Books worth reading | ATCF | Episode 13

Vance Crowe [00:00:00] As the crow flies on the Vance Crow podcast, Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. On Fridays, I sit down to share some thoughts, philosophies, concepts, things that can help you become a tangibly better communicator. And there's two pieces of advice that I give when somebody comes up to me and says, I wanna be a speaker, or I wanna be more persuasive when I'm standing up in front of a crowd. And the two pieces of advice that I always have is, one, go practice. You should join a group like Toastmasters. You should get involved in a speech team. Hell even join like some sort of theater troupe. Anything you can do to spend time in front of people and be able to manage that adrenaline that comes from the judgment that you know the audience has on you. Anything you can do to better learn how to control that, you will become a better communicator. But the second thing that I think is deeply important is something that isn't speaking at all. In fact, it's almost the exact opposite of speaking. It is reading books. Because books give you an incredible advantage out in the world. You get to read and understand and experience an adventure that another author has put together for you. You get to share the wisdom that they have from their ideas, from their recounting of facts and history or just from their creative and interesting stories that resonate deeply within us. And so if you are reading a book, you get to rapidly expand the number of experiences that you have.

Vance Crowe [00:01:35] But there's another interesting function that happens because you are not the only person that reads that book. When you read a book that others have read, you now have had essentially the same experience that they have. Now, it might be a little bit different because when the author describes the rolling green grass, you are in a sort of relationship or sort of a dance with the author, just you and that person because you take the image of rolling and green grass and you paint your own experiences onto what the author has written. And so you have your own picture that is gonna be slightly different than your friends or your neighbors or another random person that read that book. You will have all seen rolling green grass, but it will have been your own specific type that you painted in there. But even still, the adventures, the chaos, the tragedy, and the change that all happens throughout these stories, you and all of the other people that have read this book get to experience it. And you have built a pattern language. And I think that reading books is what allows you to really open up what you're capable of thinking about. And as you can tell, almost all of the experts that I've had on to interview, they have almost all had some book that made some big impact. You've heard me talk all year long about the book Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins. That book helped me to understand that it wasn't motivation that I needed, it was discipline.

Vance Crowe [00:03:07] And I think anybody that is trying to make a big change in their life would do well to read a book like that. I also suggested the book, trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday because I think that it explains how the media works and about how outrage is actually favored in the social media economy and what one should do, should you try and play along with that game or should you go a different route. I thought that was a very interesting book, but I'm not the only person that's been citing books. You know, just last week, Kristi Beck suggested 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson. I know that Jason Bachman, the owner of Strange Donut, talked about setting the table by Daniel Meyer. Even Dr. Perla talked about a man called Ove and a book that he found very interesting. So we've heard a bunch of people give book recommendations and I hope some of you have taken on those recommendations and, and thrown 'em into your audible or picked up the book and started reading them. But I wanna be more deliberate about this. So what I have decided is to start a two month experiment and it's, it's just going to be two books that I would like to read together. But these are not going to be Oprah Winfrey Book of the Month Club. This is not going to be something where I'm trying to encourage people to get book pages where you're trying to read a certain number of pages. I wanna choose books that have staying power. I wanna choose books that have deep meaning that can be shared by many, many people and can teach us deep lessons. And I think the way to do that is to break down the concept that was put forward by a man named Nasim Taleb called the Lindy Effect.

Vance Crowe [00:04:46] Now the Lindy Effect is essentially a prediction about art and culture and how long they will last into the future. And one of the observations that Taleb makes is he says A book is likely to be around for as long as it has been around in the world. And you may have heard me talk about this on the podcast before, but essentially what he's saying is if, if a book has been around for 10 years, let's say the, there's a Bill O'Reilly book that made it to the top number one bestseller in the New York Times. If it was written about 10 years ago, it's likely to be around for another 10 years. Or you can imagine those books, chicken Soup for the Soul they were written about 20 years ago. You still kind of hear them about, but they'll probably be around for another 20 years. But if you keep extending that out and you keep going further and further, like a book like To Kill a Mockingbird that was written in the sixties, or even go way further and go to the Bible written about 2000 years ago, the likelihood that those books will be around for another 50 years or another 2000 years is higher because they've already been around for that amount of time. So I wanna choose books that have some amount of that Lindy effect. I, I know that a lot of the books that we talk about in this show are the ones that impacted us today. They were written for a modern age. But I want to change this up and I want to do those deeply archetypal books that teach us lessons that transcend whether we're in a modern age or a colonial age or a medieval age. I wanna be able to try and go as far back as we can.

