Which books have helped you grow personally and professionally? In this new segment of #NotBusiness, John and Molly discuss the books that have had the biggest impact on their professional growth. You’ll learn what Molly reads every year to refuel her creativity, the book that helped John prepare for his new role at Smart Marketer, and more insights they’ve picked up across years of reading. From pages that engulf you in a world of marketing and wizardry to the examination of each stage of life as it relates to business, this booklist has something for everyone.
You’ll Learn:
- The book that all leaders should read (plus more book recommendations)
- A place Molly HIGHLY recommends you visit
- 2 communication concepts John adheres to all the time
- The importance of your good, bad and neutral habits
Resources Links:
- Smart Marketer
- Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert
- The Wizard of Ads: Turning Words into Magic And Dreamers into Millionaires by Roy H. Williams
- The “The CEO Test: Master the Challenges That Make or Break All Leaders by Adam Bryant
- Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler
- The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg
- Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to $100 Million in No Time Flat by Michael Masterson
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Links to Join:
Timestamps:
0:31 In this episode, Molly and John share their TOP 3 business and marketing books.
1:23 If you’ve been following Molly, you’ve probably heard of this book.
4:00 “These are such weird books in the best way. It’s really like Harry Potter meets Smart Marketer.”
6:41 Molly’s 3rd book is perfect for you if you’re in a leadership position.
8:45 John’s 1st book is what he hails as his “number one professional development book”.
16:26 Start good habits or remove bad ones with help from this book.
21:14 Business Psychology — John’s final book examines the mindframe and thought processes of a company during each stage of growth.
31:44 Thanks for listening! To share your feedback or get a question answered on the podcast, follow and message Molly on Instagram at @mollypittmandigital.
Transcript Of Episode 50:
0:00 Molly: I read it and I always gather some sort of insight. It always helps me move forward or make the next best decision or feel inspired or go back to that place where I remember that all of this is about magic and it is about fun and there’s no need to take it so seriously.
Ezra: #NotBusiness.
0:31 John: Hello, and welcome to episode 50 of the “Smart Marketer” podcast. I’m your host, John Grimshaw, and I am so excited for today’s episode. And I know I said that at the start with every single one, but I’m not kidding today. This is going to talk about one of my favorite topics, which is books. On today’s episode of the “Smart Marketer” podcast, Molly and I are both going to go through and share three of the most important books we read that changed the way we think about work, business, interpersonal relationships, and have a lot of really useful tools. So this is going to be kind of, like, a quick summary or maybe a book report on some of the most important things we’ve ever read. I cannot wait for you to hear these, and hopefully, you listen to this and get the big idea, but also say, “Hmm, I should definitely add that to my reading list.” So without further ado, let’s dive in.
1:23 Molly: Hello, everyone, Molly here to share a few of my favorite business and marketing books. So, to be honest, I usually read books that have nothing to do with business and marketing. It’s meditative for me, a way to get my mind off of business, give me something else to focus on, something that’s entertaining. I love true crime. I love anything that’s a thriller or a mystery, but I have read some really impactful business and marketing books that have definitely affected my career, and I wanted to share them with you today in hopes that they can also help you.
So the first book, and if you follow me for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard me talk about this book, but the first book is “Big Magic” by Elizabeth Gilbert. And it’s called “Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear.” Now, this book isn’t necessarily specifically a business book, but it is all about creativity. And especially as marketers, I can’t think of anything more important for us to be able to access on a whim than the ability to be creative, to come up with creative ideas, creative solutions.
And so, this book was hugely impactful for me, not only in terms of the way that I think about creativity and how it works and really how it functions in our day-to-day life, but also how you can access that creative space at any place any time that you need it. I love Elizabeth Gilbert. I’ve, you know, been following her since “Eat, Pray, Love,” but this is a very different book from “Eat, Pray, Love” and it’s had a really significant impact on my life. So I couldn’t recommend that one anymore, whether it’s the audiobook, whether you’re reading it. I check back in once a year and make sure that I re-consume this book just to ensure that the information is fresh. And I just love the way it makes me feel. I think it’s also just Elizabeth, as a person, her energy, the way that she writes, whenever I’m reading this book or listening to this book, I just feel really good about it, and I feel really good about my ability to be a better marketer. So, definitely check out “Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear.” Again, it’s not specifically a business book, but it’s really helpful for people that do work like we do.
