--:-- Host: Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today we have a tremendous episode for you, a conversation with Nick Hutchinson, the founder of BookThinkers.
--:-- Host: I met Nick through his Instagram channel where he was reviewing personal development books. He's got a great podcast where he interviews some of the biggest names out there in personal development, in business, in leadership. And Nick has a new book out called *Rise of the Reader*.
--:-- Host: As many of you know who listen to this show, I am a ferocious reader. I read every morning, every night, putting down a couple books a month. I just love to intake knowledge. Nick has developed a process for working through books, not necessarily faster, but with more value, extracting more value from books. That is right in my sweet spot and something I obviously wanted to share with you guys.
--:-- Host: I am just so happy to have Nick on the show to talk about his work, his Instagram channel, which is phenomenal, and his new book, *Rise of the Reader*.
--:-- Host: Before we get to Nick, I want to give you guys a quick shout out. The podcast is growing like crazy. I appreciate you. Please keep sharing the show. It means so much to me. As we've come off the Agency Intelligence Podcast Network and we're starting to redevelop our own vein of content and bring in new guests and new ideas, it warms my heart. It makes me so happy that you guys continue to find value in this show because I love doing it. I love having these conversations with you.
--:-- Host: We don't run ads on the show anymore. The only thing I ask of you is that if you find value here, please share the show. It's how more people find this content. It's how more people find our thought process and our mindset. If you listen to this show, then we think alike. I love that about you. I love you for listening.
--:-- Host: With all that, let's get on to Nick Hutchison.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Dude, I appreciate you taking some time. I know you have a new book coming out, which is a very hectic time in anyone's life, even though books are your business. But I appreciate you taking the time and chatting with us here.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Yeah, man, listen. There's nothing that I enjoy more and that brings me more energy than talking about books, talking about my book. So thank you for the opportunity. Hopefully I can drop something useful for your audience today.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So what is it about books? I have a particular opinion on this topic, but I'm interested in you because a lot of my guests, when they come in here, they've started recommending audiobooks. I am not a huge fan of audiobooks personally. But what is it about books in general, long form versus just pumping out 10,000 social media posts? What attracted you to this and had you found it as a business?
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Well, when I was growing up, I was not much of a reader, which would surprise anybody watching the video version of this podcast. I've got a thousand books behind me. But when I was growing up, I was more of the athlete stereotype, not really much of the academic. Going into my senior year of college, I took an internship at a local software company. My boss at the time introduced me to the world of podcasting. A show just like this, where a host would interview a series of guests in some type of niche—insurance, entrepreneurship, whatever the case. I had about an hour commute each way to that internship that summer, so I started to listen to a ton of podcasts.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Just like you're highlighting, a number of these people who I wanted to be like, successful people, they were giving at least some of the credit for their success to the books that they were reading. Eventually I just kind of had this aha moment where I thought, if I'm deliberately choosing not to read these books, I'm deliberately choosing to live under my potential. That was my wake-up moment. From there, I fell head over heels in love with the personal development space. I removed pain after pain and developed skill after skill after skill by reading and implementing these books.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: I'll wrap up this tangent by saying that just like you, I appreciate the look and feel and the utility of a physical paper book. There's nothing that beats that for me. I do listen to some audiobooks, but only when I'm in the car. If I have the chance to read a physical book, that's always my default go-to because I can pull so much more out of a physical paper book than I can an audiobook.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, it was funny. I was being interviewed on a podcast earlier this week and the guy was talking about audiobooks. He said, "You've got to listen to audiobooks," and blah. I was like, "I'm going to push back on you." I think audiobooks are a marketing hook. I think they're a way to sell more stuff. That's my honest opinion. I don't think anyone actually gets stuff out of audiobooks. I know, "Oh, I'm an audio listener, audio learner." Statistically, audio learners are a relatively small portion of the population. To me, audiobooks are really a way for people to say "I read a book" without actually fully engaging in it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: When you're listening to an audiobook, and if you were to pan over here, you'd see I have stacks and stacks similar to you. I don't nicely color code them like you do. Mine are just a disaster. The first thing I do when I get a new book is I rip the jacket cover off and throw it in the garbage. That's the very first thing I do. I don't keep the jacket covers. All the books look basically the same unless they're paperbacks. I'm not a purist at all. I make whichever one is cheaper. If the hardcover is cheaper, I get that one. If the paperback's cheaper, I get that one. So I have both. They become like textbooks for me.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I learned from James Altucher, he's a former guest on the podcast.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Same here.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: If you're two chapters in and you're not loving it, throw it out. I hate this. I wanted to give it a shot because I love him. I'll get back to it. I go on tangents as well. There's only one rule on the show.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Can I guess what you're about to say?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, go ahead.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: I feel like we're cut from the same cloth. You love Alex Hormozi, so you listened and read the book at the same time.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I know I did. Well, I read the book right now. To say no, although I'm thinking about trying that. I actually bought a book from a guy I've followed for years, and the first two chapters are so terrible I literally flung it across the room into the garbage. I hated it. I'm staring at it in the garbage feeling terrible. I don't know why this person who has no idea who I am, I feel something bad about throwing it in the garbage. I thought, if another chapter of that will be a waste of my life, I can't do it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Hormozi's new book, *$100 Million Leads*, is awesome. I'm plowing through that.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Yeah, I got it right there.