Jay Papasan:
So, this week, we ended up answering a question I didn’t know that we were gonna ask an answer is, what does someone learn when they read about 3000 business and self-help books in their career and distill that into some really good takeaways? So, this week, I’m interviewing Todd Sattersten. He wrote a book called the 100 Best Books for Work and Life.
Discovered on the journey that over the course of preparing to write this book four and a half years and many years before, he read 3000 plus books, probably reviewed a thousand of them to select a hundred. And we unpack some of the lessons he learned; some of the lessons he would make sure that our ONE Thing listeners should look at; what sections of the knowledge out there, the books that we would be most interested in reading and learning about after learning about The ONE Thing; and also just some great practice.
If you’re a reader, readers are leaders, how do we read for what we need? How do we make great selections? How do we set aside the ones that don’t matter and pick more of the good ones? You’ll love this conversation with Todd Sattersten. He’s an authority in the world of books. He’s the publisher, our publisher, the Bard Press Behind The ONE Thing. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
I’m Jay Papasan and this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
Todd, my friend, our publisher at The ONE Thing, welcome to the show,
Todd Sattersten:
Thank you so much, Jay. I am just thrilled. I’m thrilled to be here.
Jay Papasan:
AndI’m so excited. I’ve read your books before. You wrote an earlier version of this. You also wrote a book about everything you knew about business books, which was just out there like for the real nerds to read because you are one of the authorities on self-help and business books. So, I’m super happy to chat shop with you about your new book, the 100 Best Books for Work and Life.
So, I want to dive in. You know our audience. You’ve been helping us with The ONE Thing for many years. What do high achievers, how are they gonna use this book? Why should they buy it and how will they use it?
Todd Sattersten:
Yeah. I think one of the key features of the 100 Best is that I think we need to read a wider range of books. I think the books that high achievers are reading, if you’re in a bookstore, you might find some on the business shelf. I think you find some over in personal growth and self-help. Frankly, they’re also reading over in body, mind, spirit. And it’s difficult to find those, kind of, scattered all over the bookstore.
And so what I wanted to do was really get rid of those traditional categories and create chapters that were focused around problems. So, what I hope people will do is I hope that they’ll open literally to the end pages where we have a list of all the chapters in all the books that are in those chapters, find a problem that they’re working on right now, and go right to that chapter. Go right to that chapter. Each one of those chapters, you can probably read the four book recommendations in 10 minutes maybe. And I’m hoping out of that, you’ll find one book in there that speaks from the perspective of the problem that you’re trying to work on.
Jay Papasan:
I love that. And so, I’m looking at the inside. So, inside the end papers, for people who don’t know, publishing speak is like inside the front cover. You also made it like a checklist where those of us who’ve read a lot of them can say, “Wow, I’ve read 55 of the top 100!” I haven’t actually done the math yet, Todd, but I started going through. How many different categories? I see, like, there’s change management, coaching, leadership, personality, purpose, sales, teams, thinking, money. Like, you hit a lot of the big ones. How many total categories of problems did you try to organize around?
Todd Sattersten:
Yeah, there’s 25 chapters in the book that are organized into five larger subsections. So, we’re trying to give people some good navigation to help them get to, “Oh, maybe I’m working.” If you go look at the table of contents, you can kind of see those bigger sections that we created
Jay Papasan:
Yeah, like I’m working on me. I’m working on progress, growth, leading in connection.
Todd Sattersten:
Yeah. And I think those are the main problems. And so, trying to organize these books around what those most common problems are, that was what was really the most important thing to me. I just think it’s often, you can’t look at the cover of a book sometimes and know exactly what problem it’s helping you try to solve. A lot of times, you’re getting those recommendations from people. They’re saying, “Oh, my gosh. You’re working on this problem? Oh, go check this out.”
So, I’m hoping that Todd, the curator, can help the high achiever get to the book a little faster. There’s 40,000 books in business and self-help published every year. 40,000.
