Transcript
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I love to set a SMART goal for every book that I read.
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So let's say I was going to pick up the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership and I'm reading the book because I want to be a better leader.
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What I'll do is I'll set that SMART goal and I'll write it on the inside of the cover, something like I'm looking to find and implement at least one way to improve my leadership at BookThinkers and within my team by the end of August, because this is my business, these are my people and they deserve the best leader possible.
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Hey, Uncommon Leaders, welcome back.
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This is the Uncommon Leader Podcast, and I'm your host, John Gallagher.
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In today's episode, we're diving deep into one of my favorite topics the world of reading habits and personal development with my special guest, Nick Hutchison, CEO of BookThinkers and bestselling author.
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Prepare to be inspired as Nick shares his journey from a childhood love for stories read by his dad to overcoming social pressures in his adolescence and ultimately rekindling his passion for books through business podcasts during college.
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Nick opens up about his own book, the Rise of the Reader, and offers some practical advice for tackling reading challenges, staying connected to the material and ensuring that what you read transforms your life.
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So listen in and then share this with one person you know needs to hear this story as well.
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You're going to love it.
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Let's get started.
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Well, You're going to love it.
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Let's get started.
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Nick Hutchinson, welcome to the Uncommon Leader Podcast.
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It's so good to have you on the show.
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This is the second try we had.
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We had an interesting start a couple of days ago when you had a pole outside your house, get hit and lost power.
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So we're going to do this again.
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We're going to have fun, but I'm looking forward to our conversation.
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How are you doing?
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I am doing well and, as you know, I always love to kick things back to the host.
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And can I ask you the first question today?
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You absolutely can Bring it on, come on.
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Okay.
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So instead of asking you what your favorite book of this year 2024, has been, I'll switch it up a little bit.
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What's one major personal development book that you have decided not to read?
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One of the major bestsellers that you just haven't read yet.
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Maybe it's something you'll read in the future, but you just haven't bought into the hype.
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No, it's interesting because I think we'll get into questions there, and let me think so.
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Probably the one that I have not and I don't know the name of it, maybe that's one of the challenges is Goggins book.
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Uh, I have not chosen to go there.
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I know you've been through 75 hard.
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I have not chosen to go through 75 hard yet as well, and I don't know if it's a intentional blocking of what's happening, cause I know a lot of folks who have read his book, uh, or it's more of just a uh, a fear of taking that discipline to the next level, but I have not chosen to break the pages of his book and make that happen.
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Maybe it's one that'll happen here in 2025.
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Can't Hurt Me is David's first book, and then he wrote another one called Never Finished.
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You know, what's interesting about David Goggins is I fell into the hype when Can't Hurt Me originally released and I thought what a crazy amount of discipline this man has been able to foster for himself.
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But as I've gathered additional perspectives, I've realized that at least I think that discipline and strategy are two ends of a spectrum, and the more discipline you require it's because you have poor strategy.
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And so now I actually default to the other side of things, where I think if you just have great strategy, you don't need much discipline.
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And somebody like David I mean it's a very rare human being that can accomplish what he has, and most people don't want to go through that level of suffering.
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I think that's part of it.
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I think that might be the suffering more than anything else and again, I might get there at some point in my journey.
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But I also know that my knees and shoulders at my age start to really give way.
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But, like I said, it's probably more of a fear of that because I've been part of watching some folks going through 75 hard.
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And you want to talk about discipline.
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Like you said, if you've got a strategy, if you've got a plan and can execute to that strategy, maybe there's something to that, and I often talk about that being the difference of doing and being that we can do a lot of things, check a lot of boxes off and make things happen.
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But the being side is when you just start to live that out, when you live out your vision for your life or whatever that is, or the vision for your company, that it can be pretty powerful and it just becomes part of who you are.
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So I know good question, thanks for changing it up on the Audible and I'll still share that.
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The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership is still the one that's impacted me the most over my life, because I know that's the one that you like and there's three versions of it sitting up there.
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But we're here to talk about your book that's had an impact on me as well the Rise of the Reader, strategies for Mastering your Reading Habits and Applying what you Know.
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So, before we dive into the details because I don't have enough time to ask you the questions that I want to just tell me a little bit about how you end up writing this book and who you wrote it for.
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Over the last seven or eight years, I've built a community, mostly on Instagram, called Book Thinkers, and Book Thinkers is a place where I share the nonfiction, business and personal development style books that I'm reading and my favorite takeaways from each book.
