5 of My Favorite Books

All right. Hello, hello, hello. Ramit Sethi here. And on tonight's Fireside Chat, we are going to talk about five of my favorite books. Now, if you're curious about what books I like, you can Google Ramit favorite books. And I think we have several articles out there about 50 of my favorite books and 25 of my favorite marketing books. But tonight I thought I would talk about a few different books that I don't think I've publicly mentioned. And I'm going to mention these books. I'm going to tell you a little bit about why I love them and why they have influenced me. And if you've got questions on Instagram, we've got a question mark box at the center bottom or bottom right of your screen. I'm going to ask you to write your concise questions there so that I can answer them after I go through these five books. So again, if you've got questions, type your concise questions. I really don't need your life history and how you were born under a coconut tree. Leave it for another time. In fact, send it straight to Nobody will ever read this@iwillteachytoberich.com Go ahead and send me your life bio there. But for tonight, if you've got a question bottom right, little question box, type it in there. All right, so, oh, and let's make sure we're all, since we're all in this together, let's get our nightly ritual of our hand sanitizer. Thank you very much, Cass, for the diligent reminder.

No problem.

Okay. My first book that I would like to talk about tonight is a book called Creating Magic by Lee Cockrell. Lee Cockrell was a senior executive at Disney for decades. I really like him. I really like him. I'm a fan of Disney as a company and I really like Lee as a leader. And what he talks about is what it takes to be a leader and what it takes to create magic at a company like Disney. Multi billion dollar company. Now, some of you may know how big of a fan I am of Disney that I actually went to the Disney Institute and I took one of their courses. Their courses was on creating values in your company. I had had my eye on that course for years, maybe 10 years. And my business was finally at the scale and the management needs that I decided, you know what? I'm gonna do it. And the funniest thing about this course was it's Disney. So they don't care to convince you. They're like, we're Disney. You're Gonna come one way or another. They have a description that's maybe two paragraphs. The price is somewhere. I didn't even know what the price was. I didn't care what the price was. I. I just sent it to my assistant. I said, let me do this. And so a few weeks later, I found myself in Orlando for an absolutely incredible course that I took with them. So Creating Magic talks about what it takes to create magic as a leader with a massive organization, and also what it takes one on one, to create magic. So you can have a massive organization of thousands of people in it, like Lee did, or you can have simply your customers, you can have maybe even your partner. And some of the strategies and tactics that he talks about are really simple. He's a real folksy guy. He's like, look, this is what I did. He's like, every Friday I would send out a newsletter and I would sit there in my, whatever Word publishing desktop publishing app, and I would put the graphics in and I would share stories about each of our people. Okay. He was sitting there on Friday afternoons writing this newsletter to go out to like 5,000 people. Now a senior executive could be doing lots of other things, but he chose to do that. And the more I've become a leader, the more I have seen that simply being there, walking your company, whether it's virtual or not, and telling your people that you appreciate them and being specific, it makes more of a difference than any compensation you can do, than any cool whiz bang feature you can add. So this is true in business and in life. And I'm a big fan of Creating Magic and actually all of Lee Cockrell's books. Huge fan. Okay, Another one. This is an unusual book called the Geography of Madness by Frank Burress. This is a very provocative book. And this book state. This book starts off by talking about there's a disease called penis loss. It's like losing your penis or penis destruction. It's something like that. And what happened was in certain African countries, men would suddenly feel that their penis was gone, it had vanished. And you might be sitting here saying, hahaha, that's. That's so rudimentary. That's so we would never do that in our advanced culture. And yet we have diseases in America that are dramatically less prevalent than in other countries. We have things here that other countries are not afflicted by. Why is that? If there's one thing in America that is controversial, it is to tell you you might actually not be afflicted by the thing you are incredibly Controversial and provocative. So I made the case to my book club that we should read this book because it tells you that or raises the idea that perhaps some of the things we thought are facts might be stories, they might be cultural, There might be a variety of other reasons. And you can imagine that if you are hearing me right now and saying, if you're feeling resistance to this idea, then I think this book might actually be perfect for you because it challenges a lot of preconceived notions. We have my book club. I told them, trust me on this one. It's unusual, but I think you will love it. And most of them did. They were really happy that we read it. So the Geography of Madness really forced me to think bigger. And originally it was based on an Atlantic Monthly article that I read that absolutely blew my mind. So that's where you can get a taste of that. By the way, how often do we actually encounter an idea that challenges our very beliefs? Right? We take so many, I call them invisible scripts. We think education is always better. Buying a house is better than renting and all. And on. On these, we must have kids. 2.5 kids and a white picket fence and all this stuff. What are some of the invisible scripts that you have in your life? And what are some of the invisible scripts that you have changed in the last 10 years? Think about that. If the answer is none, then you might be. You might not be exposing yourself to enough new ideas. Some of my invisible scripts that I changed were the common one. I used to be a skinny Indian guy. I thought that was just genetics. I changed that. I learned it was not. It was a story I was telling myself. I learned that I used to think eating only based on taste. I choose what I want to eat by what do I feel like today? And now I have an entirely new lens on how I choose what I eat. So those are just two examples from fitness and food. But of course, in business, in relationships, you'll often see this with guys in New York City who are single and they describe themselves as the like the single bachelor. And then when they are thinking about getting in a relationship, it really challenges their self concept. So these are some questions about invisible scripts, which you can also google and see some of the stuff I've written on. Okay, I've got three more that are more related to business. So I'm going to move through these ones quickly. And again, if you've got questions, how do you read books? How do you find books? Whatever your questions may be, post them in that question box. Reader and also a writer. I love talking about books. I just love it. The third one is a book called the Trusted Advisor by David Meister and Charles Green. Now, I happen to know Charles. He's an amazing guy. I interviewed him for one of my prior programs. The Trusted Advisor shows you what it looks like to be a leader where you are not just trying to sell people something to make a buck, but actually trying to be their trusted advisor. And when you think about trusted advisors in the past, what do you think about maybe a family attorney that's been with you for generations? If you live, for example, in India, maybe you think about a jeweler. They've been with you for generations. Who would your trusted advisor be? This is what this book talks about and how you can do that and build a much deeper relationship. And if you've been keeping an eye on what I do in my business, I hope you see that I'm not simply here to make a profit. Although that is the point. That is one of the points of business. But it is also to become a trusted advisor. And sometimes I have to forego profit in order to become more trusted with you. But I do believe that over the long term, it's a win win for both of us. Okay, I've got one introductory business book and one advanced business book. Which one should I do first? Let's go to the Cas. What do you say?

