How to remember what you read in 2022
Jordan Raynor sits down with Jeff Brown and Jesse Wisnewski, Authors of Read to Lead, to talk about how losing your job can be a blessing, how to absorb books into your bloodstream, and what my personal reading and note-taking process looks like.
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[00:00:05] JR: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Call to Mastery. I’m Jordan Raynor. This is a podcast for Christians who want to do their most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. Every week, I host a conversation with a Christian who is pursuing world-class mastery of their craft. We talk about their path to mastery, their daily habits, and how the Gospel of Jesus Christ influences their work.
Today's guests are Jeff Brown and Jesse Wisnewski. Jesse is an impressive technology executive, currently serving as the Director of Marketing at a company called PhoneBurner. Before that, he was in seminary and worked in a local church, so I loved getting to talk to him about that transition.
Jeff is a popular speaker, author, and host of the Read to Lead podcast. Jesse and Jeff recently teamed up to write this super practical book called Read to Lead: The Simple Habit That Expands Your Influence and Boosts Your Career. So, Jesse and Jeff and I, we recently sat down and talked about how sometimes losing your job can be a blessing that God uses to sanctify us. We talked about how to absorb books into our bloodstreams. Not just to read a book, but to retain it and really let it change our lives. And then finally, I shared a little bit of detail, I think, for the first time publicly, about what my personal reading and note-taking process looks like. Please enjoy this episode with Jeff Brown and Jesse Wisnewski.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:01:58] JR: Hey, guys, welcome to Call to Mastery. Really excited to have you here. So, Jesse, we were talking a little bit about this before we started recording. My background is in tech, so I'm super interested in your career. Tell our listeners a little bit about the work you're doing today.
[00:02:15] JW: Yeah, sure. So currently, I serve as the marketing director for a company called PhoneBurner. And the quick story of getting here is kind of a series of sovereign events, if you will. I grew up in the stereotypical West Virginia family, coal miner dad, stay-at-home mom, attended school, first entered into sales and insurance out of college. But after that, soon afterward, since the call vocationally to serve as a pastor, so I resigned from my position, went to seminary, ended up serving as an assistant pastor, and then ended up joining a church in Seattle, Washington, more in like a marketing position. And it was through that position that ended up leading me back into marketing and sales after that. So, I worked in the publishing industry for several years, joined a startup, originally at one point, providing financial services or digital giving for churches, and then recently joined PhoneBurner in the marketing side of things. And so really enjoying the company, the work, and the product and serving our customers with what we have.
[00:03:17] JR: Let's see how well you know the product. What's PhoneBurner in 30 seconds?
[00:03:21] JW: PhoneBurner is a power dialer. And so, to break that down into layman terms, we make it easier for anyone making an outbound call. So, whether that's a sales team or political campaign, to make 60 to 80 calls, perhaps an hour, so to make them quickly, to make them more efficiently, and to keep track of reporting and database and all that.
[00:03:44] JR: Yeah, so my listeners know, I used to be CEO of a company called Threshold 360. Today, I'm executive chairman and we actually use the product. We use PhoneBurner. We love it. So, I'm a huge, huge PhoneBurner fan. All right, so Jeff, you're a coach, a very popular podcaster, how did you and Jesse get connected?
[00:04:03] JB: Jesse and I first met at a conference several years ago put on by a guy named Jeff Goins, called the Tribe Conference.
[00:04:09] JR: I love, Jeff.
[00:04:10] JB: Yeah, that was about 2016. So, we sort of vaguely knew each other in the sense that we were “friends on Facebook” and we had met in real life once. But he approached me in, I think, it was 2019 about this idea he had for a book at that time. It was called The Reader’s Edge. He had run it up the flagpole and not gotten any bites at that point, and the feedback he was getting were along the lines of, “Hey, you don't have a platform. We'd love to publish this.”
[00:04:36] JR: Every publisher’s go-to excuse, not to publish a book.
[00:04:38] JB: Exactly. So, he sat on that for about a year, I think. And then it occurred to him that the content and the topic, the focus of his book was was very much in line with a podcast I'd been doing for a number of years called Read to Lead. So, he reached out to me on Facebook and said, “Hey, is this something that would interest you? Would you consider co-authoring a book?”
