DTC+: Books are a waste of time

I used to read lots of books in my wantrepreneur days.

All the gurus I was binging on, they all preached books.

However, in those days, reading was as useful as the binging, I’d get nothing out of it.

No needle was moved.

Also, if you asked me two weeks later what the books was about, I couldn’t really tell you.

Fast forward a few months ago, I got back into books and they completely changed (and are changing) my now non-wantrepreneur business.

What switched?

Two things - RETENTION and APPLICATION.

If you don’t retain the information from a book, it’s time wasted.

If you don’t apply information from a book, it’s a bit better, but it’s still quite close to a waste of time activity.

“If you’re not changing your behaviour, you’re not learning” - Alex Hormozi

There are two things, tactically, that I changed to get the complete opposite result from the same activity.

RETENTION

I took this from an episode of the Ramsey show:

Take notes, while reading, on the back of the cover.

I just started Robert Cialdini’s “Influence” and this is what the back of the cover is starting to look like:

This way, you can “reread” it again in the future in a few minutes vs. a few days.

You can set a reminder every 3 - 6 months to go back to all the books you’ve read and just go through the notes.

I bet you’ll get some new ideas, in the now changed context (different time of reading).

Ideas that would’ve otherwise gone into the ether.

APPLICATION

Now here is the golden step, unless you bring all the wisdom from the pages to real life, the reading and retention phase were both wasted.

Some recent examples:

• “The E-Myth” completely changed the way I think about business - the importance of a team and process. We’ve now implemented and continue implementing/improving systems on a daily basis, to make the business more valuable, efficient and a lower-stress environment for everyone involved

• “Built to sell” completely changed our business, from a “Shopify handyman” agency, to a manically focused CRO productized service that works ONLY on the biggest needle movers for an ecommerce store

• “Unreasonable Hospitality” completely changed the way we run our weekly team meeting, making it a much more fruitful, collaborative, enjoyable and fulfilling time for everyone vs. previously me and my co-founder doing monologues

• I can go on and on…

My approach to reading now is less of an information gather, but a “spot the opportunity” time, where I look and immediately implement/test a change in the business and see how it impacts it.

I no longer read, I hunt for applications.

Try it next time you read something - take notes, apply.

I bet you’ll get more out of books.

PS - Information is useless without application

NEEDLE MOVING CRO HERE.

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