Introductory?

Introductory first. I love this book. Actually, everybody who reads this book loves this book. It's called it's yous Ship by Captain Michael Abrashoff. This is an awesome book. It doesn't matter if you run a business or not. We read this book in our company book club when we had one years ago. And this is a Navy captain who comes into one of the most highly regulated industries you could possibly be in. And he comes onto one of the lowest performing ships in the Navy and he turns it around like magic. How does he do it? How? In the Navy, where everyone follows a protocol, they ask their boss what to do. He changes the entire culture from the bottom up so that everyone knows it's your ship. And changing that culture is incredibly hard. We've had to do some cultural changes at IWT over the years as we've grown. Culture is hard. You know what they say in business? Culture eats strategy for breakfast. You can have the coolest strategy, coolest brochure and graphics, but it's the culture of your team. Are they go getters? Do they understand risk? Do they feel empowered? Are they compensated correctly? Do they Feel trusted. That is really hard to change. I love this book. I think it's as applicable to a business as to a family. And so if you find yourself constantly having to nag your partner or convince somebody, you know, put the towel in the hamper or like, you know, close the toilet seat, whatever, this book might help you rethink the way you approach those conversations. Okay, finally. And then we will do questions. This is a little bit more of an advanced book. The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. This book is well known in Silicon Valley. Ben was a. An operator. He was a CEO and then he became a venture capitalist. And he basically talks about how his business went through a massive upheaval, massive, like massive recession overnight, and they were about to go out of business. And he talks about what it took to turn that around. And this is what you do when your back is against a wall. He talks about what is it like to be a wartime CEO? Super different than a peacetime CEO. So for any business owners, you can read this book. And while you probably are not making billion dollar decisions like Ben was, the idea that I've been talking about in the last few fireside chats of move, accept reality and make a plan. That is the key to this book. So one way or another, you need to move. Otherwise it's over. Being stagnant is death, especially when things are hard. So those are my five books that I really enjoyed. Now let's do some questions. What do we have?

All right, the first is, do you prefer physical audiobooks or ebooks?

I prefer physical, but I read most of my books on Kindle. I prefer the tactile experience. I love writing notes in them. In my opinion, books are meant to be written in. So one of my favorite things is to see an old version or old copy of my book with tons of notes and pages ripped out. And I want it to be used. It's not meant there to be a piece of art. It's meant to be used. Unfortunately, living in New York, I've had to compromise on space. But my dream, which I will eventually get, is a massive library. Just a massive, beautiful bookshelf. Bookshelf porn is a thing. There are places online you can find it. And I subscribe to all of those sites and all those subreddits. And I will have my library one day and I will get all of my books in physical versions.

