Our Top 16 Life-Changing Books For Business Owners

You're listening to the six figure own studio podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio. Now your hosts, Brian Hood and Chris Graham.

Welcome back to another episode of the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood and I'm here on my bald and beautiful black shirted cohost. Oh, come on. Don't blow me up for that. Christopher J. Graham. This is the first time in the history of our podcast and actually probably that's a lie, but in a long time that I've ever seen you in a non purple shirt, like 50 episodes. I went to the bank today, so I felt like a purple shirt. Might've been too loud at the bank. Yeah. Be proud of who you are, Chris. You're the purple shirt and beautiful cohost Christopher J. Graham. Okay, got it. Don't be ashamed of that. Never allow that to hold you back from being yourself, even in a bank. Screw the system, man. Death to the man. I'm 100% with you. I love the purple shirts. They're not going anywhere. I'm obsessed with them. But they present some problem on a warm day at like a bank because one year loud and too purple shows a lot of pit stain.

Oh yeah, it really does. Anytime you raise your arms up, I just cringe. And how much [inaudible] going on that purple shirt man. But a dark shirt nobody can see. I'm pretty sure you only have one purple shirt that you just wear every day. And if that disgusts our listeners, I am right here with you on the discuss level here. I think I have 12 or 15 purple shirts, American apparel, tribal end. You know we gotta do what you gotta do. I think family guy and probably [inaudible] has made fun of this a few times where like you open up Peter Griffin's closet and he's just got like 30 pairs of green pants and white shirts. That's how I imagine your closet. It's only purple shirts closet. You think I hang these shirts on fricking hangers, kind of a psychopath. Do you think I am? That's what they do in cartoons and your cartoon character? To me. Oh man. I have a drawer, a drawer. I have a drawer and it's full of tee shirts and underwear. Too much information and then I have another drawer for socks. That's like a third of the size. Are you a boxer or a brief or a boxer? Brief guy. I've got about 12 pairs of the exact same pair of boxer briefs and it's the only thing I wear and I have no idea what brand is. I just like it.

Yeah. I bought whatever brand Tim Ferriss used to push way back in the day. Oh yeah, he's pushing me undies lately. Yeah, I think everyone's, that's the advertiser who's paying the most now. That's why everyone's pushing them, but it was like ex-officio or something like that was the brand. I'd be down for some free underwear if we mentioned them in the pod. It's true though. It's true. No. If we ever advertise free underwear to you guys, stop listening to our show. That's not the type of show of this is. That's true. We will never have an underwear sponsor. I don't care how much they pay us, but I will talk about the underwear I wear cause it's my underwear and it's not someone else's. Let's move on to something of more value because we've lost 37% of our listeners this week and that's okay. But it's our 100th episode, Chris Graham.

Oh my gosh. Can you believe this is, we've made it a hundred damn episodes a hundred weeks without missing a week on the podcast. I've missed a couple of weeks. Here's the thing, I can believe it now, but if you would have explained like here's what it's like, I know you just want to hang out with Brian once a week and that's why you agreed to do his silly podcast idea. That's true. But if you had explained to me like, here's how your life will change, I would have been like no way for the next two plus years. You will be meeting with me every week, sometimes multiple times a week. Sometimes we just chat and don't even record and we're going to talk business and it doesn't get old. Yeah, I hasn't yet at least actually, so hopefully here's to a hundred more at least we don't have any massive like crazy celebration plans for a hundred episode, but we're not that type of person.

We do want to thank you guys. It is mind blowing that there are so many people that are creatives that are trying to build their own business, that are excited about their own personal growth and making themselves into better human beings. That's fucking great. Thank you. I'm going to cuss on my microphone. I did it celebrating the hundredth episode with the explicit tag on iTunes. Thank you so much. First gram, this is the episode we get banned from iTunes. Oh geez. Let's kind of move this into the topic of today's show, which you probably know by the title of this episode. The reason we're talking about our favorite books is because this is the stuff that's gotten us to this point to this 100 episodes. It is worth us having an entire episode dedicated to our favorite books because without these books we would not be successful entrepreneurs, which means we would not have a successful podcast because if we weren't successful entrepreneurs, no one wanted to listen to us.

We do a week talk about business because who wants to listen to people that talk about business that aren't doing what they talk about. Right? Totally. Gosh, we tried to narrow this down to like five books total for this episode didn't work. There's a 0% chance of that happening. We went through our bookshelves. We spent a little time, I picked up like eight books. Chris has like 10 bucks with him. I don't know how many books we're going to try to do today, but we're going to try and get as many in as we can and this may take a while. I don't really care how long this takes. Well, let me hop in here with explaining why I started reading in the first place. Yes, explain why. I've told the story in the podcast before, but basically my story, I

hired someone to build me a website for mastering. It had the before and after player on it where you could select the genre of music that you wanted to hear and then you could flip back and forth to master and unmastered

you say it like it doesn't exist anymore. It's still the exact same site with improvements. Now

it's exactly the same. Yeah. But at the time no one had ever done that. But I knew if I build this, people will understand the service I provide and the level that I provided at. And I started that. I got crazy overwhelmed really fast cause I had no idea what I was doing. I only read one book and it was about advertising and I didn't know anything about business other than advertising. And I had a little miniature nervous breakdown and abandoned my mastering studio one day and was like, this isn't gonna work. There's too much work. I can't keep up with this. My wife picked up this book called the four hour work week at the library. It's been sitting on my couch for three months in the studio, racking up late fees. I'm going to go read one chapter of it. Chapter five sounded kind of interesting. Life changed and wondered to myself why didn't my teachers in school tell me there was good stuff in books, which is hilarious because it's almost the only thing they told me. Yes.

So we're going to get into the specifics of that book specifically cause that's on the list. We're going to talk about a bunch of other books and everyone's going to take something different away from this episode because again, this is one of the most buffet like advice buffet episodes that we've ever done. I don't think anyone should read all these books, especially depending on what stage in business you are. So maybe we should talk on what stage of business you should be in before you read each book, if we can remember to do that. But what I will say is that the success Chris and I have in all of our businesses right now, because we both have multiple businesses, including our studios, including the six figure home studio, podcast and blog, and then also our software companies file pass and bounce Butler. We have success because we look outside of the music industry for advice, for best practices, for ideas.

And I think that's what sets us apart from a lot of other studios because a lot of other studios only look to your left and to your right, to the studio down the road to the studio you find in the internet to the successful producer you like. You only look to those resources. And what we've done and what's helped us get outside of our industry is to look to these other proven resources and other industries that look at life and business and problems and problem solving in a completely different way and give us unique perspectives to tackle the unique challenges that we face in the audio world.

Yeah, and that basically comes down to if your business isn't running well, it's probably because you've only looked at other businesses in your own industry to learn how to run it well. If you have business problems, you need business solutions and you have to look to business resources and that's inevitably going to bring you into contact with other businesses and other business models. Success like this, this is not like an a, I don't think this is an opinion. I think this is the truth. This is a mountain I'll die on. Success comes from looking how business

as a whole works and figuring out how to apply it to your own unique skillset, your customers, the unfair advantages you have. If you happen to be like a retired rockstar and you want to start a business, it should probably have something to do with music so that you can leverage what already has worked for you in the past. It's true. So I just think if this podcast is your only business resource week to week, you're doing it wrong. I love that you listen to our podcast. I don't want to lose you as a listener, but I also think that you should be looking to other businesses for advice and feedback and it doesn't have to be podcast, that's fine, but it can be other podcasts, but you definitely should be looking to other books in different industries for advice, feedback, ideas and inspiration. Totally. Well, as I was going through my list of books that have influenced and shaped me the most more than just about anything else, one of the things that surprised me is in my top 10 and probably in my top five are three books that were all recommended to me by the same guy.