4:00 Molly: Okay. So the second book is actually a trilogy. It’s a series of books, and these books are by Roy H. Williams. And Roy owns the Wizard Academy in Austin, Texas, which I’ve had the opportunity to go and take classes at Wizard Academy a few times. I don’t even know how to describe Wizard Academy other than it’s like being on a Harry Potter set surrounded by fellow business people and marketers that think the same way that we do. And as I said, Wizard Academy was founded by Roy H. Williams who is absolutely one of the best marketers in the world. Roy has done things like sold more Rolex watches than anyone else through radio advertising. And he’s been doing this stuff for a long time and he understands marketing in a way that really supersedes the digital space. He understands marketing in a way that is so deep and so human that it really doesn’t matter which platform you apply his teachings to, it’s simply going to work.
So this trilogy is called “The Wizard of Ads.” These are such weird books in the best way. It’s really like Harry Potter met a smart marketer. So not only do you get this amazing imagery and language and storytelling that comes from Roy which he is also this way in person, you also get some amazing business and marketing information that can help with whatever projects you’re working on today. So, “The Wizard of Ads.” It’s a trilogy of books. They’re incredible. They’re mystical. They’re magical. Any time I need a little bit of inspiration, I’ll just open one of the books, and whatever chapter is in front of me, it’s usually a story. I read it and I always gather some sort of insight. It always helps me move forward or make the next best decision or feel inspired or go back to that place where I remember that all of this is about magic and it is about fun and there’s no need to take it so seriously. I think that’s what Roy helps me with the most. So definitely, definitely check out those books. I don’t know if Wizard Academy is back up and running, but give it a Google, and I recommend any of the in-person courses that they offer. I’ve taken almost all of them and they’ve been very influential in my career.
6:41 Molly: Okay. So last but not least, this is a book that I’m actually in the process of reading right now. It is called “The CEO Test” by Adam Bryant. And this is a bit more tactical than “Big Magic” and “The Wizard of Ads,” but it’s really for anyone who is in a leadership position. So, Adam interviewed over 600 CEOs and he’s compiled all of this information into a book to really see, you know, do you have what it takes to be the best CEO possible? But it’s not really just for CEOs, it’s anybody that’s in a leadership position, and it chats about what it’s like to be a leader today, making hard decisions, you know, building the stamina to have the energy to do what we need to do to lead teams into the future, into 2021 and 2022. So I definitely recommend “The CEO Test: Master the Challenges That Make Or Break All Leaders.” It can be a little bit dry at times, but there’s some great tactical information in there for anybody who’s in a leadership position that once they get better at decision-making, that wants to get better at building all-star teams, that wants to get better at dealing with the loneliness that sometimes can come from being in a leadership position.
I know that that’s something that I struggle with. As much as I love what I do and I love leading teams, it can be a lonely experience. And so, so far, this book has been really interesting and informative just to help me with where I am right now as a CEO. So hopefully, this is helpful to you all. Grab these books, read them, let us know what you think. Send me a DM on Instagram @mollypittmandigital. Let us know what your favorite business and marketing books are right now, the ones that have most impacted your career, and let’s get reading, guys. Talk soon.
8:45 John: So the first book I want to talk about is what I recommend as my number one professional development book. And it wasn’t always this way. I probably read this book about three years ago, but it is probably the most important one I’ve ever read. It is called “Crucial Conversations” by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler. And the reason this book is so important is because communication is threaded into every single part of life, including business. Learning how to effectively navigate communication within an office or within a remote work setup or whatever might be is so important, and these principles bleed out from your work to other parts of your life too. But the general gist concept of the book is that it teaches you how to productively navigate high stakes, emotional conflicts or differences of which there are certainly quite a few in anything you want to do with your job, whether you’re trying to make a case for a project you think is important, fighting for more budget, or dealing with an employee or boss who is not respecting your time, your energy, your attention.
These conversations are the difference between feeling successful, productive, and solving problems and feeling dejected, defeated, and needing to change jobs, leave companies, burning out, all those things. It’s really, really important to learn how to manage this communication task. And the idea behind the book is that these people, the authors of the book, interviewed a lot of very successful leaders and they found this reoccurring theme among all the people that they interviewed, that they had a really good system for working through interpersonal conflict and differences to get everybody on the same page and recruit everyone to the sort of mutual end result that everybody wanted. And the book details uncovering and discovering this sort of shared characteristic and then the process by which you, the listener or me, right, John, can go through and try to implement some of these principles in your own work situations.