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And now that community numbers across all the platforms in the hundreds of thousands, in some months we do a million impressions, and so you can imagine, over the years I've received a lot of questions from people in my audience.
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They'll say things like hey, nick, I appreciate all of the books that you're recommending, but whenever I pick up a book, I have a hard time finishing it.
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Or they'll say, hey, nick, I appreciate all of the books you're recommending and I've read some, but I have a hard time implementing what I've read.
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I get excited, but then I fail to take action.
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Or some people say, hey, I read that book too, but I forgot all the takeaways.
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Why do I struggle with retaining the information I've read?
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And so, over the years, I just saw a very clear need for somebody to step in, research a lot of these problems and provide solutions, and so, of course, I did my best over the years to answer each question that came my way, but I always felt like I could do a little bit more for that person if I had more time, if I wasn't just responding on an Instagram DM.
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And so one day it just sort of hit me.
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My followers love books and so I might as well write a book that answers all of the questions that people consistently ask me, because obviously there's no other resource available.
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Otherwise they wouldn't be asking me so many questions and it would have been easier if somebody else had written the book, because it was a painstaking process for me.
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But over the last few years I put it together and voila, now we have Rise of the Reader.
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Well, I appreciate it, all those things that are there, right?
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People don't have time to read, or they don't retain what they read, or, again, even the simplicity of knowing that there was something there that I really wanted to learn and then setting the book back down and not remembering to follow through on that activity.
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The book is chock full of habits and, frankly, let's say, tactics that can help folks move.
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That, and maybe I can try to ask you a question, at least one that you haven't answered before as you go forward, but I think there's one that you touched on that I wanted to ask right off the bat.
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So you asked me about one I haven't read yet.
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What about the thought and philosophy of, once I start to read a book, I have to finish it, or it's not right.
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Do you think that putting a book down because it's not impacting you is okay to do?
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What is your experience there?
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Funny enough, when I first started this reading journey about 10 years ago, I had this idea in my head that to check a book off the list, you had to read it cover to cover.
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And I mean I'm talking, I read everything from the acknowledgements in the front of the book through the, you know whatever the thanks at the end of the book.
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And I don't know where that came from.
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I don't know if it came from school or I have no idea.
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But over time I realized that not every book was created equal.
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Not every book provided the same amount of value as the last one that I read, and sometimes books promise to solve problems and you get halfway through and you realize this book is not going to solve that problem for me.
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And so I was listening to a podcast a couple of years ago between Ryan Holiday and Tim Ferriss, and Ryan said life is too short to read a bad book, and he developed something that he called the rule of 100, where he says take the number 100, subtract your age.
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So for me, right now when we're recording this, I'm 30.
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So we'll take the number 70.
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That's how many pages you have to read before you're wise enough to determine whether or not you should continue.
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And he says the older you get let's say I was 60, I would only have to read 40 pages because I'm a little wiser than I was when I was 30, for instance, and I think that's a good rule.
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Like I said, life is too short to read a bad book.
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Not every book is created equal and there really are no rules.
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You don't have to read a book cover to cover if it's not providing the value that you originally thought it was going to.
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So these days I will put down a book, or maybe I'll skip a chapter every once in a while.
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That's not fulfilling me.
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I'm going through one right now and I'm glad I followed that, because I was about ready to put it down in the first 30 or 40 pages and I had a few more to go.
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I only had five more pages before I could actually put it down.
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I didn't know that rule of 100, but let's assume that I'm going to use that in the future as well.
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I plowed through it and found some good things.
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There's this fear of missing out for me inside of a book too, waiting for that idea.
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That's there.
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I call a little bit of an audible here, because even you asking me the first question is something that I rarely get to do answer a question on my own podcast but I want to ask even about as you go back in your time.
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I'm going to take you back a little bit.
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Have you always been a reader?
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Tell me a story from your childhood.
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Maybe that still impacts who you are as a reader or a leader today.
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I was read to a lot when I was a little kid, so and I haven't talked about this before, so good question.
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When I was growing up, I was the oldest of four boys and my youngest brother.
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So I'm the oldest of four boys.
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My youngest brother is only five years younger than me, so you can imagine it was chaos for my parents four boys, five and under, at one point, and my dad would always read to us before bed and he read all of these great children's stories, a lot of works of fiction with knights and dragons and things like that, and he would use different voices for the different characters, and a lot of times we were talking about this at a Sunday dinner.
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Recently my family still meets up on Sundays for dinner he was saying that a lot of times he would fall asleep while reading to us and then we would wake him up and say, dad, finish the chapter, finish the chapter.
