EP 156: Turning Books Into Real-Life Results with Nick Hutchison

Welcome to the Heart-Led Business Show, where compassion meets commerce and leaders lead with love. Join your host, Tom Jacobs, as he delves into the insightful conversations with visionary business leaders who defy the status quo, putting humanity first and profit second. From heartfelt strategies to inspiring stories, this podcast is your compass in the world of conscious capitalism. So buckle up and let your heart guide your business journey.

Ladies and gentlemen, gather around the microphone and the earbuds. Get those ready, get those warmed up because we are about to dive deep into some heart-led business talk. And we have the wonderful Nick Hutchison, who is a bestselling author, keynote speaker, and founder of Book Thinkers and the host of the number one book club, on school, and he's helping ambitious readers read less and apply more, which is what we all need. And then he turns the world's best books into real-life results. So I can't wait to have this conversation with you, Nick, and welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. I'm excited. Let's provide some value today.

Absolutely. You know, I've always struggled with reading books, not reading, but reading books on a regular basis. And so, This topic really excites me because I do like to read, but I just don't do it as much as I want to. I always have a goal of doing a book a month, but I would love to learn how to read less and apply more. So I can't wait to dive into this. But of course, the first question I always ask is, what's your definition of a heart-led business?

By positively impacting the world, And the founder is serving the person they once were. So for me, in my early 20s, I was a confused person. I was really insecure on one end of the spectrum and a little bit too arrogant and full of ego on the other end of the spectrum. That was a confusing place to be.

Yeah.

And over time, I used books to help gain more self-confidence. But also value positively impacting the world and being a little bit more empathetic and grounded. And so now I'm helping people connect to the books that can help them solve their biggest problems and build their biggest confidences. And so that's what a heart-led business is for me. It's somebody who's motivated by positively impacting the world, and they're doing that by serving the younger version of themselves.

That is the first part of that definition, like serving the younger side of yourself, which I love that because we think about the younger one of us is probably a lot of the people that we're surrounding ourselves with. So by serving the younger people who are younger version, we're serving the other folks that are around us all the time. I love that. That's beautiful.

Yeah.

I've got a mentor named Rory Vaden and Rory has a famous quote. The actual quote is, you are most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. And So when you asked me the question, that's what came to mind. It's, you know, we're all best positioned to serve the person we once were because we've overcome problems. We have value we can share with that person. And there are a lot of versions of our younger self that are out there looking to overcome the same challenges that we already have.

Yeah, 100%. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about your journey into the book club, but more importantly, like, Having that heart-led business mindset, how'd that come about?

Well, I read a statistic recently that kind of scared me, Tom. There's a researcher out of UC Irvine named Gloria Mark, and she's been studying attention span for over 20 years. And in 2004, she found that the average person would spend about 2.5 minutes on a screen before they'd move on to the next screen. Well, today, 20-ish years later, it's 47 seconds, which represents a 70% decrease in our attention span over the last 20 years. So you can only imagine where it'll be 20 years from now. And I believe that the best way to lengthen your attention span and maintain control over your own thinking is by reading a long-form physical paper book. But to your point, we all, we all have this desire to read more or to read more books at least, but it's difficult. And so I created the book club as a way for ambitious readers to be held accountable to that goal of one book a month inside of a group. And there's also a great study out of Dominican University that says simply by writing a goal down, you're 42% more likely to achieve it. And then you even double your likelihood of that if you share weekly updates with a group of people who hold you accountable to it. And so what better format to do that than a book club, right?

That is brilliant.

Yeah.

And so you advocate for the physical reading of a book, a physical book, page-turner. What about like Kindles or e-readers like that? Is that somewhat acceptable?

