How to Use Business Books To Transform Your Business

Are you trying to figure out how to get the most bang for your buck out of business books?

I’ve read hundreds of books myself and worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs, and I found that there are some best practices that make a really big difference.

The two most common pitfalls I see people run into with business books.

1. They don’t really know where to start or how to start picking out and reading business books
2. They’ve read a million books but haven’t actually changed anything in their business. They’ve heard all these cool ideas and concepts and maybe know some vocab words but that hasn’t made a real-life difference in what they do.

This video is geared to give you practical advice that I’ve learned for myself over time that’s really helped me out.

I’ll talk about four key concepts.

1. How to pick out a high-quality business book
2. How to consume a business book the most effective way
3. Remember the information from the book
4. Implement the contents of the book to change your business.

1.) How To Pick The Right Business Book

This is probably the hardest part both for those who

• haven’t really started their business book learning journey
• and even those who have read a million books but struggled to make meaningful changes.

Acknowledging The Noise

There is a giant marketing machine behind books.

Now I love lots of business books but they are essentially a marketed product. All of the glitz and the glam of “Must read”, and “12 things that you have to know”, all of that is built up to add a lot of pressure to an entrepreneur.

An entrepreneur’s biggest scarcity of resources typically is time. When you only have so much time, all these books are vying for that time.

“Read this one, read that one.”

There’s also some status jockeying amongst other entrepreneurs, “Oh you haven’t read this book?”, “Oh, it’s a must-read”.

It can have us feeling very pulled in different directions.

On top of that, whenever someone does read a book oftentimes they feel very insufficient. “Wow here are all these things I should be doing and I’m not, I’m really behind the curve.” They can beat themselves up over those mistakes that they’re making.

Now, if you start reading 10, 20, or 30 books like that, pretty soon you’re very convinced that you’re the worst human being/worst business owner ever and that everyone else has it figured out and you do not.

There is a big amount of pressure and problems that can come with reading business books.

Why Are You Reading?

I’d like to really break down picking a business book into two categories.

1. Entertainment
2. Implementing changes in your business

I think these get muddied sometimes. It’s important to keep them separate.

Entertainment

I have no problem with reading business books for entertainment.

A lot of entrepreneurs, myself included, love to read about business. I get a big kick out of it. I’m happily reading business books all the time.

But it’s important I recognize when I’m just reading that business book for fun versus when I’m trying to read to actually improve and work on my business.

When I separate those two out, I find sometimes when I’m reading a business book for fun, I would actually rather go deeper into the entertainment rabbit hole and read a science fiction or fantasy book for fun instead. To go deeper into my own enjoyment of entertainment and not to pretend that I’m learning about business when really I’m just kind of goofing off.

Entertainment again is a totally acceptable justification for reading a business book.

It can help you pick one out that is fun to read.

Recognize that’s what it is, and that the goal is different than implementation.

Implementation

Implementation is the most impactful reason to read a business book.

This is how you actually apply what you’re learning to your business and can help offer a filter for picking out what business books to read.

The biggest problem with all the marketing efforts that happen to produce the books is you feel a lot of pressure to read all of these books.

What Problem Are You Trying To Solve?

If you are not currently having a Sales problem in your business, then reading a Sales book, even if it’s a “must read”, or “the best book on Sales ever written”, is secondary to your maybe Managerial problems and focusing on those.

Knowing exactly what your problems are, and using a book as a specific prescription for those problems can really really help.

Books are a great opportunity when you’re feeling stuck.

Whenever you don’t feel like you have the vocabulary or the knowledge of how the pieces and the gears move together, a book can give you some of that information.

It’s still on you to implement and make changes, but a book is really perfect for that. Picking out a business book should not be on marketing and hype and general things, but a very topic-focused specific search.

Pick The Right Book To Solve The Right Problem

I recommend being slow to pick out a book because then whenever I do consume that book, there’s a higher chance I’ll apply what I have read in that book.