Jay Papasan:
Every year?
Todd Sattersten:
Every year. I’m not counting self-published. I’m counting commercially published books. So, I’m hoping a book like this very quickly gets you to the titles that can be helpful and, frankly, right down to the problem that you’re working on today.
Jay Papasan:
I mean, the problem of choice, like when I’d give keynotes around The ONE Thing, you know, like you can’t know everything. And I’m a reader. You know I read about 50 books a year. It would take me 800 years if I only read business and self-help books to read just the books that were traditionally published in these categories in one year.
So, it comes back to we do have to choose. So, how do we choose? And that is one of the questions I’m gonna get to, but you did differentiate it. There’s business books and there’s personal development. And you’ve shared with me, you kind of define them differently. Would you mind sharing that? It’s actually, I think in the foreword to the book.
Todd Sattersten:
I think business books are generally outcome-focused books. What we’re trying to do with those books is we are trying to create some kind of success-based outcome in our lives, and it’s generally gonna be connected to business organizational success. In some ways, I actually call business books self-help for leaders. Like, they’re kind of focused on those problems in that genre.
On the self-help side, usually, we’re doing work on ourselves. Like, we are doing work on something that’s internal that matters. I think that business books tend to be solution-focused, and I think self-help tend to be a little bit more problem focused.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah, that was the thing I was going for. I thought that was really interesting. Like you said, in a business book, they’ll spend about 20% of the time identifying the problem and the rest is all dedicated to the solution. And that kind of flips in a self-help or personal development where the goal seems to be more around awareness than solving the problem for you. And I’m not gonna quibble with that. Awareness is where it all starts.
Todd Sattersten:
Yes.
Jay Papasan:
So, alright. All of that said, how many books do you imagine you read? And I know that it might go back to the beginning of your business career if you really were adding ’em all up, but how many books do you think you read in the course of, like, curating this top 100?
Todd Sattersten:
When I think about this book, you gotta go back pretty far. I mean, these books really draw from probably the last 20 years largely of what’s been published. So, I probably read two or 3000 titles somewhere in that range.
Jay Papasan:
That’s crazy.
Todd Sattersten:
It is crazy. Like, when I was really in the thick of it, I was probably doing a hundred books a year. And it’s both. You know, I have a career back working on the book selling side of things, so it was very important for us to be very aware of what the books were in the market. I’ve shifted now more to the publishing side. And now, my interaction with it is, “Oh, we’re publishing a book in this category. What do I need to know about all the books in that space?”
So, there’s always been different needs, but the quantity of books really probably hasn’t changed. I’m probably like you, I’m probably doing 50 to a hundred books a year because of just both interest and what I think we need to be successful at the press.
Jay Papasan:
So, the point of that, call it 3000 books, right? And that might even be conservative knowing you. What would be some of the top lessons you learned? So, like, one, probably how to set aside a book that’s overrated fast, but like what would be some of the lessons you learned as a business person, as a person? I know you, you’re striving to be the best version of you. What were some of the big lessons you learned on that journey?
Todd Sattersten:
When I think about the books, what I’ve learned from books is this really goes back to something we’ve already touched on, which is I’m amazed how often the idea of self-awareness comes up.
Jay Papasan:
Really?
Todd Sattersten:
And it comes up over and over again. If you look at Angela Duckworth’s work, she says-
Jay Papasan:
Grit.
Todd Sattersten:
Right? She says gritty individuals build a kind of self-awareness to be able to control and manage their inner dialogue. That’s how they actually build perseverance, right? There’s a researcher, his name is Mark Beman, and he says that he can predict how creative someone’s going to be in solving a problem by measuring how self-aware they are.
Jay Papasan:
How do you know if you’re self-aware or not? Like what’s the difference between self-aware and like self-conscious and/or self-absorbed? Like where do we draw the lines there?
Todd Sattersten:
Yeah. So, then, I end up at Timothy Galloway. He wrote a very famous book called The Inner Game of Tennis.
