Less Motivation, More Education - Part II: Examples

Last week, I shared that long-form content, as well as books, seems to be the format that suits me most, when it comes to consuming valuable/useful information that stays with me and that I can use proactively.

This week I want to share a few books, that have helped me in the past few weeks, each with its own very unique lesson, that when combined have shaped my recent approach to building DULO.

My recent reading rhythm started off with "This is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn To See".

To summarise it for ya, Seth Godin goes into the fact that marketing is actually helping and being useful to someone else, or a group of people. Seth suggests that when "marketing", we focus on the smallest viable audience (niche), we understand what their pain points are and from there we devise a strategy of communication and service that has the sole purpose of being in service to those people and helping them overcome their pain points.

"People like us, do things like this."

This ties a bit into my newsletter on selfishness, so Seth's words rang true with me when I read the book.

The next book that makes the list is "Get Big Fast and Do More Good: Start Your Business, Make It Huge, and Change the World". It is an entertaining recollection by the founders of Yes To. of their journey in building a successful business. As always, different people will find different lessons in the book, but for me, the one thing that stuck out is that IT IS EXTREMELY BENEFICIAL TO BE A GOOD SALESMAN OR have one as a co-founder.

To be honest with you, this is a skill set that lacks in our team and it's something that we either have to work on, get someone to help us with it, or we need to massively overcompensate with other sets of incredible skills in order to have a chance at building a solid business.

Next on the list is a book by Alex Hormozi, someone that I've singled out to follow very closely lately. The book is called "$100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No" and it's mostly to be applied after a business has already taken off. For this reason, I will definitely be coming back to it, once we start having more traction.

On a side note, I've recently pretty much stopped consuming most content (muting accounts and not scrolling social media), but I still keep a close eye on what Alex is posting, on YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter. Another person that I do that with is Jack Butcher.

I left the last book to be THE MOST influential book that I've recently read. It shaped my mindset toward creating things massively. Thinking about it, it didn't "shape" them as much, as it gave me the permission to validate how I feel about creativity, but have been hesitant to approach it in that way, given that most business advice out there is about pushing things into existence, rather than letting them happen through you when they are supposed to happen.

The book is by the legendary music product Rick Rubin and it's called "The Creative Act: A Way of Being".

To try to summarise such a book would be impossible, but to give you the gist of the idea, Rick's main thesis is that creativity is more like an energy that is out there and each of us can tap into it at any time, in any format and everywhere.

It's an energy that can accomplish things through us, as long as we let it. It's about having an open mind by not looking for something specific, meanwhile looking at everything in detail.

The effect that the book had on me was to relax my mind in a way that I was pushing for things to happen and forcing myself to think of ideas and instead just create a calm focused energy that seems to generate ideas passively in the background, that I can pull and manifest when needed.

Again, it's even hard to explain the book, without having to write a ten thousand word essay on it, but it was a major mental shift for me and how I approach creating stuff on a daily basis. It brought me calmness and productivity in a way that most tools out there fail to do simultaneously.

Let me know if you decide to give one of these books a read and what you thought about it ;)

Have a great one and see you next week!

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Julian.