What Jesse didn't know is writing a book is something that was on my bucket list for a long, long time. I hadn't really let that be known publicly because I didn't want to be held accountable to actually having to do it. But I had never considered co-authoring. The idea had just never occurred to me. So, when Jesse presented that idea, I was very intrigued by it, we got together, we redid the marketing proposal, and the book proposal added my platform that I had built through the podcast. To that I sign, with the same literary agent, the same person re-shopped the book, and we got a bite this time. And so then, a year, year and a half later came the book that we now know.
[00:05:38] JR: I love it. So, I want to talk about the book in a minute, but I want to dive a little bit deeper in the backstory. So, Jesse, you talked about your experience in seminary, you used to work for a local church, and now you work in the world of business. I'd love to hear you talk more about your journey here and the transition, maybe, that you've made mentally of seeing all work, not just work inside the church, as good and God-honoring. Have you been on this journey these last few years?
[00:06:06] JW: Yeah, and actually share a little bit about the story in the book itself. So, kind of going back to the church I joined in Seattle and when I was more in a marketing role, is during that time, I had a sense of no ill will from the organization that my position was going to be phased out for different reasons, which then led me to make or look for an internal pivot within the organization. So, this is going back to 2012, 2013, and content marketing was something somewhat new on the horizon then. And it was something that the organization that I was a part of actually did.
So, during this time, having, five kids, well actually, had four kids at the time, that fifth one joined us a couple of years later. I was in seminary still. So, I didn't have an opportunity to perhaps pursue a different degree. I didn't have opportunity to really do a lot of different things, maybe like a certificate or that. But I did have the time and the resources to purchase multiple books on a topic of content marketing. Long story short, read through several books on that topic, ended up developing a proposal for the organization, pitched it, and ended up pivoting into a content marketing strategy position within the organization, which then was the foundation or catalyst for me to then move into a marketing management role within publishing companies.
And then from there, that background experience and other things I picked up along the way, was then foundational in joining a startup company, building out their content, brand awareness, those type of things. While on that with that startup company, developing the other skills of you know, building a team, watching the team work on a product, developing go-to-market strategies, and then being able to pivot into general market with the marketing skills and experience I have today.
[00:07:52] JR: So, I know a lot of people in our audience who are working as marketers, or in sales, or as artists, whatever, can sometimes feel this implicit message from the church that their work is less eternally significant than the pastor. Did you ever struggle with that as you were making that transition from the local church out into the world of work?
[00:08:11] JW: Not necessarily with that angle. The thing that I wrestled with for several years was, am I still called vocationally to serve in the pastorate and continue to knock on that door. And then over the course of years, and just experience with working and then what doors of opportunities were open and what doors were closed, I found myself getting back immersed in marketing and could see that vocationally, I could still serve the Lord and glorify Him through the work that I'm doing. And marketing a product or service regardless if that was a product or service with the startup company that was providing digital giving software technology for local churches, or today with a company like PhoneBurner, who's providing power dialer software for general market businesses, primarily and others.
Today, I don't wrestle with it, because I know vocationally that, regardless of the work that we are called to do, that we can still glorify God in whatever we put our hands to. So, whether that's serving and marketing ourselves or whether that's a homemaker, whether that's a coal miner, like my dad, or whether that's writing a book.
[00:09:16] JR: Very well said. Jeff, I'm curious about your faith story. What's the quick story here? Were you raised in the church? Did you come to faith later in life?
[00:09:23] JB: I was raised in the church and attended to kind of hellfire and brimstone church, very legalistic upbringing, if I'm being honest. And so, when I was old enough, maybe 12, 13 to make the decision on my own as to whether or not I would go to church, that was an easy decision for me to make. My dad was an entrepreneur and got into business for himself around that time. So, as a family, we were going to church less and less anyway. And so, I really stepped away from that environment, that community for about 10 years. And then when I was 22 years old, I got fired from my first radio job. I spent 26 years in radio, but I got fired from my first job nine months in and I was devastated.
