8 Life-Changing Books To Read In 2025

0:00Welcome back to Secret Leaders and Merry Christmas everyone. So this Christmas we have made the Secret Leaders book collection. So we're bringing together the best ideas, like our best books. This is like not an ad at all. These are genuinely Dan and I's favourite books across a few key topics. I would say that some of the books we're talking about today have been like instrumental, completely formative in my life. I talk about them all the time. And funnily enough, your books as well, like especially one of them is one of my favourite books ever. So I'm so pleased to see that. and we're giving this entire collection to one of you at the end of the episode so stay tuned for how we're doing in the giveaway and let's get into it so who wants to go first me or christmas donnelly i think you go first because you've really leaned into christmas here with the uh with the hat well i wouldn't say i leaned in i'd say that you've leaned out i didn't have a hat it's christmas i didn't have a hat do you want a hat look i mean if you're gonna throw me a hat off camera let's throw him a hat yeah i will see if a special hat my incredibly large head wow right that's a vibe mate i don't know if i'm gonna record the whole episode well we'll see we'll see how you get on yeah okay um so a bit of a weird way to start uh an episode with physical books because my book we're starting with a category of guest books so our favorite guest books that have come in on the show and etc etc um my guest book is not on the stack that's probably quite annoying i'm sorry but there is a good excuse the book is are you ready for it i'm ready what's your dream by simon squibb he does say that a lot he does so um what's your dream by simon squibb the reason it's not on the stack by the way is because he's actually very kindly offered to send us a signed version for this prize giveaway yep so very cool yeah very cool so uh you're going to get an even better version than this uh digital version that someone is going to superimpose into my hand in the edit.

1:59Sorry, Alex, making you do that now. I'll tell you what I like about what's your dream. I have a bit of a personal story here that Simon does himself admit and tell. When I first met Simon, it was during COVID. He didn't really have any followers and I'd just started Heights. We were living close to each other. I lived in Camden. He lived in Bells Heights Park. We walked like, you know, near each other a lot. And so we went on these walks. He was telling me about this book that he was writing. This book? This book, but a slightly different version of it. It's evolved probably, yeah. Yeah. And it was not good.

2:29And I basically told him very directly, I don't think this is good. I don't think it's interesting. I don't think it's unique. And also I think that if you, because a lot of my friends are authors, I was like, also, if you genuinely want a good book deal with a publisher, if you don't have an audience already, or you don't have like personal brand leverage or expertise, like someone like Angela Duckworth, for example, you know, know you're a professor in university you don't have those things um you don't get paid you don't get a big offer up front from the publisher and the less they offer you for the book ironically not the more they put into marketing because they're seeing some kind of connection there the less they pay you the less they market it so it's kind of not worth your time and what i would do is just hold off on that book you don't need the book and the world doesn't need another book right now we had a whole a long chat about the book um last year he basically got in touch with and was like, I've redone the book.

