January Bookshelf:

These books are in order of reading, not ranking.

1. The Talent Code by Dan Coyle
2. $100 Million Dollar Offers by Alex Hormozi
3. $100 Million Dollar Leads by Alex Hormozi
4. Positioning by Al Reis
5. Beyond Band of Brothers by Major Richard Winters
6. Irresistible by Josh Bersin

Best Quote from the Books:

“Never, ever give up regardless of the adversity. If you are a leader, a fellow who other fellows look to, you have to keep going. How will you know if you have succeeded? True satisfaction comes from gettting the job done. The key to successful leadership is to earn respect - not because of position or rank, but because you are a leader of character. Properly led and treated right, your lowest ranking soldier is capable of extraordinary acts of valor. Ribbons, medals, and accolades, then, are a poor substitute to the ability to look yourself in the mirror every night and know that you did your best. So, Hang Tough.”

• Major Richard Winters, Easy Company 506th PIR, 101st Airborne?

The Talent Code by Dan Coyle

• Studies the development of talent and skill from a scientific perspective. Does a great job challenging the weight we give to genetics when it comes to talent and skill.?
• Takeaways:?Deep Practice: Deep practice emphasizes the importance of deliberate focused, challenging practice in skilled development. Deep practice involves pushing yourself beyond the comfort zone, the point of failure to enhance learning and mastery. Reps, you need reps!Myelin: Mylan is a fatty substance that wraps around nerve fibers in the brain, insulating the connection which reduces the odds of “failing, or messing up,” by keeping the electrical current pulsing from point to point B. The more of those neurons fire, the more myelin and wraps around it, the more wraps around it, the faster and more efficiently the signals are and the quicker your body is able to decipher them. Practice at the margin of your ability produces the most.Chunking: Break it down into simpler less complex skills and piece it into manageable parts. Enables focus and efficient training and increases the likelihood of success in skill acquisition. Also encourages pattern recognition by which you can shortcut learning other parts of the skill.Repetition: Practice until failure, then repeat!This enforces neural pathways, making execution of a skill more automated over time.?Reps are the only way to force the growth of myelin.?Feedback: Watch the film, and take the notes.?Closing the time gap in our feedback loop is crucial to putting skill acquisition on hyperdrive. Don’t wait to take corrective action, implement it immediately.Feedback includes coaches, peers, and most importantly self-scout.?

$100 Million Dollar Offers by Alex Hormozi

• Create offers so good that people feel stupid saying no.
• Takeaways:Offer the Incomparable: creating a product or service, or simply reworking your existing product or service in such a way that consumers have a hard time comparing anything to it. Couldn’t involve features, exceptional service, or a novel approach or guarantee to delivery.Raise Your Value: enhance the desire for your product or service, by providing certainty/enhancing, guarantees, and sharing testimonials, speeding up results or delivery, making the ease of doing business with you incomparable. “ Deliver more than your customers money-worth.”Solve All of Their Problems: (That pertains to you! HA!) address or remove all obstacles that are keeping your clients from achieving their desired outcome with your product or service.Stack Your Offer: (“While we are here” discounts.) increase value without increasing your costs, or overhead. Two transactions at one time with one customer beats to transactions with two customers most of the time.Make it Limited: your offer should have a quantity, or time cap to drive urgency in crunch decision-making into your desired outcome window.

$100 Million Dollar Leads by Alex Hormozi

• Understanding the Importance of Leads: leads are potential customers who have shown interest in your product or service, but haven’t made a purchase yet. Effective advertising and knowing your CAC, LTGP, and ROAS will drive optimized lead generation. (Cost to Acquire Customer, Lifetime Gross Profit, and Return on Ad Spend)
• Captivating offers and lead magnets: Give, give, give, give, give give, give, then ask. The longer you wait to ask for a sale, the larger the ask can be, but you must be providing ultimate value at all times.
• Diversify lead generation strategies: minimize your reliance on a singular ad channel and maximize reach. Hook retain reward system: hook with engaging content, retain their interest with value, reward them for taking action.
• Measure and Optimize for Success: KPI’s to measure effective lead generation. If something is working, give it legs, if it’s not, kill it. Test and scale, the top 1% of Facebook marketers are testing 15 to 20 different ad, creative messages and variants of the same ad for each ad.
• Leads don't appear magically: you must be proactive! Reach out and ask for referrals, create a referral reward, that is real value! At the end of the day, every person on our team is responsible to kill something and drag it home.

Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout

• The brand with the most effective marketing strategy takes the top spot on our own brand ladder, making us want to buy only from them.
• Your strategy needs to stand out against all other advertisers. Otherwise your product/service will be forgotten.
• Be the first of the pond! If you can’t be first, then you need to be disruptive.
• If you can’t be first, find a niche or be the sucker fish to your competition.
• Once you’ve developed an effective marketing approach, position for the long-term i.e., 5 to 10 years. Don’t fret over the short term approach.
• A well-known brand can only stand in one vertical at a time.

Beyond Band of Brothers by Major Winters

• Lead by example: “First rule of leadership: If you’re a leader, you must lead. The second rule of leadership: If you’re not the lead dog, the scenery never changes.”
• Preserver through adversity: “Lastly, hang tough! Never ever give up regardless of adversity. If you are a leader, a fellow who other fellows look to, you have to keep going.”
• Train your team well: “There is no need to tell someone how to do their job if you have properly trained your team, so train them well.”
• Stay positive: “After that first night I was sure to get on my knees and thank God for getting me through today.”
• Give reasoning for your actions: “When we were at Bastogne, and you pulled a man off of the line, you need to go and give them a reason for pulling them, give them a purpose/ job. Otherwise they will feel as though they have done something wrong.”
• Take a moment of self reflection: “Each and every day, look yourself in the mirror and ask if you did your best today, and be honest.?
• Stay in top physical shape: “Physical stamina is the foundation for mental toughness, so get tough.”

Irresistible by Josh Bersin

• Teams over hierarchy:?Teams are duplicable if you need to scale and disband if they fail. Hierarchies, to scale, require reengineering of the organization.?Reviews are able to be done in isolated cyclops that remain vision oriented rather than favoring hierarchical loyalty.
• Work, not jobs:Autonomy and Flexibility over traditional career journeysDrives organizations to hire for culture fit, and potential rather than true job experience.?Skill based compensation is at its core, lending to greater autonomy for the individual.
• Leaders coach, not boss:Leaders must understand the fluid working picture of the organization if they are to succeed in this coaching role.?Leaders connect business to larger societal/ community needs.Organizations must empower leaders by encouraging feedback, development and continuous learning.?
• Growth, not promotion:?Measure success by the value they create, the customers they serve, and the brand and work culture they cultivate. Then are compensated accordingly.?By making growth a primary goal and measure, promotions almost come as a byproduct.The organizations that win, create clear and considerate career paths that are easy to communicate and understand.
• Culture, not rules:Shared values and vision clarity and alignment are a MUST.Allows for autonomy and impact in the goal and mission of the company.You can't out culture poor compensation! Compensation is intrinsic to a good healthy culture.?
• Purpose over profits:Profits are required, preferably healthy ones. But, profits will never be enough to drive a team toward unity and goal achieving.?The team is healthier when the WHY behind our purpose is clear.
• Employee experience over output.Minimize bureaucracy to have a good time.As owners of the organization, employees are our customers. Our customer experience should create raving fans out of our team, and output will come as a byproduct of that effort.