Once you have kind of a genre, an issue that you’re trying to solve or work on, whether it’s Management, Sales, Financial Mastery, whatever that subset category is, that eliminates tons of books, which helps really narrow the field.

Within that, if you check, there are probably 10 to 20 highly recommended books in that category.

If you start to evaluate what those generally cover, you’ll have a better idea of which one specifically solves the thing that you’re focused on.

Take Finances for example:

• Is it more of a personal finance side of things?
• Is it about how you manage the cash flow of your business?
• Understanding your reporting documents?

There are subsets of categories that can lead you even further down the pathway.

By now you should have probably settled on a book that you might like to actually read because you have eliminated those that are just marketed to you.

You’ve determined if you’d like to use entertainment or implementation as your focus. If it’s implementation, you’ve figured out the actual problem you’re trying to solve by reading a book.

Then in that field, you’ve looked at the range of highly recommended books online and you’ve picked out one or two that seem like a really good starting place.

2.) Consuming Business Books The Most Effective Way

Now it’s a matter of actually consuming that book as effectively as possible.

I used to consume books exclusively in actual paper form in my hands and read them. But I found, as I had my own business, that it was really hard to have the time to sit down and just consume a book.

What I would do instead is listen to audiobooks. (I’m embarrassed to say now that before I began that journey, I thought audiobooks were kind of for people who couldn’t figure out how to read. They didn’t have maybe the mental and intellectualism to go through a book.)

Now I am super sold on audiobooks. I think it’s the best thing ever for a busy entrepreneur. When I’m commuting to my office, when I’m doing the dishes, taking care of chores around the house, I can put an earbud in, consume content, and really pick up on some important details.

I’m a giant fan of audiobooks. If you’ve been someone who’s really held on to the old style of a paper book, I cannot recommend enough for busy entrepreneurs to start to play with audiobooks.

There are a few things to know about that.

Where To Listen To Audiobooks

Hoopla

There’s an app called Hoopla that is usually a free app with your local public library where oftentimes you can get free audiobooks just by putting in your library card, which is awesome.

They don’t have every book ever written, but if you look at that of 20 or 30 books you’d like to read, there’s probably one or two on there, especially if they’re older releases. So Hoopla has some free options.

Spotify Premium

If you have a Spotify premium account, they have some audiobooks on there now as well.

Audible

Of course, you can pay for some books on Audible or a monthly subscription.

Pro tip: If you’re not reading like the “one per month” that the subscription gives you, you can go to cancel your Audible account, downgrade to a Silver Plan where you get one credit every two months instead, so you don’t have a pile of 30 credits that are building up over time and save some money.

How Listening To Audiobooks Saves Time

I prefer audiobooks to consume.

I have had some people who really enjoyed getting the hardcover book, listening to the audiobook, and then highlighting or making notes in the physical book as they go. That’s sort of a user preference.

You’re welcome to sit and read books if you still like to. I just find it’s time-intensive. And in many business books, after you read more and more, there’s some similar lines that happen across them.

There are longer stories that are told where you have to be super tuned in. And so an audiobook is really, really helpful.

3.) How To Remember What You’ve Learned (So You Can Apply It Later)

So how can you actually retain what you’re learning in the audiobook?

Assuming you’re reading a business book, it’s not really helpful to think of it as a 400-page chunk.

It’s important that you have the key concepts you’d like to take away. And so I find it really helpful to make some kind of big-level notes as I go.

• What is it I’d like to retain and remember to actually apply to my business?
• What are some of the frameworks for thinking of things?

Where To Take Notes

I am always making those notes as I go.

If I’m driving, I’ll use my phone and give it a prompt of, “Hey Siri, make a note…” and I will have that note created.

If I’m at a stationary place, I’ll get a piece of paper and write that note out or type it in my notes app.

Over time while reading the book, I have somewhat of a summary of the key points of that book I would like to retain.