Jay Papasan:
Oh, yeah. My coach, our head coach, Jordan Freed, quotes that all the time.
Todd Sattersten:
Right. So, I included in the 100 Best his book called The Inner Game of Work ’cause I liked the context from which he was writing from a little bit better for our audience here. But what I always pay attention to in his work is simply bringing awareness to something that you’re working on changes it.
Jay Papasan:
Oh, okay.
Todd Sattersten:
Just simply. Like, he tells the story of going and working with… I think it was like the Houston Philharmonic. And the tuba player was having a hard time doing a particular run in one of the pieces. And he simply said, I want you to pay attention to your tongue. Just pay attention to every little piece of it that you can as you try to run this next thing. And literally just asking a person to pay attention, to draw their awareness to it changed their perception of it. Like, no, I just want you to focus on being aware. I don’t want you to do anything more than that. I don’t want you to add anything in addition to it. I think it’s that work that lets us see things better.
Jay Papasan:
Okay. Well, that lines up. I know one of my friends is a psychologist and focused on behavioral modification, and when we were talking shop, he just said, “Yeah, the first step is to have them track. Often they do the thing that they want to stop.”
Todd Sattersten:
Yes.
Jay Papasan:
And just like there’s no judgment. I just want you to write down every time you take a drink, or you smoke a cigarette, or you pick it yourself, or whatever the behavior is they’re trying to work together to finish. It starts with just kind of being aware and he goes, the amazing thing is if like someone was a pack-a-day smoker, just the act of writing it down, sometimes, will get them to slow down on the behavior.
Todd Sattersten:
Jay, I’m amazed how looking at my Spotify play history influences how I can see moods, how I can see cycles of my mood of what types of songs I’m listening to, what the themes of those songs are. I find it in my YouTube history as well. It’s funny, there’s so much ability to see what we’re doing now passively, frankly, that it’s tracked passively going back. Like we used to say, like your version, just track it.
Jay Papasan:
Right.
Todd Sattersten:
Start a journaling process. That can be really helpful. Like, a one-day, one-line journal starts a wonderful self-reflective process. There’s also a whole bunch of passive ways that you can go look at other things where you might see patterns showing up over and over again that could be really informative. So, I think there’s a bunch of ways. Pay attention to and use all of them.
Jay Papasan:
We definitely live in the time of the quantified life, whether we want to or not. When we’re working on reflection with people, some people will look at their calendars, but their calendars don’t reflect a lot of what they do inside and outside of work. And we’ll say, “Well, maybe also flip through your photo history.” Go to your search, go July 2025, and it’ll only show you the photos that you took that month. And that sparks awareness around, oh wait, we did take some time off that month. And awareness is huge. So, I love that as the first lesson.
Todd Sattersten:
Jay, let me say one more thing here ’cause I think this is incredibly important to this piece. We are such present-minded-focused beings, animals, like whatever word you want to use. The prefrontal cortex is only about an inch thick. It sits on our front forehead, and it doesn’t have a lot of room, and it takes a lot of energy. So, all these things that we’re talking about give us other tools to see and remember things that we just don’t literally have the capability to do.
So, unless we’re building these other mechanisms, I think to be able to build more self-awareness, our brain doesn’t have the capacity to hold onto all of it. And so, I think that’s another way that self-awareness gets built.
Jay Papasan:
Okay, I get that. I feel, when I think about our ONE Thing family, a lot of them, we say a lot of times they’re doers who don’t make space to dream. And they’re very focused on what they’re doing. And if they’re not in the present focused on what they’re doing, they’re thinking about what they’re gonna do next, right? So, they tend to be somewhat present and future focused and not that reflective. And the self-awareness comes from reflection, is what I’m getting from you. That we have to look back a little bit and kind of trace our path to be aware of the patterns.
Todd Sattersten:
Yes. Short stop. Yes.