3:22I want you to read the early version of it, et cetera, et cetera. You were completely right. I really appreciated that. And he's got big contract, big publisher, loads of marketing dollars. His first book, he'd written it. It was similar, but not the same. Could have been much worse. And there's no real problem with that. Maybe he did the first one and then he does this one, whatever. But I feel like there's a personal connection there. So I read that with a bit of pride. And now like Simon is fucking huge. Huge, huge. It's insane. And I feel like he, it's not just that he's big now like he even when i met him january 2023 before we will like when we all met and started making content at the same time such a weird whatsapp group that was um but he wasn't big none of us were big and yet his growth has been good the whole way through but recently exponential exponential like he's completely taken off that um like that is a great story and his his focus on consistency has been amazing so the book is kind of like a modern day um rich dad poor dad essentially you know it teaches you a lot about uh finance like the way to think about financial literacy um owning your choices and obviously following your dreams following your passion um and trying to basically put good momentum and good energy out there you know what simon's like it's obviously a very good positive energy book um but i thought it was great and he's done a really really good job with the book it's going to be a bestseller and the reason it's going to be a bestseller other than being a decent book your audience is that big and your publisher is going to go that hard on promoting it which they will it's kind of a foregone conclusion it's december now when we're recording this is out next month you're going to see that book everywhere on an every bookshelf it's interesting as well because i've just done a book deal and uh do you resonate with what i said yeah i mean i spent forever analyzing because i really didn't want to write a book and then i was like if i write a book like anything i say if you're going to do something like do it properly yeah i spoke to every author i possibly could i spoke to all the publishers i then did a book deal and then i ended up pulling the book deal because i was like i think i can think about this better i think i could write the premise better and go again and the thing about getting a good advance one obviously the money is good but like you say the advance is to put the ball back in their court that they have to deliver on what they believed was a brilliant book and so they have to push hard they have to put money into editing they have to put money into ghostwriters they've put money into marketing getting into stores etc and so completely resonate and and i suspect that with him he will just sell the beginning part which is the second most important part which is the pre-launch of the book pre-launch sales determine how much marketing spend goes in pretty much definitively so if they see a pre a book in pre-launch that does like 20 30 40 000 copies the the publisher's going holy shit this thing's going to be massive let's up our marketing spend and then the second most important thing about a book is the fact if i read a book like some of my favorite books ever once i read it i just give it to people yeah totally whether i give it or i buy it for them totally like i read the untethered soul recently i love it i have quite literally had like a religious experience with that book that's on my list but i have bought it for so many people i I can't tell you.

6:41This is explaining your bloody spiritual energy right now. It's great, isn't it? The best. Have you read The Surrender Experiment, his other book? It's actually his first book. But it's on my list. You're going to love it. I gifted that book to Ali. Really? And he had a spiritual experience about Ali Abdel. Yeah. It's amazing. I'll tell you, it's probably better, but Surrender Experiment is his life story. I mean, obviously we've categorized the books today, but like at the moment, I would say that's my favorite book ever. Yeah. If we're doing a spirituality list, that's always in my top three of spirituality books.

7:10Yeah. I've only had it for a couple of weeks. I've read it twice. Really? On one plane journey, I read the whole thing. I know we're not focusing on that book, but he's just got a couple of lines. I call them like brain harpoons. So when someone says something, it's like, that's stuck in my brain forever. You take a pause, you highlight, you write it down, and then you read it again. You're like... So he's got one about your brain, which is like, there's a noisy roommate inside your head. Yeah, yeah. And it's a fucking psycho. Yeah, yeah. It's messy. It shouts at you, and you can't get it to shut the fuck up.

7:38Yeah. But it is your roommate. I would say a lot of my current Zen in life was coming from a variety of different things. But then I read that book and I feel like it codified loads of things for me. Interesting. About the internal voice. Yeah. I've noticed that about you. This actually makes a lot more sense now. Because you're a bit different this month. Now you said you've read that book and it makes a bit more sense. Okay. So my guest book was Simon Squibb's What's Your Dream? Yeah. What's your book? so my guest book uh is a book that i have read about a thousand times and it was i think my first episode that i hosted with you of secret leaders which is dan priestly daniel priestly which is the key person of influence if you haven't read it i still think it rings as true now as it did then when i read it and it was honestly like i feel like i read this when i was a kid the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey and it's very much about how if you're in any industry if you can become you know known as the key person within that industry no matter how small or niche or big or whatever 99 % of all the opportunities within that niche will come to you and like I would say that in my life I very much practiced this book and I very much now help and advise people on how to implement this in their lives but i feel like it was such a it was so ahead of its time as a book like the concept it was kind of almost he wasn't even speaking necessarily to begin with with social media in mind he was more talking about like thought leadership and reputation within a space but he's completely right like in like these weird power laws if you're the most well-known you know uh specific lawyer like maritime lawyer and you're the most well-known one you'll get most of the big jobs come to you first and that's just the case of life you know in all industries so people should practice this yeah i think they say something along the lines of you know uh attention and audience just spreads your surface area of luck yeah yeah and he has that saying that i think he he sort of altered from the really famous saying which is like i think the famous saying is like everything is down downstream everything is downstream from attention i think he changed it to everything is downstream from lead generation Yeah, he did.