Yes, absolutely. Certainly better than audiobooks. And I could give you the science as to why. Yeah, well, look, I mean, depending on the person and depending on the science that you read, somewhere between 60% to 80% of the inputs to our brain at any given moment are visual. So, by default, if you're only listening to something, you're at a disadvantage. And to make it even worse, we know we don't listen to audiobooks with a notebook and a pen, right? We listen to audiobooks while we're Multitasking. We're in the car, we're at the gym, we're doing chores, we're doing busy work. So the likelihood that you form enough of an emotional connection to an audiobook input to actually internalize it or take action on it is pretty low. It happens, but for me, I still love audio as a medium for learning. I just listen to biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, or fiction books that I'm not trying to. Use, right? Or implement directly. I'm just trying to satisfy curiosity or have some fun. Now, Kindle books, to your point, I think Kindle is a great way to read. I just, I love turning the page. I've got sort of like a visual memory and I love to remember exactly on the page where something was. I love the visual reminder of the book on my shelves. And so yeah, they're a little less convenient to travel with. I typically get caught in the airport with some pretty heavy backpacks, but I just love physical books.

I think some airports have come up with the book exchange. Maybe like I've maybe heard about that. Maybe I dreamt about it, but that would make sense, right? You have the, you buy and resell and give away a book.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So you're not weighted down. Yeah. That's cool.

No, it's true.

Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of people are visual learners. I know I am. And so when listening to a book, Usually like exercising or driving or something like that. I will have to rewind a couple times and just, and, and, you know, you're listening at 2x usually, like, so it's like, so of course you're not capturing everything, but yeah, I like to go back. Yeah.

Look, they are more convenient, certainly. So I can appreciate that. And I do believe that listening to a great prescriptive audiobook, even though the chances that you're going to implement it are pretty low, I think it's better for you as a human being than just listening to the same song or radio station for the 10,000th time in a row, right? If your goal is to make change, solve problems, build skills, satisfy curiosities. But the best version of the reading experience, in my opinion, is monotasking, focusing on one thing at the exclusion of everything else. And if you can layer those inputs together by reading a physical book and having the audiobook playing in the background at 2x speed, by the way, so it keeps you inside of the book and it's not going so slow that you deviate and you lose your attention. I think that's a great multisensory experience. You've got the touch of the tactile book, you're flipping pages, you're reading and leveraging the visual input. You have the auditory. experience. Maybe you burn a candle or something to get smell in there. You probably won't taste your book, but that's okay. Maybe you have coffee. And so you get fully immersed inside of the experience and you have a better chance of internalizing what you've read.

Yeah. Well, you know, there is a certain scent that books have that is just so memorable. You walk into a library, every library has that same kind of paper smell to it, which is, I actually enjoy that.

Me too.

I do too.

A book.

Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know about tasting fiber in it if you're eating the pages of your books.

I have, I think one time on video a few years ago for a social media clip, I maybe ripped a page out of a book with my teeth or something, but I don't think I swallowed it. Awesome.

So tell me, how did you get into, or what's your journey In terms of getting into having the book club and doing what you're doing today?

Well, when I was growing up, I was not much of a reader, Tom. I was more of the athlete stereotype, not really much of the academic. I was always capable of doing the work. For example, I took AP Calculus in high school, but I had a 0% homework average and still passed the class, right? I was one of those kids. Who didn't think reading or applying themselves was necessarily cool. And so I focused more on sports. I played football, I wrestled, and that behavior, that kind of attitude stayed with me into my college experience as well. But everything changed when I took an internship going into my senior year of college at a local software company. It was a sales internship, and my boss at the time, Kyle, would bring me on these local sales trips. And he would play podcasts where successful people would be interviewed and they would share how they became successful. And I was fascinated by this. I'm a 3rd year going into 4th year business student, and no one told me that the world's most successful people were giving all their secrets away for free on podcasts. And so that summer, as I commuted to and from the internship, I started to listen to podcasts on my own. And over the first couple of weeks, I recognized that so many of these successful people were giving at least some credit for their success to the books that they had read. And I started to hear the same books talked about, personal development classics like Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. And I realized that if I was going to live up to my potential, I had to shift from a non-reader to a reader. And so I went to my local Barnes& Noble. I went to the nonfiction business and personal development section. I grabbed 10 books, which was a lot of money for me to spend at the time as a broke college student. I went back to the office and every day as I wrapped up lunch or as I wrapped up my workday, I would read. And I really became passionate about these books almost overnight. Because I started to solve problems, build skills, satisfy curiosities, leverage the decades of life experiences that these authors were condensing into days of reading. And the long story short here is that I started sharing the books I was reading on social media just because I was passionate about them. I built an audience of readers over time because I had access to so many readers. I had authors knocking on my door asking if I could help promote and market their books. So today, Book Thinkers, my marketing agency, I actually have 20 people working there helping hundreds of authors a year promote and market their books. But now I'm getting back to my roots, which is serving readers, helping readers get connected to the right books and helping them implement those books, which is why I started the book club, you know, almost 10 years after my reading journey started.