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's right there.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: So here's my pitch for a book. When you read a physical book, not a Kindle—I think Kindle's garbage as well—you can't do anything else. You have to physically turn the pages. If you want to highlight something, you have to take a pen out. You have to write notes, dog-ear. You have to work it. It becomes a work of art. It becomes your thing. It's not just this book that 10,000, 100,000, a million other people have. It becomes yours specifically, marked up by you, dog-eared by you, creased by you. In my opinion, your brain just sucks more of that in. You own it versus all the other methods. I highly advocate for that. Now, if people want to buy a book that I write on audiobook, I'll take the cash, that's great. But I don't condone it.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Listen, we have a lot of very similar viewpoints. Number one, my books look like they've gone through war by the time I'm done with them. Coffee stains, pen, marker. Here's another example of something that I do that pisses people off: I rip out pages. Here's a page of *$100 Million Offers* because I want to look at that value equation as often as possible when I'm talking about my own services. If I want to retain something, repetition leads to retention. I'll rip the page out and keep it with me all day so that I can revisit it every time I fumble for my keys or my wallet. It's right there.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's next level, man. That's next level.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: The thing about audiobooks and Kindle that I don't enjoy... Let me restart. I read a book called *The Art of Learning* by Joshua Waitzkin. He's a multi-time chess world champion and mixed martial arts world champion. Really interesting duo. He would study a subject like chess so intensely that it would become part of his subconscious. When it became part of his subconscious, his subconscious could act on his behalf. You're not going to get that from an audiobook. You're not going to get that from a Kindle. You're not going to get that from a book summary. Those are the worst things on the planet. Something like Blinkist—I'm not an advocate. Yes, you might be motivated for a few minutes, but you're not going to implement anything. You need to read the physical book, be with the information, study it where it's your only focus. All of the ancillary case studies, the lead-up stuff—that's how you retain and implement a book. I have tons of strategies on how to do that more efficiently, but I do think it starts with a physical paper book.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think there are two kinds of people out there. The people who read Blinkist, in my opinion, want the soundbite so they sound smart. That's what they're looking for. They don't actually care about the information. They have no intention of actually implementing it. It's, "I want the soundbite so that when I'm at a party and there's a pretty girl or a good-looking guy in front of me, I can rip off this soundbite and sound super smart." That to me is why you read those things.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I subscribed just to see why so many people are subscribing. Whatever book was the first one, it was Ray Dalio's new book. I looked at it and I had already listened to that on audio and read that one, so I've done both. I looked at the Blinkist and thought, there's nothing here. You can get a couple soundbites, but there's so much context woven into that book that you have to have to understand why the soundbite is even important. You're just regurgitating something without any depth. It's completely shallow.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: For a lot of people, that's enough. That's really what they're looking for. But if you're trying to take your game to the next level, which it sounds like you and I both try to do very well, I think of them as tools in my tool belt. I don't care about the soundbite. I want to know how to use the information. That to me is what's most important, and why I'm so excited to have you on the show because you literally wrote the book on how to do this.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Before we get into exactly what the book is on, what did you see happening in the marketplace that you felt it was necessary to write a book on essentially how to read better? I don't want that to be a shallow interpretation of what you're trying to do, but essentially how to consume and use that better. What were you seeing in the market that said this is something that needs to be written about?
--:-- Nick Hutchison: As I built my Instagram community, which has about 150,000 nonfiction readers in it—we do about a million impressions a month—as I built that community over the years, literally hundreds and hundreds of people said to me, "Nick, I appreciate the book recommendations. I see that you're implementing them. Super cool. But I'm having a tough time doing that. How do you translate information into action?" Because like you're highlighting, action is the real measure of intelligence. It's not being able to regurgitate something. It's not sitting on a stoop and debating philosophy all day long. It's by taking action and applying these books to your life.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Here I am, in my late twenties. I've only been reading for about 10 years, and I've designed my ideal life in a short period of time. People ask me, "How do you take action? What are you doing that I'm not to implement these books effectively?" I'd respond to people with a voice note here, an email there, maybe even a quick Zoom call, shaking hands at a conference. But I felt like I was underserving those people because I never really even took the time to analyze my own behavior.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: When I decided to write this book on how to apply more from what you're reading, I first started by almost like observing myself from a third-party perspective. I would look at my own behavior. What am I doing differently than everybody else? What does my behavior look like? I started to name these frameworks and build these routines that other people could implement. I would start to offer them, and people saw a lot of success. I thought, I've got to write the book on this. That's why I decided to write it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The fact that you actually have strategies and methods to the application of what you learn in a book is probably something that people haven't thought too much about. Is that what you're finding? That people struggle without a true framework or a set of filters? They read these books, but then they just get popped back on the shelf and nothing ever happens from them.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Right. Same thing happens at conferences too, by the way. I'll give you an example. I've actually gone through the audio of this already just because it was available earlier than the physical book, but I haven't started the physical book yet. Let's say that I was reading *$100 Million Leads*. One of the issues that most people have with the books they're reading is they don't set an intention for the book. I'll meet somebody and I'll say, "What are you reading?" And they'll tell me and I'll say, "Why?" They'll say, "What do you mean why? Why are you reading the book that you're reading?" Then they'll say, "Well, somebody else recommended it to me," or "I saw it on Instagram."
