MBA1215 Q&A Wednesday: How do you read so many books while running a business?

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Heyo. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Pump business goodness in your ears every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online and Today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode. On our Q and A Wednesday episodes, I answer a question for one of you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over@omar100mba.net Today's question is from Ellen and Ellen asks how do you read so many books while running a business? I notice that you cover a must read episode twice a month and read over 50 books a year. How do you manage to do that when you're running a business full time? Thanks. Love the show Ellen. Thanks for your question Ellen and it's a great one. I want to start off by saying that I've said this before and I'll say it a million times over. I believe books are one of the best investments ever for around $10, sometimes as little as $1 on a Kindle. You get insights, mind sh, you gain perspective and you grow as an entrepreneur for a few bucks. It is insane in my book, pun intended. But I understand it could be a challenge to read books when you've got a busy schedule. So in today's lesson I'm going to give you my strategies to reading as many books as possible. Your number might be five books a year or ten books a year. But my goal is by the end of today's episode, you're reading at least twice as many books every year. I'll show you how. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. There's just nothing like a great book that can really change the course of your career. Really of your life. As an entrepreneur, there are so many times I finished a book, and it's made such a shift in my perspective as an entrepreneur. But I must come clean. Growing up as a child, I really wasn't a huge reader. You know, I read the books I had to for school, you know, book reports and all that. And my mom would take me to the public library during summer break because, of course, the school would give us, you know, summer reading lists. But I never actually spent money on buying a book or picked up a book on my own volition. I actually became more of a reader later in life, around when I was 21. 22 is when I started to pick up the reading bug. And to be honest with you, back then, it took me a while to get through a book because I was a slow reader. I was just not in the habit of reading. And it took me like, two weeks to a month to finish a book. Now, for me, that's pretty slow. Actually. I prefer reading a book as quickly as possible. Why? Because a lot of these books have ideas that are compounded to get the best effect of a book. Whether it's a biography, autobiography, a tactical book, a business book, or even a fiction novel, it's best to read it in as much of a short amount of time as possible. Think about it. The books you remember the most are the ones that you actually finish quickly. The ones that you finish maybe when you're on vacation and you have nothing to do other than read a book on the beach or beside the pool, and you get through the book in two to three days. So in today's lesson, I'm gonna show you how to get through books as quickly as possible. You're gonna need a couple tools, tools of the trade here, but it's gonna be well worth it. The first tool is a Kindle. I highly recommend getting a Kindle. I wasn't a believer in, like, ebooks or Kindle books for a very long time. I thought, no, I prefer the paperback. I like to hold the paper in my hand. I like to flip through the pages. I'm just old school like that. And that's how I was until just one day, by chance, a buddy of mine, Jason Zook, was reading a Kindle. And it was just there on the table after he read it. And I kind of just picked it up and said, hey, can I take a look at this? And he said, yeah, sure. You know, he showed me how to power it on, and I started reading the Kindle, you know, page after page, I'll flip through the pages. And within a few minutes, I forgot I was reading on a device. I realized, wow, this is a lot more comfortable and a lot more natural than I thought. It's not an actual screen. It uses some sort of ink display. From that moment on, I was like, I need to consider this. And I'll tell you why. The Kindle is going to help you read more books faster. Number one, it's going to allow it to be convenient. And number two, it's going to kill all excuses. Okay, we have all these excuses in our head why we can't read books or we can't read every day. It's too time consuming. It's too costly. I travel a lot, so it's hard to, you know, carry books with me. I'm unable to finish books, I don't know which books to read, all that kind of stuff, right? All these excuses. And I had those excuses myself. The Kindle solves them all. Why? Number one, Kindle books are always less expensive than paperback. So you're always going to be able to get a book for less money. Sometimes it's the same price, but it's rare, so books are just flat out cheaper. So even if you buy one book a month, it's going to be the cost of maybe a sandwich or something. It's pretty ridiculous. Number two, it's super convenient. All your books are on the Kindle. I have hundreds of books on my Kindle and I still have plenty of space. So when I travel, it's so easy to just to take my Kindle. It's lightweight. You can go through security with it. You don't have to take it out like a laptop. And you have your whole library of books with you at all times. This also means it's convenient and small, and you can put it at your nightstand. You don't have to have a stack of books or go to your library or have a bookshelf or any of that kind of stuff. You can literally pick it up and read for 15 minutes every night. When you go to bed, you could do the same during breakfast. Read for 15 minutes. And if you read 30 minutes a day, 15 minutes in the morning, 15 minutes at night, you're going to get through a book every two weeks just by reading your Kindle for 30 minutes a day. That's seven hours of reading. The average book will take less time than that. And the Kindle learns what you like, what you're interested in, the genre of books that you read, and recommends new books for you. And you can see reviews and all that kind of stuff right on the Kindle. It's also really inexpensive. It's a great investment. I know you're gonna have to put some money up front. It's about $100 or even, like, less now. And there's different models of Kindles, and I think you can get one for as low as $60. But that's literally the price of around two or three hardcover books. You invest in the device and you save money in the long run because Kindle books are really cheap. And Kindles are not going anywhere. It's just really, really popular. And they're really comfortable. They don't hurt your eyes like your iPhone or your smartphone screen. And they just make reading easy. So your first tool is grab a Kindle and start reading a book on a Kindle. Choose any of the books that I have recommended on a must read episode and read for 15 minutes. 15 minutes is nothing. 