This was I remember the date, April 1st, April Fool's Day 1988. Well, two days later happened to be Easter Sunday, and I found myself in church. That was one of a couple of times a year, I went to church, right? And the message really spoke to me that day. I didn't accept Christ or recommit, I guess maybe is the better term there. But when I got home, I knelt down next to my bed, and prayed the prayer and got right with God, again, at age 22. I didn't know that this radio career I'd chosen for myself was where I was supposed to be. And so, I prayed that day, “God, show me what you want me to do with the rest of my life. I don't have a job. I don't know what to do career-wise.” And two days later, I was at my dad's business, he owned a couple of service stations in the community. This guy dressed to the nines walks in, and he's in sales, and he's looking for a gas trade in exchange for advertising on his radio station, which happened to be the local Christian station that I had just started listening to the day before. That was my sign from God, that I'm going to give a tape and resume to this guy, which I had in his hand the next day. Two weeks later, I was working for that station, and for the next 25 years, I would work in Christian radio.
[00:11:16] JR: That's so wild. So, I'm curious, looking back in retrospect, you say April 1st, you probably think it's a joke that they're firing you on April Fool’s Day day. You're devastated. In retrospect, can you see that work was starting to become an idol? Is that a source of devastation? Was it economic devastation? What was going on in your soul? If you can remember, back when you were 22.
[00:11:40] JB: My brain, the way it worked at that time was what I thought people turned on their radios to hear me. They didn't turn on the radio station to hear music. They turned on their radios to hear the guy behind the microphone. And that was sort of my attitude on the air. That was partly why I was let go. It was because I just wasn't coming to work with the listener in mind, it was all about me in the spotlight and having this platform, and look at me and look what I can do, and aren’t I awesome, and all that.
So, I think having that taken away from me, and it’s not the first or last time this would happen. I guess this is God's way of giving me a wake-up call and saying you need to depend on me just a little bit more than you are right now. In the case of that first story, it was a wake-up call to say, “You're not following me, that needs to change. And I'm going to have to yank the rug out from under you to get your attention. Here's the way I'm going to do that.” As I said, two days later, I found myself in a church community, and we know the rest of that story. But yeah, it was definitely a wake-up call.
[00:12:36] JR: It sets a great example of how the Lord uses work to sanctify us, right? Even the negative, even the bad, what we would consider bad the circumstances of our career, Romans, 8:28 and 29. He's working all things for our good and that doesn't mean circumstantial good, doesn't mean that you are going to get a better job, Jeff, it means your sanctification. As Paul says in Romans 8:29.
So, Jesse going back to you for a second, it sounds like you've understood, maybe this is formed in seminary, you've understood this biblical truth, that your work inside and outside the church matters for eternity. I'm curious, what's your practical response to that truth, in the work you do today doing marketing for a tech startup? How does that truth that your work matters to God influence how you do the work?
[00:13:27] JW: Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, it's influenced that the work that I do, regardless of what I do is for the glory of God, and for the good of others. So, the quality of the work that I aim to produce is produced to reflect His glory and not my own. Regardless of whatever, you know, work I find my hands at to do, so whether that's vocationally or perhaps things at home, or maybe in the community, or serving the local church as a volunteer, is I want to be able to do so in a way that glorifies God and is good for others. And so practically, that's how that influences that on a regular basis.
I think to kind of going back to your question with Jeff about, idolatry and stuff is, the identity, my identity is in Christ. And so regardless of my failures or faults, I can know that through faith in Christ, if they're sin, that I'm forgiven to that, but I'm made right with God through faith in Him, regardless of what I do or don't do. So, I don't have to perform to earn his approval of me. That provides a lot of steadfastness, a lot of security and that regardless of what I do, kind of going back to your passage of quoting Romans eight, that all things work together for good, whether it's failures or setbacks or breakthroughs that God is faithful toward me through faith in Christ and the power of the spirits that work with me to bring Him glory and whatever I'm doing.
[00:14:53] JR: Yeah, well said, Yeah, I think part of our response to the Gospel is that peace that the God of the universe loves me regardless of how productive or unproductive I am, regardless of how masterful or not I am at my vocation, but that piece also leads us to an ambition to want to get good at our crafts, because we believe it's a means of serving others really well.
So, Jeff, y’all’s hypothesis in this book, Read to Lead, is that reading, and specifically reading books, is critical to mastering what we do vocationally to the glory of God. I'm curious why you guys think – I agree. But I'm curious to hear you guys expound upon why you think this is so critical?
[00:15:36] JB: Well, I think all of us are leaders, whether we have a leadership title or not, we all influence people around us, whether it's coworkers, family, friends, people above us, people below us at work. We need to remember that when people follow behind us, they can only go as far as we go. If our growth stops today, our ability to lead stops along with it. So, I think when we take on this mindset of learning and growing today, we can count on those around us learning and growing with us. So, it's not just about the individual, it's about when you embrace this mindset, understanding the impact it's going to have on everyone you influence.