Oh, wow. Awesome. And so, Talk to me about the business then that you're in and what's making that heart-led.

Yeah, well, I mean, it's kind of connected back to the first answer. I was a young 20-year-old kid full of insecurities and arrogance, and I was looking for a better life. I was looking for more certainty and self-assurance and confidence and a way to serve. And I found that by reading and implementing books. By getting connected to these authors who are just trying to make the world a better place by sharing their greatest life lessons and trying to make a positive impact. And so books changed my life. They really did. They've made me healthier, happier. They've made me wealthier. They've made me more spiritually connected. I have better relationships now. I'm positively impacting the world. And so I realized that I could do that in a one-on-one situation by recommending a book or I could do it at scale by helping authors more effectively reach the people that they are best positioned to serve. So when I say that we serve hundreds of authors a year, we serve hundreds of nonfiction business and personal development authors that are just trying to make the world a better place. And writing a book is not the same skillset as marketing a book. A lot of people love writing, they love impact, but they don't love the promotion and marketing. So we help scale their impact. We help scale their reach. That's how it's heart-led. It's because I know that there's somebody out there that could use that book, but they're currently unaware of it because the author is too insecure to post on social media, or they don't understand the technology, or they're not well connected enough to make it happen. And so Book Thinkers as a business, as an agency, My team will help step in and help them build better content, get connected to the right resources, influencers, podcasters, et cetera. And so all of these, you know, I think about people as, or readers as people with problems. And I think about authors as people with solutions and we're just helping connect them at scale. Even though our fingerprints are one or two steps back in the process, like it's not obvious that an author was on a podcast or that their social media content was created because of Book Thinkers, but we know that it's happening behind the scenes.

Oh, that's really, that's fascinating that taking a, I'll call it a hobby, you know, of learning to read or not learning to read, but reading more books and getting in, you know, deep into the personal development piece and then building a business off of that. I love when people do that, when founders like, find the solution within themselves and then take that out to the world. That's, that's very, very cool.

Yeah, it all happened by accident, uh, which is the best part.

Exactly. I think the best businesses happen by accident because they're not manufactured, but it's kind of organic and it just happens and it's what people want.

I think you're right. I think one of the biggest differentiators between the agency that I have today And so many of the other businesses that we either partner with, compete with, just kind of run into in different ways is that we didn't look at the author landscape and say, there's a lot of money to be made here. Like, I didn't understand the author landscape at all when I started sharing the books I was reading on social media. I never thought much about the author. I was only focused on the reader. And it was only over time through inbound requests. with authors asking if I could help them, that I started to understand that industry. And so you're right, like, you know, I came from the reader side. I came from the people that we're trying to impact. And you're right, I think that's made a big difference.

So in building the business, and as we all know, building businesses is difficult to say the least. And building a heart-led business, I think, has its own unique challenges as well. What have you found to be probably the biggest challenge that you've had to overcome having a heart-led business versus one that's just focused on making as much money as possible?

That's a great question. One of our core values as a business is Unreasonable Hospitality, which is also the title of a book by Will Goddard. It's an amazing book. All of our core values as a business are actually book titles, which is kind of fun and unique. And unreasonable hospitality, at least in my definition, is always doing the right thing, trying to go above and beyond for our clients in every situation. And so a couple of our services, Tom, behind the scenes, they have a minimum 3-month commitment because it takes a few months for our services to actually start to see an ROI.

Right.