That was my original business mentor, doctor, Mark, fix area, the dentists guy you've mentioned in the podcast multiple times throughout the years. It was wild like looking through these books and be like, wow, Mark recommended or gave me these books. Holy crap. I'm so grateful for him, so thanks Mark. Man, you've really changed my life. I'm hoping this episode is kind of that moment for our listeners, like if you don't have that mentor in your life, this podcast episode is, we're giving you these books to go check out to make massive changes in your life over the long run. Yeah. This is my attempt at imitating Mark is the podcast. Yeah. At scale to thousands of people. Yeah, so no pressure, Chris. No pressure, and I don't have a doctorate, so there's that too, but yeah. Yeah. Well let's dive in. Let's talk about the books that have shaped us, but before we do that, I want to mention, let's dive in, but not in this miscon what you just said.

Right to the edge of the diving board. Toes curled over the edge. Before we dive in, here's what I would say. This messed with my head a lot. I read a couple business books like two or three and I realized like what an amazing resource they were and I knew that 10 years from now I'm going to have businesses and I'm going to read books and then I'm going to say, gosh, I wish I had read this book when I was younger. All the books I've read have just been in an attempt to minimize the number of times that I'm going to say that when I'm older. That's it. So take her advice. Read some of these books that you know you should read so that when you're older and your businesses medium sized or medium successful or whatever it happened, whatever your dream is that you don't look back and say, Oh gosh, if only I had read this book when I was younger, I wouldn't have the problems I have now. It's true. Before you get to today's episode, we need to talk about our sponsors, Chris. Oh yeah. We have two sponsors for this podcast. Not really real sponsors. Yeah. These are not real sponsors so you can actually keep listening cause these aren't like stupid D sponsorship

or whatever. The first sponsor on our list today is Chris's company called bounce Butler. Chris, would you like to tell our audience who is a good customer for bounce speller and what is the benefit they will get from it by using it?

Do you spend a lot of time bouncing? Do you hate bouncing? Are you bouncing all the time? Do you wish that you didn't have to bounce one audio file at a time in ProTools? Cubase studio one? Well, studio one's coming soon. Logic logic, Ableton fill in the blank. Basically, if it's a popular dog bounced, Butler supports it. And so what you do is if I use free loops studios that we don't support for D loop studios, sorry. So let's say if I use garage band [inaudible] honestly we could support that. That would not be, no, don't. Okay. Just out of principle, out of principle. But here's the thing. So let's say you're exporting a bunch of stems and you want to bounce them all down, or you've got like vocal up, vocal down main version in a radio edit, et cetera. You've got tons and tons and tons of bounces to do bounce.

Butler is an app. You open it up, you tell it which sessions you want bounced, you hit okay and then you leave and go hang out with your fam and bounce Butler texts you when all your bounces are done. That's it. That's bounced. Butler, check it out at [inaudible] dot com by the time this episode comes out, it might be open access for everyone, but right now we're an early access. We're working the kinks out, but people all over the globe are bouncing their files with bounce Butler and it's awesome and exciting for me because it lets people have some freedom outside of their business by adding

some automation to their systems. I'll talk about it real quick myself. If I finished up an album, I have so much to do, I have to do again vocal up, vocal down, muted. So for instrument only stems all sorts of bounces that have to do for 10 songs. So imagine how many bounces have to do for that bounce. Baller will let me just select a bunch of different sessions, bounce them all down and I can go off and play video games or read books. You could go read books, nerdy fantasy books, so the next sponsor on this episode is my company that I have with my best friend Trevor. We run a company called file paths that you can get to by going to file pass.com and file pass is for any recording studio or any audio professional who is collaborating with clients on projects.

When you send files to clients and they start sending you revisions, you are getting revisions back on email. You're getting them back on text message. There are messages, you go on Facebook, they're finding your Tinder profile and messaging you through there. They're finding you on farmers only.com they're finding your profile and Christian mingle.com and there's just sending your revisions on every possible platform under the sun. Anything that you've ever created an account on, they're sending their long list of revisions. We need the vocals up one DB here. We need the guitar of one DB here.

It happened. The worst is when they're like on the fourth bar of the second bridge when it goes to minor, if you could turn up the boom.

So knowing, yeah, that's the kind of stuff that'll make you want to pull your hair out. In Chris's case, he's already pulling all his hair out so I don't know what he'll do. Yeah, there's some, there's some still. So the way file pass solves this problem is by creating a platform that allows you to centralize all your revisions in one place. So you send your client a file through file pass. They can play it on any device, stream it at high definition, no encoding done. If you upload a way file, they will stream away file and it allows them to leave timestamped revisions directly on the song. This is so much better than getting email. This is so much better than getting a bunch of communications from a bunch of people on a bunch of different platforms. It is right there in one place so that you can have all conversations about that session or about that song right there in the app and it's not out everywhere on the internet.

This saves your Christian mingle profile. This saves your farmer's only profile. This saves your Tinder profile. This saves people from messenger you on Facebook. It makes your life so much better and I almost forgot the best part. If the client still owes you money, you can put up behind a paywall, meaning they cannot download the file. They can only stream it until they pay you through file pass, meaning you get your money, they get their file until they pay you money. They don't get their file. Now file passes the bad guy. You can go on and live in your life having a nice time on Tinder or whatever it is that you do. I'm not judging you if that's you, but you can go to file pass.com right now and sign up. We may be out of early access by the time this episode comes out. I don't know. Actually, we're so close to the full launch. Either way you can get on the waiting list or you can get signed up. Just gotta fall back.com you'll figure it out. Go to file, pass.com sign up today and your life will be so much better.

Brian, I can't tell you how many people I've heard that have mentioned file passed to me that are like all this fruit and great. Oh man, clients love it. Oh it's so awesome. I think you're going to be the industry standard and I think it's going to be rare to find a recordings to do that. Doesn't use file pass in the future

for the fact that we're an early access. We are growing so fast as incredible because we haven't put a single cent in a marketing, we haven't even optimized things and it is like already taken off. So we're excited to get this thing out into the world so we can actually spread the good word of file pass to the audio nations. Now let's actually move on to the episode. So what's the first book on our list today, Chris? We're starting with books that both you and I have shared together as our most influential books because at some point we're going to get off the same list here and not be influenced by the same books, but what's the first book on the list, Chris?

Usually my most dogeared book, we got to start with four hour work week. See original business book, the first business book I ever read, and to be honest, it's the first business book that most people have read.

I can't remember if this is the first one that I read, but I will say, I actually think I dove into podcasts. This was like 2013 surprisingly so this is before podcasts really took off an early adapter. Yeah, and every single business podcast I would hear the four hour work week book mentioned all the time. You could not listen to a podcast without hearing this book, and it's kind of the same today. It's withstood the test of time. It is a classic, a 12 year old classic. Yeah. This book is something that has definitely shaped my mindset. And I'd say this is one of the biggest takeaways of this book. Now we're not gonna go into depth with like a full breakdown of each of these books because we don't have time. We have too many books to cover. But Chris, why should someone read this book?

Well, I would say the reason you should read this book is if you're listening to our podcast, you're trying to grow a business, you're trying to do what you love for a living, and the four hour work week is just a really palatable, fun, easy. You don't need to be a reader to pick that book up. It reads itself. That's one of the reasons it makes such a great business book because it's accessible. A lot of business books that Brian and I love that are a hard read, they're complicated.

There's a couple on my list today that are going to be a struggle to get through, but it's worth the struggle. This one is not a struggle to get through.