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Let's start here. Set an intention that follows the SMART goal framework. It needs to be specific, measurable, attainable, actionable, written and relevant, and time-bound. If I was reading *$100 Million Leads*, yes, this book can help my business, but I'm not going to read it aimlessly. My intention, which I'm going to write on the inside cover, will say something like, "Find and implement at least two new lead generation strategies that I can apply to BookThinkers by the end of the month." That's specific. It's measurable. I know whether or not I achieve the goal. It's attainable. It's not "use this book to make $100 million by next month." It's "find and implement at least two strategies." It's relevant to my business, which means I'm emotionally connected to it. I'm going to write it on the inside cover, which I'll tell you about why we do that in a minute. And then it's time-bound because you need a deadline to make action happen. Otherwise, Parkinson's law: if you say by the end of the year, you'll take a year to read the book.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: If you can add the word "because" at the end of your intention, that's also where some magic starts to happen. Why does this book solve a problem or help you build a skill? Tie some emotion to it. So I'd like to "find and implement at least two strategies for improving my lead generation at BookThinkers by the end of the month, because this business means everything to me, man. The right book at the right time can change somebody's life. When I feel that impact, I'm fulfilled. I know that by supporting more authors in my business, I could do that at a bigger scale and help the right person get the right book into the right hands."
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Now when I write that on the inside cover of the book, each and every time I read a little bit more, I'm going to read that intention first so that my brain can filter for those lead strategies that I can implement by the end of the month. At the end of the book, I may have 20 or 30 potential options. That's overwhelming. That's not attainable. So I'm going to look at that entire list, rewrite it, and then I'm going to say, "What 20% of these can create 80% of the change I'm looking to make by the end of the month?" Realistic action. I don't want to implement everything, just the things that are related to my intention. Otherwise, you read these books and everything's interesting to you, and then you don't take action because you're not being specific and you don't have a goal for the book.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: That's an example of a reading strategy that I teach in *Rise of the Reader*. I'll stop there because I could go forever. Clearly, you could say I'm passionate about this. People are missing it. They're reading without intention, and it stinks.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I really like that. I've read more books than I can count. I have hundreds, thousands. I've been reading. I used to get made fun of in college because everyone else would be running around playing video games and I'd be sitting in bed reading, mostly because I just enjoyed that a lot more. I don't know that I've ever thought about it from the standpoint of having a specific intention for that book.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: My question would be just kind of framing, getting my head around that. Take a book like *Thinking, Fast and Slow* by Daniel Kahneman, which is a very rich book. I'm probably a little more than halfway through. There are 50 different conceptual concepts that you're trying to wrap your head around that are deep and dynamic, that you could implement in your life. How do you start to pick?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Let's say I set my intention for that particular book as: I want to better understand why I react to things and the difference between my reactionary brain and my logical brain. I want to understand that difference, but there are a hundred things in there. How do you start to pick once you have your intention? Every book is going to have more than two, let's say. How do you start to define which ones, and do you come back to it again? How much time do you spend on a book? I can spend a year just on that one book implementing the different things in it if I were to take them and go through one by one. How do you start to break that down?
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Sure. I would ask you to structure your intention just like you did: "Find and implement two ways to understand the difference or the space between an input to my brain and its reaction." Why do you want to do that?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Why are you asking me that?
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Why do you want to understand that better?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Because I am an emotional person and a passionate person who also has ADHD. I found that oftentimes I allow inputs to create reactions that aren't actually the way that I want to react, which has a negative impact sometimes in relationships and in life. I want to start to fix that.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: I can relate. I would say one of two things. If you want to keep your intention as it is, just understanding the concepts, I would try to write down all of those concepts once you're done reading the book in one place. I would look at which two, three, or four of these are the most mind-blowing. Then I would rewrite those into an online notebook and try to review them as often as possible. Maybe even do a little bit of further research so that you truly understand that concept and can teach it to people, can talk about it on podcasts.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: What I'd challenge you to do instead is look for strategies to improve the space between the input and your reaction, and then work on those on a weekly basis until you feel like you've mastered them. For me, I know that through consistent meditation, I've been able to increase the space between an input to my brain and my reaction. I don't know if Daniel talks about it in *Thinking, Fast and Slow*—I've had that book since the beginning of my journey, I haven't read it yet. But if he recommends meditation, for instance, I would say, "Okay, that's the actual lead mechanism that I can implement into my schedule, and then I can measure for the outcome, which is better emotional intelligence." I'd plug into my activity tracker on my calendar a few meditations throughout the week because Daniel details the science around how meditation improves emotional intelligence. I'm making that up because I haven't read it, but find and implement some strategies that are a little bit more actionable.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Otherwise, your intention of just understanding the concepts is useful, and maybe the follow-up is to spend a little more time researching the things that you found the most shocking so that you could teach them to other people. Useful, but probably not implementable.