Reading Your Way to the Top!

We’ve roughly reached the half-way point of the year now and I’ve already learnt a huge amount since 2019 began. As I mentioned in a previous blog, in my view it doesn’t matter how much experience you have or how impressive your job title is, you should always be striving to develop your skills and improve the way you do things. This year, I’ve had the fortune of hearing directly from some of the top experts in the areas of business and self-development through attending a number of major international business conferences. These include Grant Cordone’s 10X Growth Conference in Miami, the Business Excellence Forum in Telford, UK, and most recently the ScaleUp Summit in Atlanta. This has allowed me to gain insights straight from the horse’s mouth from the likes of Sir Clive Woodward, Grant Cordone, and Brad Sugars, to name just a few. 

Of course these kind of events don’t come around every week, so throughout the year I have to find a regular pattern of self-learning to improve my skills in business and life in general. These include sessions with business coaches, peer-to-peer mentoring, and reading business and self-development books. It is the latter of these I want to discuss in this blog; in particular my approach to choosing reading material and the methods I use to take in all the information on offer. I also want to share insights from a couple of books I’ve read this year that I especially enjoyed. 

Reading has become so crucial to my learning that I now create a 12-month plan of self-development at the start each year which includes the all books I intend to take in. This is all based on what I want to achieve by the year’s end. While I’ve always made sure there is a 12-month plan in place from a business perspective, it is only in recent years that I’ve put such a strategy in place for developing my own skills. In the past I would choose books on pretty much an ad hoc basis; usually those that were recommended to me or any I randomly came across that stood out. Although I took individual lessons from these, my learning wasn’t very focussed or structured. Now I only seek out books that are relevant to what I want to achieve over a 12-month period, so it’s much more strategic. 

A question I often get asked is how, as a business owner with an extremely tight schedule, do I find the time to get through such a large number of reading materials. For me, the answer is to make the most of all the down time I get. What I mean by this is to productively use any ‘dead’ periods where there isn’t much I can otherwise achieve. This includes my daily train commute to the EMG office, about an hour each way, which provides a great opportunity to shut myself off from the world and read. I also regularly travel abroad as part of my work, so sitting in an airport or aeroplane is the perfect environment to sit and digest the contents of a book. I’ve even found I can do this whilst driving – don’t worry I’ve still got both hands on the wheel as I’ll listen to an audio book! I also use audio books when I go running, which works really well as I find exercise is a brilliant way to free my mind. 

Anyway, onto the favourite book I’ve read so far this year. This is by Jesse Itzler, one of the speakers at the 10X conference I mentioned earlier, and it is called ‘Living with a SEAL’. This book is all about the time when Itzler invited a US Navy SEAL to come and live with him and his wife for a month with the purpose of pushing him to the absolute limits, both mentally and physically. It’s written in a really entertaining way, describing the unbelievably hard exercises he was being made to do by the SEAL. But the underlying message is that when you think you can’t do any more, be-it exercise, work, whatever, in reality you have probably only reached around 40% of your capacity and can force yourself to accomplish a lot more. That’s the key lesson I took: when you think you’re at your limit, 

ask yourself whether that really is the case, and keep pushing yourself onto ever higher levels. This message has already had a massively positive effect on me; for example, I listened to the audio book of Living with a SEAL whilst out running and even though I felt shattered, it inspired me to keep on going a lot longer. There’s an old saying that you can make more money but you can’t make more time and I think that’s very applicable here. 

After I read Itzler’s book, I looked into who the SEAL he talked about was, and discovered it was a guy called Dave Goggins. This led to me buying his book entitled ‘You Can’t Hurt Me’, which follows a similar theme to Itzler’s book in terms of getting maximum potential out of yourself, although in a more serious style. Here, Goggins outlines how he managed to become probably one of the most physically fit people in the world. This book has been passed around our sales team at the EMG and they are absolutely loving it! 

So that’s a little bit about me and my strategies for using books to aid my self-development. I’d love to hear your thoughts on what I’ve written in the comments below. Have you read anything this year that has particularly inspired you or changed your perspective at all? Are there any books you’ve come across recently that you would recommend for me?