My highlights from the book:

1. If you want to persist and thrive, you’d better not rest on your laurels.

2. There’s nothing I’d rather be doing. I was born to go into business for myself — and I was destined to find a business that would allow me to share with others my enthusiasm for things I find pleasurable.

3. This is not a typical business book, and it's certainly not a how-to book. I don't enjoy being told how-or that-I ought to do something; and I'm equally uncomfortable doling out advice without having been asked for it. What follows is a series of life experiences that led to a career in restaurants, which has, in turn, taught me volumes about business and life. Along the way, I've learned powerful lessons.

4. Creating restaurants or even recipes is like composing music: there are only so many notes in the scale from which all melodies and harmonies are created. The trick is to put those notes together in a way not heard before.

5. Hospitality is the foundation of my business philosophy. Virtually nothing else is as important as how one is made to feel in any business transaction. Hospitality exists when you believe the other person is on your side. The converse is just as true. Hospitality is present when something happens for you. It is absent when something happens to you. Those two simple prepositions-for and to-express it all.

6. I never fully understood how or why, but sometime in the late 1960s, when I was still a young boy, Open Road Tours went bankrupt. I remember abundant tears and shame, but few details. I heard comments like, "We expanded too quickly.”

7. This was another confusing and painful consequence of the failed business. My mother was anguished, and her disappointment and disapproval were apparent. Business details were not openly discussed, but the family's bruises were deeply felt.

8. Although Dad may have been an inventive entrepreneur, he did not have the necessary emotional skills or discipline, and he failed to surround himself with enough competent, loyal, trustworthy colleagues whose skills and strengths would have compensated for his own weaknesses. By 1990, shortly before he died of lung cancer at the age of fifty-nine, he was once again bankrupt.

9. I had an uncontainable drive to win that was now in high gear.

10. I told my uncle, “I can’t believe I’m doing this LSAT thing tomorrow. I don’t even want to be a lawyer.”

"So why are you? You know you dont want to be a lawyer. Why don't you just do what you've been thinking about doing your whole life?"

"What's that?"I asked him.

"What do you mean, What's that? Since you were a child, all you've ever talked or thought about is food and restaurants. Why don't you just open a restaurant?"

The idea felt, at the same time, both foreign and like an absolute bull's-eye. The next morning, completely relaxed, I took the LSAT, and then I never bothered to apply to a single law school. From that moment on, I was oft to the races.

11. I scoured the city  for unlisted places-seeking the right place in the right location. I had two nonnegotiable needs: I wanted to open in an emerging neighborhood; and I wanted to have the right to assign my lease to someone else if my restaurant should go out of business. 

12. I was soberly aware that failure was a real possibility. 

13. To this day, getting an assignable lease is the first piece of advice I give to any new restauranteur.

14. Replicating something already in existence isn't where my own business or design sense has ever guided me.

15. What mattered most to me was trying to provide maximum value in exchange not just for the guests’ money but also for their time.

16. I was just four years into the restaurant business, and the fire inside me was only beginning to burn.

17. There is no point to work hard every day for the purpose of offering an average experience.

18. Mary Kay would teach her salespeople that everyone goes through life with an invisible sign hanging around his or her neck reading, “make me feel important.”

19. I feel the entrepreneurial spark when some instinct tells me that a certain dining "context" doesn't currently exist but should exist. I then ask myself a series of questions that force me to examine and challenge the status quo-and then change it. Each question begins with these five words: "Who ever wrote the rule...?”

20. I always thought of expansion as dancing on the edge of failure. It wasn't until after my father died that I began to give myself the freedom to expand my business. It was almost as if my fear of repeating his defeats was softened by the fact that he wouldn't be around to see the outcome.

21. I had learned to trust my own instincts, and to make them explicit for others.

22. We had made a fundamental mistake by trying to extend an original brand without having first established the core brand.

23. The experience was a vitally important illustration of an inadequate focus on a core product.

24. The inception of Shake Shack actually began with a humble hot dog cart.

25. Small as the project was, I took this cart quite seriously. I was asking myself, "Who ever wrote that rule that you can't push the envelopes of excellence and hospitality for something as ordinary as a hot dog cart? Could a hot dog cart ever be anything more than just a hot dog cart?"

26. I set off to study burger and shake stands all across the country.

27. "Opening this new restaurant," I said, "might be the worst mistake I've ever made." Stanley [Stanley Marcus of Neiman Marcus] set his martini down, looked me in the eye, and said, "So you made a mistake. You need to understand something important. And listen to me carefully: The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled." His words remained with me through the night. I repeated them over and over to myself, and it led to a turning point in the way I approached business. 

28. Stanley's lesson reminded me of something my grandfather Irving Harris had always told me: “The definition of business is problems." His philosophy came down to a simple fact of business life: success lies not in the elimination of problems but in the art of creative, profitable problem solving. The best companies are those that distinguish themselves by solving problems most effectively.

29. Indeed, business is problem solving. As human beings, we are all fallible. You've got to welcome the inevitability of mistakes if you want to succeed in the restaurant business-or in any business. It's critical for us to accept and embrace our ongoing mistakes as opportunities to learn, grow, and profit. Baseball's top hitters can make seven mistakes out of every ten at-bats, and still ride a .300 lifetime batting average into the Hall of Fame.