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Just listening through your process, I do think that I fall, just like everybody, into the trap of reading a book, putting the book down, and being like, "Wow, that was amazing." During the time period of reading the book, I'm lit up and these things are happening, and then the book goes on another shelf and it kind of fades away. What I've started to do is put books within reach that I consider textbooks. One that I've just read that's awesome—I don't know if you've read this one yet—is *10x Is Easier Than 2x* by Benjamin Hardy. That is a phenomenal, phenomenal book. Absolutely out of this world, textbook style. I've implemented multiple strategies from that, but it was only because it really blew me away. What I'm going to start doing after this conversation and after I read your book is doing this with more of them.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'll give you another example. Chris Voss's *Never Split the Difference*. I've read it twice. The first time I read it, I thought, "This is amazing." Maybe tiny little things sunk in. The second time, some more sunk in. But I need to figure out how to use this. There's so much just in everyday life, how you communicate with someone, helping them feel like you're listening to them. Again, my biggest problem, which is obvious, is I have no problem making words come out of my face hole. So I have to slow that down so other people can hear. I like this a lot. I like this idea of setting an intention, making it specific, SMART goal, and then finding ways to actually implement it. I think it's a wonderful strategy.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: I started to think about this originally because I'd go to conferences and meet people at entrepreneurship events. I'd be like, "Why are you here? What can I help with?" And they wouldn't have an answer. I thought, you don't even know why you're at this conference. Then I'd start asking about books, and you don't even know why you're reading the book you're reading. Let's build some intentionality into everything that we do so that when you're at a conference and somebody says, "Hey, what's going on? Nice to meet you," you can say, "Hey, can I share my intention for the event?" And they're like, "Yeah, sure." And you're like, "I'd like to find and meet and schedule a virtual coffee with at least three authors so I can share with them the services that BookThinkers provides. Do you know of anybody in the room that's an author?" Right then, that person can help me on my journey. They know exactly what I'm doing.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Same thing with the book. If I'm reading *Never Split the Difference* because last time I got hosed while buying a new car and I wish I had my negotiation skills tuned up a little bit, I'd read the book and say, "Find and implement at least two strategies that I can use next time I buy a car because I got hosed last time and spent thousands of dollars when I could have just read this $25 book instead and saved myself the money." Now when I'm reading through, I'm visualizing myself at the car dealership and thinking, "Oh, this is one of the strategies I could have implemented." Then you start to practice it. Intention is a big part of the process for me.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I did the same thing with a work negotiation that I was having. The second time I reread it is because I completely blew this call. I shouldn't say blew it, it just didn't go the way that I wanted. It wasn't an easy call, but in self-reflection, I did not help steer it in a positive direction. I thought, I did not have the tools walking in. I didn't prepare properly. So I went back and read again. I came back and did the same exact thing. I thought, if I had just stopped and taken a breath and said, "How am I supposed to do that?" and brought them back to solving my problem, we probably could have gotten to a solution that worked for everybody much faster.
--:-- Host: What's up guys. Sorry to take you away from the episode, but as you know, we do not run ads on this show. In exchange for that, I need your help. If you're loving this episode, if you enjoy this podcast, whether you're watching on YouTube or listening on your favorite podcast platform, I would love for you to subscribe, share, comment if you're on YouTube, leave a rating review if you're on Spotify or Apple iTunes. This helps the show grow. It helps me bring more guests in.
--:-- Host: We have a tremendous lineup of people coming in, men and women who've done incredible things, sharing their stories around peak performance, leadership, growth, sales—the things that are going to help you grow as a person and grow your business. They all check out comments, ratings, reviews. They check out all this information before they come on. As I reach out to more and more people and want to bring them in and share their stories with you, I need your help. Share the show. Subscribe if you're not subscribed. I'd love for you to leave a comment about the show because I read all the comments. If you're on Apple or Spotify, leave a rating review of this show. I love you for listening to this show and I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoy creating the show for you. All right, I'm out of here. Peace.
--:-- [Return to conversation]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Let's get back to the episode. Man, so I love that. One of the other things that I wanted to ask you about specifically about the book is note-taking. I have a very random underlined, star, highlight, scribble-in-the-margins system. There is no rhyme or reason to it. Do you have a specific style, tactic, or recommended methodology for note-taking to help people capture more out of each book that they read?
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Yeah, absolutely. It kind of starts with this understanding that note-taking and reading are two completely separate activities. If you try to do them at the same time and pivot between both, which most people do, you're going to be very slow and inefficient. When I'm reading a book, I like to stay in the book. I'll have a highlighter or a pen and I'll note something next to an area of the book that I think is related to my intention, maybe an action that I could take. But I'm not going to stop reading just so I can take some notes.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Think about this metaphor from Jim Kwik's book *Limitless*. He says, imagine you're driving through a neighborhood and you're going really slow. You're reading slow. You're driving really slow. Your mind can wander because you're driving at a slow, comfortable speed. You can notice the mailboxes, the houses, the cars in the driveway. "Ooh, look, a G-Wagon," whatever. But if you were driving fast, your eyes are glued to the road because you cannot mess up. You cannot drive onto somebody's lawn. You need to keep your eyes on the road. Same thing happens with reading. We can read so much faster than we give ourselves credit for. By reading slowly and taking notes, it's going to take you a long time to go through the book. Instead, know your intention, highlight things that are related to your intention, and at the end of a reading session or at the end of the book, then you get into your note-taking.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: What I like to do is rewrite all of my notes. I think repetition leads to retention. If I can rewrite all of my notes into a notebook, that increases my understanding. Then I like to go through that list and say, "What am I going to take action on? What 20% of these notes can lead to 80% of the change that I'm looking to make?"
