MBA1757 My Favorite Tools For Professional Development + Free Ride Friday

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Perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium support, and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster, and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey O welcome to the $100 MBA show. Because entrepreneurship is a lifelong journey, that's why we deliver 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 Webinar Ninja, a software company that I started back in 2014 with my business partner. And today is Free Ride Friday. On Freeride Friday, we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away easy course, our $500 course on how to build your own online course over at easycourse Co. If you want to win it, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review. That way you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday to see if you want it's that easy. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on Apple Podcasts. In today's lesson, you will learn my favorite tools for professional development. These are tools, strategies, things, things that you can leverage to maximize your improvement. There's a lot of things you can do to get better as a business person, as a thinker, as a leader. But I've boiled down the three top things you can do to get better, and I guarantee you some of these are gonna surprise you. But I've tried a lot of things. I'm a personal and professional development junkie. Okay. And what I found is that if you stick to these three things, you're gonna find maximum results and you're gonna find yourself getting better as a leader, getting better as an entrepreneur, making better decisions, hiring better people, getting clearer about what you need and want out of your business, and just simply getting better at business. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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So my three top professional development tools strategies hacks the first one may surprise you and I think it's probably the most useful and most underrated use of your time. And that's thinking time. What's thinking time? Well, I actually learned this from Bill Gates. I read that he actually spends a few days every few months, he calls them thinking days. He just spends two, three days doing nothing but thinking. This is not meditation. This is not, you know, some sort of silent retreat. This is a chance for your brain to process everything going on in your life. All the ideas getting thrown at you, all the things you've been thinking about before sleep, after sleep, during lunch, all the ideas you have for your business, for options, for features, for packages. We are overwhelmed all day long and we do not get a chance to process these ideas and allow our brains to solidify them and come up with solutions. So I love this idea of thinking days. Now you may not be able to do a few thinking days every few months, but I do recommend that you do have some thinking time now. One of the best ways I like to do my thinking time a walk. I like to go for a walk, even if it means just going for a 30 minute walk once a week. For me, I found that 30 minutes is the minimum. My kind of optimum amount of time is about 45 minutes to 50 minutes. I find that sometimes it just takes about 15 to 20 minutes just to process the fact. I'm giving myself a chance to think and just to let all my crazy busy mind ideas get out of the way. And then I start to process and think about the things I've been wanting to think about and it's just literally me walking and thinking. There's nothing in my ears. I'm not listening to a podcast. I'm not listening to songs. I'm not talking to anybody. I am literally just in my head. And this is very important for you to get comfortable with. Some people are like, oh, I get nervous. I need to do something. No, you don't. You have to allow time for your brain to process and to solve problems and come up with great ideas. I'm sure in your business, your team members throw ideas your way all the time. You get ideas by looking at things on social media. You read a book, inspired you with a few ideas, and you haven't really get a chance to flesh out those ideas. They're just really in their infancy. They haven't really been developed. And these walks, these thinking minutes allow you to do that now, in addition to once a week of about 30 minutes to an hour of going on these walks. And you can do more than once a week. I do recommend you going on some sort of sabbatical where you just have a couple days to think. Even if you just do this once a year, I would recommend if you could do it more a couple times a year, maybe even once a quarter. And with thinking days, you don't need to do nothing at all for a couple days, but you could do something that's outside of your normal routine. And this could be. You can be going skiing, where you're just consumed with the skiing and allows you just to be in your thoughts and not be consumed with conversation or doing other things. You could be going on a bike ride. You could be going camping. You could be going fishing. The point here is that you'll notice that I'm trying to step away from technology. I want to get away from my phone and get away from the simulation. I want to just be in my thoughts, give myself a chance to just think about what's going on in my life, what's going on in my business, what are some things I can improve? What are the things I want to do to move my business in the right direction? Am I happy with the direction it's moving in? Thinking time is incredibly important, and it's going to help you as an entrepreneur and your business in a huge way. Allow yourself to think. Your decisions have so much weight as the leader of the company. Okay. Your decisions have so much influence in the way things were going to pan out. So you need to make sure your mind is right, that the tool your brain that you use to make decisions is in the right state of mind. And if you don't do this, if you don't spend time to think and process ideas, you're leaving money on the table. You're leaving precious opportunities on the table because you're just rushing through decisions, you're rushing through your business. Give yourself time to think. I think this is one of the best things I've ever implemented and I highly recommend it as well. The next tool I think is super underrated in terms of professional development, even personal development is books. There are so many different things you can do to learn. You can watch YouTube videos, you can take online courses, you can take in person courses, you can have a coach. All this stuff is great. I really do believe that there's value in all these things. But for best bang for your buck, for best impact, for most value for your dollar, there's nothing that can really beat a book. I just haven't seen it. Books can cost as little as a dollar on Kindle and it can even be free if you are subscribed to Kindle Unlimited. And you can just read as many books as you want. That's from that library. Or you can buy a book for like five or $10, $20, $30. Oh my God, this is an expensive book. It's still incredible value. There's so much you can learn from a book. If somebody tells you to read a book, they recommend a book to you. Don't hesitate. Like my friend Ramit Sethi says, just buy it. You'll rarely regret buying a book. For those who know me, I read a lot of books. I read a little over 50 books a year. Some are fantastic. They're game changers, some are not. But that's okay. Even if the book is not game changing. I'll always learn a few things out of that book. I'll read the whole book. I'll learn two or three things and it's still well worth it. Reading a book doesn't take too long. It's a great chance to take a break from technology. Even if you're reading on her Kindle. A Kindle is very gentle on your eyes and is distraction free. It's away from your phone. I also find that books can be an inspiration and it can be instruction at the same time. Sometimes you just need to be inspired. You need to be pushed. I really think that's what a great book can do. There are so many skills I picked up from reading books. I learned how to code from reading4dummies book. Like I mentioned in yesterday's Episode I learned SEO through reading books. I probably learned most of what I know about SEO from one or two books, but books are really good as well as giving you perspective. Reading biographies, reading case study type books like the Blue Ocean Strategy is a great case study type of book where they teach you a concept through a bunch of case studies where you get a glimpse of how other businesses operate widens your perspective. I can't emphasize how impactful books have been in my journey. Nothing really beats it in terms of content, in terms of bang for your buck. Lastly, my third tool, Hack for professional development podcasts and specifically Certainty Some podcasts. Now I love my podcast of course. I think these lessons are perfect for you to get started with your day. Get a little something so you can move on and implement in your business and improve every single day. I am a big fan of my own podcasts, but I want to talk specifically about other types of podcasts that I really think can really help you. Especially podcasts that have founder stories. Podcasts like Finding founders, podcasts like How I Built this. These types of podcasts give you a quick, fast forward glimpse of the journey of entrepreneurs. It will detail some of the struggles, it will detail some of the wins. It will detail the decisions they made that made all the difference. And not only will you learn what works, but you'll also learn what doesn't work. You'll also learn from their own stories. The struggles and challenges are just par for the course. That's part of being an entrepreneur. You'll really resonate with that. You'll start to feel like, okay, I'm not, you know, damaged goods or I am not alone here. People also experience that that are highly successful. You'll also learn how to pivot with the market. Many founder stories, you'll learn that they change their business to be able to cater to their audience and cater to the current market changes. And I'm a big believer that the best way to learn is in context, through a story, through an example, a real life example. So devour these founder stories as much as possible. And I find that listening to podcasts that have founder stories are the easiest ways to do it. Because you can be, you know, commuting, you can be in the gym. You can be doing other things while you're listening to it.