Yeah. So I would say, I'm gonna mess this up. When someone asks me, you know, what business book would you recommend? I ask, have you read the four hour work week first? And if they say no, then that's the first book I recommend every time, no matter what situation they're in, no matter what their business is, and no matter how successful they are, if they're making $300,000 a year, if they're making $30,000 a year, that's the book I recommend first. Great, unbelievable book. What is next on our list, Chris? Well, we've talked about it many times in the podcast. I would say the second book, maybe it's not that far away from for a work week as far as its impact. I think about four hour work week or something. I learned in that book at least once per day and I also think about the Go-Giver all the time.

Yeah, we've talked about this somewhat recently in the podcast. One of our guests, our only guest, it's been on multiple times. Graham Cochrane, and this is a book he swears by as well, so we're not going to really go into depth of this one either. Again, for brevity sake, but this was a game changer for the way Chris and I both approached business. This is the book that if you struggle with the mindset of scarcity, which we talked about in episode 96 and if you struggle with the positive mindset of the abundance mindset, if he struggled to live that life, which we talked about that in episode 97 if you struggle with getting rid of the scarcity mindset and nurturing the abundance mindset, the go giver is the book that will absolutely reshape the way you think about business and it goes against every single depiction of business and movies. Businesses always evil. It's always the big fat businessmen.

Coffee is for closers. Yeah, great movie, by the way. Yeah. What's it called again? Glen. Gary Ross. Yeah, I think it's Glen. Gary. Glen Ross. It's hard to say. It's so weird, but yeah. Here's the thing. If you're a new listener, when I was young, people would talk about business. I was just like, Ugh. That's like talking about, uh, that's like so grimy and dirty. And from what I've learned, reading all these books and from what I've experienced, business is about being good. It's about serving people. It's about treating people the way you would like to be treated. Let me just say this,

a successful longterm, sustainable, enjoyable business is like that. Yes, you can still have a successful business by the world standards by being, I guess for lack of a better term, evil. I just don't see how you could enjoy that and you're going to have a more flourishing, growing, sustainable business, especially in a personal brand driven business. If you live the Go-Giver life well, and if you think that a win means someone else needs to have a loss, if that's like your old school, like I was born before the eighties like mentality, no offense to any you guys born before the 80s that's an old school business mentality that doesn't work in a world where everyone has a television studio in their pocket. You'll get found out, you'll get crushed and you'll get past. Yeah. With the way social media works now and how connected we are with each other.

You can't live a scarcity driven life. I think the Go-Giver is a great book to help you get past that. Moving on to the next book that Brian and I love caveat this book scares. I've already cussed on to do it a few more times. It scares the shit out of me. This book terrified me and it was disturbing when I read it and I think about it all the time and I read this book as a defense strategy against people with a scarcity mindset against evil people that just want to like steal from you and I'm going to mispronounce his name and you're going to correct me, Brian, but it is influence the science and practice by dr Robert [inaudible] called Dany, C. I. A. L. D. I. N. I. You tell me how to pronounce that. I've always heard it pronounced Charlie. Charlie. No, it doesn't look like that, but Robert Cialdini influence the psychology of persuasion.

That's the book that I have at least, I don't know what you call it there. I think it's a different edition, but yeah. Oh, interesting. Yeah. We have different covers on ours. Oh yeah, yeah. Either way. This book, I would say you would not want to read this book until you are further into your career until you are starting to maybe do paid advertising for sure. You want to read this book before you do paid advertising. Yeah. Don't do paid advertising that reading this, you've got to have some amount of success in your life for this book to really matter. This will make you think too much about your marketing efforts if you get this book too early. Is that a good caveat here, Chris? Yeah, this book, my reaction when I finished it was I was like, they should require every student in America to read this or they should ban it and I'm not sure which.

If you're a manipulative asshole, there it is. Test number three, sort of Chris is on a roll today and you read this book. It is going to give you dangerous tools to hurt people if you use them the wrong way if you use them the wrong way. However, the reason this book is important to read, and this was so sad for me to read it cause I would read it and be like, Oh someone did that to me one time and I fell for it. Oh crap. They did that to me too. And I also fell for that. I would just say this book is great for yourself, from people who want to take from you. It's awesome. Yes. So it covers six different weapons is what he calls to influence people to essentially do what you want and that sounds really manipulative. There's a positive side to this book, however, and that is if you are trying to provide a high quality service and you are using these weapons as he calls them, these weapons of influence too, get someone over the hump to trust you, to hire you for your services.

This book is a great use to pour fuel on the fire of your marketing efforts because just one of these six things that you covers into the book. Just one of these six weapons of influence as he says, is enough to double your efforts in paid marketing specifically. Oh, easily. Easily. Yup. So when you put all six together, it is insane how much better things can work in your studio when, I might be remembering this wrong, but when Mark my first business mentor told me about this book, he kinda did it and like hushed tones a little bit. You know like I'm honestly like hesitant to mention it on the podcast because it's like giving someone a lighter and that could go really, really well or really, really bad. This is a dangerous book. And so like I said, it should either be illegal or everyone in America should have to read it in like eighth grade.

Yeah. I think at the very least reading this book as a defensive measure, because here's the thing, now that I know these things, I spot this all the time, not just on advertising, but just if someone's trying to sell me something or someone's trying to influence me in some way, I can spot this stuff so fast. And here's the thing I've been sold to with these techniques before. I've called these things out. I can list these things off and I will still buy things from people and it doesn't bother me because I know at the end of the day I know how this all works and I'm okay with it. As long as you understand it and as long as it's used within reason, this stuff can still be powerful even if you know it's still happening to you. So let's move onto the next book on our list, Chris.

Well, this one sounds like what we just described influences. It sounds like a book that assholes would read to take advantage of the downtrodden. It's how to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie. I'm going to do what you just did on that Oh, first edition. That's my first edition, 1937 a copy of this book and that's how much I enjoy this book. Gee, it seems like you like it. Yes. Here's the deal. This book is so much different than the book we just recommended. The book called influence. How to win friends and influence people is a book I would recommend. Even the most absolute beginner. Even if you don't have a business, this book is an absolute essential read for you because it's so powerful to know how to have social skills. This is basically a social skills book disguised as this scammy, how to win friends and influence.

People think it's just basic social skills and a lot of this is actually more on the go giver mindset. Yeah. Understanding that the sweetest sound someone could ever hear is the sound of their own name. Yeah. Brian, how to win friends and influence people. I'm embarrassed to say I have only cried while reading a book. Two, maybe three times. This book was one of them. Well, first of all, it's not talk at all about your emotional immaturity. If that's the only times you've cried, but why did this book make you cry, Chris? So here's the thing. You read the title and you're like, Oh, that book sounds like it was written for douchebags. It was, but not to help them be better douchebags to cure them of their douche. Baggery. Ooh, it's a while, but I am. I'm a little bit of a D bag.

Just a tiny bit. This book is about loving people. Well, that's what it's about and that's what life's all about, man. That's what being a dad's all about. That's what being the husband is all about. That's running a business is all about. That's what being a mastering engineer or mixing engineer and tracking your business coach, you name it, it's about loving people well and about helping them achieve their potential. This book is how to help people achieve their potential. This book is on the short list of books that I did. I try my best to read a yearly how many books released in 1937 are still highly recommended as viable resources for especially self-improvement today. When I finished this book, my grandpa, Dick Stacey, great guy, super cool guy, God rest his soul was obsessed with this book when I was like 15 1415 years old.

I think it was obsessed with it a lot before that and he started trying to get me into like the self help self-improvement genre and I was like, Nope, won't do it. Like was not into it at all and I finished this book and I was filled with regret that I hadn't read this book at 15 would it changed my life? Yeah. That's every book in this list though. Like you said earlier, it's like you read these books and you're like, how the hell did I know to not know this stuff earlier? Why didn't I read this book earlier? Most of the books on my list were not written when I was 15 this one was if I could go back in time and send 15 year old me one book and be before it were a week for sure. But second place would be how to win friends and influence people.