--:-- Nick Hutchison: And I'll rewrite those into an online notebook like Evernote. So you said *Never Split the Difference*. Maybe you find yourself in a situation where you only have three minutes to prep before you walk into a negotiation because it just got thrown at you at work. If you have all of your notes in an online notebook that syncs between your phone and your laptop and everything else, then you can quickly get in there, look at your notes from *Never Split the Difference*, review the framework, and walk into the meeting. You mentioned tool belt. I like to call it a book belt. Sometimes you don't need the hammer, but you have it available to you so that when you need it, it's there.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: So reading, you can read in anticipation of events and then pull those notes out later if you use effective note-taking strategies. And again, rewriting them is another form of repetition. And if you can teach them to friends and family and you can talk about it on a podcast or whatever, it's another form of repetition. Teaching increases retention as well.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. That's 100% the case. It's funny. I will talk through heady concepts sometimes with my kids that I know they don't even understand at this point, they're just used to it just so I can talk the idea to them in my head so that I can think through it. And they'll be like, my older son, he's nine going on 10, he'll be like, "Dad, I don't even understand what you're saying." And I can tell they're not even listening. I'll just be talking to them about something. And it's simply just to get it straight in my head because I have to talk through something to understand it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So it's like, you read through it, you underline it, you work it. I completely agree on the repetition part. That's one of the things that I don't do. I used to do book notes on my website, mostly for myself to work through it. And then sometimes I do it as a podcast episode. I would talk through what I found in the book, what was good about the book as a way to promote the book if it was good, and also just talk through some of the concepts. I think I may get back into that because I've been reading pretty heavy. And even if it's interesting to the audience or not, I could care less. I mostly want it for me. Because you spend this time. It takes time. You're choosing to read a book versus some other activity. You might as well get the most out of it that you can get out of it if you're going to take that time.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Yeah. And so when I've been selling this book recently—it just became available for pre-order, launches November 1st—I've been telling people, if you choose to read other books before you choose to read this one, there's an opportunity cost to that because you won't have everything that I've learned to get the most out of the book. So you'll miss something where you won't get enough out of the book. And that's what it is. 10 years ago when I started this journey, I've learned and changed and evolved and iterated a thousand times. And I know in the future, I'll have better strategies as well. But what I have now is much better than what the 20-year-old version of myself had access to. Because again, like you said, nobody teaches you how to implement what you read. I wish they did. I looked for the book a thousand times, but it doesn't exist. And so that's why I've decided to write this one.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: And I had a little bit of imposter syndrome. I'm 29 years old. Am I old enough to write a book? The average age of the people that I'm reading is 50s, 60s, 70s. But I have something to offer that that earlier version of myself didn't have access to. I'm one or two steps farther than they are. So I'm just trying to be as useful as possible to that guy. You know what I mean?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, well, I'm 42 and I still have imposter syndrome daily. So don't feel bad about that. I don't know that anybody that's trying to actually do something meaningful—I've never met anybody that doesn't have it. They say that some people might say they don't, but I just don't think that's true. Everyone that I've met who's honest and is trying to do something big, they feel the exact same way. You can't not. It's part of the creative process.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So I self-published a book back in 2015 when I was 34. And there's a lot of it—it was a pretty amazing process. I'm proud of parts of it. There are other parts that as a rookie kind of doing it myself, I would do differently or better. But putting all your thoughts into something like this, it codifies your thought on it. You own it now. When you do that, that's one of the processes that I really liked about it. There are certain concepts in that book that I still believe today that are still true, that are universal in my opinion, that are here no matter what. I could pull them out and talk through them in an instant.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And I have no doubts that you're going to sell a ton of copies of your book and you're going to be just fine. But at the very least, you will own this process and be able to teach this process at the drop of a hat at any time. And you'll be able to build upon it. It becomes—you now have this ledge. For the rest of your life, you have this ledge that you will never go below that spot. You now own right here. You've set it in stone. And if you were climbing this wall face, you're not going to fall below that spot now. And the next book will do the same thing for you. And now you'll be here. And that's just how you continue to get up the mountain.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think that it's very important for people to create long-form content like that, specifically books. So at 29, I'm impressed. I think it's phenomenal. So talk to me a little bit about your actual business, BookThinkers. What are you guys doing? How are you helping authors? Where does it come from? Obviously you have a love for books and that's where this comes out of, but what is the problem that you're seeing? I just had two very good buddies that wrote books. Very happy for them. But watching them go through the process, kind of like I did a while ago, it's a freaking challenge. So when people come to you, what is the problem that they're initially looking to have solved? What's the most common problem?