So there’s two really important concepts that come up in the book, and the book has quite a bit to it, but if you get these two big ideas, you have the basic tools you need to start working on this. The first one is this idea of psychological safety, which is the idea that you need to create environments where people are comfortable sharing thoughts, feelings, emotions, and data in order for you guys to make a good decision. And the other one is this concept of the path to action, which is the process by which all of our emotional reactions are generated, which is really interesting to think about. Let me go into a little bit more detail on both of these. So, the psychological safety one sounds a little out of place in a business context, right? You may think that, but really there are so many high-stakes decisions that are made in business that people have really strong opinions about.
And the concept of psychological safety is, frankly, a very useful one in any interpersonal conflict but it is critically important here because when we are trying to make decisions within a business about a business or about relationships with employers or employees, making sure that you have all the data and all the information is absolutely critical to making the right choice, and if you don’t make people feel safe, if you don’t create an environment where they can share their opinion, where they can share facts or things that they’ve uncovered, things they’re concerned about, or challenges they’ve had with, again, employers or employees, it really cuts both ways, if you don’t create an environment where that can be shared, you will make a decision on an imperfect set of data, which means you are much more likely to make a very bad decision because you don’t know that so-and-so didn’t actually contribute to this project, or you don’t know that this person uncovered a fatal flaw in the product that you’re about to launch. And so you absolutely must lead with the psychological safety to create an environment where people can tell you what’s going on in the business.
And the idea is that by creating a safe environment where people can add meaning to the conversation, you can recruit people towards a mutual purpose. So people come in with different opinions and you hone in and say, “Hey, at the end of the day, we are trying to grow this company 25%. We’re trying to get this really high-performing employee in alignment with us so that they can stay at this company and there’s no more conflict between these people.” All these different things that can come up. You can always boil them down to a shared goal, the mutual purpose that people with really different opinions are all trying to serve. And if you can get that concept honed in, right, where you create safety and then find what that mutual purpose is, that is one of the best ways to actually make good decisions because suddenly you have good information, and even when people disagree with the outcome, at least they feel like they are connected to the larger reason that it’s being done, so you’re not going to be sabotaged or have people not participate in whatever it is.
The other really interesting thing that they talk about is this path to action idea, which I think about probably every single day. And it’s this idea that when you have a strong emotional reaction, that reaction is generated entirely by your own brain. So the example I always love to use is about Molly because Molly is a very good support and doesn’t mind being teased. She’s a little bit clumsy. And so, the good example of a path to action is one day Molly bumps into me and spills my coffee, right? You know, she just is walking and she bumps into me. The coffee comes out of my hand. In the moment of that bump and that spill, I tell myself a story, right? I have a reaction to that event which leads to me getting pissed off, honestly, because I just spilled my coffee. That reaction comes from me saying, “Molly is so clumsy. She doesn’t think about anything,” blah, blah, blah, saying all the kind of negative stuff, and I get angry. I get mad. I say,” Hey, you need to give me space.” Well, it is understandable, right? We all get mad sometimes when things like that happen, but the idea of the path to action is all of those emotions. Molly didn’t do anything to make me angry, right? Molly is just being who she is and she bumped me by accident. Totally something that can happen, right? And you can already hear a different sort of tone and a different take on the same thing, right? I can say, “Molly is clumsy and inconsiderate,” or I can say, “Molly just bumped into me.” Right? She was working on something. She was making a note about something we just talked about and bumped into me.
And it happens. Both of those reactions can come from the same inciting event. And when you learn that the emotions you feel, the reactions that you have are actually created by your own brain from you telling a particular story about somebody having bad intent or somebody being inconsiderate or somebody doing something foolish and driving your emotion from that, you have so much more power. You do not have to get angry when somebody accidentally shows up five minutes late for your Zoom meeting. You do not have to be disappointed in someone when they turn something in a day late, right? Because these things happen in life. The general idea here is just that realizing that your emotional reactions come from a narrative you create in your own mind lets you stop, think, and really, at the end of the day, give people the benefit of the doubt. And not only that, give yourself the benefit of the doubt too, right? This path to action comes up just as much internally as externally. It is so important for us to not be angry at ourselves when we accidentally hit the snooze button another time because all you do is lock yourself into these negative patterns of behavior. So really I cannot recommend “Crucial Conversations” enough. It will teach you so much about how to communicate better with others and with yourself and really resolve this kind of tense awkward business conversation so many of us are scared of and try to avoid.