Jay Papasan:
Got it. Alright. So, I wholeheartedly endorse that we all could be a little bit better at self-awareness. What would be another big lesson that you think you learned or that stood out in reading thousands of books?
Todd Sattersten:
I think it’s a ONE Thing lesson, and I think it’s a combination of what I saw in the books, but also what I think of in making the book. It took me four years to write this.
Jay Papasan:
Wow.
Todd Sattersten:
So, pick up a four year project. Again, it goes back to what I just said, like, how do you keep the motivation? How do you keep the visibility to what you’re doing? How do you learn what’s possible? For me, I would say one of the things I learned and this is progress principle., So, how do I make what I’m doing visible? So, for me, literally from the first day I started writing, I had a spreadsheet. I tracked three things. I tracked number of pages read every day, I tracked number of words written every day, and I tracked how many reviews was I done with?
Jay Papasan:
Okay.
Todd Sattersten:
If I showed you that graph, you would see a graph that kind of was very flat for about 18 months. I was probably doing a review every three or four weeks. I wasn’t making a lot of progress on the project, and I reached a point where I had to make a decision, is this a project I’m really going to invest in?
The data was super clear. It was very clear I was not invested in the project. I was not spending enough time on it. And once I said, this is important, this project needs to exist in the world, I’m not exaggerating, it’s one of those hockey sticks, it literally turned and went upward. And every week for the next, I think it was 36 weeks, it had to be longer than that. It had to be 56 weeks, I delivered a review every week.
Jay Papasan:
Okay. So, you, like, basically quadrupled your output?
Todd Sattersten:
Yes.
Jay Papasan:
This is kind of funny. We talked about it would take me 800 years to read the books in one, but I remember in the first book that Gary and I wrote together, we talked about there a lot of people that are kind of following the Methuselah of it. And if people don’t know in the Old Testament, the person who lived the longest in the Bible is someone named Methuselah. I think it was like 800 years. But if you look at the progress they’re actually making and step back and it’s like, yeah, you’re making progress, but you’ll never get to the finish line in this lifetime.
So, I love that you were tracking it. You could look back and just say, “Look, if I’m actually gonna do this thing, if I’m gonna stick with it, I’ve gotta accelerate the pace. I’ve gotta be all in.” And that’s a good lesson for all of us that we can say that we’re doing the thing and that makes us feel better. And we say, “Oh, I’m writing the Great American novel,” but like, are we really committed to doing it?
Todd Sattersten:
And I think you then get into those next steps, which are probably really very familiar to your audience. Of course, you need repeated action. Of course, you need to build a time block. I added a two-hour time block every morning, that was another piece that completely changed my output. I think like another piece that I figured out was when there was a blip, when there was a gap between reviews that was a little bit longer, it’s because I wasn’t queuing up the next book to be ready. So, like, I needed to have the next book ready for that next read to get into the review process.
So, there’s these things that you learn when you’re building that kind of process to, how long does it take? What pieces need to be in place? And I was building, kind of, this production line to like, I need to get to a hundred reviews. That’s what’s gonna finish this book.
Jay Papasan:
That happens with commitment though. Like you realize that you’re committed, you’re actually tracking and seeing your results, and then you start to notice patterns. That’s what happens, right? And we talk about in the book the domino effect. And so, part of the elbow of the curve is you get better at whatever it is that you repeatedly do, especially if you’re doing it purposely.
So, like I always connect the set up whatever’s next, I always called it the Hemingway method. You ever heard that story? Like every day, when he wrote, he would write the first sentence of the next thing he was going to write, so that when he showed up the next day, he had a place to start. And I’ve seen that a million times with salespeople. The thing that they need to set up for the next day is, “And here are the first three people I’m gonna contact tomorrow.” So, they don’t have to think about what they’re gonna say and who they’re gonna talk. They just get into the flow much faster.