9:54Yeah. So I think the famous saying rings true. Yeah. Like everything is downstream from attention. So if you build a business and you can pull attention to you, it's just top of funnel activity, isn't it? And so, yeah, I thank Dan for one, I've read all his books and I love them, but two, coming on the show. Okay. So that is guest picks. Those are our favorite guests. Yeah. But this next category, getting hot? Yeah. Yeah. It's bloody hot in these. I am committed to the cause. Good man. It's still looking quite good on brand. actually it just doesn't move it's amazing you should see what this fucking Jufro looks like it's just awful ok so favourite business books, I'm going to stay on brand here haven't brought mine but the reason is, I have an excuse it's actually slightly more niche and the lead time on Amazon was ridiculous and so for guests for whoever wins our bundle they can choose Kindle or Physical or Audible, whatever's better for you Yeah, exactly.

10:53So the book is called The Great CEO Within. And it is by a coach, an entrepreneur called Matt Moshari. Matt is considered one of the best coaches to entrepreneurs in the world. He has some quite famous people that he coaches, including Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, Naval Ravikant, like a whole list of amazing people, Brian Chesky, etc, etc. So he's a serious, serious like top tier coach. And basically he noticed when he was like, you know, coaching all of these people over the same time, they kind of had a very similar, similar kind of questions, similar kind of challenges, et cetera. So what he did was he wrote a word doc with the top list of questions that he asked people when he's coaching them to help unlock things.

11:43And he said that actually one of the great insights it's fundamentally is you've got to work through obviously processing systems so systems that can scale and then also just understanding how to unlock potential out of people with you know kindness decent questions etc etc it's like this stuff is so obvious it's like once you've worked through multi-billion dollar founders and the scale of their problems going up and hiring hundreds and then thousands of people managing these companies etc is that you you realize a lot of these questions actually end up all being the same and on a very fundamental level they're quite human so he wrote this doc and it went viral and he basically decided to turn it into a slightly slightly larger but very succinct still book so the book is super short the audible which i've listened to as well i've read and listened to the audible super short we're talking like a few hours two three hours um and really powerful and what's really cool is you can literally turn up on monday it's like a manual you can turn up on man on monday in your company and start putting some of the things into processes um so you can be like okay meetings um this is how we could run an efficient um quarterly meeting this is how we should run a one-to-one meeting this is how and this is how these things can scale so it's kind of like a how-to but that works at any kind of level and i found it to be very succinct very simple very practical and also literally like the handbook that's used by these like incredible founders all over so for anyone listening uh if you're in your company at the moment it's not quite working out yeah and you're struggling as a CEO especially.

13:14Management's not working, one-on-ones aren't working etc. Like literally get a copy or we might give you our copy. So my business book is The Lean Startup. Everyone's favorite startup book. Yeah I mean but it's a bit that's like one of those things that I always find funny when people say it. It's like the reason it's so successful is it's so good and like when people say that they don't like things that are you know like over a million copies sold for a business book is like crazy yeah it's ridiculous crazy numbers but i like the principle because i think that like the world got to a point where like we were all so okay like spending loads of money on growth and i feel like the principles in the book are very true about like build an mvp minimal viable product and put it out into the world it's a bit like combine this book and this book together like priestly and lean startup and you get a sense of being able to build like high margin, high scale businesses and test them for not much money, which I think is in the early stages of entrepreneurship, what you should be doing.