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Yeah, well, I'll tell you about that problem and how it all started. When I started sharing the books that I was reading on social media, I had no real intention other than connecting with like-minded people and sharing the books that I was reading. And as that audience started to grow, authors would reach out and say, "Hey Nick, my target reader for my book looks exactly like your follower base. Can I pay you for a book review?" So here I am. BookThinkers is a side hustle. I'm just sharing the books I'm reading and people are willing to pay me for book reviews. That's pretty cool. So I started to understand that they're looking to pay this as a form of advertising because I could sell books for them.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: So I'd go back to these authors and I'd say, "Hey, is there anything else that I could help with related to PR, book marketing, social media? This is my interest and one day I want to work full time in it. Let me explore things with you." And what I realized was that most authors were behind the eight ball. Launching and promoting a book is a team sport, yet so many of these solopreneur types or semi-retired business executives try to go at it alone. But it's a lot to manage. And so oftentimes they'll release the book, they'll realize only in hindsight that they should have done more, and they'll come to a company like mine, BookThinkers, that has a big audience. And they'll say, "Can you get my book in front of your audience? I'll pay anything because nobody bought my book and it's super disappointing."
--:-- Nick Hutchison: So as I continue to build this business, I try to get earlier and earlier in that process. What can we do in advance of a book launch to guarantee a little bit more success? So today there are three core services that BookThinkers offers. Number one, we do short-form video content. So we'll help an author turn their book into 50 or 100 Instagram reels, TikToks, YouTube shorts, et cetera, so that they can start to build an audience in anticipation of their launch. And we try to structure these videos with a strong hook to grab attention, some meaty value, and then a call to action to pre-order or purchase the book only when it's necessary. And we'll fly out to an author, we'll bring the cameras, the lighting, the scripts, the whole nine yards, and we'll help them start to build that social media community in anticipation of a launch.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Number two, we do podcast booking. I heard James Clear on a podcast earlier this year say that the reason he thinks *Atomic Habits* was so successful is that over 100 podcasts went live during his launch month. So BookThinkers offers that as a service. If we have enough time, we'll place an author on up to 100 podcasts in anticipation of their book launch that will all go live around the time their book comes out. So think about what that does for an author. They can sell copies of the book to all the podcasters and their audiences, but they also get this huge SEO boost and all these additional books that get purchased as a result of them being interviewed on podcasts. If each show goes out on five or six different platforms and backlinks to their website and their Amazon account, that's a ton of attention, all within a very focused short period of time.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: And then number three, we do book reviews. We have an audience of over 150,000 nonfiction readers, most of them on Instagram, and they're looking for a new book recommendation every day. So if something fixes a problem they're facing or helps them develop a skill that they're looking to develop, and we put it in front of our audience, we can move a lot of books that way. And so we'll get book posts going out that generate pre-orders right on launch day, a little bit post-launch to get that extra hype that they're looking for because platforms like Amazon have algorithms. And if you can generate a lot of attention upfront, then it will kind of carry itself for a longer period of time as well. On top of that, social media management, a bunch of other book-related consulting. But those are some of the things that we help to do. We help to get earlier in their process and build the platform, have the audience, have the podcast go live, and then get other people like BookThinkers to post about them.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Oh, that's awesome. So you aren't doing any of the—you're not also like a publishing house kind of thing. You come—we would come to you. If you're an author, you would go to you guys after you've got a book deal, you're locked in, you're in the writing process or you're towards the end of the writing process. And then you come and say, "Here's the concept. Here's the book. Here's what we're doing. Here's the audience we want to go after." And then you guys come up with a plan for actually getting that book to try the early traction that you need to drive up rankings and stuff.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Yeah, exactly. And another issue with that process that you just mentioned is that these publishers or self-published authors—but these publishers and PR companies, they typically don't touch social media. They really stink at it. And so very early in my journey, a lot of these big publishing houses, they'd be sending me business because their process stops the minute the book comes out. But the author wants to sell the book for years to come. So there's a disconnect. They don't do any social media coaching. They might provide some digital assets or something for the author to push. These publishers are also kind of like VCs. They'll place 20 bets. One will take off and they'll forget the other 19. And that one will pay for the other 19 that they neglect. And so these authors who sign these publishing deals, they realize the publishers don't help them at all. And so at the very least, they'll say, "Well, go talk to BookThinkers. They'll help you."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, that's pretty cool. And your podcast, you've interviewed some really amazing authors, amazing thinkers, celebrities, all kinds of stuff. I mean, that's got to be pretty exciting to be able to pick the brains of all these people and really dive into these topics that they've become experts on either through their own research or their own experiences.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. The podcast came from popular demand. We just had a lot of authors starting to follow us that I looked up to and I was like, "Whoa, these people are accessible." And I have follow-up questions after reading their book. So why not document that conversation and share it with everybody? So yeah, I've been blessed to interview so many of my favorite authors. And all of these people, for the most part, they just want to positively impact the world. And so if I can put them in front of my audience and they can share what they're teaching and why they wrote their book, I'm happy to be there for that conversation every time.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, that's pretty tremendous. So obviously you're the guy here. You read books with intention. How do you pick your next book? How do you think through what the next book is that you're going to read?