[00:16:19] JR: That's good. And in the book, you guys talk about these five science-backed reasons how reading helps you pursue mastery of your craft. Would you guys, one of you guys, maybe Jesse, give us a quick rundown of those five science-backed reasons why we should all be reading more.
[00:16:34] JW: Yeah, for sure. So that's chapter two. But yeah, we actually get into eight science-backed reasons with that. One of those being increased professional opportunities, reading helps improve your decision-making skills. Reading is also shown to reduce your stress levels. Another thing as well as probably for a lot of folks, but reading also helps you sleep. So, you know, read books at night, you're going to sleep a little easier. Reading is going to help your ability to lead. It's going to help you become smarter. Reading is also shown to help you to become more creative, and then reading also at the end is going to help you be better with your communication skills.
[00:17:11] JR: It's good. Jeff, why books? Why not blog posts or podcasts? Why books specifically?
[00:17:19] JB: Yeah, I think hundreds of years ago, when books first came on the scene, Jordan, they impacted not just what we think about, but also how we think, more so than I think any other medium. And the problem with today is this web generation, we want everything in bite-sized chunks, and we want it fast, and we want it quick. Our focus has been challenged greatly. It's very difficult for some people to sit down, even 25 or 30 minutes, and focus for that amount of time necessary to read a book. But the thing I love about books, compared to those other mediums you mentioned is that with a book, it's usually months if not years of living, and research and work that's gone into writing it. And it's all of it in one place, right? It's in a format that I can easily share with, hand to, to someone else.
[00:18:12] JR: I made this point in my most recent book, Redeeming Your Time that books are also – they’re just a much more filtered medium of content. What I mean by that is, for a book to get in my hands, an author has to agree to spend, let's call it 400 hours of her life writing it. An agent has to decide, “Yep, I'm going to represent that author.” A publisher, let's call it a dozen people at a publishing house has to decide that the message of the book is worth sharing with the world. A team of five editors puts the manuscript through the wringer, and then I got to hear about a book at least me personally, five times for my friends before I read it. And compare that to the level of friction of an Instagram post, where the only friction is the tap of my thumb right? It's crazy. Books are just filtered for accuracy. They’re filtered more importantly for relevancy. I don't know. That's one of the reasons why I love the medium so much and it's why I pretty much exclusively consume nonfiction books. I don't listen to podcasts. I don't read any news websites. Jesse, I'm curious if you've got anything to add to this. Why do you love books and this medium so much?
[00:19:30] JW: Yeah, I mean, nothing too much to add, like how you added the filtering process there. Yeah, there's many people involved in that process of publishing a book to take whatever idea you have, and then develop it out even further. But no, nothing to add to what's already been shared from you or Jeff.
[00:19:47] JR: All right, so let me ask you this, Jesse. I think a lot of people struggle with retaining what they read in a book. They're reading all these great books, helping them master their craft, for the glory of God in the good of others, but they can't seem to, as you guys say, absorb it into their bloodstream. What advice do you have for them?
[00:20:06] JW: Yeah, what we share in the books built on reading comprehension, retention, philosophies that have been in works for many years. One is SQR3. So, survey what you're going to read. Question it. Read it, recite it, review it. So, practically even from that, as you're reading a book, it's like having a conversation with an author. So, write in the book, as you're reading it, take notes along the way. And then the big thing for retaining is also reviewing those notes at some point in time. So, whether you're keeping notes digitally, or keeping notes and an index hard, or I use a commonplace book, taking the time to go back through those notes, however often you see fit to review that, so that way it helps to keep it fresh for you.
[00:20:48] JR: All right, so take us through this framework, again, because I haven't heard of this, SQR3. Break that down a little bit slower and expound upon this maybe using an example, Jesse, of what this looks like.
[00:21:01] JW: Yeah, sure. So, SQR3, survey, question, read, recite, review. So, the first step survey is, and this is one of the things we recommend in the book is survey what you're going to read before you read it, and surveying could be half the time to read 10, 15, 20 minutes. I'm going to survey the chapter ahead of time. I’m going to read the chapter title, perhaps I'm going to read the introduction and conclusion, and I'm going to survey and I'm going to scan through the subheadings as well. So, that way, it kind of like gives you a map, you know what to expect with what you're going to read. So that's going to prepare you mentally to be able to better absorb and comprehend as you're going along.