14:15Like I understand that venture capital and those businesses require so much money, but even in those businesses, I think sometimes people could go, I'm just going to build the lean startup version of this thing. I'm going to like release like V1 of this thing and it costs us a couple thousand dollars rather than be like, I'm going to hire a massive tech team and like build this thing and they will come so i just feel like it's such great principled thinking about like test demand fundamentally and like work on audience before you go all in on something so i i loved reading that when i was younger because i was i was i because i was running an agency that was quite big we were doing millions and millions a year but we weren't making any profit and so like i reckon that book kind of brought me back from the brink of just focusing on top line growth so i would say like absolutely critical reading for all yeah it's interesting like when i read it i um obviously i read it because everyone reads it and you're talking to read it it's like part of the past 100 you're not running a startup if you haven't read that book yes that's definitely true yeah but it's just parts of it are just like all right i don't need to know how fucking toyota run their factories you know it's just like the the length of detail of because they are the the actual innovators of the lean process and they did obviously change their entire business and become one of the most successful car manufacturers in the world by running a lean process which is where he gets the inspiration from on there were so many parts of it i was just like i think when i read it i was in such a bad place it was so chaotic growing so fast and things was complete mess in my last company gravel um and i read it and i was just like shut up yeah fuck off yeah so i mean there's also possibly i've just got a lot of bias from where i was in my life when i read this and also that every time you tell somebody you've got a problem they're like have you read this lean startup i mean the fuck off it's so true have you read it all i would say of the lean startup of all of these books i'm sure my own book in the future is that the books get padded out apart from the ceo one that you're talking about that i haven't read yeah right is that books get padded out to make the book longer so many books fundamentally could be like a fifth on on that note yeah the great ceo within i spoke to matt and he he purposely didn't get a publisher if you get a publisher they force you to have a certain amount of pages because it's the amount that they can charge for the book right so there's a minimum amount of pages you have to have to have a 1099 book to have a 1499 book um and there's a minimum so your editor and your publisher will force you to have a certain amount even if your message is done he chose not to have a publisher because he refused to make it any bigger than any than it would and so he's self-published which maybe explains why it's harder to find on amazon but it's it's short it's succinct it gets the job done it is hard to find but like it's feels strange i feel like the books in our studio they're all the same size or larger there's a minimum size i've been told to read the book the ceo great ceo within the great ceo within i feel like i've been told to read that recently like four or five times that's the measure of a good book though i think nowadays and especially in the in the land of like internet founders you know like like us i suppose like people with a following but also are entrepreneurs they are so focused on pre-sales more than anything yes but what you should focus on is like a book that's going to be handed on because like a book should be like a pension should be like in the background just doing that continuously like rolling and rolling and rolling whereas i see so many of these flash and pan books but you know these books so far have stood the test of time okay so what is the next category tell us about your next book right so the next thing we've decided to do is like you know dealer's choice so to speak this This time last year, pretty much specifically bang on, I went to a cabin in the woods.

17:50Can we shout out the cabin? Unplugged. Unplugged for everyone watching. Yeah. This is not an ad. Not an ad, just my favorite. Just love Hector. My favorite. Love Hector and absolutely love those cabins. And I read this book called Outlive by Peter Atiyah. And as you can see, it is motherfucking enormous. And also really challenging. Oh, a million copies as well. bloody hell um it's in the middle ridiculously scientific when did that come out a year ago that came out a year ago maybe 18 maybe 18 months yeah i mean that is wild in book land it's really good yeah and he almost didn't i'm very on trend you know he almost didn't publish it so he started writing this book and then he gave up on it for a few years and a friend basically basically like told him to like go and finish it and stuff he talks about it in the book um so peter atia is a uh a you know a quant analyst he's actually very interesting so he is a um a guy who worked in he's one of the best heart surgeons in america and then decided that medical profession was too stressful for him etc and he just wanted to do something else we went and became like a quant analyst um at like mckinsey no uh even better at layman brothers doesn't sound something right behind right right just and he became his his specialty was subprime mortgages and as this whole thing came out he became one of like the world experts or whatever um and it was super random thing and he was like okay fuck all of this obviously i'm in the wrong space again and he decided to go back into health and sort of like understand the science and art of longevity and the the thing about the book that i think is particularly interesting he has a thesis that if you can map out the...