Vance Crowe [00:06:18] So I'm gonna be choosing a, a book that I think will help us get through the month of December as things are getting darker and the days are getting shorter and colder. And as we head towards Christmas and ultimately the new year, I wanted to choose a book that would prepare us to have the best January that we can, that 2020 catapults off into the future. And one of the ways to do that is to really think about ourselves, to have a deep look at who are we, what are we doing, what are we trying to accomplish? And where are the places in our lives that we could make really serious mistakes, things that would take us off of our path and keep us from becoming the full person that we know we could be. So as I was talking about this sort of book club or book reading exercise that I wanted to do it with you guys, I spoke with two people. I talked to my brother Dan Crow, who is on Twitter. He is actually kind of new to Twitter. So if you're interested in following somebody that is just beginning to meet new friends and really build relationships, check him out. Dan Crow is at whole deal H-O-L-E-D-E-A-L-H-O-L-E-D-E-A-L whole deal. That is an an allusion to his geothermal well drilling company. And then I also spoke about it with a guy that I'm always mentioning on the podcast, Rob Long, who goes by Plantables on Twitter. And both of these guys were saying, let's do something that is not easy. Let's use the fact that all of us are gonna be doing this together to try and take on some books that sometimes it's gonna take a little bit more effort to get up and read that, that it is gonna be a little bit tough.

Vance Crowe [00:07:58] But if we do accomplish it, then we've done something good for ourselves. So this month, in the month of December, I am choosing the book Dantes Inferno. And I think that this is a fascinating book. I read it in college, but I can tell you that I don't remember some of the core stories and I'm certain I was too young to really know what the story was all about. But at its core, the hero of the story is asked to transcend into hell to make a trip to see who all is in hell and what brought them there. So I know the core story of the book, but I'm still very excited to read it. I think that for some people, just getting the audible book and just listening to it on tape will be good. I'm gonna get the physical copy and try and read it and I'm gonna try and have it done by the last week of December. So the last Friday of December, I'll do a little discussion on here and hopefully you guys will have read it along with me. My hope is that if you are reading it, flip a photo of the of the book that you have or of the screenshot of the audible and let us know how you're going through it, how fast you're making it through it, and what you're thinking along the way. And then we'll have a conversation about it that will allow us to kind of enrich and build on that, on that pattern language that we're building. 'cause we're reading the same books together. Then in January I made the decision that I'm going to invite Lyle Benjamin for on Twitter that Lyle Benjamin is the president of the Montana Grain Grower's Association.

Vance Crowe [00:09:29] And he was in a conversation with Jared McDaniel's wife, Jules McDaniel, and he, she was asking about favorite book or something along those lines. And it came out that Lyle is actually a book collector of sorts. He has an extraordinary collection and every winter he sits down and reads several volumes set on a subject of something he doesn't know very much about. And I was so impressed with the depth of knowledge that he brought to the conversation about sharing books that I thought, man, there is no better person to give this task to. And I wanted to give him a few weeks to really think about what is a book that is Lindy that is going to teach us something deep about ourselves. And then the fact that because we've all read it and we all have this pattern language, we all now know something more about one another. So I've given him that task. And in January I'm sure he'll let us know. So I'm in a round out for now. It is the Thanksgiving weekend. I hope that you are having a wonderful time, spending time with the people that you're grateful for, the people that you sacrifice every day for, and the people that you know are willing to sacrifice for you. I'm gonna sign off for now. Thank you so, so much for joining me and look forward to Wednesday because I just downloaded all of the audio that Jared McDaniel, Dwayne Faber and I captured when we were at aggregation. And it is good. It is really good. It is something I'm really proud of. And we made a journey up to one of the largest cattle shows in in North America and I am really excited to share that with you.

Vance Crowe [00:11:05] That experience was second to none and, and I'm, I'm really glad that I'm gonna be spending more and more time with Jared and Dwayne. So check that out on Wednesday and we will be back next week. Thanks so much. Ah.