For sure. This book is just, it's a delight man. If you haven't read it yet, someday you're going to read it probably and you're going to wish that you had read it when you're younger. So skip that part and just go ahead and read it. If you listen to this whole episode and are like, well, which book should I read next? My advice would be, well first of all, I read four hour work week. Second of all, read how to win friends and influence people. Yep. So this book, if you have read this book before, this is another good one to bring back up and read again. If you haven't read it in a couple of years, like this is definitely one you need to bring back and just refresh yourself on every single time without fail. I'll read this book and be like, shit, I have not been doing that shit.

I am really bad at that shit. I am a horrible person. Shit, any be a better person. Every chapter is that way. Yeah, it's awesome. Yes. Again, we're eights on the Enneagram, so we like those punishing books. That reminds of how bad the human wheel. We also need those books probably slightly more than everybody else. That's true. All right. What's next on our list, Chris? Well, those are all the books that we shared on our list. So now a slight transition. You pitch me a book and then I'm going to pitch you a book and so on and so forth. Okay, great. These are books that are not on Chris's, I guess top 10 that are on my top 10 or however many books that I have left. So the first book, and this is in no particular order because there's no, it's hard enough selecting my top favorite books.

It's hard enough just to do that. There's no way I could rank these from like least to best. So this is just happened to be the top of my stack here. This is a book called building a StoryBrand. We've talked about this before on the podcast. I talk about it all the time with my PPC students, and the reason this book is such a big deal to me and such a game changer for me in one of my top books is because it's better than any marketing book I've ever found. Yeah, it does. The job of shifting your brain to make you realize, one huge fact, I can sum up the book and this summary right here, but I think you need the book to really drive it home. You are not the hero in your business, on all your marketing, on any ads you run on your website.

You are not the hero. Your customer is the hero. You are merely the person that guides them through the journey from where they are to where they want to be. And if you understand that one simple fact, all of your marketing will be more successful, all of your cells be more successful, your business will be more successful, your clients will be happier, they'll refer you more. And so it's a huge, huge benefit. And if you pair this with how to win friends and influence people and the book influence, it is absolutely insane what your business can do with just those three books alone. Totally. If you are a producer and you do not understand the hero's journey, I don't know how, I don't know how. So the hero's journey is covered in this book. It's basically the seven part framework that pretty much any story arc follows when there's a hero and a guide, we think of Lord of the rings or star Wars or pretty much any book really or any movie follows this journey and he breaks it down and how it applies to marketing and it is just so, so well done.

So I can't recommend this book enough fun story about this book. It's number 12 for me. I love it if you said no, it's not number 11 it's not number 13 is number 12 never. I can't, I can't decide that decisively because it changes so often. Like this season it's the number one book next year it'll be like the number 15th book cause I've just got somebody in the books I love. It just depends on what my business needs. Fun story about this book. The author's name is Donald Miller. I met Donald when I was about 2324 before I was a professional audio guy. I was a professional singer songwriter and my main thing was I would go to young life camps. Young life is like a Christian ministry to high school kids and they would bring me in as a singer songwriter and I would share songs at these like events that they would hold. It was great. It was a ton of

fun. I'd really enjoyed the heck out of it and it was at the time was like, my dream was I wanted to be a special musician at young life camps and they brought me in for a college event. It was like three or four days long and Donald was one of the speakers and I was one of the musicians really. And we got to hang out, we get to know each other and he was super cool and he was brought in by this guy that was on young life staff. After the event, Brian, the guy who brought him in, called me up and was like, Hey man, me and Donald are going to go to British Columbia and we're going to go on a kayaking trip through a young life camp. And we wanted to know if you would want to come. And I said, no. Oh my God. I said, no. It was $800 and I said no,

and it was like, it's probably one of the top stupidest things I've ever done. Dude. This is one of those pivotal moments in a life that you either go down path a

or path B. yeah, it would have completely changed my life. And here's the frustrating thing. It was a kayak trip down a tributary up in British Columbia that ended at [inaudible]

Bob Gough's house. Bob golf wrote a book called love does. That's incredible set of business book, but it's absolutely amazing. New York times bestseller. Yeah.

That's when Donald Miller met

Bob Goff. No, this is what I heard. And if you read the book, I want to say it's a thousand miles and a thousand years or something. 10,000 miles and a thousand years or something like that. Yeah, it's that book. He talks about the story of meeting Bob Goff for the first time and the Bob Goff. This guy is an absolute character. Yeah, he's amazing in the book and in real life. I aspire to be Bob Goff in the way that I father my children, father, my children. And the way that I dead. Yeah. Well, it's so interesting and this is such a huge tangent, but I've never heard the story and this the one of the few times I've heard a new story from you on the spot, a hundred episodes in Chris. I've read a thousand, whatever the book is by Donald Miller, where he talks about this kayak trip. That's the crazy thing.

[inaudible]

no, that she would have been on that you had a chance to be on this kayak trip to meet this crazy ass character Bob Goff, who's just waiving these strangers in overt his massive log cabin home to spend the weekend with him like it's such a crazy, it's a good book to read. Anyways, it said, I can't believe you missed out on that story for $800 that is insane.

Yeah, it was real silly. That would, I mean like you look at how that changed Bob Gough's life. You look at the how that changed Donald Miller's life. Who knows what it would've done to me. Yeah.

I'm actually grateful for it because that means you're on a completely different trajectory now, which means you met me and now we have a straight cast together and we're celebrating our hundredth episode. But you could have still read about me if I was on the trip. That's true. I don't, I don't know. Anyways, let's move on cause this tangent. So now, okay, so I talked about my book, which was again building a StoryBrand written by Donald Miller. He's actually famous for the book blue, like jazz, I think. Right? Great book. Never read it actually. But that's one of the few books I've done. A Miller, I haven't read,

not a business book. It's kind of like a stream of consciousness, a fiction book that right. Who is God? What are we doing here? Type of stuff.

Okay, cool. So what is the book you're gonna pitch me next? It's on your top 10 list. Chris Malcolm Gladwell,

one of my favorite people on earth. Blink. His book is dope. Yeah. Blink is this idea that when you get really, really good at something mastery, you put like your 10,000 hours in that you develop a superhuman ability to make decisive decisions in the blink of an eye. What's the decisive decision? Sorry, I had a burp and it was distracting me. Dang, you pump the I decisive distraction. Anyways, this book is awesome. It basically outlines like you can get this superhuman ability to know things or to make decisions in the moment. And for me as a mastering engineer, you know, my job is to make a decision. Who should I do this or should I do that? Should they make it sound like this or should make it sound like that blink was so amazing for me because it was this like, Oh, like a lot of times I'll pull a song up and in less than a second I'm like, I know where I want to go with this.

If I'm listening to the loudest part of the song. And it was wild to read this book and be like, Oh, other people experienced that too. In every industry, especially the creative arts. Whoa, cool. So I think about blink all the time because it's this fascinating way that the human mind works. When you get really, really, really comfortable with a task or you know, a topic or whatever, your brain starts to do things that you would never imagine it could do. And so blink is amazing. Malcolm Gladwell's just awesome blankets is not necessarily a business book. It's more of a like how our brains work book. But guess what? That has an awful lot to do with how business works. So it's awesome. I love him. His podcast, revisionist history. Dope. So good.

I started listening to the beginning and I didn't love it but I need to get back into it cause it is blown up. It is huge now and I'm sure it's gotten way better. He would be a dream guest for me on this podcast. Malcolm Gladwell. I like his voice. He's got a good voice. He's so great. Your turn. Brian pitched me a book. Okay, that's so well done. I hand you this. Wonderful. Okay, Chris now take from this sacred list of yours and pitch it to me and you're like, alright Brian, give me your down bro.