16:26 John: So the number two book I want to recommend is another one that is a little bit more self-focused than externally focused, and it’s “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg. And I started reading this book when I started managing people, and it’s not a book about management, but it is a good book with a lot of very useful lessons that I applied quite extensively in breaking into this new role in my job. And the general idea of the book is that the reason people so often try to start a good new habit and fail is not necessarily that the habit itself is the problem, it’s that habits do not exist in a vacuum, right? Getting on the treadmill and running 10 miles every day, that’s probably a little far, but that’s not something that’s going to arise in a vacuum, right? There are certain conditions which will allow you to actually do that, or conditions which when not met mean you can’t really stick with it. And that’s the beauty of this book. That’s what’s so powerful is you realize that habits are actually three different things.
Habits are a cue that triggers you doing some kind of behavior, whether it’s a good habit, a bad habit, or a neutral habit. The behavior itself, whatever the thing is that you want, right? It’s running 10 miles or it’s, you know, having an extra drink when you probably shouldn’t or it’s eating a cookie, right? That’s the example they use in the book, a very neutral example. And then there’s the reward, the chemical induction in your brain or the sense of feeling or monetary reward or whatever it might be. The thing that when it happens makes you feel like this is the thing you want to keep doing, the positive reinforcement. And when you start to understand that habits are not one of these three things but all three of them together, this allows you to change habits because you can fix bad habits, right, by keeping the same cues and rewards while you change the behavior.
So in the book, the example of the cookie is grounded in every day, like three…I think the author of the book, Charles Duhigg, would go get a cookie and it would give him positive serotonin, and when he stopped and realized what was going on, he discovered the reason he was eating the cookie was not because he needed the sugar or whatever, it was that he enjoyed the time talking to people that he spent in the cafeteria for 10 minutes when he had the cookie. So he just replaced the cookie with a conversation with a co-worker. Instead of going down to the cafeteria, he would just walk over to someone’s office and chat with them. And he got the same reward and had the same cue, it’s the time that he needs to step away from his desk and take a break and was able to change the behavior, right? He changed the behavior, the thing he didn’t want to be doing into something else by keeping the other two parts in place, the cue and the reward.
So this is how you can change bad habits, right? You identify the cue, the thing that is triggering the habit itself or the behavior, and you identify the reward and you make sure to keep those two in place while you change the actual behavior. You can also use this to intentionally create new habits, right? If you want to start running, well, you need to find a reason to go do that, right? For me, I just started going to the gym again a few months ago. The cue for me is I go with my brother, and so there’s some accountability to another person. That doesn’t mean we don’t move at sometimes, but I make sure to say, “Hey, I’m going to go. You’re going to come with me,” or he says, “I want to go to the gym. Can you come right now?” So I’ve got a cue and the reward is I get some time to sit and talk with him and I feel better when I exercise, but without that cue of having some accountability and without the reward of the social interaction and the feeling better on my body, I wouldn’t really be able to stick with going to the gym. And so, I was able to build a new habit not just replace a bad habit. And this book is really…I think that’s a good summary of it, right, the gist. But this book is incredibly useful because I have found myself getting so much better at making the positive changes I want in my life, whether it’s removing a bad habit or building a new one by thinking of habits, not as one piece, but instead these three pieces together, the cue, the behavior, and the reward and leveraging that mental model to change things or to create new things because I know that I’m getting the positive feedback I want.
And there’s a really great study in business and marketing in this too that comes from this idea of Febreze, I believe, where they created Febreze and it would get the sense out but for some reason, the product just didn’t stick and it’s because the product was missing the reward, the good sense. So when they originally were marketing Febreze, it was missing that burst of floral scent or fresh sheets or whatever it might be that this is what you look for in a particular scent. And when they added that into the mix, the product suddenly stuck way better and sold very well. And, I mean, Febreze is now a noun and a verb. So they really figured it out, but it shows how powerful this idea of the reward is. So a really interesting book, really great little case study there about marketing, in general, and definitely super useful if you want to change or improve yourself or kind of tackle some bag of habits that you’ve been struggling with.