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So those are my earliest memories of reading and I loved those experiences.
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But when I got sucked into the world of middle school and high school, I stopped reading.
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I didn't read for myself and, for whatever reason, there was this narrative that reading wasn't cool.
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Right, it was the nerdy kids, not the athletes that were into the books, and I wanted to be the athlete.
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I wanted everybody to think I was cool, and so I think that was part of the reason that I stopped reading for a long time.
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And even you know, I had some social anxiety, and so the idea of reading or presenting in front of the class and messing something up or mispronouncing a word and then getting laughed at that scared me big time, and so I created all of these artificial stories in my head of why I shouldn't be into books, and so I didn't read really for about 10 years.
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I want to say, despite the reading that happened early in my childhood that I loved, I totally stepped away from it.
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Interesting.
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I mean because that is basically.
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Well, I'll stop short of saying your life.
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It certainly is your vocation right now.
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With regards to being a reader and so many books behind you and the ones you've read, was there a catalyst that took you back to the other side that said, yeah, now I'm going to become a reader again?
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Yeah, when I was going into my senior year of college at the University of New Hampshire and I was pursuing a business degree, I took an internship at a local software company.
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It was a sales internship and one of my bosses, kyle, shout out Kyle, thank you so much, man, for recommending what he's about to recommend.
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But he introduced me to podcasts.
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So we went on a couple of local sales trips and he would ask if he could turn on business podcasts and I said, yeah, of course I don't mind.
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And I started listening to these business people.
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These very successful people share all of their greatest life secrets for free on these podcasts, in these interviews, and that fascinated me.
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And he said to me one time Nick, listening to the same song or the same playlist or radio station for the 300th time isn't going to change your life, but the right podcast might.
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And that potential is what keeps me engaged.
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It keeps me excited.
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And so I was commuting about an hour each way to that internship over that summer period and I started listening to podcasts all sorts of nonfiction, business and personal development type shows where successful people are being interviewed and after a couple of weeks of consuming this content I started to realize that successful people read books, and a lot of times they've documented their greatest life lessons in their own books, and so it would be foolish for me, I realized, to ignore reading as a way to improve my life when the roadmap is clear.
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All of these people that I want to be like are giving at least some credit for their success to the books that they've read or have written, at least some credit for their success to the books that they've read or have written.
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And so I went to my local Barnes and Noble one day on a lunch break.
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I grabbed about 10 books.
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That was its own crazy experience.
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I almost didn't buy them, but I ended up buying the 10 books and I went back to that internship.
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I closed my office door each day after I finished my work and I would sit there and I would read these books and I went back to school my senior year a completely different human being and I fell in love with personal development.
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That's fantastic.
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As I know my mom is a listener.
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She always not always she often gives me a hard time about my reading habits.
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Growing up she said I wasn't a good reader growing up as well.
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But I was told I read books, but I read the books that I wanted to read about athletes or about sports teams or different sports.
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They weren't really about the non-fictional other things that were going to help me grow that maybe she wanted me to read.
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But I love the story about an individual who was actually a catalyst to get that started going again.
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For me it was.
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I talked about that book, 21 year feudal laws of leadership.
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After I got out of college I was done reading there's no doubt about it and when I had a mentor give me that book and walk through it with me chapter by chapter, it was something that converted me and uh, back to a reader again and I missed a lot of those years that you picked up in college.
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So that's a really good thing.
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You know folks would tell me that's one of the biggest barriers that I run into, because I do believe that leaders are readers.
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You just touched on it.
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Those that are successful have often talked about the books that have impacted their life.
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But when I get a chance to coach individuals and talk to them about starting a reading habit, they'll say I don't have the time to read.
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I just can't find the time to sit down and read the book.
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Help me coach them as to why they have the time to read.
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Yeah, when somebody says, nick, I appreciate your love for books and I understand how much they've impacted your life, but I don't have time to read, and the excuses are I have a couple of kids at home, I'm running a startup whatever the case is, I travel too much, and I always start with the following question, I'll say I understand, but hey, john, if I paid you $10,000 to read a book by the end of next month, do you think you could do it?
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And immediately that same person that just told me I'm too busy to read, they go.
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Yeah, I could read two or three if I was getting paid that much.
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And so they've fallen into my trap, because what they've admitted is that it's not a matter of whether or not they have the time to read, it's whether or not they prioritize reading over something else.
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And so once we kind of get to that common ground, you could read, but you have other things that are taking priority over your reading.
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Then we'll chunk it down a little bit.