Now Brian, tell us about the book that has changed. Yes, you are alive. Okay, so you just talked about blink, which is like getting to the point with a skill that you can make a decision I guess in the blink of an eye. And I definitely have gotten that in a few things. Mixing metal specifically I can listen to two seconds of a song and know like decisively what needs to happen next to get to that point, however is a lot of work. And this book that I'm about to recommend is one of my all time favorites. This is all my short list of yearly reads or actually a prefer the audio book for this. So I don't actually have the physical book of this because the author reads it and he does such a great job of reading it that I can't make myself read the physical book.

It's a book by Darren Hardy and it's called the compound effect. And this book basically walks you through how easy it is to make massive changes in your life. If you only understand the effect of compound interest essentially or the compound effect of all the tiny decisions you do in your life day in and day out over the long period of time. He uses it for weight, he talks about it for business, he talks about it for relationships, he talks about it for any skill. And if you're trying to get to the point where Malcolm Gladwell's talking about in blink to where you can make a snap decision in the blink of an eye and be 100% confident in it, you only get there through the compound effect. And I think the formula he uses in the book in it, I'm due for my yearly listen again for this audio book, so forgive me if I'm rusty on this, but the formula he gives his small actions performed consistently over time equals massive change.

Something similar to that. And that's basically what this book covers and assist a really good mindset shift and good reminder of how these small little decisions that extras helping the food or that extra Coke you drink at the end of the day or that one extra task you failed to do at the end of the day. How these little tasks can all add up at the end of the year or the end of the decade as either massive positive change or massive negative change, massive weight loss, massive weight gained, massive business improvement, massive business attraction or implosion and failure. So I really love how accessible he makes this sound and feel because again, anyone can control the little decision you make right now. Just the small decision and when he realized how much that small decision right now that you're making right this second adds up. If you just keep making that small decision in a positive favor, if you keep making that over and over and over again over a long period of time and once you realize and notice how much those add up over time, it can make a huge difference in your life. In business, so I loved that book more than most of these books. Actually, I need to listen to it again.

I just bought it on Amazon. Good. Here's the thing. I would say we're going to go off course for just a minute for basically all of human history. Up until really recently, books were really expensive. They were really hard to find. They were really hard to get and usually you didn't buy them. You got them in a library. You had to borrow them. We live in an amazing time. I just spent 20 bucks to buy that book and I know based on Brian's pitch, it's going to change my life. What a ridiculous investment it is to be able to get on amazon.com and to buy a book and have it shipped to you maybe the next day for me. Crazy. Did you get the physical copy or the audible version? I read. I'm not really an audible guy. Oh, I forgot.

You read way faster than I read. I'm an audio book guy if it makes sense. That's a one I highly recommend. If you are an audio book person, that book does really well for audio, but physical work better for some people, including you

just know yourself. That's all you need to know is know yourself, which the better version for you. Totally. There's not one way to do this, but if you like physical books. I do. I also love Kindle, but I have a hard time finishing a Kindle book. I read really fast in the Kindle and I read slower with a physical book, but I finished a physical book more often because it's easy to see my progress is and dumb as that sounds.

I like Kindle for like I told you, I'm a fantasy novel nerd. I just finished the miss Bourne series two days ago and I love that because when I'm reading in bed at nighttime has the led backlight is dope. Super nice man. I'm telling you for reading it at night, the Kendall with the backlit, I've got to kind of voyage I adore. Yep. By the way. Side note, hit me up with your recommendations of mega fantasy series, kind of in the vein of Willow time or game of Thrones or miss Bourne series V. read the Lord of the rings series yet. Yes, I've read the fricking Lord. Please get out of here like that's come on. I need real recommendations from actual book nerds, not Eucharist. There's a CS Lewis series, that hideous strength. It's pretty wild. Like OSI Saifai. Chris, it's time for you to pitch me a book and my friend.

Well last one fact. One of the things I love to do when I hear about new books, I go on Amazon at the bottom of that book listing, there's a used section. I love buying a used hard cover copy of a book. Yeah. Because for me it's like a merit badge. It's like a special magical possession and I just like, I like to have a hardback and you can buy him used for cheap. We're on side tangent on side tangents now, but I actually like to buy the book from the author so they get the royalty. I like to support them, but I don't give a damn. If I've bought the audio book, I'll go buy the used physical book because I don't want to give him the same royalty for the same product twice. That's where I'm like I'm buying used for the second copy because I liked having both copies.

If I love the audio book, I'm going to buy the physical copies. Well, even Kindle books, I'll go buy the physical copy as well. Like the ms Bourne series, I have all three of the trilogy of that as well. Yeah, I'm the same. I often buy the Kindle version and the physical version almost all the time I buy used because I like a hardback and the hardbacks usually out of print. Usually a book comes out, it's hard back and then a while later they switched to paperback and then you can only get a hardback if you buy used and like most of the books we're talking about are a couple bucks. If you buy used like three or $4 again, even if there were 30 40 $50 you should still buy these books because these are books that shaped our career. So let's, speaking of books that shaped our careers, Chris, what's the next book on your list?

This book hurts me. It's called the paradox of choice. It's by Barry Schwartz. We've mentioned it on the podcast before back with the thing, our first interview with Graham Cochran and this book, the subtitle is why more is less and it talks about a personality type called a maximizer. A maximizer is obsessed with getting the best possible deal and the best possible product and they spend all their time trying to get best case scenario. So much so that many people, myself very much included, ended up not acting in their own best interest because they spend so much time deliberating between Wilshire like get this one or that one. And the illustration he uses is that going to the grocery store in deciding on a new type of cereal, is that a maximizer? We'll walk in and he'll spend like 40 minutes reading the ingredients and looking at every single box of cereal and then Wayne, which one would give him the most pleasure when in fact just picking something popular, buying it, and then having 40 minutes of additional free time would have given him or her more happiness in the first place.

Or depending on the level of income you have, it would actually be better just to buy all 40 boxes of cereal and try to get the fuck on. Yeah, so the quick picture for Barry Schultz in the paradox of choice. I don't think everyone needs this book, but I sure did. I think about it all the time. Let me actually speak on that a little bit. We've mentioned the Enneagram a bunch of times. I highly recommend going and learning more about the Enneagram because it helps you understand yourself and your motives and why you do certain things and why you don't do certain things you know you should do. In our community, the most common Enneagram type was a type five and the type fives are the ones that are endlessly searching for answers and looking for knowledge and trying to maximize all of the information they have.

I see where you're going. So a large percentage of our audience suffers from this issue. So I do think if that's an issue, you know, you have, this could be a good book for you to kind of help get past that. I will say though, Chris, you still do this shit. Oh, all the time. All the time. I'm still struggling with it. Yeah. There's a sizeable portion of our audience listening right now that's thinking, gosh, I wish they'd shut up about the Enneagram. It sounds so dumb. I also used to think that I'm an eight on the Enneagram and in stress. I'd go to five. Same here. Yep. And this is why I spent like 45 hours researching the tiny minute details between three different cameras before I went to Thailand in 2017 yeah. I could've bought all three and still came out ahead. Yeah. So an unhealthy five does this a lot.