21:14 John: The last book is very businessy. So the first two, one was about communication, one was sort of self-improvement and building habits. This last one is called “Ready, Fire, Aim” by Michael Masterson. And I read this book a long time ago back when I was working at Digital Marketer, and it’s really just stuck with me ever since then because it provides this really useful mental model of how to think about stages of growth at a company. And so, this is why I think this book is so, so interesting. In it, Michael Masterson, I don’t know if we’re on full first name basis yet, but he introduces the four stages of growth, and those are infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Okay. Is that helpful? I don’t know. Is he talking about people? What is he talking about? So these are the four stages of business growth, and the idea is that they roughly map to a common amount of revenue in your business. They roughly map to common problems and challenges, and they roughly map to common opportunities and skills you need to go to the next phase.
And this was why it was so powerful is now when I work with a business as a consultant or when I come in and, you know, help run a business like I do at Smart Marketer, I can easily identify what are the biggest challenges that this company is facing and what are the biggest opportunities that I need to make sure it’s capitalizing on? All while trying to figure out what I need to do to myself to make sure I can help them reach the next level, right? Those skills. The book also talks about this idea of rapid testing and iteration, which is really, really useful. And I think that’s fun and interesting, and you can also read “The Lean Startup,” things of that nature that talk about this.
But I really think the four stages of growth is why this book has stuck with me so much. So I just want to introduce to you all the four stages of growth. And I suspect as you hear these, you’re going to start to map your own business experience and life experience to these ideas and you’ll suddenly say, “Hmm, this might be where I am in my business, and how do I take advantage of that? Or what should I be doing to overcome this problem?” Or maybe you’ll finally hear the problem clearly for the first time in a while. So let’s talk about those four stages. The first one is infancy, and this, I call it the idea to business stage. I don’t think he gives them these specific names, but it’s basically when you’re making between $0 and $1 million, more or less. The main problem here is that you haven’t nailed your offer, and that’s why this is the idea to business stage. The job you have here is you need to figure out your offer. And as always, it’s good to remind people the difference between a product, which is a thing, right, an iPhone case, and an offer, which layers in a reason for people to take action and what kind of transformation they feel and some pricing elements and all the stuff. So an offer for an iPhone case might be never shatter your phone again, right? No more $800 bills when you break your iPhone. This thing is waterproof so you can adventure, can take amazing pictures, right? All those are narrative hooks that can become part of the offer around selling a phone case, which is not inherently sexy or interesting in and of itself, but it enables a lot of things that people want.
So the main challenge here is you need to build a scalable self-liquidating offer. You need to build a way that you can repeatably take this offer out to an interested audience and sell it, and sell it for enough money that you can pay to show the offer to more people and get more people to buy. The main opportunity here is you have a chance to take really big swings, right? When you’re still figuring out what your business is and how you serve people best, you are going to win every time when you do big wild changes, maybe not wild, but a little change where you change a button color from green to red, that’s not going to be a difference-maker, right? You need to go out and radically play around with what is it my people need? What is it that I have? And how do I find the intersection point between these two? You can also use this time to really build your customer and prospect list up, right? This is a great time to do some early company building and start to collect an audience of people that want to follow you. And what you need to be able to do here in the infancy stage is to build and to sell. You need to build products and offers and you need to be able to sell those products and offers. So that’s the first stage.
The next one is probably the one I would say I work in most myself, and they call it childhood, a time of lots of growth and learning in and of itself. And this one is called the rapid iteration stage. And the main challenge here is profitability. The idea is that in the infancy stage, you basically figure out how do you take an idea and sell products with it? And ideally, you’re getting a self-liquidating offer set up. The idea is that you sell something for $100 and it costs you $50 to produce and you spend $50 on ads and that gets you to a self-liquidation, right? So you can do that 100,000 times and grow your business. But you don’t really make a ton of money doing that, and you might even be losing a tiny little bit of money. So profitability becomes an issue here. And the way that you can kind of fix this, the challenge and the opportunity, is that you need new self-liquidating offers, new products, and new general offers, right? New things that you can take out to people and resell.
So the thing you want to take advantage of here is this idea of I’m selling a widget, right? A phone case. Well, maybe I need to go upmarket and start selling people the phone as well, or maybe I need to go down market and start selling people the pop socket. So you start to layer in different pieces around the initial product you created. Maybe you start making phone cases in a different color, but it’s a lot of rapid product iteration to figure out what it is that people are responding to and doing more of it. So the skills you need here are you need to be able to identify why people are buying your product, what’s working about it, honing in on that, and then iterating on it, right? How do I give them more of the reason that they’re coming to me? Maybe it’s that they like this phone case because it helps them take better pictures. What additional tools can you provide to help them take better pictures? Right? Maybe you add a lens they can layer on top of the case, or maybe you give them some kind of cloth that you sell really cheaper they can wipe their lens off before they take a photo with their phone that improves the quality 20%. These kind of ideas, right? Learning how to get really nailed in on what the, not just messages but who your audience is and why they are coming to you and doing more of that for them is how you get through the childhood stage.