19:38So his whole thing, by the way, is like he's a strategist. So when he was a heart surgeon and everything, he would say to people like, you know, what do you need? And this is your care plan. And this is the strategy you need to have that. And when you're dealing with financial markets and stuff, hey, if you want to do this and you want that outcome, you have to have a strategy. Here's a strategy. So his book here is like, hey, everyone says they want to live for a long time. They'll talk about the different things. But actually, if you do that without a strategy, you're kind of on the path to nowhere.

20:01So here is a strategy. for how you would live to 100 years old, for example. He has lots of really great concepts in the book, which I think can simplify a lot of the jargon and stuff that you say. One of the challenges that I've personally had in my life growing up fat is health fads. So I'm really into this, and then I kind of stop. I'm really into that, and then I kind of stop. And he says here, no diets or no focus. There's no focus on nutrition. You should forget about diets. He's got some nutritional biochemistry. Yeah, he's got basically no focus on nutrition. And he actually, interestingly, because he's quite out there and opinionated, but he's like, nutrition is so tribal.

20:43You say, go vegan, everyone says vegan shit. You go eat meat, everyone who's vegan tells you that's wrong. He's like, I can't be focused in any of that. I'm focused on the body. So how does the body move? What does the body do? What is the biochemistry of the body? Let's leave nutrition to the nutrition experts, which is also quite nice for once, right? Got a Brian Johnson vibe? No, Brian Johnson's very focused on the nutrition side, right? He's fully vegan. Oh, is he? He's fully vegan, yeah. And has been fully vegan for the entirety of Blueprint. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

21:15So, whereas Dr. Peter Ossia eats meat and is like, yeah. But he's like, but you do you. So find your own nutrition path. And he has this concept, which is called the centenarian decathlon. And his point is, we know we think about marathons and we think about the different things we want to do in our lives and therefore some short-term achievement or raising funds or whatever they might be. Most people say they want to live to 100. But actually what most people say is I want to live to 100 and have as much vitality as I can. I want to be healthy and I want to be able to do things when I'm 100 because what's the point in being sick?

21:44So it's like if you want to do that, you need a strategy of how you're going to do that. And it doesn't just happen by accident. It happens from certain ways you move your body. So we can break down the very simple logical process of what a centenarian would need to do. For example, if you want to be 100 and pick shopping bags up off the floor, right, then we're going to have to work on these shoulder exercises. If you want to be able to pick your great-granddaughter up and like whatever, you're going to have to do these hip hinges. And if you want to walk up the stairs unassisted at 100, this is what you need to do.

22:18So he breaks things down into a really basic way. And he says that, and this is actually one of the reasons why I'm bulking this year, I've been like trying to put on weight and I put on seven kilos purposefully this year based basically on this book because you can essentially build muscle broadly up until your 60s. And if you're lucky, 70s and in your 70s, you can kind of maintain. And from 80s, it's mostly atrophy, even which means decrease, even at like best rates. so your opportunity for building for building most of the joint strength you need most of the muscle strength and all of the things you actually need is in a very long period so he's like most people don't look at this at all until they're 40 or 50 and you can still do it all from 50 comfortably but actually the earlier you start so he says like mid 30s is a great time to start but like really by 40 you're ahead of the game so i read it i was 37 i was like all right i'm going to be 38 that gives me two years to get my body prepped for this uh centenarian decathlon for the rest of my life by the time I'm 40.