The next thing is questioning. One of the tactics we share in the book that's not unique to us is that you can take like the subheadings, and typically their statements, but maybe adapt those into a question. So, that's why again, it's just a little way you can prepare yourself to what to expect and what to retain what you're reading. And, of course, the first on that: read. Like, you've got to read, right? You got to sit down, you have to do the work. You want to read more books? You got to sit down and read.
So, as a part there, reciting, going back into through the notes through reciting what you're reading. And then one of the things with reciting, we’re just even taking notes, and there's no right or wrong way to do this particular step. But some of the things we share is as I'm reading a book, I'm either putting down like a dot or a mark of some sort. You can use whatever marking you want. So that way, when I'm done with my allotted time of reading of 20 minutes, for instance, then I'm going to go back through, find those marks, I'm going to reread that part I marked and I'm either going to highlight it, ignore it, or maybe even take little notes in the margins of the book, and then review.
So, for me, the way that works at least is when I'm done with whatever book I'm reading, I'm going back through all of those marks and all those notes, and then I'm transferring them to an index card. And then with that index card, I'm then storing them away and my commonplace book I mentioned again, not a unique or I did it myself, it's something I picked up from following Ryan Holiday.
[00:23:07] JR: Yeah. I've read this blog post. It’s a great blog post.
[00:23:12] JW: It is a great blog post and I am totally envious of his commonplace book because it is significantly more robust than my own. But I take those note cards and then I have different categories that I have within my commonplace book. And then I'm adding them to that. And so, when I'm ready to look at them again, or perhaps pick those note cards back up for a future project, then I'm going to have those in one place I can refer to.
[00:23:35] JR: Yeah, this is really good and it's given me an opportunity to talk about one of my all-time favorite products, and no, I don't get paid a dime from this company. Do either of you guys use Readwise?
[00:23:49] JB: Yes. We have some resources that are referenced in the book that we include that in one of our resources. I love it.
[00:23:56] JR: I am a super fan of Readwise. So, for you listeners who have no idea what we're talking about, let me break it down for you. Readwise is this little web app, I pay six bucks a month, something like that for it. And it connects my Kindle and my Evernote accounts. And unless I'm reading an advanced copy of a book, I'm pretty much always reading on my Kindle. And so, when I make these highlights and notes as I'm reading, it saves all of those notes to a single note in Evernote and you can make it go to Google Drive, wherever you want, Dropbox, whatever, right?
Then taking a page out of Ryan Holiday’s playbook, Jesse, I wait a few weeks after I finish the book and that's when I go and review my highlights and my notes. And the reason why I wait a few weeks, it's a form of editing. What I thought was important that I highlighted today, in three weeks it's not going to look important to me, right? But I go in, I create permanent notes for all those things, and then of course I tag them to projects to categories, et cetera. I'll tell you what it's been a game-changer for me for retention. Because when you read a book, it's such a massive investment of time. I want to make sure I'm able to extract some value out of that investment later on. So, I love it.
Jeff, is this a similar process to what you follow reading books?
[00:25:20] JB: There are some in the SQR3 you're talking about. I follow a similar process. I tend to dig a little bit more deeply into what I'm reading, spending more time with the book. I can often separate the note-taking from the reading. And so, what that looks like is I'll set a timer, I’ll have the Pomodoro Technique and read for 25 minutes and just read and only allow myself to make some of those markings that Jesse was referring to. I'll use an asterisk or a star to mark something that is incredibly important I want to come back to, a question mark for maybe something I'm not sure I understand or maybe I'm not even sure I agree with. And then a Q for a quote, or something the author said I think is particularly pithy that I want to remember, and I only allow myself to make those markings as I'm reading.
So, I'm not reading and then taking notes as I read stopping down to do that, I'm just reading and only making a small marking similar to what Jesse talked about. And then once I've read for that interval, and presumably finished what I set up to read during that time, I take a break and come back and then the next interval, I set a timer, and now I'm just going back to those markings, and making notes from those markings. So, I've separated oftentimes, again, the act of reading from note-taking, similar to writing, and as a writer, I think you'll understand this, it was very hard for me early on writing, and not editing as I wrote. I wanted to do both at the same time, and I learned, I can do much better and write more in less time if I just write in one sitting and edit in another. I try to do the same thing with my reading. Read in one sitting, take notes in another.