The next two stages are much bigger in dollar ranges, which makes sense, right? Because we started with an idea that we turned into a business and then we figured out how to do more of that to turn this thing into something that can actually generate a little bit of revenue. Now we get to the adolescent stage, right? Where revenue is between $10 million and $50 million. And this is the systems and people stage. The main problem here is your systems are overloaded, right? You went from maybe one self-liquidating offer or two to a bunch. You went from a really small team of just you to everybody you need to support selling this thing, and you probably didn’t build every system perfectly along the way because you were moving quickly. It happens to all of us, right? That’s just natural.
The main challenge here is you need to update and/or create systems to manage projects and people. Ezra talks a lot about bringing Colleen in at Smart Marketer, and how important that was for him, and it’s because Colleen was able to come in and provide systems so that he could keep taking new products out and bring new people into the business and keep things moving rather than getting blocked up when somebody was confused or when a project got dropped because somebody missed that this due date was coming up. Huge, huge part of growing a business. The main opportunity here is that these systems actually pull you, the business owner, or you, the manager, or whatever your job is out of day-to-day operations so you can focus on direction. Really, really important because it allows you to step out of the day-to-day business and instead think about the big picture moves the company needs to make, which is part of the reason this covers such a large range of revenue because it’s really also about setting the trajectory once you have the systems in place. So the skills you need here are you need to be able to build health checks. You can quickly check in on the business because you’re going to be less day-to-day involved and you want to make sure things are going okay, and you need to work on steering, right? You need to figure out how to make big strategic moves within the company while you’re doing all this.
The final stage, adulthood. So this one is revenue of $50 million to $100 million, probably could even go higher than that, but it’s the maturity and the re-invigoration stage. The main challenge, the main problem here are both around stagnation, feeling like your business is stagnating, feeling like you personally are stagnating, and you have to figure out how to become entrepreneurial again because the way to break through this sense of stagnation and slowness and dullness is new ideas are needed. So the opportunity here is your relationship to the business can change. You can say, “I’ve already kind of pulled myself out. I’m just going to do less with this business and let it run at this size it’s at.” You can say, “I’m going to do more. I’m going to go deeper and do something different with this business because I really think this one can be even bigger than it is now or it can metamorphosize.” You can say, “You know what? We’re going to take the small sector of the business and blow it up and make it bigger because I think this is where the future is,” right? You’re changing your relationship. Maybe you’re not managing the business as a whole. Instead, maybe you’re really focusing on the small subset and you’re going to treat it just like you did the business at the beginning, right? Idea to business stage.
The main skill here is finding your joy. You have to figure out how to take the talent, the knowledge, the insight you have and make it fun for you, again, so that you can keep investing in your business and keep it growing if you want to, or pulling out and saying, “I’m done with this business. It’s time to move on to the next thing in my life.” So, “Ready, Fire, Aim” also has this whole thing about testing and iteration that is definitely worth the look as well, but I feel like I’m running a little long on my section anyway so I won’t take up any more of your time but definitely, definitely recommend that book. And the subhead for it is “Zero to $100 Million in No Time Flat,” which is certainly a very good hook for a book, but it has a ton of useful information in it. So those are the three books that I recommend. I really, really think they are all very powerful and they all do different things, right? “Crucial Conversations” helps you navigate complex moments of tension which you absolutely have to be able to do to succeed. “The Power of Habit” helps you make changes within yourself. And I always believe modeling good changes in yourself is how you help other people change, plus building good habits is one of the keys to success. And “Ready, Fire, Aim” gives you this mental framework to quickly and easily figure out, “Hey, what is the next big thing that I need to do in my business?” Hopefully, you enjoyed those. Hopefully, you enjoyed hearing Molly’s three favorite books as well. Thanks as always for listening, and we’ll see you again in the next one.
31:44 Molly: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the “Smart Marketer” podcast. For any resources mentioned on the show today, please visit our show notes at smartmarketer.com/podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an honest review on whichever platform you are listening. Thanks again, and we’ll see you next time.