23:17Is that something you think about a lot? Yeah I think about I think about the exercises that I do and my conscious choices in the gym and my movement choices throughout the week are all based on the Outlive program all of them. So it changed my life on the basis of I've been living I've been living this. 38? 38. It's a book for you. Five days five days a week I exercise and I exercise specifically according to what I learned in that book. Does it relate at all to you being CEO, founder, being in business? Definitely CEO, founder and dad, because the thing that I need is energy. I need lots of energy to do the three things.

23:53I need to feel really great. And I'd say this year, I felt the best I probably felt in a long time. You have mad energy. Yeah. And I think I attribute a lot of it to my diet and exercise this year. I'm really going for it. And of course, so much energy from heights. And that, yeah. this is a plug this is not an ad but every guest that we ever have on the show is already a customer of heights it freaks me out to a point i can't even tell you all it's crazy they've got great taste yeah sure high performance yeah i need something to sell all right so mine's outlive i just talked very passionately about it uh what's yours so my dealer's choice my book would be this book was given to me by a guy called spencer which is funny because um it's like the only person ever i've fallen out with really really like ever he was a mentor of mine when i was younger he gave me this book and he was like learn because I wasn't the salesperson the confident one the front of house founder I was like the guy doing the designs and I was the guy doing all the work and this mentor that I had called Spencer who fundamentally I think is actually a decent guy he was just miffed at me not wanting to work with him as a consultant anymore but he told me that fundamentally if you're ever going to be a founder and a successful one you have to learn to sell in selling damn true is not just selling to a customer it's not like selling over a lemonade lemonade stand it's selling to everyone and everything the whole time continuously always on yeah you know like your team must believe the mission your customers must believe like we had the guy from castor on recently and that's coming out soon and fundamentally he has to he has to get the football teams to believe that his product is better than these super established brands and so this book is a great day one understanding that like selling is not a bad thing it's not a bad topic like to be someone that sells is not a negative yeah because sales people get a bit of they get people like sales people but it's like really smart sales people will sell to you and you'll buy the vision without knowing you're being sold to and that's do you know what i always notice when i go to america because it's so different everyone sells in america very comfortably when I go to America I realize what like as the buyer I want them to be selling to me I noticed that like oh this is great actually like I want to hear their confidence selling and here it's just kind of a bit uncomfortable so it makes you as the buyer a bit uncomfortable when you don't want to buy it so much it's something I would like really really practice like persuasion and convincing others is like a critical skill and like I came from a b2b world where like it was all that the whole thing was convincing someone else sitting across the table who was the custodian of a big brand to work with my tiny agency and so like it became my art form basically but then even as time has gone on i've built like the media stuff now nowadays broadly speaking it's kind of the same thing but just on mass and so i would say to young founders i can't out of all the books say that if i was to give you one book i'd give you any other book than this one because this is like this is an internal thing that you do you learn how to be persuasive like you learn how to be convincing and i think that carries through all marketing all personal brand everything and so like give it a go that's a solid pitch clearly just sold it pretty well read the book sold okay next category final category okay can i go first actually you're up this category is mindset and my choice is grit by Angela Duckworth Two things to say One is that I've invited Angela Duckworth Onto the show Many times She has declined Angela If you're watching Angela come on We have relaunched the show There's now two of us And now there's At least one Representative genius On the show And we That's I'm not sure about that But we are certainly Growing fast Podcasts being listened to By thousands of people And we're gritty We're gritty as fuck So come on And talk to us about Grit Okay so My story about Grit This is completely true no hyperbole down the lens it changed my life so the book yeah so i was in a really really bad place um very depressed very anxious and very like lost after my last business scrabble um and i felt really sorry for myself and i very randomly there's a guy called azim azar i don't know if you know him he writes something called the exponential view um and my friends he was like there's and he knew that i was like in this bad place and he's like uh there's i had nothing to do i was out of a job and i was just like looking for something and he was like there's a there's a talk at the welcome center today um by a guy called martin seligman who is a psychologist on positive psychology you should go um it's about positive psychology you're down in the dumps maybe it's a good thing and i was like fuck it well i've got nothing else to do i'll go so i went down to the welcome center i went to see this guy martin seligman who is actually a very very famous he's probably more famous than anna duckworth and he was her teacher um so he is the founding father of something called positive psychology and the concept of that is um anti-freudian freudian psychology is you're stuck with the brain you're born with so it's your genetics it's your past all this kind of shit and um martin seligman psychology is which positive is all about actually no you can change your brain uh you just got to think positive thoughts and you've got to like focus on like the next thing the next thing next thing and your brain is plastic and you can change it etc and his student was angela duckworth i went to that talk and i was like well that was actually quite interesting whatever and they were selling some books afterwards and everyone kept saying this book's great so i picked it up and i bought it and i went home and i read it and it categorically changed my life because the book does an exceptionally she's a gifted writer she is a gifted scientist and she does an incredible job of explaining it's probably the first science book i ever read in my life um and she does an incredible job of explaining how she can essentially predict the success of a human being of people in high performing situations she has like the marines the sas all this kind of stuff right um you know outside of just ceos and business people which she also does and she can almost always tell whether or not they're going to be successful or they're going to make it through hell week for example or anything like that she came up with the process of testing these things so fast with such high probability that she ended up working with the US government just to kind of predict like who the most gritty hardcore and capable people are and it's not all about muscle or anything it's just about your attitude if you get hit in the face are you able to get back up again are you able to like just wipe that dirt off and just get back on the horse and just go again and she has this like constant um constant story after story scientific study after scientific study more importantly um of how the correlation between successful people and your ability to just go for something whether or not you're successful it's actually irrelevant how you respond to it it's all that matters and she did such a compelling job of that i basically got myself out of a hole yeah and was like fuck it yeah i've just been hit in the face that's my example right now i've just that's just happened to me yeah it's really embarrassing um i'm ready to go again like it was like a wake-up call like a jolt i was like that's it boom so andrew if you're watching thank you that book absolutely changed my life it helped me get back on the horse and i feel uh i always come back to it it's thorough like i would say like i read it it's a very good i read it at a good time and it's really fucking thorough it's Robust.