[00:26:57] JR: Yeah, it's really good. Jesse, I'm curious if the principles in this book have influenced how you read Scripture.
[00:27:04] JW: Yes, it has in terms of – there’s a couple of parts in the book where we get into speed reading techniques, or scanning or skimming, that no, not so much so. That's something I try to avoid with reading at least the Scriptures. But the one thing, I guess what guess a couple points there with the Bible, like learning retention comprehension has definitely helped on a regular basis with my daily reading. Now, one point, or story I do share from the book is when I first learn how to speed read, I was actually in graduate schools in seminary. And learning that technique placed me in a position to read a tremendous amount of resources for research papers and other things. I felt more empowered to actually complete my reading assignments and or even do more reading for whatever research paper I happened to be working on. So, that definitely practically influenced me on that regard.
[00:27:57] JR: I'm so skeptical of speed reading. I always have been.
[00:28:00] JB: You're not alone.
[00:28:01] JR: I know I'm not alone. But I know there are people in our audience begging for me to ask how do you double your reading speed, triple your reading speed, and not lose retention?
[00:28:14] JW: So, agreed that it is, you know, speed reading does have a lot of misconceptions or misunderstandings. For clarification, we're not talking about reading a book osmosisly. I'm just looking at the page and just absorbing the contents into our system. So, the average reading speed is around 240 words per minute when it comes to the nonfiction book. If we're talking about the average adult reader who reads at that speed, then yeah, there is a likelihood that he or she can increase their reading speed to 400, 500 words, so doubling how fast they can read without sacrificing retention and comprehension.
So, this isn't something you can do right along the way that you have to train yourself to do that and we provide lessons and practice and tips on how to do so. So, if we're talking about that then yes, we would agree with you, but kind of going back to the misconceptions, now if we're talking about you know reading thousand of pages in a sitting or reading a book and perhaps minutes, word for word, that's something we agree with like we're not talking about reading that fast.
[00:29:20] JR: Yeah, and a lot of times I find, I don't want to speed read. I read for the joy of reading a lot of time, but I do think there are situations in which all of us want to read faster so I'm looking forward to digging into that. Jeff, there is something to be said for reading too much. I think of any medium consuming, too much content of any medium. How do you ensure you're not just consuming the information but processing it, chewing on it, and making use of it. Do you limit yourself and the number of books you read in a given month, given week, et cetera?
[00:29:53] JB: Yeah, I generally limit myself and I guess for some this may be a high number at one time would have been for me, but I limit myself to about a book a week. I feature an author on my podcast every week, and that's generally the book I'm reading in that given week. But I think it's important to identify, Jordan, before you sit down to read a book, answering the question, why am I reading this in the first place? What's the goal? What do I hope to get out of it? What problem is it going to solve for me? Those are just several different ways of asking essentially the same question. Write the answer to that question are questions down, and then that gives you some insight as to with nonfiction, as to where to begin. Go to the table of contents, and identify are there three or four chapters out of this 15-chapter book that get to exactly what I need?
If the answer to that is yes, start there. You don't have to read it linearly. You can start with the chapters that speak to the problem you're trying to solve. If you finish those chapters, whatever it is, and you've gotten what you needed out of the book, set it down. You can call that book done. You can call that book read if you've gotten what you've identified you needed from in the first place.
[00:30:56] JR: Yeah, I never feel an obligation to finish a book. I'm always aware of my sunk cost bias. And if a book is not doing it for me, a third of the way in, I'm out. I also love, because I read on Kindle, I almost always download the sample of the book before I spend money on the book, because I'm cheap, and read and see if I like it. I'll tell you what, my favorite reading habit, one of my favorite reading habits is the popular highlights feature in Kindle. I think this alone is worth reading on Kindle.
For any writer, anyone who wants to quickly skim a book's contents, just go look at the popular highlights and what's resonating with readers. It's a game-changer and it gives you great insight into what's working and what's not working in a book. All right, so speaking of books, we wrap up every conversation on this podcast the exact same way answering three questions. I want to ask both of you guys these questions. Number one, we'll start with Jesse. Which books do you find yourself recommending or gifting to others most frequently?