15 minutes is, you know, at least the amount of time it's going to take for you to fall asleep. And then 15 minutes in the morning while you're eating breakfast, having your coffee, that's 30 minutes a day. What's great about the Kindle is that when you turn it on, it takes you right where you were in your book. You don't have to use any bookmarks or any of that kind of stuff. So use that strategy. Use a Kindle. The next strategy is going to require you to download the Audible app. Audible is the best place to get audiobooks. And I'm not just saying this because they've been a sponsor of the show in the past. I've been using Audible for years. I have an annual membership there because it's well worth it. And it's just the best way right now to listen to audiobooks. It's not perfect. I'm gonna tell you right now the Audible app has a lot of room for improvement, but it does the job. Okay. You can buy books on Amazon and then download them on your Audible app. So audiobooks are expensive. They're actually more expensive than paperback. But I have an Audible membership. I recommend you get that. I have the gold annual, which is 12 books a year. 12 credits a year for $150. Now, it's cheaper to go annual than monthly because it's $15 a month for one credit a month. So it works out that you get around 3 credits extra for your year. Now, the awesome thing is that if you don't finish the 12 credits, you don't read 12 books in a year. They roll over. They roll over to the next year. If you want to get started for free, the code that they gave us or the link they gave us is audible.com MBA you get a free book when you get started. I believe it's still valid, so you can check it out now with Audible, you can listen to hours of books. My recommendation is I would save your Audible credits for biographies, autobiographies, books that are not tactical. It's a lot easier to listen to an audiobook that tells a story, something that doesn't require you to do any kind of homework or write down things. You may want to write down some notes, but you're not going to, you know, implement any kind of strategies. These books are great for mind shifts, for perspective, for inspiration, for learning how or what it takes to become a great entrepreneur. Some of my favorite biographies is Elon Musk by Ashley Vance, Total Recall by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. The late Anthony Bourdain. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. These are all fantastic, fantastic, fantastic biographies. You can sample the book before you buy so you can hear the narrator if you like their voice and you're good to go. Now, the reason why I mention audiobooks is because audiobooks are a great way to get through books, biographies really quickly. Why? Because you don't need to be only reading. You can be listening to the book while you're working out, while you're commuting, while you're folding laundry, doing some lawn work or, you know, some gardening. And I get through a lot of books in the year because I listen to books while I'm at the gym, and I go to the gym three or four times a week. I spend an hour at the gym every time so I can get through, you know, two books or so a month. And once you get used to listening to audiobooks, you can actually speed it up a little. You can go to 1.25x or 1.5. I know people that do 2 times or 2x. I can't do it that fast. It's too fast for me. But the point is, is that you can actually get faster than you imagine. I love audiobooks so much. I actually re listen to books that I love. I'm re listening to Shoe Dog now because I loved that book. So get on Audible, you know, get some books for you to get started with. Choose some of the biographies I mentioned and listen to books while you're doing other things. Between those two audiobooks and Kindle, the Practice, the 15 Minutes in the Morning, 15 Minutes at Night. They're getting through four books a month. That's 48 books a year. Even if you do half that, you're probably way ahead of the average person. Those two strategies are really how I get through so many books every year. It's really that simple.

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To wrap up today's lesson, a word of warning. Okay. When you read many books, there is going to be the off chance that you're going to read a bad book. It just happens. And it happens to me all the time. I read maybe three or four bad books a year. Even though I do my due diligence and read the reviews, they're just bad, in my opinion. Maybe they're just not for me. Or maybe they're too beginner for me. Or maybe over my head. There's two schools of thought about finishing books. Should you finish a book that you're not enjoying or not getting anything out of? See it to the end and see what happens, or should you stop and stop wasting time? My opinion is you should read at least 20% of the book. Sometimes it takes a while for a book to kind of start its engines. I've recently read a book that was just like that, Traction. I did a must read on that. It took a while for it to kind of pick up traction, right? It took some time, but once it did, it became a page turner. So give it at least 20%. If after 20%, it's like, man, this is horrible. You know, what a horrible book. Or I'm not getting anything out of this. There's nothing wrong with dropping a book and picking up another, but at least give it 20%, and with a Kindle, it actually show you how much of the book you've read. 10%, 5%, 20%, 17%, whatever. It's just a numbers game. It's gonna happen, so just expect it. Well, Ellen, I hope that answers your question. I hope I've helped you learn how to read more books in a year. Even when you're juggling your business. The time I'm giving to reading books is really time I'm doing something else, or it's very minimal. I'm falling asleep or I'm having breakfast. But it's the consistency that's really what gets you through so many books. It's being consistent. And because you know the Kindle is so portable and you know the Audible app is on my phone, I have no excuse. Even if I'm traveling, if I'm going away, even if I'm on vacation, I can continue to read. Well, there you have it. Thanks for listening. If you have a question you want to ask on Q and A Wednesday, just email me over at Omar MBA Net. I would love to answer it right here on the show. In tomorrow's lesson, I'm going to be covering how to conduct a 15 minute post mortem. Anytime you complete a project, any significant project, whether it took you two weeks to complete with your team, or a month or a year, it's really healthy to do a postmortem to take a look at what happened and learn from the experience. We do this in our team every month. Every time we push a new update or finish a project with webinar Ninja or software, we have a 15 minute postmortem to say, hey, how did that go? What did we do right? What do we learn? I'm going to give you the formula in tomorrow's episode, so hit subscribe so you don't miss it. All right, before I go, I want to leave you with this. The reason why I shared the story at the start, which is true, I wasn't a reader growing up, is because a lot of us have this idea of ourselves. Like, I'm one thing, I'm not a reader, I don't like reading that type of thing. And we just tell ourselves this story. You could do whatever you want. You could be anything you want. You can tell yourself a different story. You can say, I haven't been a reader, but I'd like to become one and have that kind of attitude. Don't shut the door, don't close it off. You can change and that's how you grow. Alright, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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