And so we know that when people hang around for a few months at a minimum, they start to see the impact of the work that we're doing, and therefore they'll stick around longer. So it helps us as a business, but it also helps them see what we're trying to do. Every once in a while, there will be a customer of ours that has a change in their financial situation. Maybe business isn't going super well. Maybe, uh, something's, something's happened in their health or whatever that kind of inhibits their work. We're the type of business that says, hey, although you signed a minimum 3-month agreement and you're only 2 weeks into the contract, we understand life happens. Of course, we'll let you out of it. We never want you to have to spend your last dollar or think about us as an inconvenience. And I know a lot of people in the business space that would hold their customers to those contracts. We're not like that. We don't want to be like that. And there are many other situations, but because you asked about kind of making the most money versus being heart-led business, like that's a very clear example of we will sacrifice money to make sure that we're doing right by our customers.

Yeah, I love that. And that's, to me, that gets to the heart of having a heart-led business. And it also brings up a challenge as well in terms of how do you balance that then with obviously, you know, 20 staff members, they probably like to get paid at some point. So how do you balance then, some of these issues that come up while still knowing that you need to make a profit, you need to pay employees, you need to get paid yourself, pay off investors, all that?

Yeah, that's a great question. Thankfully, we've never taken an outside investment, so that relieves a little bit of the stress. But you're right. I mean, on a biweekly basis when you've got to pay 20 people and you know they're using that money for their families and paying off their own debts and living their own lives, it's It's a certain weight. I'll say that we, as a business, as a business owner, I've always loved the idea that no matter how many times you've read Aesop's fable, The Tortoise and the Hare, the tortoise always wins. So slow and steady, never getting overextended, making sure that when we bring somebody on, there's already kind of plenty of business, plenty of opportunity for them, plenty of margin. So that we are not getting overextended. And so I'm grateful to say, and again, it's not because of anything special, it's really just because of patience that since 2017, when we legally registered the business, and then really in 2021, when we started adding staff, we've never had a situation where we can't make a payment or we have to ask a team member to go without the money that we owe them. So I think it's just slow and steady, never growing too fast, never compromising our values, always making sure that we're operating with our team and our customers in mind when we, you know, when we make a staffing decision.

Yeah, that's great. And I had a mentor once tell me that the first day that you can't make payroll is the first day that you're going out of business.

Oof.

Which is it? Yeah.

I mean, I think that's true.

Yeah.

It's a correlation there, I'm sure. Yeah. So we talked about challenges. How about good things that have happened from being heart-led versus just being profit-driven?

I've got a crazy story. And oftentimes when I tell this, people say, no way that really happened like you tell it, but it did. So a few years ago, 2023, I was on my honeymoon. We were traveling throughout Europe, my new wife and me, and we were in this tiny little city outside of Dubrovnik, Croatia. When I say tiny little city, Dubrovnik is actually a tiny little city. It only has a population of 42,000 people. So the little village that we were at probably had a population of 500 people. And we had just arrived at our hotel. We put our bags down, we went to the hotel buffet, and we had a pretty Poor food experience. Now, I'm on my honeymoon. I'm trying to impress my wife. She loves food. I was too tired to go out, so we opted for this hotel buffet. It did not please. And so after the buffet experience, we went out to hunt for a restaurant to eat at the following night. Well, after about half an hour of walking into this little village, we come across this beautiful restaurant that sits up against the sea. I'm talking glowing lights, clinking wine glasses. Every table's full. The servers are flying around with great looking food. Like, this is the spot. My wife says, I want to eat here tomorrow night. But we look at the host stand and there's a line of about 20 people and they look like they've been there for a little while. So instead of waiting, we continue to wander around. Maybe we find another spot, maybe we find a bar, have a drink, come back a little bit later, make a reservation. And so we go off, we find a really cool bar, we sit down, we get lost in conversation. We're talking about our future together and we have another drink. We talk about the beauty of Croatia. We have another drink. We talk about our last stop. We have another drink. And all of a sudden we realize a few hours have gone by. So I call the server over. I hustle to sign the bill. I leave a big tip, right? Trying to give the universe some positive karma. Like, I hope this other restaurant is still open. We run back through the cobblestone streets. My wife's in heels, so that was funny. And we get back to this restaurant, but unfortunately it was closed. I mean, the chairs were up on the tables, the lights were off, there's nobody there. And I was kind of faced with this situation trying to impress my wife who was unimpressed with my food choices so far. And I come up with a brilliant idea because remember I told you I had had a couple of drinks.