31:31Yeah, like you're going to want to like sit, make notes, think deeply about it. It's not like a flash in the pan book. Yeah. Like it's a real understanding of like your own resilience over a long period of time. So yeah, I'm a huge, huge fan. I haven't read that for a long time. I read that again in like a bad period of my life and I feel like it was really useful. I'd like to read it now. I'm in a good period of my life. I wonder how I'd respond. So what's your book? This is the final book of our Christmas giveaway. What have you got for us? You're like going to be like, oh, you're such a cliche.

31:59Oh, I love this book. yeah it's another book that changed my life in fairness but i never lived to practice but anyone anyone who knows me will know that like this it's like become part of my personality which is i'm a big believer in what has come before us no longer fits the world now i don't believe that like everything we've been told about our lives and the way we should work and the way we should like grow up is right and i feel like we should be fundamentally aiming at different things and that's why like anyone who knows me knows that like I work very hard in the time that I work but when I don't work I'm completely offline and like completely non-working and I feel like some people forget how to do that and I think it's because I think it's because they're taking a break from the thing that they do and the thing that they do is work whereas I feel like if you really really think about it all you should be doing is creating the ability to have more non-working time and yeah if you love your work then that's the benefit and I would say I like my work but four hour work week by Tim Ferriss I feel like conceptually is a very strong principled thinking for uh entrepreneurs and employees about like how to structure your life for the things that you really care about like I always find it's very strange that the question we ask each other when we go out is like what do you do whereas it's like what are you passionate about what are you interested in like you know what is life outside of work for you are just so much more fascinating as questions i actually really try when i meet someone new to say what are your interests same and nowadays like if someone like someone says to me what do you do i'm like i work in marketing and like if you get that out of the way quick you can get on to talk about loads of really interesting shit rather than for like someone like you and me who you know are annoying entrepreneurs would just like say the same nonsense about what we do over and over and over again and so i feel like it's principled thinking about like leverage about time off about like why throughout the year you should actually try and have as much time off as possible.