All right, next question. Do you read fiction?

Good. I get this question a lot. Like most of my friends, I rarely do. I do sometimes Some of my. I do. And I love, like, one of my favorite books is a book called Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld, which is a book about a fiction book about a young high school prep school, all right. And this Midwest student who goes to this upper elite east coast school. And I just thought Curtis really nailed exactly what a high school kid would be doing, especially out of her element. But I rarely do. I really don't. I would say it's maybe 5% of the books I read. And I don't know why, but I know that a lot of my friends who are in business, we all kind of do that, too. So maybe we have a lack of creativity, I don't know. But it's a very small amount that I read.

All right, book you're looking forward to this year?

This year?

Yeah.

How about, like, this week? I don't think in terms of years, I just. Okay, so I have something called Ramit's Book Buying Rule. And Ramit's Book Buying Rule goes like this. If you ever see a book that you're even remotely interested in, buy it. Do not agonize. Do not equivocate. Do not question it. Just buy it. These books have some of the smartest thinkers in the world who've condensed their Wisdom for about 10 or 20 bucks, dollar for dollar, you cannot get a better ROI. So I buy indiscriminately. And in fact, as I was going through my Kindle preparing for tonight, I saw so many books that I bought years ago. Some of them I've never read, but I'm okay with that. I know that hopefully I'll get to them one day. And sometimes when the feeling strikes, I go in. But I will say that I reread a lot of my favorite books once, once a year.

Where do you find new books?

I find them. I'm in a book club, so I'll tell you a little bit about that in a second. I read a lot of articles, for example, in the Atlantic Monthly or wherever there's news. Authors get their books excerpted or written about in news. So New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, all these places. And if the article is amazing, half the time at the bottom it says, this is by Blank, Blank Blank, the author of the upcoming book Blank. So immediately I go click. And I pre order, and then weeks or months later, it shows up in my Kindle.

Boom.

As for my book club, one of my buddies suggested that a few of us get together and do a book club, because we used to all go out together when we were single. And. And since we're in relationships, it got harder for us to find time to see each other. And so one thing about guys in particular, I think guys need an excuse to get together. This is why guys get so excited by bachelor parties. But you will almost never hear guys doing a guy's trip for no reason at all. So we do a monthly book club, and the host suggests a few books. We kind of vote, but the host chooses. And. And that way is another way that I get exposed to new books.

Great. All right, next question. What's the best advice or lessons you've learned from your book club?

There is nothing like discussion. And I think that you can read a book alone and you can understand it, but the minute you put few other smart people with diverse opinions in the room, suddenly that book comes to life. And it's amazing. In our group, we have people who see things very differently. And the good news is it's a respectful conversation. But it's also kind of humbling because I walked in there thinking like, yeah, I know this book inside out. I read it, I have notes. And suddenly someone will say, well, you know what? That reminds me of this experience I had. It completely changes the optics that you look at the book with. So if you can get a discussion around a book or even read reviews or thoughtful discussions about a book, if you can't have a book club, then at least find out what other people are saying about it. I find it to be really valuable.

Do you take notes on books as you're reading them?

Yes, I do. And that's one of the tragedies of reading it on Kindle is that I don't take notes as much. I'll highlight key things, but I don't take as many notes as I would with a pen. Now, I will tell you that occasionally if a book is so good that I need to share it with one of my co workers or it's relevant, then I will take all the high. Amazon Kindle has this thing where you can extract all your highlights and just copy them. So I copy them into a Google Google Doc and so it's just highlight, highlight, highlight from the book and then I will leave any comments in that Google Doc and say, hey, we should think about this for that project. Or do you think this is something we could consider next quarter and I'll send it to them and that helps to take the knowledge that I've learned from the book and then disseminate it around to the people in my company.

Do you have a routine for reading no.

Wow. This is like a big guilt trip under me today.

It's like, do you read Saturday Night Guilt Trip?

Do you read on a physical?

No.