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I love to recommend replacing 15 minutes of social media scrolling in the morning or the last 15 minutes of your Netflix in the evening with reading a good book, and in 15 minutes of reading, most people can read about 10 pages.
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Once you build up a little bit of momentum.
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And 10 pages five days a week, Monday through Friday, it's 50 pages a week, and you and I know, since we're both readers, that most of these books are only about 200 pages nowadays.
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So 50 times four is 200.
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You could read a book every single month just by replacing a little bit of Netflix in the evening or a little bit of social media in the morning.
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If you do both, you could read two books a month.
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That's how fast it can happen for people.
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And so the other thing is how do we get people excited about reading?
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Well, read about one of your favorite sports idols, that'll keep you interested.
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Or define a problem in your life that really bugs you, and then go out and find a book that promises to help you solve that problem, so that you stay emotionally connected to that 15 minutes a day.
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And eventually, once you build the habit and you leverage strategy instead of discipline, because you see the value in the reading, you'll want more than just 15 minutes every night.
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You'll be dying to read that book.
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And that really does happen for people.
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Hey, listeners, I want to take a quick moment to share something special with you.
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Many of the topics and discussions we have on this podcast are areas where I provide coaching and consulting services for individuals and organizations.
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If you've been inspired by our conversation and are seeking a catalyst for change in your own life or within your team, I invite you to visit coachjohngallaghercom forward slash free call to sign up for a free coaching call with me.
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It's an opportunity for us to connect, discuss your unique challenges and explore how coaching or consulting can benefit you and your team.
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Okay, let's get back to the show.
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You know I love that because it happened for me, and it happened as a result of reading your book, nick.
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I was a reader in the morning, no doubt about it, but I added that time before I went to bed as well.
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And really this is another question for you too is I added another book, so I might have two, three or four books going at the same time.
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Do you focus on one book or do you find that you can read multiple books at one time?
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I also read multiple books at one time.
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I'll have two or three physical books going and then I'll also have one or two audio books going all at the same time, two audio books going all at the same time.
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And I write about in Rise of the Reader this concept that I sort of I modified from James Altucher, and I call it book sex.
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And so book sex is the idea of taking two totally random ideas from two totally different books and, just as a little fun thought experiment, merge them together and see what type of idea children are birthed.
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So I give the example in the book.
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What if you're reading a book on leadership and delegation and you're also reading a book on intermittent fasting and dieting?
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They might seem totally unrelated until you practice book sex and you merge them together and maybe you come up with an idea of intermittent delegation where, instead of delegating, once a day you accumulate all the things that need to be passed off to somebody and once a week you hand it to them.
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So it feels less overwhelming.
00:19:52.093 --> 00:19:53.415
Does that work?
00:19:53.415 --> 00:19:55.632
Is it an effective delegation strategy?
00:19:55.632 --> 00:20:00.548
I have no idea, but maybe you wouldn't have thought about it unless you were reading both books at the same time.
00:20:00.548 --> 00:20:04.115
And so that's one of the reasons that I love to kind of merge ideas.
00:20:05.076 --> 00:20:09.946
I love that merging those ideas, book sex and, for those who are listening in, this is a clean show.
00:20:09.946 --> 00:20:19.182
Stay with us, we're going to go there, but I mean it's quite a fun concept to think about in terms of bringing the ideas of two different books together.
00:20:19.182 --> 00:20:23.131
Eventually, they have to run together to be able to help you to get things done.
00:20:23.131 --> 00:20:28.606
And you also talk about being very intentional with reading books too, and this is something that I.
00:20:28.606 --> 00:20:33.988
Another habit that I picked up first of all was I wrote in front of my book, and I'll let you talk about it.
00:20:33.988 --> 00:20:35.853
I want to pick up two habits.
00:20:35.853 --> 00:20:41.813
One was more reading and one was being intentional with what I wanted to read, what I wanted to get out of the book.
00:20:41.813 --> 00:20:45.700
So tell me about that and having a smart goal and being intentional with your reading as well.
00:20:46.644 --> 00:20:46.986
Yeah, John.
00:20:46.986 --> 00:20:52.309
I'd meet people at conferences or online and I'd say, hey, what are you reading?
00:20:52.309 --> 00:20:54.753
And they'd say Atomic Habits by James Clear.
00:20:54.753 --> 00:20:58.070
And I'd say, amazing book, why did you decide to pick it up?
00:20:58.070 --> 00:21:02.185
And they'd say, I don't know, Never thought about that.