Because that’s the biggest thing is that you’ve listened to a book for a bit, then you go about your life and kind of forget what you wanted to do. Pretty soon the whole book is finished, but there’s not a clear step you actually know you want to take in making changes and implementing in your business.

Making notes as you go is a very, very key thing. I really prefer my own notes to some online generated notes or relooking at summaries later. I find that that helps me also remember as I go.

Number Of Notes I Write = How Impactful The Book Is

The surprising thing to me is that in many books I’ve read almost the entire thing and only made five or six notes.

From other books, which were amazing, I’ve made 30 or 40 or 50 notes. So to me, the quality of the number of notes I feel the need to record is a partial reflection of the book’s quality.

There are some books I finish and I’m like, “Well, that was just a lot of anecdotal stories and not much meat to it.” So that was easy to ignore.

Making notes is really, really key in the remembering phase.

4.) Implementing Changes To Your Business After Reading A Business Book

The final step is actually implementing them in your business. Again, the goal of all of this is to take what you’ve learned and make a change in your business.

If not, you were just reading for entertainment, which again is totally fine. But now the goal is to actually get this into your business.

Implementation Takes Time

These changes should take a lot of time.

There are some things that are internal mindset changes, and reading that reminder every so often can help give you that different viewpoint.

But most implementations require the conscious action of sitting down, working through an exercise, and beginning to implement.

When I was newer in my business, I would probably read something like 15 or 20 books, you know, every month or two.

I was just tearing through those books. But now I will only read a few books a year. And it’s not because I know it all.

It’s because my entire focus now is on implementation.

How much can I implement of what I read in a given book? Until I’ve really put those things into play, I’m not ready to move on to another one. I don’t want this giant debt of undone activities to stack up.

I want to focus on what I already know I should be doing and be doing that.

Then if I’m consuming some new content to solve a problem, implementing and working through all of that content.

Put The Author’s Vision To Work

I typically begin with a plan of trusting the author to some degree since they seem like they know what they’re talking about.

I will trust that maybe this will work out but on low-risk things. That way, if they are incorrect and their experience doesn’t match mine, I get some quick feedback. And in doing that, what I’ve seen is really important is that there are a few things to consider.

1. Quality Of Content
2. Timing

Quality Of Content

One is the quality of the content itself.

Does it actually describe what is going on and what to expect as the ins and outs of that experience I’m trying to learn from?

This is usually fairly easy to judge. Is the information clear and concise? Does it make sense with how you understand the world to work?

Timing

Two is, when should this actually be applied?

This is the amazing part that’s not talked about near enough, is that you can learn a new concept in a business book and it is the exact right thing to do at this stage in business and the exact wrong thing at this stage of business. It becomes right again later at this stage of business.

Knowing WHEN the information you’re reading applies to your situation is really, really key. That’s a big thing that I think is oftentimes overlooked. And so that timing piece is pretty much everything.

Even reading the best books, if the content is great and you’re applying at the wrong timing, your results will not be good, or you’ll be over-complicating things too soon.

Those are some keys I think about in implementation. And again, I really focus on implementing as much as possible.

Learning What Book To Read Next

In the Implementation Phase, oftentimes I will know what my next business book has to be. I’ll recognize, “Oh wow, all this is going really, really well, but I’m really stuck on implementing this one particular facet. I need additional information to make that work.”

That kind of begins the trail of building information out. I know which subtopics I need to learn more about to be successful.

Conclusion

All right.

Those are some keys I found to be useful for me on

1. How to pick out a book that is of high quality
2. How to consume that book, (the easiest, lowest friction method)
3. How to retain as much information as possible
4. The importance of implementation

If you have any questions, let me know.

Otherwise, I’ll put out some recommendations for some books I found helpful, try to be clear on exactly the use case, when it’s useful in business, and who it’s a good book for.

Best of luck to you.

Have a great day.