Do you have a routine? No. Do you have any books you're excited about for the rest of the year? No. This is like. I'm like, eeyore tonight, and I'm talking about something I love. This sucks. All right. No, I don't. And actually, I want to share something that happened. So I was talking to my buddy Derek maybe a year ago, and I was telling him how we had both struggled reading books. And we both love reading. We used to read, I think, two books a week. We're voracious readers, and we just kind of, like, started reading Reddit instead, and it's kind of addictive and Twitter and all this stuff. So he told me what he had done, and he encouraged me to fit it into the cracks in my day. So I'd been listening to some Audible books, and he went the extra step. So I told him, you know, I go to the gym every day. Sometimes I walk, sometimes I take the subway. And he texted me the next day at like, 4pm he's like, Dude, quick reminder. Listen to the audiobook today on the way to the gym. And that little push got me to do it. It got me to pick up that habit. And instead of listening to Spotify, I turned on Audible and I listened to 10 minutes, and it was awesome. So fitting it into my routine was something that was challenging, especially because I work from home. But he really helped me to get that routine back on track.

All right, next question. What's a book you've read over and over?

Oh, wow. There's a book by one of my mentors, Jay Abraham. Getting Everything youg Can out of all youl've Got. I've read several copywriting books over and over. Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz is a very, very, very advanced copywriting book. It's not for beginners, but it is dense and highly relevant. And every year I read it, I discover something new. Another book that I read 15 years ago, and I really didn't like it. And then I read it five years ago, and I was like, this book is awesome. Is 22 immutable laws of Marketing or of branding. And that also shows that sometimes you're not ready for a book. I wasn't ready for that book back then, but when once my company had grown and I understood marketing a lot better in a different way, I was ready for that book. So those are some of the books that I read frequently.

Oops, I flipped the camera again. Sorry, guys.

Here we go. Oh, Cass, do you want to tell them about the rest of your evening yesterday?

Oh, my gosh. We'll talk about that another time.

Notice that the camera's a lot steadier today. I noticed that.

Not so many giggles tonight. All right, next question. How do we join your book club?

You don't. I get this question all the time. It drives me insane. So I get these people, they're like, oh, dude, how do I join your book club? I'm like, you don't start your own book club. And they're like, oh, no, I could never do that. I just want to join your book club. I'm like, dude, the point of doing awesome things is you are the first one to do it.

You.

And what people want to do is they want to magically jump into a book club with a close knit group of friends, and they want to kind of just like not do the work to get invited into the room. Now, I remember when I was younger, I went to speak at a conference and I was sitting next to a guy named Guy Kawasaki. Some of you may have heard of him. He's kind of a big deal. Used to work at Apple. And I was young, I was 24, something like that. And afterwards I said, do you mind if I ask you a question? He said, sure. I said, I want to do more speaking like you do. How do I do that? Because he speaks everywhere and he kind of looked at me and he goes, get good first and worry about speaking second. And I kind of just like shrunk, you know, Like I was completely deflated, like a paper bag. But he was right. He was right. And that is if you want to get invited into the rooms with people who you admire. The lesson he taught me there was, you need to do the work to get invited in there. And the work starts by you getting good and probably inviting other people. So it's easy to wait to get invited to a book club. Why don't you just start your own? Invite four of your friends. Two of them won't show up. Two of them will. And just be like, hey, I want to do this. Here's the book we're going to read, this is how we do it, etc. And I can tell you the format of our book club. But that's not the magic. The magic is one person doing the work to invite other people. That is how you join your book club.

All right, any advice for someone who doesn't love to read but wants to like it.

That is an awesome question. Oh, my God, it's my favorite question. Okay, so, Cas, this happened to you because when we met, you did not read a lot of books, right? And what I discovered was there were certain things you believed about reading books that I took for granted, and I gave you some suggestions. One of them is start with a really easy, fun, candy cane book. You do not have to read Shakespeare for your first book. In fact, forget it. I love John Grisham. Anything John Grisham writes, I'm buying it. I don't care. I automatically buy it. So find a book that is super entertaining and relevant. It can even be rereading it. Number one, make it fun. Make it easy. Number two, if you don't like a book, stop reading it. Give it 30 pages if you don't like it. Done. Easy come easy. Go get the next book. Cass, what was your belief when it came to starting and finishing books?

I felt like if I bought it, I had to finish it even if I didn't like it.

Why'd you feel that way?

Because I'm not a quitter.