Yeah.

I come up with a brilliant idea because of that liquid confidence that I'm going to break into this restaurant and I'm going to write my name on the guest list for tomorrow night. Because if our name is on the list, if our name's on the list and we show up, they have to let us sit. Right. So I was kind of hoping that the door wouldn't actually be open, Tom. So I go up to the door and I grab the handle and I give it a little push and it opens. And so now I'm faced with, do I go inside? Do I run away? Like, what's going to happen? What if I get in trouble? But anyway, I go inside of the restaurant and I step into the light and immediately there's a guy about 20 or 30 feet back putting away silverware and we just lock eyes. And I'm just, you know, fight, flight, or freeze. I just freeze. Like, I don't know. I don't know. I'm just standing there looking at him imagining maybe he'll disappear or he won't see me or something, but we're directly making eye contact. And he starts to say something, and I think he's about to yell at me in a language I don't understand or call the police. But instead he says, hey, I know you. Now, again, I'm kind of buzzed. Does he really know who I am? We're in the middle of this little village on the other side of the planet. And so I'm like, does he think I'm Tom Cruise or something? And he says, you're Nick from Book Thinkers.

What?

And I get Goosebumps every time I think about this story, and I had the weirdest response. I said, "How do you know that? Prove it." And he said, "He said, 'Dude, I've been listening to your podcast and following your book recommendations on social media for years.' And immediately I'm just like, 'Oh my goodness! I mean, what are the chances of this?' Come to find out his name is Tony. He's working summers in Dubrovnik to help pay for a side hustle that he's planning to start because of the books that he's read. But he's from a neighboring country and, but there's not a lot of work opportunity where he's from. So he goes to Croatia and, uh, and he, he starts to tell me about all of these really intimate details, things that he's learned, book recommendations that he's had. I mean, he even references things that I've, I had only posted on Instagram stories from years prior, like collaborating with authors and stuff. So he's a, he's a real fan.

Wow.

And he tells me about the books that he's read and how they've changed his mindset and everything like that. And I'm just in awe. And so is my wife, Rachel, because I had told her about a couple of things like this that had happened in the past, but nothing to this level. And so, you know, it really warmed my heart in a lot of ways because at that moment in time, I was wondering, like, I'm getting all these social media impressions and followers, but am I actually making a difference? And here I meet this kid on the other side of the planet who never, by the way, had liked a post, commented on a post, sent me a message. I had no idea the impact I was having until I broke into his restaurant in Dubrovnik, Croatia. And to kind of put a pin on that story, since I know I've been talking for a few minutes, he says, unfortunately, we're all booked for tomorrow night, but let me reach out to my boss and see what I can do. And he made a table available. We go back the next night, we have the greatest restaurant experience ever. I mean, they bring over great appetizers and entrees, fresh fish and wine and desserts. And then at the end of the night, I mean, we meet the whole staff. At the end of the night, Tony, who's just a busboy at this restaurant, by the way, he pays for our whole meal, which—

What?

Understanding his situation is, is one of the most humbling things somebody's ever done for us. And he handed me a letter, a handwritten letter in an envelope, and he said, don't open this until you leave Croatia. And he said, I'm a little nervous about what I wrote. I kind of poured my heart onto the page. Don't open it until then. And so we're on the plane leaving Dubrovnik a few days later onto the next stop, and I open up the letter and it's 5 pages of handwritten, basically testimony for why I should continue creating content and the impact that I've had on this guy's life. And so I went home and I, you know, after our whole honeymoon trip, and I thought, how could I deliver value back to him? I mean, the letter that he wrote will keep me going for the next decade, right? That's how much impact it's had on me.