And Barry shoulds. This just tells you what an idiot you are for doing that and it's great. Thanks Barry. Does it give you things to work on our solutions to like waste to get out of that mindset? Does he like break that stuff down? It was basically like talking about how irrational that is and what the opportunity cost of that behavior is. Fantastic. A little bit of a hard read. It's a little dry. He's not funny. I'll say that, but it's a great book. It's interesting what a little bit of humor can do to spice a business book up. That's no joke. All right, next to my list. Now this, you're not going to no joke. Okay. I'm having a knowledge that Meghan let you switch it over to me now. So that was your book. We're going to go to my book on the list next and I'm going to pitch you on this. Do it. Have you read the pumpkin plan, Chris? Hell yeah. Okay, so you actually have read this then. This isn't on your top 10 though. Write 1718 for me is good. Pumpkin plan is a book that has been a good mindset shift for me and it's written by a guy named Mike McCale [inaudible]. This is one of the few business authors I found that Ken lightheartedly explained complex topics and keep it entertaining. Yes, agreed. He's also one of the few authors I know that will actually narrate his own audio

books and he does a great job of making it sound engaging. Just the way he talks is fun to listen to, so that's another one. That's a great audio book. Now, the pumpkin plan, just a long story short, it's an 80 20 principle book. It is a way to look at your business to start identifying the, let's just say clients. You need to get rid of the types of clients you need to get rid of and identifying the types of clients that are worth pursuing more of. It is a really good job breaking this down and 80 20 principle in your business. Again, 80 20 principle is 80% of your income comes from 20% of your clients. 80% of your headaches and problems come from 20% of your clients. That's rarely the same 20% group of clients. So if you were to cut out that group of clients that were 20% of the headaches and double down on that 20% of clients that brings in 80% of the money, you are going to come off a much better business owner.

So this book is a great one to listen to if you are struggling with this sort of thing. This is not for the absolute beginner because the beginner's not ready to 80 20 they're clients yet or their business yet. But if you are at the point where time is your enemy, you have more work than you know what to do with. You are constantly struggling to figure out how to gain more of your time back or you're getting a lot of clients that you hate working with. This is the book for you. So this is a little bit more advanced one, but it is very approachable for people of all levels, I think.

Yeah. And again, I wouldn't read this until you, you have a lot of customers fun story about this book. I literally like business books and I also at one point in time loved writing reviews on Amazon. And so like every book I would read I'd be like, Oh yeah, four stars or five stars. Whoa, Whoa, three stars. And Mike is an interesting guy because here's his business strategy with becoming an author. Pumpkin plan was, I think his first book. I could be wrong about that. He went through Amazon and was able to figure out who was writing reviews for business books and then he reached out to people, myself included and offered to send us a free edition. I think it was like a preprint edition of his new book. And the pitch was, Hey, if you like it, please write a review. And I was like, Oh my gosh, that's the coolest thing ever. So he sent it and I read it and I wrote them a five star review.

Well there you go. Go read Chris Graham's five star review on Amazon for the pumpkin plan. Right. Alright, Chris, what is next on your book list books that changed the shape of your career

in no particular order? Again, recommendation from dr Mark, integrity by Dr. Henry. Cloud. Not an easy read. It's not to say that just sounds like a slog. It's an entertaining read. It's a fun read, but it's kind of like getting your face peeled off by a carrot peeler because it hurts. Sounds awful. You're reading it and you're like, Oh, I'm so terrible. Oh gosh, I hit, Oh, I don't have any integrity. Ah, and what's cool about this book is he redefines the word integrity in some fun and interesting ways. And Brian, as you can see, it's a lot of dog ears, man, as a lot of dog years, every third page is dogeared on your book. This book was awesome

and I'm so grateful that Mark recommended it to me. This book wiped the floor with me. It just absolutely kicked my butt. So what kind of person needs to read this book? It's a good question. I don't know how to answer that. This book was so intensely personal for me. Why? I don't know, man. Why was it personal for you? What made you even want to read in the first place? Cause this doesn't seem like a book that appeals to me because Mark told me to. That was it. Mark told me to read it and I was like, this book will change your life. My wife has read this book. My wife has read almost none of my business books, but she did read this one and she insists. It's incredible and we quote it all the time. The book is called integrity, the courage to meet the demands of reality.

The six essential qualities that determine your success in business and basically to sum up this business is we love to lie to ourselves. We love to tell ourselves we're better than we are. We're more successful than we are. I am at least as equal, potentially worse at this as the average person. And this book is about confronting the reality that you aren't as awesome as you think and it's great. What is the benefit of reading this book? Ego. Death. That's it. Ego. Death. That's what I'm going to say. I spend most of my time every day trying to have that. And this book was really, really great for me. It was awesome. So I guess my pitch is that it was so intensely personal that I'm having a hard time pitching it to you guys cause it's kinda like, yeah. Um, my, my kids are so great.

You guys should totally meet them. Read integrity. Brian, what's your next book? I'm selling uncomfortable, lighthearted book here. This is a little easier to sell to pitch you on. You've actually read this when it's just not on your top 10. More than 4 million copies sold. That's social proof by the way, at the top of this book. Oh, I see what you did there. Also number one, New York times bestselling author. That's another social proof indicator. Dave Ramsey. Oh yeah, the total money makeover. A proven plan for financial fitness. Number 13 for Chris Graham. I love that book. I'm surprised isn't higher on your list considering you just got out of debt, you just paid off all your debt. So here's what I would say. Whatever you're going to say. I'm going to say it's the only reason this isn't one of your top 10 books is because you haven't experienced long enough time debt free to understand the difference of life.

You're probably right about that. I haven't actually finished this book yet. I'm in the middle of it right now. Dave Ramsey would be a dream interview to have on the podcast. Yeah, of course. You and other lot of other podcasts, but, okay. Yeah. He just is your dream interview for any podcast ever. Yeah, I love that book. I had never thought about debt in the terms that Dave Ramsey describes, and I would say this about Dave Ramsey. I think Dave Ramsey might be the greatest communicator that is alive. Oh, was it? That was a Harley Davidson motorcycle. Wow. That was loud. Yeah. Hopefully you guys heard that. What I was trying to say before that Harley, Oh man, that guy's got some horsepower to hit. Yeah. James, make sure you turn the gate off for just a minute so everyone can hear that. Yeah, yeah, I'll do it. I'll do it. Okay, so here's the thing.

I think Dave Ramsey might be the greatest living communicator that there is. He's amazing. He's so amazing in his ability to tell stories to people in ways that they can understand and to get them to change their behavior for their own good. And one of my favorite things, Dave Ramsey, he has basically a call in show where people are like, I have this debt problem and Dave Ramsey will ask like five questions and then give them the path forward and it's amazing. It's so good. So let me just go ahead and flip the table here. This is my book to pitch to you so you don't get to talk here. Second of all, sorry, I think you're being a little bit facetious saying he's the best communicator living today. I would say he's one of the best business communicators on radio right now or podcast. He's a lot better than us.

He's fantastic. Whether you agree with all the stuff he says or not, which I don't say I don't agree with everything he teaches and says and neither do you. He is a fantastic communicator. But the reason this book is on my list is simply because it's set me up financially, personally, financially for success years and years and years ago, so that I do not have the stress of money holding me back. I'm not making fear-based decisions. I'm not making decisions based on how little money I have. For example, when you didn't take that $800 canoeing trip, stop reminding me about that with Bob golf and Donald Miller. That was a decision you made because you probably didn't have the $800 to spare then. And I understand, but that was a decision I don't want to ever have to make. If an opportunity comes up like that, I want to be able to jump on it.

And the only reason I can is because this book has helped me set up my finances in a responsible way. I have an emergency fund, I have debt paid off 100% debt free, and it's made my life and now my marriage so much better. So the benefits that this book has brought in my life are massive. So it's probably should be higher up than it even is right now. My top 10:00 AM I meeting my top five because of the benefits I got from it. Is it the best book, the most well written book of all time? Not really. Is it a super entertaining read? Not really, but if you follow what the book teaches you, your life will be better period. And that to me is a book that should be in your top five favorites. You're not wrong. I think that you hit the nail on the head with saying that I haven't been debt free long enough and here's the thing, for those of you guys that might not be caught up with past episodes, I took on a bunch of strategic business debt and it worked. It helped me grow my business. But in retrospect, I think the psychological damage that that debt did to me actually slowed my business growth down. If I had to guess of all the books we've talked about, which book is going to slowly get higher on my list, I would pick that book. Yeah. It's only gonna rise from this point on. The longer you live a debt free

life. Yeah. All right Chris, what is next on your list? And now we're kind of running along here, but you know, let's just keep going.