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To wrap up today's lesson? My three Dynamite tools Hack for Professional Development Number one Thinking Time and Thinking Days. Do it okay. Make the time, put it in your schedule and try it out. It may feel a little uncomfortable in the beginning, you're not used to it. But force yourself to be not distracted by technology, just you and your thoughts. Go for a walk, take some fresh air in and then graduate to, you guessed it, thinking days. And you can do some immersion activities to allow yourself to kind of let your mind wander. Number two Books. I'm astonished at how much value you get from a book. Every time I read a book, even if it's not fantastic, like I said, I still get more than I bargained for, more than I paid for. Great value. And number three Founder Story Podcasts Success leaves clues. So go ahead and listen to successful stories. And also in those stories you'll find not so successful stories. You'll find that they didn't always succeed and they made mistakes. And it's great to learn from mistakes. Thanks so much for listening to the 100 OMBIE Show. Today is Free Ride Friday. So let's see who won this week's Free ride. And the winner is. Sharpman1. Sharpman1 says just write five stars. They give just the right amount of information to comprehend and implement on a daily basis. Sharpman1, you are a Free Ride Friday winner. Thank you for dropping us an Apple Podcast rating and review. Your mission is to email me at omar00mba.net so I can hook you up with the free ride to EZcourse, our $500 course over at EasyCourse Co so you can build your own online course. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. It's that simple. Thank you in advance for doing that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. You'll notice that the three things I mentioned are inexpensive if not free, like podcasts. They're simple. They're not complicated to implement. You can do it right away without any learning curve. And three it's approachable. Anybody anywhere around the world can pick this up. Even if you're on a budget. You can go to the local library and take out. Books cost nothing to go for a walk. And when things are simple and easy and straightforward, you can do them consistently. That's why I love them. I can do these things over and over and reap the benefits. They're not complicated. There's no learning curve. There's no hoops to jump through. The simple things are the most effective. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care of. Gas, snacks, tolls. This trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

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