Yeah.

How can I have more impact on him? And then I remembered he said his favorite book of all time was The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco. I happen to know MJ, so I reached out to MJ. I told him the story. He signed a couple of books. I shipped them all the way back to Tony's home country, to his parents' house. And when he was wrapping up that trip or his summer work in Dubrovnik and he went home, he got those books and he just, again, he was so happy. He sent me a great message. So, that's a heart-led story in a lot of ways, obviously, but it's kept me going. For the last few years in a big way.

That is an amazing— I'm getting goosebumps just hearing that story. That is amazing. And just a really great testament to, you know, for podcasters and for authors and for influencers that you don't know always what the influence it is that you're having on other people because not everybody does the post, the like, and the comments. And it's always nice to hear that. That's That's very cool.

Yeah. Feedback. I mean, you're right. Impact is only felt through feedback. And so here's a fun message for your audience, Tom. If anybody's still listening to this crazy conversation, reach out to Tom, let him know what you think about the podcast, how it's impacted you, because you're right. As a creator, sometimes you feel like you're pushing out value into the void, into the vacuum. You're not really sure. if anything's really landing or coming back. And you only get to know that through this tiny little 1% of people that decide to review the podcast, write you a note, send you a message on LinkedIn or something like that. And so that's a little call to action for the audience. Reach out to Tom, let him know what you think of the show.

Awesome. I appreciate that. And I can't believe our time has gone quickly today as well, but tell us, how can people learn more about the book club and, and you in general.

Well, Tom, I'd love for you to put a link in the show notes below for people to learn a little bit more about the book club. You can go to skool.com and just search Book Thinkers in the little search bar. You can find our book club. You can join it each month. We are reviewing one book together as a group through weekly calls and leveraging my reading and implementation structure. And then we're actually inviting the authors in to do a live Q&A. So the month that we're recording this, September, we have Jim Kwik, who's the author of a new book called Limitless Daily. Next month, we have Vanessa Van Edwards, who has her newest book, Conversation. In November, we have Robert Greene, who's launching his newest book, The Law of the Sublime. And so we have these amazing celebrity influencers, thought leaders coming in and having private fireside chats with our community. And, uh, we're just, we're having such a fun time.

Oh, that's amazing. Very cool. And then if there are authors that are listening, and I know there probably are, how can they learn a little bit about the agency and promoting their own book with your help?

The best place to go is bookthinkers.com, spelled just like it sounds. And we have information and testimonials and case studies about everything that we do. And there's a little book a call button so you can meet with our team and Tell them a little bit about your situation and see if one of our services might help you out.

Awesome. Well, cool. Well, I encourage everybody to do that. So, Nick, thank you so much for sharing your stories today, sharing your wisdom of your heart-led business. I really appreciate it. It was absolutely fascinating for me as well. I love that story of how do you?

Dubrovnik.

Dubrovnik. The story in Dubrovnik.

Yeah.

I will be going there and messing up the name of their city all the times.

And hey, for any Game of Thrones fans, Dubrovnik is actually the site that they filmed a lot of stuff. So it's really cool through that lens as well.

And I've heard Croatia is just absolutely beautiful as well to visit.

Yeah, well, that's sort of Italy and Greece, but for half the cost. So I recommend it.

And half the people too, right? I'm sure.

Yeah.

Well, awesome. Nick, again, thank you so much for spending your time with us today. I really appreciate you.

Yeah, I had a great time. Thank you, Tom.

You're very welcome. And thank you listeners for tuning in today, wherever you might be tuning in, whether that's YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. We really do appreciate it. And check out all that Nick is doing down in the show notes. So make sure you're checking that out. And while you're down there, if you don't mind sending me a comment or maybe even a review of the show, It just helps spread the word about the Heart-Led Business Show and helps those that might be struggling with their business, wanting to know, should I make a profit or should I be heart-led? And let them know that they can do both. And until next time, lead with your heart.

You've been listening to the Heart-Led Business Show hosted by Tom Jacobs. Join us next time for another inspiring journey into the heart of business.