[00:31:58] JW: Yeah, recently that's been Scaling Up by Verne Harnish. And so that's one regular now, talking about like vocation mastery. One that I recommend and one that our 14-year-old son is reading right now is The Call by Os Guinness.
[00:32:11] JR: Yes, so good.
[00:32:11] JW: Oh, excellent. Read it a few times. And then Every Good Endeavor by Tim Keller.
[00:32:16] JR: Yeah, it's one of my all-time favorites. I love that. All right, Jeff, how about you?
[00:32:20] JB: Yeah. For me, I'm a big fan of Liz Wiseman. I read Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter first about 15 years ago. I can't count the number of times I've recommended that book. I've interviewed her four times for my podcast, the most recent episode of which dropped today, Episode 400, where I interview her about her new book, which I'm having to make room next to Multipliers when it comes to recommendations. That's Impact Players: How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger and Multiply Your Impact. And another favorite author of mine is a guy named Todd Henry, and I'm particularly fond of his book Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day, and anything by Seth Godin.
[00:32:58] JR: Yeah, those are really, really good answers. I like that. Coming from the guy doing the Read to Lead Podcast. These are terrific. Did Liz Wiseman write a book a long time ago called Rookie Smarts?
[00:33:09] JB: She did. I interviewed her about that one as well.
[00:33:12] JR: It's a really good book. If you're curious about it, go check out Jeff's episode with Liz about that. Alright, guys, you can, as always find those books at jordanraynor.com/bookshelf. Alright, Jesse, who would you most like to hear on this podcast talking about how their faith influences their pursuit of masterful work in the world?
[00:33:31] JW: Yeah, that would be John Rydell. He's the CEO and co-founder of PhoneBurner. So, he happens to be my boss, but he's also a phenomenal man, husband, father, and business leader.
[00:33:42] JR: Yeah, I love that answer. I'd love to meet John. All right. How about you, Jeff?
[00:33:46] JB: I don't know if she's been on the show before or not. But I got to say her name again. I think Liz Wiseman would be fantastic talking about that very topic.
[00:33:55] JR: Interesting. I didn't know Liz was a believer. That's fascinating to hear. But it makes total sense, given her content. All right, guys, Jesse, what's one thing from our conversation today that you want to highlight or reiterate to our listeners before we sign off?
[00:34:08] JW: Yeah, don't take your professional development for granted. Things are changing rapidly, and always learning is essential. And so arguably, the best way to improve yourself professionally is by reading books.
[00:34:21] JR: Yeah, that's good. How about you, Jeff?
[00:34:22] JB: I think when it comes to reading and reading consistently and intentionally, I think three things we fight are time, boundaries, and focus. And so, plan your day, protect your boundaries, and prepare your space with regard to focus. So, I think what gets scheduled gets done as Michael Hyatt says, and I think this goes for anything, not just reading. So, I schedule my reading time, I protect it like I would any other meeting or appointment. I protect my boundaries by not being afraid to say no and realizing no is a complete sentence. And if I'm going to say yes, I need to defend that yes to myself.
And then with regard to focus and preparing your space, when you sit down to read, close the door, sit in a comfortable chair, put on noise-canceling headphones if you can, tell the others around, you're going to do that first because I've learned the hard way on that one. If you're going to have your phone in the room with you at all, connect your headphones to an app like Focus At Will or Adagio, which is an app that lets you search for classical music based on moods that you can really focus for that 25 or 50 minutes or however long you plan to read.
[00:35:22] JR: It’s really good. It aligns with a lot of the tips I outlined in my book Redeeming Your Time. Hey, guys, I just want to commend you guys for the terrific work you're doing in the world. Thank you for reminding us that all work inside and outside of the church matters to God. And thank you for giving us some super practical tips for making the most of the books that God is bringing into our lives.
Guys, the book is Read to Lead: The Simple Habit That Expands Your Influence and Boosts Your Career. The book has insanely good ratings on Amazon that any author would be jealous of. Jesse and Jeff, thank you so much for joining me.
[00:35:56] JW: Thank you, Jordan.
[00:35:57] JB: Thanks so much.
[OUTRO]
[00:35:58] JR: Hey, I hope you guys enjoyed that episode. Hey, listen, it's been a blast being with you guys for 2021 We got a lot more amazing content coming down the pipeline for 2022. Love you guys. Grateful to be doing this show with you. Happy New Year.
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