Author: Adam

I just wrapped up reading Exactly What To Say by Phil M Jones – this was a great short read that gave me some wonderful ideas on how to better use concise language to get better results more quickly.

Which means what exactly?

Well, the book is laid out into short chapters focusing on the “magic words” that you can use to get the outcome you’re looking for more quickly.

For example, future pacing is addressed where you ask the question, “how would you feel if…” and fill in the blanks with whatever fits for your discussion. For this example, maybe it would be “how would you feel if you had a short, to the point, phrase for every conversation in your life that helped you reach decisions with others more quickly?”

Well, now you’re thinking about it and creating a better mental image or feeling that is more “customized” to you than anything I could every guess at!

Each chapter has the reasoning behind using the phrase and then goes into actual examples so that you can see how (and sometimes when) to use it in case you aren’t familiar or certain.

This was a great short read that should provide both short term and long term ROI. Helping people make decisions and move conversations forward is a powerful tool.

If you’re interested in reading the book, check it out here.

You can find the audiobook here.

Win Bigly, by Scott Adams, was an interesting read from my POV – it sets a lot of powerful persuasion techniques forward in the context of the 2016 US Presidential campaigns.

Regardless of whether you want to know more about the campaigns or are tired of thinking about it (or living the results) there’s something for both sides. The campaign and election is used as the background of Win Bigly to weave the story and deliver some great details and higher level concepts dealing with persuasion, how to use it, how to “detect” it, and specific ways you can use these same ideas.

I’ll admit it – this is a book that I will need to reread a time or two so that I can really soak in all of the lessons. Luckily, Scott Adams made it fairly easy to grab the details by very logically organizing the book while still using powerful storytelling. He lays out the terms and ideas needed at the beginning in an easy to read manner and gets going quickly from there.

Overall, I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for insights into the election or how to use high grade persuasion techniques in their personal or professional life – check out the video for more details and use that to decide if this book is the right one for you.

Grab Win Bigly on Amazon Here

Get Win Bigly on Audible (audiobook) Here

On the recommendation of a copywriter friend (Adam Bensman at Brain Hickey – check him out!) I read Building A Story Brand while on the road a few weeks ago.

The book is an easy to read framework for realizing how to position your business or brand as a story that your customers want to be a part of. This is different than telling your customers a story about yourself or just making something up – you’re given the framework to tell the story (on your website, in your copy) about why your customers need your business.

The step by step layout is great and goes through the arc of a story that you need to then insert yourself and your customers into in order to create this story that builds brands and loyal customers that are drawn to you.

It reminded me of Russell Brunson and all of the stories he tells. Do you know why he tells so many stories to get his points across? It’s because we as humans are wired to be more receptive to stories and find them much more interesting than logic, even when the same ideas are being communicated…and they can be highly persuasive.

But, back to the book.

It’s a great read that is very actionable and gives you the framework to start defining your brand in a manner that will ultimately help draw the customers you want closer. Definitely worth the few hours to read it.

And there’s an added bonus – the last section deals with putting the story into practice on your website and in your company culture. Good stuff!

You can grab your copy of the book here: https://adammoody.org/storybrand

Or get the Audible version here: https://adammoody.org/storybrand-audible

The good news – this is a really easy recommendation. If you know you need or want to create more content, with higher quality, and better processes, stop what you’re doing and grab this book. It will help you – that’s the bottom line!

Of course, if you’re like me you might want to find out more – in that case, just watch the video above for the full Story Engine book review.

It’s a great short and to the point read that you can easily get through in less than a week (and I’m sure many people could tackle it in 1 or 2 readings). That isn’t a bad thing, it’s got a lot of value and not a ton of fluff.

If you’re ready to grab your copy, you can get it at Amazon via this link: https://adammoody.org/thestoryengine

As mentioned, there’s a lot of resources available for free with this book – you can get your hands on the PDF’s, spreadsheets, and more to take your content marketing game up a few notches.

The only people that I would not recommend this book to are the ones who are VERY new to content marketing or just getting started with writing online.

This book assumes some knowledge of the area and is really meant for the business or blog owner that wants to create and utilize better processes for some real world content marketing results.

If you liked The Story Engine book review leave me a comment or click on the YouTube embed and leave a comment there.

James Shramko starts off his book with a great metric that we should all consider: Effective Hourly Rate, or “EHR”. If nothing else, you should take away from this Work Less, Make More review that regularly reviewing and estimating your EHR and then taking steps to increase it can be hugely beneficial.If you’ve watched the summary video above and want to grab your own copy, you can get it here: https://adammoody.org/worklessmakemore

Now, for those of you that have been running your own businesses for several years, this may seem on the simple side. However, I’ve personally found time and time again that simple is good – right?

This EHR metric is something that I’m going to put into my toolbox and evaluate quarterly. It’s a great way to see how effective you are, and it can apply at all scales (business, project, tasks, etc).

What I liked about the layout of this book was the remaining chapters of the book that James uses to give actionable advice on how to increase your EHR.

For example, one of the first areas you can (and should) work on is your effectiveness or productivity. Start monitoring your time, what areas are producing a return, and how you can minimize the bad, and expand the good. Just taking time each week or even month to look at this and make positive moves can have an enormous effect.

In the book, he then goes beyond this and into many different areas such as building a team, creating systems and processes to grow, and something that I personally found to be a great idea – “the infinity project”.

What’s that?

It’s a project, or projects that you can have  your team work on when there is down time. Once you have a team there’s certainly going to be hours or parts of days where they might be between projects or waiting – don’t let that go to waste, have them engaged in a long term project that highlights their strengths.

I highly recommend Work Less, Make More for a quick but engaging read that will give just about anyone some good ideas and strategies that they can put to use immediately.