--:-- Nick Hutchison: There are a few different ways that I approach that question. Number one, I'm paid to read a lot of books. I'll just say that up front. So that has an influence on what I'm doing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Which is not a bad career. I mean, that's not a bad gig.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: That's not a bad gig at all.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: No, we're pro-capitalism here on the show. So it's all good. But that's not a bad career at all.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Yeah. And you know what? The BookThinkers team, my company, we have 10 people on my team now that help support the authors we work with. So a lot of them get to read these books and work with these authors behind the scenes. So it's freed up a little bit of my time. But I'm always looking in two places first. Number one, is there a pain that I'm currently experiencing on a regular basis that I could overcome if I was a little bit more educated? So alleviation of pain. The other thing is developing skills. So where would I like to be a year from now? And what's holding me back? Where am I the bottleneck in achieving something a little bit bigger and better? Lead generation is a great example. BookThinkers is not great with paid advertising. And we only use one of the lead generation tools that Hormozi highlights in here. So it's like, that's a skill that I want to get better at. So I'm going to read about it. Those are the first two places that I look.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Some other things: popular books are typically popular for a reason and they come up in conversation just like this. So I like to read a lot of the bestsellers. There are a lot of them, so I can't get to all of them, but popular books are popular for a reason. If I'm attending a conference and I know there's a speaker that I want to interact with, I'll read their books so I have a better foundation of knowledge to apply what I'm learning to. So that's another place that I go. Or I ask the people that I want to be like, "What books are you reading?" because I want to get inside of their minds and replicate their behavior. So books are typically a big piece of that too.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I definitely have found it hard when you interact with somebody and you want to talk about books or something you've learned or picked up and you run into people who don't read. I hate this about myself because it feels judgy, but I'm kind of judging them immediately when they don't. I'm like, "Wait a minute, you've never heard of Ryan Holiday? You've never heard of insert whoever?" And they'll be like, "Oh, I don't really read. I don't have time to read." And I'm like, "Wait, are you speaking English? I'm sorry. I'm struggling with what you're saying to me right now. You don't read books? Like you're an adult? I don't get it." So what's your response to that? Give me, what's your response to that?
--:-- Nick Hutchison: So here's a good one that you can use. If somebody tells you they don't have the time to read, ask them this: "If I gave you ten thousand dollars to read a book by the end of next week, do you think you could do it?" And they'd be like, "Oh well, of course I could do it. I'll read five." So it's not a question of whether or not you have the time to read. It's whether or not you assign enough value to it. Because you'd read if you were getting paid, but you're not going to read for free. So now let's talk about why it's valuable. And so I think that's a way to kind of redirect them.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love that. "I can't read. I don't have time to read." To like, "Oh well, why should I be reading?" You know what I mean? Yeah.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So one of my missions—there's something I say all the time here on the show—is that health is a competitive advantage in business. And I try to stay fit and healthy. I eat healthy. I'm currently on day 12 of 75 Hard.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: That's right. It's good, man.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. So I try to share because I'm in my forties. I try to show people like, look, just because you hit 40 doesn't mean that you have to all of a sudden just get a dad bod or a mom bod and kind of give up. Prioritizing this stuff has benefits beyond just the way you look or whatever. And a lot of my social media content tends to be around the emotional aspects of leadership, et cetera, and how we put ourselves in the right mindset.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So I get the same thing because people will be like, "Oh, you work out twice a day." And I'm like, "Well, that's just because I'm currently doing 75 Hard. I don't do two workouts every day, although I may. It hasn't been very difficult." But it's like, this is the difference between me having energy to the end of the day and not. This is the difference between me feeling good about myself and not. This is the difference between me being anxious or me getting rid of that anxiety. And I'll literally list out these different things. And I'm saying, "If you could get rid of all your anxiety for the day, would you go to the gym for 45 minutes? Would you go for a walk? If at 3 PM when you're normally just filled with pounding anxiety for everything that's happened in the day and everything that's going to happen in the rest of the day, and if you could just take 45 minutes out, would you change that?"