Todd Sattersten:
Yeah. What you made me think of there, Jay, which kind of combines two ideas we’ve talked about, is when I got to the quote in the book that I knew would lead the entry for that book, I knew two things. One, it was a book that was gonna make the 100 Best ’cause I was like, “Oh, that’s the quote. That’s the great quote that’s going to lead off and create context for the whole thing.” So, that’s one piece.
And then, the second piece is, “Oh, I’ve got the start to the review.” I know the direction now that this whole review is gonna take when I write it. It’s interesting, like you said, as you learn process, there’s a whole bunch of pieces that come out of it that I think are really important. Again, self-awareness, like noticing the things that are gonna matter to make you successful.
Jay Papasan:
I love that. That’s an unexpected lesson I’m learning from this interview. We need to take a quick break, Todd. So, let’s take a quick break and we’ll hear from our sponsor. And then, we’ll see you on the other side.
Welcome back everybody. So, God, we were kind of going through some of the lessons you learned over the course of reading 3000 plus books, which boggles the mind but, also, is the book lover in me is like, “Yeah, go get it.” Like all of that knowledge. And I also know you putting it to use.
A lot of our listeners, they’re listening because they wanna learn in order to be or do better. They read in order to be or do better, right? They wanna become a better person, right? Maybe that personal development side of the thing or maybe a better business person or whatever that is. You know, The ONE Thing reader. When you look through the topics that you covered, where do you think they should look first? What would be the next books after The ONE Thing that maybe you’ve curated that you could point them to right now?
Todd Sattersten:
I like the work that you’ve done since The ONE Thing around like the values deck.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah.
Todd Sattersten:
‘Cause what we’re really trying to push towards is, what is it that’s driving all of these things? Like, it’s great to know what my one thing is but unless I know what the purpose is behind it, I think it quickly becomes directionalist. So, I would point people to the chapter on purpose. And the reason I’d point you there is because. I chose four different books. I chose a book from a coach, Martha Beck. A lot of people would know Martha Beck. I chose a book called Designing Your Life from two folks at Stanford that really tricked more of a design thinking, borderline engineering approach to it. There’s a book from David White who’s a poet. And then, there’s Parker Palmer who is an educator. He’s really taught educators how to educate and Let Your Life Speak is the name of that book.
I chose those three books really specifically. The breadth of approaches that people take to trying to find purpose, it’s the toughest one. It’s the one that no one can answer for you. It requires your own work. And I think giving people a variety of approaches that match maybe wherever they are maybe right now in their life, but also maybe match their personality, I think is incredibly important. So, I don’t think unless you solve the purpose question effectively that any of your other work is as good as it could be, frankly.
Jay Papasan:
Well, it lines up. I remember going out when the book first came out. I think I traveled to about 36 cities that first year and gave, like, a whole day seminar. And the part that people knew was important, right? We made it the foundation. If our readers, the book readers there, we know we have like an iceberg, and we talk about if someone’s really productive, that’s the tip of the iceberg. And underneath it is a strong sense of priority, which comes from having a strong sense of purpose.
And so, a lot of people put down the book and they ask not just in the productivity sense, what’s my one thing or my priority? They’re like, what’s my big one thing? And that’s something that people, I’ve just seen them over the years wrestle with, Todd.
So, you curated four books. So, one of them that caught my eye that I haven’t read, like Finding Your Own North Star. So, like there’s four different viewpoints on how to do this. You said one’s from design thinking. Can you just go a little bit deeper and which one spoke to you?
Todd Sattersten:
Oh, Jay, I’m always a sucker for the poets, and the mystics, and the spiritual folks who appreciate that it’s kind of hard for us, again, almost the small beings that we are, for us to figure out what’s important to us. And I think it’s like-
Jay Papasan:
Can, I guess real quick, I’m looking at the title. So, the titles are Finding Your Own North Star, Let Your Life Speak, Designing Your Life. I’m gonna get Designing Your Life is the design people from Stanford, I’m just gonna guess.