Cool. All right man. So I read four hour work week, my first business book and at the end of four hour work week, there's a list of books he recommends.

I should look at that list. I haven't looked at that in a long time.

I live for lists of recommended books from people I think are awesome.

Hence this episode on episode 100 of the six figure home studio podcast.

Yeah, one of my favorite things, one of the books Tim Ferriss recommended at the end of four hour work week was a book called advertising secrets of the written word by Joseph Sugarman. Joseph Sugarman, you might know him as the inventor of blue blocker sunglasses from the 1980s Joe writes words, people buy his things, he's really good at it. And guess what? You have a website and guess what? Your website has words on it and those words are called copy. And making those words is called copy writing and Joseph Sugarman has some really great tips. I'm just going to sum the book up for you. When you write copy, when you're trying to sell stuff, the purpose of the headline is to get people to read the first line of your copy. The purpose of the first line of your copy is to get people to read the second line of your copy and so on and so forth. And that concept alone was life changing for me. It made it so much easier to try to tell people what I could do for them.

Yeah, copywriting is a skill that's so few people in the audio world have and it's understandable. We are audio engineers, we are mixing engineers, we're mastering engineers, but we're not all but rock Barry, you know, actually again, but rock Barry was great. He's a really good copywriter. If you go back to episode number 92 what's doing someone in your areas charging $5 a song? His business is terrible, but his copywriting was actually good. Super dope. Unbelievable. Yeah. So again, copywriting is a valuable skill to know because you have to understand how to sell yourself and great copywriting is a way to make you appeal to your target customer in a way that removes the friction, the lack of, or the bad copywriting is just adding friction to the whole process of gaining the customer. So this is something that can be used in great advertising in your website, on your emails, on any sort of communication that's written. Great copywriting is a fantastic skill to learn and if you pair it with the book influence by Robert Cialdini, Oh yeah, it amplifies it. [inaudible]

one of the things that surprised me as I've been doing those, the guys that listened a lot to the show, you've heard me mention the business coaching thing. I meet with about four people a week for about an hour each. One of the biggest things, one of the, I'd say top five things that we ended up talking about and helping them grow their businesses, copywriting skinny on their website and talking about like this could be clear, that could be more snappy, could be more punchy. It's a huge piece of building a successful business. It's being able to get people emotionally connected with you by pushing some buttons on your keyboard. It's a magical skill.

All right, next on the list. Chris is one of my favorite books is my turnout, right? Yeah. Cool. I like to just jump in cause you're not great at que and me up here.

I'm so sorry about that. I was thinking about that this week. I'm not happy with that. I need to be better at cuing you up.

You stopped talking and then you're done and then and then I have to pick up selfish. I hate it. Yeah, I don't mind. Next time I list is a book. I hesitate to even bring this one out.

48 laws of power. You're going to say 48 laws of power, aren't you? I'm like, that's the only book I've ever refunded on audible. By the way. Are you serious? Oh wait, wait, let's talk about that real quick. Okay. That book is awful. I've read that book. Yeah, it's so fucked up. I went through like a dark period of life while reading that book. It's basically like the history of power and how people manipulate other people. And again, I read it like wanting to defend myself from evil people and it was so depressing. The books called the 48 laws of power. I cannot

dissuade you enough from not buying that. It will make you lose faith in humanity

will. Oh man. Yeah. I ended up buying a gun, my first gun after reading that book cause I was like, these humans are crazy. I gotta have a backup plan.

I was going to say it is one of those things that you will lose faith in humanity because you'll think like, Oh my God, people think and act like this. So not only will it make you lose faith in humans, it's utterly useless and goes completely against the Go-Giver. It does. And it's also about 10 times the length of the Go-Giver, which should tell you something because it's way harder to be a manipulative asshole than it is to just be a damn Go-Giver. So that's all I need to say about that.

When I was about halfway through the book, I was like, Oh gosh, what have I gotten myself into? And I felt like the only way to get myself out of the funk that that book created for me was to finish it. It was like that Seinfeld, you have to go down into the crevasse. That's the only way out. You have to finish the book to end this madness and to be able to move on with your life. Interesting book of all the books I've ever read, it made me feel yuckier than any of them, so it's not on our list. Don't go get 48 laws of power.

God, no, it's not our list. The book I'm hesitating to talk about isn't necessarily a business book, but it's a book that's definitely helped shift my mind and it's a good follow up. Once you are debt free, you've read the tone of money makeover. You have a fairly successful business. It's a book called rich dad poor dad. This is the four hour work week to the real estate industry. Any successful business owner I know refers to the four hour work week as a pivotal moment in their careers. It's the same in real estate. Every single successful real estate investor I know points to rich dad, poor dad as that book in their lives. That changed everything and so this is just another one of mindset shifts. The reason I recommend it that wasn't the reason I like it is because it helped me understand longterm how to acquire more assets and how to avoid more liabilities in my life. If you know what any of that means, just read the book. It is a fantastic primer for understanding how to actually invest versus constantly taking on more debt. One of the cool things about that book that I really liked, it's not in my top 10 but I love that book. I need to reread it again by the way. It's like an every two year book.

Yeah, it's great. And the premise is rich dad, poor dad is that the author had two dads. One of them was as actually his best friend's dad and the other was his actual dad and one of the dads was poor and one of the dads was rich and understood building wealth and understood money and it's him. Juxtapositioning the two kind of mindsets about this, it's a great mindset book

and one of the big things is you'll notice either you or a lot of people in your life follow the poor dad mindset and the successful people in your life follow the Ritz dead mindset. And it's not even about like which person is better than the other. It's just about building a better life through making smart decisions. So it actually goes hand in hand with a compound effect because a lot of what you talk about is those little changes, a little decisions you make over a long period of time that make massive results in your life. So that's on my list. Rich dad, poor dad, great book, man. That's your last book. Do you have any more? I got two more. I have two more. Oh, you do? Okay, good. Yeah, we're going to go for freaking ever here. We're 66 minutes in and counting. I'm okay,

let's be self-indulgent. The first book that dr Mark recommended that I read after I finished four hour work week, so here's the story. Let me back up. I finished for a work week and I went over to hang out with Mark and his family and friends with like their whole family and there's like 17 of them. They've got a lot of kids and I went over and we're all hanging out and I mentioned to Mark and his wife Shane. I was like, you know, they're both doctors, dr Mark and dr Shane, you've mentioned them many times. Many times. I love them. They're some of my favorite people on earth and I was like, I just finished this book, four hour work week. I loved it. You guys are successful. What other business books should I read? And they both know. Powwows just E myth revisited. Absolutely. Don't read any other business books until you read the,

they're visited. Yeah. Let me just pause real quick and just say the book is the E dash myth revisited. It's like an updated version. The entrepreneur myth.

Yeah. Which is funny cause it's like it being called the E-Myth predates this book came out before like email and E commerce and stuff like that. True. But the thing that this book was so awesome for me was systemization. How do you provide super high quality artisinal level services to more than one person and do it consistently. This book from a service industry perspective is an amazing book and I've recommended it to many people and I've seen a number of people read it and have their lives changed and build kickass businesses cause it's kind of a on how to do that.