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And it's funny, people don't think about it that way. They just don't want to engage in these things. They just want to acquiesce to the easiest path. And I keep trying to shake trees and it's funny who falls out and who doesn't. But every once in a while, something will click for somebody and all of a sudden you'll see them post on social media about being on a treadmill. And I'm like, "Yes!" That's doing it. But we will just fall into whatever the easiest path is. It's so easy for people to do that. And if they don't see it, if they don't hear it, they can become blind to what's possible. And that's not a good thing.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Yeah. Here's another wake-up call for people. If you're experiencing a pain on a daily basis—personal, financial, health related, whatever it is—if you're experiencing a pain on a daily basis, over the next 30 years, you will experience that pain 11,000 times. So what if by spending $20 and a few hours of your time, you could read a book about overcoming that issue, deal with it, and never experience that pain again 11,000 more times? So just like you're saying, when you think about it, a book condenses decades of valuable information into days. A book like *Steve Jobs* by Walter Isaacson condenses a trillion dollars worth of business lessons into a $20 book. You can't beat it.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: So many of us think that our pain, our lives, our problems are unique to us. But the fact is 100 billion people have lived on this planet. Millions of them have written books. Thousands of those books probably could help you overcome the same issue that you're currently dealing with.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. That's it. That's why I love these books so much. Books are also a thoughtful gift. They are a way of sharing information. They're a way of building community. They're a way of giving people hope. There are so many things. I had someone in my life who shared a book with me recently. And it was such a reminder of the relationship I have with that person, but also it was really good framing. It was right at the perfect time. They knew that I was kind of dealing with something. And then this kind of helped me narrow that thing. It solved that problem. It put my brain in a really good space.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I know it's on the reference shelf right here. This is the ones I go to over here. This is like the active working library. That one over there is kind of a different library. And they're just an important part of our society. They're an important part of growing a community, of growing with other individuals. A good way that I will kind of see where someone is at in relation to my own mentality is I'll reference Jordan Peterson's *12 Rules for Life*. And if someone has read it, is aware of it, or doesn't start gagging when they hear it, then I know there's a good chance you're kind of like me. And we can post that book the other day.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: That's funny. To me, after the Bible, it's the next best book on how to live your life that's ever been written in history. In 2017, it course corrected a lot of very, very bad habits that I had and bad relational habits that I had. And I think that book to me, it's like the Bible and then *12 Rules for Life*. If you're looking for filter systems for how to live a prosperous life, taking out the religious aspect of the Bible because some people get all fucked up about that, just the life lessons in the Bible and then *12 Rules for Life*. That's how it goes. And that's how high I rank that book. But I don't put that on other people. You can use books as reference points or anchoring systems for relationships and stuff. They're just such an important part of our world. I think far too often we dismiss them or make excuses for not having the time when we all know that we have the time. We just don't make it.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Yeah. Check out the following math. This is what's mind-blowing to me. I'll follow up that $10,000 question with something like this. If you replace 15 minutes of your morning Instagram or TikTok scrolling and fit the first 15 minutes of your Netflix or HBO in the evening—not the whole thing, I'm not a robot, but just the first 15 minutes—in 30 minutes of reading a nonfiction book, even as a beginner every day, you'll probably read about 20 pages. You do that five days a week. That's a hundred pages a week. That's a book every two or two and a half weeks. That's over 20 books a year by replacing a low impact activity like Netflix or social media with reading a good book.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: And when I say this, it clicks for people sometimes. I can't even remember the main characters in shows that I really enjoyed six months ago or 12 months ago. That's not serving the future version of Nick Hutchison. But that book—oh, I'm still using that book. And that book I will use for the rest of my life, like *12 Rules*. That example that I had about if something's happening on a daily basis over the next 30 years, it's going to happen 11,000 times—that came from *Beyond Order*, which is Jordan Peterson's follow-up to *12 Rules*. So I'm using these things all day, every day. Serve your future self. Put 15 minutes in your morning and 15 minutes in your evening and watch your life change.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. Dude, I have enjoyed our conversation so much. I think that what you're doing—I also love the marketing hook to the book: you can't read another book until you read this book because you won't get as much out of it. I love the marketing hook there as well. It kind of wedges yourself in. You have to buy it or otherwise all the other books will be less valuable. But no, I think it's tremendous. For everyone listening, obviously you can just go to Amazon and pre-order. I'll also have links in the show notes and stuff. Where else can people get at you if they want to learn more about what you're doing? We'll have the Instagram linked up and all that stuff. But just give everyone the shout outs for where they can connect with you.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Yeah, one of my favorite things to do is play this book matchmaker role because that's a way that I can provide impact. So if anybody listening or watching today wants a custom book recommendation from me, just go to that Instagram link that's in the bio or the show notes and send me a DM. Tell me about a problem you're facing. Tell me about a skill that you'd like to develop. Tell me about something that you're interested in learning. And I'll probably ask a couple follow-up questions, but I'll make a book recommendation. And what I try to do, a little spreadsheet system for this, is I'll try to follow up and hold you accountable to reading the book. Did you read it? What'd you think? What was your intention? Are you taking action? What's the result? Because this is what it's all about. This is why I'm here. I believe in these books and I'm happy to do that for anybody that wants a custom book recommendation.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's tremendous, dude. I think I love the work you're doing. Obviously I'm a huge fan of books as well. I'm glad that we share that. I'm glad we also share the former kind of sports goon mentality when we were young, because I also had that. And that you have an appreciation for Jordan Peterson. But I wish you nothing but the best. I hope your book absolutely crushes. I'm glad we had you on. Everyone listening, go get *Rise of the Reader*. Highly recommend it. And dude, wish you nothing but the best. Thank you so much. I'm going to jump.
--:-- Nick Hutchison: Boom. Thank you.
--:-- [End of interview. Advertisement follows.]
--:-- Host: Close twice as many deals by this time next week. Sound impossible? It's not. With the One Call Close System, you'll stop chasing leads and start closing deals in one call. This is the exact method we use to close 1,200 clients in under three years during the pandemic. No fluff, no endless follow-ups, just results fast. Based in behavioral psychology and battle tested, the One Call Close System eliminates excuses and gets the prospect saying yes more than you ever thought possible. If you're ready to stop losing opportunities and start winning, visit masteroftheclosed.com. That's masteroftheclosed.com. Do it today.