Todd Sattersten:
Yeah, it is. Yeah, yeah.
Jay Papasan:
And then, Crossing the Unknown Sea. I was like, the poet is either probably Crossing the Unknown Sea would be my first choice, or maybe lLet Your Life Speak, which I could see being poetic, but I’m guessing it’s Crossing the Unknown Sea.
Todd Sattersten:
It is. Yeah, it’s David Whyte. And David, I love that he brings a poet’s perspective actually to the topic of work. So, work in a really broad sense but, in particular, the part that brought me to it, it was him focused on, how do we discern? Like, how do we pay attention to what is our mind telling us? I think we just have to be honest that purpose shifts over time, you know. I think we gotta be honest that what matters to us in one phase of our life isn’t the same thing as what matters to us in another season.
And so, I think when we’re looking at purpose from purely a success lens, that there’s some end point, there’s some exit. I think we miss that things shift and change over time, and we have to pay attention to and be as holistic as possible about what it is that we want.
Jay Papasan:
That jives with me only in the sense that the breakthrough for us was turning to core values because the question that we are trying to answer became less about destination than direction. So, I find that, yes, our purpose tends to shift over time. We articulate it differently, but I do find that we often can find there is some commonality in the direction we’re headed, even if we’re not completely able to articulate it. But we keep mistaking destinations for the direction itself. And if he’s in that camp, right, that would jive with my sense of things a lot. But that’s also, you said this is an intensely personal journey, so I could be projecting.
Todd Sattersten:
I don’t think you are because I think, again, how often do we find ourselves somewhere where we’re a little surprised but then we kinda look back just a little bit and we’re like, “Well, of course, this would be the next thing.” Like, of course, with just a little bit more time, of course, this would be the next part of what it is that I need to explore.
So, I just think please start there. Please start there because I just think your journey’s going to be smoother and your energy is gonna be directed more. You’re actually gonna be more aligned with the purpose that’s gonna just be deeply nourishing to you.
Jay Papasan:
So, I’ll just tell folks, if you’re really just wanting, like I want to go read those four books today, we’ll have them in the show notes. You can check them out. So, we’ll do the math on which one is which, and you can go click on ’em, and then go check out which one is the right one for you.
I like that you gave us four lenses to look through, but this also gets me to another question. You were curating small select selections of books around the topics or problems that you know people face in business and life. One of the core things that we talk about in The ONE Thing training is when you don’t know your answer, your one thing is to go find it. Like, I know I’m asking this question, it’s the question I want to answer. I don’t know it. So, my one thing is to go find it. And frankly, I send people to the bookstore all day long. Like, it is the library if you can’t afford books. There is lifetimes upon lifetimes, millennia of wisdom there to tap into. When you think about, like you narrowed it to 3000, how many reviews did you write to get to a hundred, do you think?
Todd Sattersten:
Well, again, I would probably start the whole arc of time. I started writing reviews probably in 2000. I had a personal blog. And then, that led to hundreds of reviews. When I was at 800-CEO-READ, I continued to review books. And whether it’s for myself or my clients, whatever the case might be. So, hundreds. Thousand?
Jay Papasan:
A lot.
Todd Sattersten:
A lot.
Jay Papasan:
So like, I’m just thinking about the funnel, like if there’s 3000 here, you might have written a thousand reviews to get to a hundred, something in there.
Todd Sattersten:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
What’s the selection process like for you? Like when you had to choose, “Gosh, I’ve gotta pick three to five at most,” ’cause I don’t think… does any category even have five books in it? I think there’s one.
Todd Sattersten:
There’s a couple. There’s a couple of a three, a couple of five, but four is pretty close for the whole book.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah. From all of the amazing works, how do I choose? Because that’s a question a lot of people ask me is like, “Okay, I’m trying to learn about marketing. Where do I start?” And I can tell them my personal favorite. Well, from what you’re telling me, I think you should go read Donald Miller and I believe he is in your short list there or [0:26:42?] which I also think is there. Gosh, I actually looked to spend… I guess I spent a lot of time in that section, Todd, ’cause the other one is The One-Page Marketing Plan.