00:21:02.185 --> 00:21:04.368
Say well, what's your goal for the book?
00:21:04.368 --> 00:21:05.069
I don't know.
00:21:05.069 --> 00:21:07.513
Why did you pick it up in the first place?
00:21:07.513 --> 00:21:19.269
I saw it on Instagram or my friend gave it to me and see, when I hear that, I think that's intention deficit disorder, because you're not emotionally connected to the information.
00:21:19.391 --> 00:21:24.767
Right, you're just consuming it because somebody else had the intention for you to consume it.
00:21:25.488 --> 00:21:30.939
I think it's a better situation when you decide I'm reading this book because?
00:21:30.939 --> 00:21:52.049
And then you define a skill that you'd like to improve, like you did, or you define a problem that you'd like to solve, and when you get a little bit more clear and specific on what your goal is, you're more emotionally connected to seeing it through, to finishing the book and to solving that problem or building that skill.
00:21:52.049 --> 00:22:02.208
So, instead of starting with the book and then defining what you'd like to get out of it, start with the problem and then pick the book that fits that problem or helps you build that skill.
00:22:02.208 --> 00:22:05.730
Then, like like I said, you'll be a little bit more emotionally connected.
00:22:05.730 --> 00:22:07.335
Now I think there's a.
00:22:07.335 --> 00:22:14.906
I did an okay job articulating this in the book Rise of the Reader and I think that in the next edition I'll do a little bit of a better job.
00:22:14.906 --> 00:22:19.978
But today I love to set a SMART goal for every book that I read.
00:22:19.978 --> 00:22:26.670
Smart is a goal setting acronym that's often used in executive coaching and leadership, team building and things.
00:22:26.670 --> 00:22:38.829
It stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound, and those five variables are very important for goal setting because they'll help you increase your success rate.
00:22:38.829 --> 00:22:42.477
So what I've done is I've modified that and I've attached it to a book.
00:22:42.477 --> 00:22:51.169
So let's say I was going to pick up the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership and I'm reading the book because I want to be a better leader.
00:22:51.169 --> 00:23:14.058
What I'll do is I'll set that SMART goal and I'll write it on the inside of the cover, something like I'm looking to find and implement at least one way to improve my leadership at BookThinkers and within my team by the end of August, because this is my business, these are my people and they deserve the best leader possible.
00:23:14.058 --> 00:23:15.728
That is specific.
00:23:15.728 --> 00:23:20.710
I'm looking to find and implement at least one way to improve my leadership it's measurable One by the end of August.
00:23:20.730 --> 00:23:21.773
Did I implement one way to improve my leadership?
00:23:21.773 --> 00:23:22.837
It's measurable One by the end of August.
00:23:22.837 --> 00:23:25.346
Did I implement one way to improve my leadership?
00:23:25.346 --> 00:23:26.630
It's attainable.
00:23:26.630 --> 00:23:30.580
I didn't say 10x my leadership.
00:23:30.580 --> 00:23:32.246
I'm just looking to implement one thing.
00:23:32.246 --> 00:23:34.891
Is it relevant to my business?
00:23:34.891 --> 00:23:36.053
Of course it is.
00:23:36.053 --> 00:23:37.696
Is it relevant to my life?
00:23:37.696 --> 00:23:38.699
Of course it is.
00:23:38.699 --> 00:23:40.484
I want to be the best leader possible.
00:23:40.484 --> 00:23:42.685
I'm emotionally connected to making it happen.
00:23:42.685 --> 00:23:42.967
Course it is.
00:23:42.967 --> 00:23:44.750
I want to be the best leader possible, so I'm emotionally connected to making it happen.
00:23:44.770 --> 00:23:45.291
And then is it time bound.
00:23:45.291 --> 00:23:47.516
Did I give myself a deadline to take action?
00:23:47.516 --> 00:23:49.207
Yeah, by the end of August.
00:23:49.207 --> 00:24:08.452
Parkinson's law, which a lot of us remember from grade school when somebody said the homework's due Monday morning and you finish it Sunday night or maybe Monday morning says that a task will expand to the amount of time that we give it, and so if you don't set a goal for your book to implement it by a certain period of time, most likely you won't take that action.
00:24:08.452 --> 00:24:28.347
So those five variables are very important, I think, for setting the right expectation for each book, and by setting it in the beginning of the book and reading it every time you go through another chapter or pick up the book to read it, you'll start filtering for those leadership items that you can implement, and that's really important too.
00:24:28.869 --> 00:24:30.435
Love that as well, and I even think about.