33:56It's like a game. How little can I work to how much can I make? And there's nothing wrong with aiming to make lots of money in a short period of time. You know, you don't have to change the world, but I would say that book was definitely a defining factor. And I would say for the books that I suggested, you know, when writing my own book, you think a lot about the books you've read and what's impacted you. I would say that those books would be like a precursor to I think what I'm writing. yeah i am like such an avid reader i've had one of the biggest impact um areas of my life so this journey probably started with grit but i read about 50 books a year wow because i read about one a week on audible by just walking or being in the car doing drop-offs or whatever and so i get through about a book a week and i'm really quite deliberate about broadly like very little fiction are quite deliberate on self-help categories across spirituality finance inspiration business etc but on a conscious level book by book i think it's really valuable to do that but on a more macro level i really strongly believe that your output is completely driven by your inputs so my logic is if i'm constantly filling my ears and therefore head with all of these like brilliant ideas whether i'm like really putting every single one of them into action or not my output is so much more thorough and sharp around these kind of concepts like whether it's conscious or subconscious that's going to be happening and so your process like you say of writing a book the most obvious thing to do is to read great books if you read great books your output is going to be more likely to write a great book i thought as well because i actually i'm not a huge reader of loads of books i actually read a lot of fictional books uh and i have recently reread two of my favorite books ever which are non-business books but i read recently Cain and Abel I've never read it Is that Jeffrey Archer?

35:44Is just the most Phenomenal book And story ever Is it? It's a huge book Who is it? It's a great Christmas book Jeffrey Archer Oh it is yeah Great Christmas book I've never read it And then The Count of Monte Cristo Like Just the most Fantastic Christmas books If you're going away So Never read either I'm not a huge Business book reader But the ones I have read I think have been Transformative So let me explain Exactly how you can Get hold of the entire Secret Leaders Book collection We've tried to make it As simple as possible so I'm going to talk you through some of the things that you need to do to get hold of this whole collection for free this Christmas.

36:16The first thing we need to do is make sure that you like this video. The second thing that we need to do is make sure that you're subscribed to our channel and the third thing most importantly that we need you to do is to make a comment in the comment section of this video telling us what your 2025 goals are. If you do all three of these things we can consider you for the Secret Leaders book giveaway. And if you're a listener and obviously might have been with me for a few years. So I really appreciate you sticking with us. Please do come over to the YouTube channel so that you can join and enter this amazing giveaway as well.

36:49We are wrapping up in just four days. So from the episode going live, it's going to end pretty quickly. We're going to be, I think the last day to enter is on the 23rd. We're going to be picking a winner on the 24th. So you get this, the vibe of winning just in time for Christmas and try and be specific. We want to know what your goals are. We're actually going to engage and that's really genuinely interested in your goals for 2025. So head over to our Secret Leaders channel. Make sure that you are following at Secret Leaders. Give us a like. Give us a like. Give us a subscribe. Give us a comment.

37:19Give us a comment. Tell us the 2025 plan. Be kind. Tis the season for giving after all. Chris, you want to put your hat back on before we say goodbye to people? No, I don't. Cool. And one of the books is only going to be available digitally, obviously, which is the great CEO within, as we mentioned. But hey. I want to say thank you as well. Obviously, I joined the show this year. it's been awesome I've had so much fun it was my favourite podcast and so to be here has been a privilege and it's so good to see you all our big focus at the moment as you will all know from the episodes is growing our YouTube channel and so please make sure you're subscribed give this a like and comment your 20-25 goals and the lucky winner will get the Secret Leaders book collection that's right from Christmas Donnelly and Dan Murray Serta this is Secret Leaders thank you very much