In this case, it's okay to quit early on. Why? Because we want to build the habit. We want to actually make it fun. So if you just see, like, just look how kids learn a skill. We got to make it fun. And then hopefully, as their skill level goes up, we can add complexity. So that's what I would suggest. Also, if you want to do it in an audio book, fine. If you. You want to read it on Kindle or a physical, well, fine. Hey, guess what? If you want to buy all three, 30 bucks, do it. It's cheap. The money is cheap, but the habit of loving reading is priceless. And I'll tell you guys that. How did I learn to love reading? Here's how I learned all the people in my family. My mom would take us to the public library every Saturday, partially because it was air conditioned and we didn't want to have to run the air conditioning because it was too expensive. So we would go there and my mom could sit and read her magazines, and the rest of us could go and read. And I would take. Especially during summers, they had these reading clubs where if you finish the reading club, you get like a Pizza Hut thing. And I would take a grocery bag and check out 20 books a week, and I would read them and I would take them back every week, and they would be like, you didn't read these? And I'm like, yes, I did. Ask me Any question? And I was what? I was in second grade and I did. I just loved reading. But that was because I started young. Not to say you can't start older, but this is how I got to where I am. I started young thanks to my mom. I saw my dad reading as well, and it's a skill. So after a while you start to be like, oh, I know what it takes to ramp up in a book and put it down and pick it up and all that stuff. So don't worry if it doesn't come naturally to you. But I don't know. I just love talking about encouraging people to read because I think it is the most dense amount of wisdom you can possibly get.

Next question. Can you give us an insight of the next book you're working on?

I. After my first version of I will teach you to be rich, I didn't think I would ever write another book again. It was really hard for me. I would wake up at six. I would write for two hours. I would go to work, I would come home and I would write for another hour. And I did it for two years. It was so brutal. And so as soon as the book came out and it did really well, right? It went to the top of the charts on Amazon and whatever. I was like, I'm done. I said what I have to say. And then, you know, five years goes by. Six, seven. My publisher kept kind of pinging me and they were like, you know, 10 years is coming up. We really gotta freshen this up. You have a lot of things that have changed. And I real. I'd been secretly keeping notes of what had changed and what I wanted to update, you know, in the new edition of the book. 80 new pages. I got married. I think about money differently than when I was in my early 20s. And of course, there's lots of tools and conversational scripts of how to talk to your partner about money, that there's just so much new stuff. Also, some of the companies that I recommended back then, I stripped them out because they turned horrible. And I added some new ones. So I wrote the new book. I took a long time, took it on our honeymoon with us. And I remember writing in Kenya, overlooking this beautiful sunset. Sounds romantic. But I was like, I hate this book right now. But as always, the process is horrible. But I'm so glad that I take the time to do it, because once the book is out, it's out, and you're either proud of it for the next decade or you have regrets. And when it comes to a Book I never want to write regrets. If you're going to write a book, write a book. And so that's what I believe. That and therefore the activation energy to write the next book is really high. But if I write it, I want it to be amazing. So I'm playing around with some ideas. If you guys think there's a book that I should write, send me an email. Tell me what you think. I'm Ramit Sethi will teach you. Be rich. Put the subject line book idea and just tell me what you think I should write. I'm always open to it. I always ask people when I meet him at book tour events, what should I write more of? All right, let's take the last question.

All right. Any good books to inspire hope in this situation?

That's the question you want to end on that I don't know the answer to. Well, this is like, hey, this is like Showtime 101.

I thought that would be a good.

One, but I don't have an answer for that.

Okay, we'll get back to you.

Yeah, check out that Disney book. I love the value section. How about time management, guys? Shit, I don't have anything. All right, give me an easy layup here. We're supposed to tie this in a bow.

Do you read two books at the same time?

I read like five books at the same time.

Wow.

Yes. This is a great question. Okay, another lay of the land. Reading tip number one. What did I say? Start easy with easy book, make it fun. Number two, easy come, easy go. If you don't like it after 30 pages, get rid of it. You can come back another time. Three, read multiple books at a time. So two is a good place if you're a beginner, if you get bored or you're just not feeling it sometimes, you know, you want something easy in the morning, harder at night, whatever. At a certain point, you can read lots of them. So you can have one in this room, one in that room, or however you want to structure it. But yes, I read multiple books at a time, and I just kind of go with the flow. What feels good to me at the moment. All right, so for the Fireside Chat tonight, we talked about five of my favorite books. I'm here tonight and every night, I would love it if you tag a friend, tell them to watch these, because in times like this, when things are going crazy outside, we know that what we can control is inside. And every night we come here, and at least for 30 minute, maybe 15 minutes, we're going to learn something together and we're going to talk about something that contributes to our rich life. So I'm doing this free. I'm doing this because the way that I know how to help is to teach. And I also get my ideas from you. So if you have ideas for this, send them my way. I'm posting these on YouTube. I'm on Instagram Amit. I have an email newsletter which has over 300,000 subscribers. You should get on@iwt.com earn and of course, we have a new program helping you to increase your income and start a business, Earnable, which comes out next week. I will see you tomorrow and every night until this is over on my Fireside Chats. Thanks, everybody.