.”
11. He plans to marry at 40. ”So long as someone will have me.”