Todd Sattersten:
It is.
Jay Papasan:
I have all three of those memorized, and they’re all great, but I would prescribe them maybe slightly different based on where someone was, but you had to narrow it down to a handful of choices. Like, what did you learn from that that maybe we can learn, so that when we need knowledge, and let’s just imagine, you had a topic that you didn’t cover with this book, I’ve gotta go solve my own problem around, I wanna go summit Mount Everest, how do we choose? How do we select better?
Todd Sattersten:
I think the first thing is, does the author make a promise to me in the first 10 pages of the book?
Jay Papasan:
Oh, okay. That’s interesting. You’re looking for a promise in the first 10 pages.
Todd Sattersten:
In the first 10 pages. And I mean very discreetly, “In this book, what you’ll learn is…” And it’s shocking how often it is that discreet that the authors just says exactly those words. Sometimes, it’s more subtle but you know the direction that the book is going to go.
Jay Papasan:
Business and self-help, I would agree. I know that I’ve told people as a measure of self-preservation in publishing, I had so many manuscripts to read. I called it the 5 and 50 Rule. If they didn’t capture me with some promise or some skill in the first five pages, I stopped there like I just couldn’t afford to do more. And that also spoke to their professionalism. Maybe I should have been 10, honestly, hearing you, who knows even more about it. But then I would go 50. And if it was falling apart by 50, I would say like I’ve gotta move to someone who’s gonna do this a better job. So, yours was 10. I’ll give everybody 10. And if they aren’t showing that they’re a master here, I’m moving on.
Todd Sattersten:
And I think it’s because, like you said, it doesn’t recover. It doesn’t have the clarity of vision from that point if you don’t make the promise to the reader. And so, I just don’t have time for that.
The second thing I guess I would say is you’ve gotta tell me something I don’t already know. My version of this is redefining the problem is usually the way to coming up with a better solution. So, I want an author who’s going to take a problem. You know how many books I’ve read. You gotta surprise me. Like you’ve gotta bring a different approach. And if you bring a different approach to the problem, then usually you’re going to tell me a different way to go solve the problem later. I think that’s incredibly important for people.
People don’t want the same bromides that they’ve read over and over again. If you don’t get past the hypothalamus where it’s basically the filtering mechanism that, like, gets rid of 90% of the stuff that you perceive, if you can’t get past that as an author, you’re not gonna have much chance, I think, with the reader. So, find some way to be unconventional and surprising because I think then you’re gonna help me in a different way.
Jay Papasan:
That jives with me. There’s a few categories that I’ve read really deeply. You know, we had to write a few books on investing, so I’ve probably read, oh gosh, or perused 150-250 books around money and investing. And I enjoy some of them. In the beginning, I didn’t know how to determine if they were good or bad. So, that is a part of the journey is I think, as you learn and read within a category that you want to be great at, maybe you’re on the path to mastery in this thing, you start to understand there’s familiar patterns. There’s the common truths that almost everybody hits.
And then, after you’ve read, say, like the basics, maybe we start with the four books in or the three books in marketing, you’ve read those, now you’ve laid down this amazing foundation, if someone’s talking about story, you can just say, is this better than Donald Miller? Is this different than Donald Miller? If it’s the same as Donald Miller, maybe I should go look elsewhere. But I do think that knowledge, that insight that you just shared maybe comes from being on the journey for a little while but I find it worthwhile to read deeply within categories because of those fresh perspectives.
I think that is part of my job description as the host of this podcast and the author of the book is to continue to read deeply around productivity, priority, and purpose, so that I can continue to pick the things that should be the most useful to our listeners.
