When I take a step back from my day-to-day activity and think about what I can do to have the biggest impact on my business, I believe it all comes down to personal growth. My business will never get bigger than me. If I want my business to grow, I must grow. To work on personal growth, I intentionally spend time with people who are wiser than me, and I listen to a ton of audiobooks. I made a conscious decision back in 2015 to spend way less time listening to podcasts and way more time listening to audiobooks, and I’ve learned a lot in the process. I think I’ve grown a lot in the process, too.
But back to what moves the needle. While personal growth is important, I believe that growth for the rest of my team comes next. Part of my job as a leader is to help the people on my team become larger versions of themselves. I encourage the people on my team to read personal improvement books, and I’ve shared a lot of what I’ve learned with my team. During meetings with my company, I would frequently share my notes with my team, attempting to help everyone else in their own personal growth journeys.
At the end of last year, I decided that this wasn’t a good use of our meeting times. It was all one-way communication. If I’m simply going to share information, I can do that with a video. So I committed to recording short, hand-crafted book summaries for the people on my team at Structure Tech. Since December, I’ve recorded over 30 book summaries, and I’ve shared these all with my team. I set a goal for myself to record 40 book summaries for my team in 2021, and I’m on track to smash that number.
I shared a couple of these book summaries publicly on my Facebook page, but I have the rest of these marked as Unlisted on YouTube, which means you can’t find the video if you don’t have the link, and they don’t show up on my YouTube page. But my business coach challenged me to make these videos public, so that’s what I’m doing. If you’d like to subscribe to my book summary channel, you can do it here: https://bit.ly/reuben-corner
Also, here’s a list of the books that I’ve reviewed so far, along with links. Enjoy.
- Awaken the Giant Within
- Death by Meeting
- Deep Work
- Emotional Intelligence 2.0
- Free Range Kids
- Game Changers, Green Lights
- Game Changers, Intro (this was my first summary, much more of a conversational recording)
- Healthy Sleep
- How to Raise an Adult
- In Defense of Food
- Leading from Anywhere
- Manage Your Day to Day
- Maximum Achievement
- Multipliers
- Outwitting the Devil
- Salt Sugar Fat
- Smart but Scattered Teens
- Spy the Lie
- Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters
- Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude
- Talking to Strangers
- The Family Board Meeting
- The Four Hour Body
- The Psychology of Money
- The Slight Edge
- The Tipping Point
- The Wim Hof Method
- Tiny Habits
- Tribe of Millionaires
- Trust Me I’m Lying
- Unleash the Power Within
- Unlimited Memory
- Voice Lessons for Parents