It's super dope. Brian, do you have anything to add? Nope. Brian podcast buddy pitch us on a book that we should all go buy an Amazon right now. So this is actually a great followup to the E myth and I don't know why E myth is not on my top 10 but this book is, but that's just the way it is. E-Myth revisited is a great mindset shift book and it's basically a parable on why systemization matters in my opinion. They don't go into the details enough of how to actually systemize your business. It's more about why you should systemize to 10,000 foot view. Yep. Miss even a 30,000 foot view. The next book of my list is a book that goes deep, deep, deep into the actual specifics of how to systemize your business. It's a book by Sam carpenter called work the system and this book is written from a guy who they scan a panic attack, a meltdown in his business because it just got to be too much and had to go to the hospital and basically wrecked his life until he figured out how to actually systemize his business.

So he goes through the process of how he figured all this stuff out, how you should create systems and checklists and procedures in your business, how to work with other people, how to outsource. It goes down this whole laundry list of things that you can do to make your business run more smoothly. And then some situations in some business models in his was one of these. Remove yourself completely from the business. Now, this doesn't make sense in our recording studio world because we are our business in most cases but there's still so much to take away from this that I think could help every single person run a successful studio. Right now if you are just starting out and you are making a, I'd say maybe less than five or 10 grand a year, this book is not for you but if you are again at the point where you are, your biggest bottleneck in your business time is your scarcest resource.

Money is fine but you know you can always earn more. If you could actually free up more of your time, you have no more time to do anything. This book, I'd say E-Myth is probably the first one you'd read cause it primes you for this, but this book does a really great job of going deep into the details of actually how to systemize things in your business so highly recommended. Love it. What was that bucket called again? It's called work the system and this is an absolute slog to get through though I will say this is very much a prescriptive book. There is no humor inserted into it. It is a chore to get through, but it is a chore worth the payoff. Huh? If only there were a book that was interesting and easy to read and fun. It was also about systemization. Oh wait, there it is. It's called the checklist manifesto by at-will go one the yes. So real quick, this is also a fantastic book and the only reason it didn't make my list today is cause I didn't see it in my bookshelf. Otherwise it would probably would have. But I will say just for record work, the system goes into even more in depth prescriptive detail than this. Again, checklist manifesto is very much story-driven and not so much how to create those checklists. But go ahead. It's still a fantastic book. So checklist manifesto is this Atul Gawande, he's

pitch of why checklists are like the most important thing that we have as humans. And one of the things that I found just fascinating is it's a simple idea. And if you look at airplanes, if you look at pilots before a plane takes off the pilot, whether you know it or not, goes through a pretty extensive checklist with the copilot and it's like, you know, no flaps, working, landing gear down, uh, you know, engines full fuel. Like they go through this huge checklist and a lot goes into building the checklist. It's not like an after the fact idea. A ton of research goes into how they phrase the checklist and what the actual instructions say and whether stuff should or should not be on the checklist and how they approach it. And what Atul Gawande found, he's a surgeon, he found, he was tasked by the world health organization to help lower deaths due to complications from surgery.

And he found out that probably the best single way to do that in the first, second and third world was to create checklists for surgeons. And at the time when he did this, it was revolutionary and it was not normal and he completely changed our world. And now it's pretty common to have a pre-surgery checklist. So I here and he goes into what makes a checklist work for us. If you're trying to systemize your business, a checklist or in many cases in our case, an online form that your customers use is an absolutely indispensable. It's the absolute top of the waterfall where all the other systems come from and this book is just super dope and explaining how to make really simple checklists that everyone's going to use. Well, fun fact, you guys might not know this about Brian and I, every single episode that we record, we go through, it's something like a 25 point checklist before we press record.

It's a big reason the podcast has done well. There's a big reason we all, we've never lost an episode. Yeah. Due to failure of something messing up because we don't trust ourselves to get it right. We follow the system and so the checklist manifesto is great fun story on this. I was reading the book and there's a bit in the book where Atul Gawande is like, yeah, you know, when I was a kid, I went to the CNE hardware store on Richland Avenue. I know it sounds so weird that I remembered that from the book, but I remember it because I used to go to the CNE hardware store on Richland Avenue in Athens, Ohio cause I used to live there and I had no idea that the author was from Athens, Ohio. I probably wouldn't have read it if I knew. I was like, Oh I guess from where I am he can't be that smart. So yeah, that book is awesome. Atul Gawande hope I'm saying his name right. Great book. It's entertaining. It's easy, it's fun. It's a really interesting read and you will love it no matter who you are. Was that the last book on your list? My last book, my 10 fantastic. We are done here then I thought I had two on my list and I actually didn't, I just had to left in the stack one we already covered. So that is

it for our top books. This is a long episode. It was, but it was really fun. Yeah. This is a fun episode cause again, a hundred episodes in, I can't believe we made it at this point and these books helped us get here. Yup, for sure. 100% and friends too. Maybe we'll have our top friends. Oh man. Anything to wrap this up. Yeah, I would say guys, we appreciate you guys listening to our show and girls. It blows our mind that thousands and thousands of audio engineers all over the globe and believe it or not, a whole lot of people that don't have anything to do with audio, listen to this podcast. I can't tell you the number of people. They'd be like, yeah, I listen to your podcast all the time, but I'm not an audio. But that's great man. Well it's because those people are looking at other industries for ideas on marketing, sales, and building businesses.

So again, Oh snap. You're right. Don't just look to your peers. Look outside of your industry for business advice. I'm going to do something we don't normally do. It's our hundredth episode. It's kind of like our birthday, who it is probably more significant than a birthday. Yeah. So I wanna ask you the listener for a present, would you do something for us? It's really easy. I promise. One of the best things that can possibly happen to us on our podcasts. They can help us get these amazing guests like Dave Ramsey or Atul Gawande or Tim Ferris or you name it is reviews on our podcast in iTunes. That's kind of like the measuring stick they use to determine how big a podcast is. As stupid as it sounds, they can't see our download numbers. They can't see how great our listeners are and how serious they take their businesses.

All they look at is, Hey, how many reviews do they have? Are they serious podcast or not? I think we've gotten probably around 255 star reviews right now. If we hit a thousand we could get bad gasses come on this show and teach you guys stuff that we don't know yet. That's true and that would be really cool and you don't even have to leave a review. You can just leave a rating and it still shows up under that number. I'm pretty sure that's the case. But just leave your review too, just so we know how we're doing. That'd be great. Yeah. Yeah. So if you guys wouldn't mind giving us a present, which is an iTunes review, even if it's just hit the five star and write like, well, let me tell you guys one more fun fact. One of the things on our checklist is we need to synchronize our audio because I'm up here in Columbus, Ohio, and Brian's down there in Nashville. So Brian counts to three and on three we say one word. What does that word, Brian poop poop. So I think we're going to leave you guys with a sink point on this podcast episode to celebrate our 100th episode. Please leave us a review. Brian, take it away with our sync point. One, two, three poop.

That's fantastic

fam. Have a good one. So that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. 100 episodes in the books. We have hopefully hundreds more to come. Who knows? One quick note, I don't think Chris has announced really anywhere publicly

yet, but he just made a bounce Butler free to use right now. Uh, he's an open beta, he needs a ton of people to use it and a bounce Butler is 100% free. So just go to bounce butler.com and you can download it and start using it right now. I had a story a from ledge Shaw, the guy behind recording studio rockstars podcast. He was telling us in his mastermind call this morning that he just queued up like six podcast episodes in a row. They were like an hour long. Each stepped away at like 3:30 PM and then at like 10 o'clock at night he got a text from bounce Butler that all the balances were done cause a alleged does old-school pro tools and it's all real time. So he literally had a bounce six one hour plus that long episodes down a in a row realtime and bounce speller helped him with that. So whether you're online or offline bouncing, this thing is going to be great for you. So I highly recommend going to bounce butler.com that's B O U N C E, but L E r.com and go download that app right now.