Todd Sattersten:
Yeah. I like your point there, Jay, because I think there’s probably a number of topics that people should have a cursory understanding of, and they should read the best books in it, and that’s probably enough. And then, whether it’s they’re working on a deeper problem or it’s something they’re next to a lot, they probably need to read deeper into that category and they’re gonna have more hit and miss.
Jay Papasan:
One of our coaches in our team, Chris Dixon, who I just love him to death. I give him credit every time because I’m like, “That’s clever.” When he is working with his clients, he says, you need to read for what you need. Do you know what you need? So, I struggle with money, I struggle with this. So, then, maybe every year you need to commit to reading a couple of books in that category, so that over time, you gain the knowledge and the confidence to be the better version of yourself there.
So, like I know that I do that. I try to read about relationships, I try to read about health. I try to read about money. There’s a few nonfiction topics that I dip into every year beyond my professional categories because I just know I want that to be a big part of my life.
Todd Sattersten:
I would add there is I think this is where I think people sometimes get frustrated. If you read deeper into a category, you’re gonna have more hits and misses.
Jay Papasan:
Yes.
Todd Sattersten:
And the value of just one piece in that deeper cut, that one little tiny different way to think about it for that expert who wants to go deeper is worth it, but I think you have to know that kind of upfront. You’ve gotta be willing to put down some of that frustration. I know you and I have talked about this before that, like, you read really widely across money and you know because there’s so many. Some, man, I was really happy I read ’em. And some of ’em, I should have put ’em down sooner. And I think that’s true in all sorts of categories. So, what my hope is with the 100 Best is I can give you the best ones and then dig in deeper to the things that are important to you.
Jay Papasan:
Thank you. You went there. I was gonna say, you did a good job. You covered 25 topics in five broad areas. Chances are if people are looking for a place to start and lay a foundation, you’ve covered their bases here for them. This is a great place to start if you wanna learn about connection and relationships, mindfulness. Like you’ve got some really great categories here. I’m curious about that. I think that I want to add more of that to my life. Well, then go. Like, any one of these categories, even average readers could read the entire category in the course of one year.
Todd Sattersten:
Yes.
Jay Papasan:
Lay that foundation. So Todd, I hate this because I’m a book nerd and, hopefully, we didn’t go too nerdy on our listeners. If you’re still here, thank you. I want to end this with a challenge, but it’s like I love talking books with Todd. He’s not just my publisher, he is a friend. What would be the challenge we can give our listeners based on this conversation that they could take into the week between now and the next episode?
Todd Sattersten:
I would wonder whether or not your listeners could be honest with themselves about the problem that they’re working on right now, or that they need to be working on, where they need to put more focus. And if it’s the 100 Best, and seeing those 25 topics and in the introduction, that’s kind of my suggestion to people. Look through the topics, find the one that works, and turn right to that chapter.
This isn’t one of those books that you read from page one to page 300. That’s not the way this thing’s set up. Go to the area where you need help, check out those books and see what that creates for you. What new thoughts do you have? What new perspectives? Oh my gosh. But being honest about the problem that you need to go work on next, I think, is maybe an unseen opportunity that I’m hoping the 100 Best offers people, and I think it’s one that’s really easy for us to avoid.
Jay Papasan:
I love that. Being honest, which also ties back to your biggest lesson you learned. A little bit of self-awareness will go a long way in life.
Todd Sattersten:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
So, Todd, thanks for being on the show. Thank you so much and best of luck with this great book.
Todd Sattersten:
Awesome. Thank you, Jay.
Jay Papasan:
All right. Well, that’s a wrap on my conversation with Todd. I hope you enjoyed it. Next week, I’ve got a solo episode for you. It’s called The Five Permission Slips Every High Achiever Needs. What we’ve noticed in our coaching and training are some patterns of behavior that don’t really serve high achievers. Whether we fell into them by accident or maybe we just built some bad habits early on that we need to break out of, I’ll help you identify them, I’ll point you in the right direction, and most of all, I’ll give you all permission to maybe get to the other side and get to the next level in your life.
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