Must-Read Books for Enjoyment and Growth || Season 1 Episode 8

What are some of the best books business leaders can read not only for pleasure but for professional growth?

In this episode, the team provides some interesting suggestions for books that can entertain, sharpen skills, and inspire learning. 

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Transcript

Scott Montminy: 0:13

Hi everyone and welcome to Now Hiring! A podcast about staffing, recruiting, talent. Oh, workforce management, technology, you name it, we will be talking about it anything that's industry related. And we have our regular Sherpas here to guide us through a deeper conversation about the industry and related trends. I would like to thank Sameer Penakalapati, the CEO and founder of Ceipal, for making it all possible. And Andy Ceipal's, CMO. Andy Weiss is here as well to join us, and I hope this is going to be a fun episode. In fact, I think this could become a regular feature, but it's based on Sameer's Reading List. So as someone who hated getting that dreaded summer reading list, and we are at the start of summer as we record this anyway, you may be listening any time of year, but it got me thinking of summer reading list. Should I be worried? Andy, I know you're an avid reader. Do you think Samir is going to help us find a good beach read here, or are we about to get into some heavy stuff?

Andy Weiss: 1:12

I hope he's going to give us some, some good some good fodder here. I've I have a steady list of books that I like to go through Scott to describe me as an avid reader. I think is an amazing stretch, but thank you for that. But I think this guy here to my to my right on screen, or left as you're looking at it, he's got some good ones, so I'm looking for some additional inspiration. So Sameer, what's on your list? I like

Sameer Penakalapati: 1:39

to read books. I think that's kind of gives me it's my mental piece of reading books is something that it's been a habit for since childhood. But the way it works for me is, you know when, when I look at the book and look into my first index and and look at the topics that I'm I'm curious about it. Like in a book, you may not find all topics are curious about it. I all just need is two, three topics that I think are, this is interesting to read, and generally, I buy the book, and then that's how we jump into it. But I'm not saying all books do that, but some books, you know, you start from start to end, because just engaging and and you you're really excited about the content. If you ask me, the recent books, there are two books

Andy Weiss: 2:29

so but Sameer, I have a question before we get into stuff on your reading list, it's just popped in my head. You talked about, like reading some books all the way to the end. In your estimation. Scott, this question's coming to you as well. Is is it okay if you, if you start a book, is it okay not to finish it, and if you don't finish it? Do you have a criteria as to why?

Scott Montminy: 2:51

That's a great question.

Sameer Penakalapati: 2:52

I have to if I had to tell you, if, if you have 100 books in your library, and people said I've read all the books. I think I can safely assume they're all lying, yes, but, but if you pick any book that, Hey, what is the one thing you like in a book? I think I can safely tell you what I liked in that book. But that's pretty much okay.

Andy Weiss: 3:17

The follow up, sorry, Scott, before we come to you. The follow up question to it is, you know, not putting it, I love, I love the sentiment of of, you know, the BS factor, but does reading, you know, using one of the synopsis platforms out there, I'm not going to name names, but you know, that claim to like, help you kind of speed through this. Does that count in your your estimation is, having read that book,

Sameer Penakalapati: 3:46

you asking me,

Andy Weiss: 3:47

I'm asking you, yeah, okay,

Sameer Penakalapati: 3:49

yeah, I know there, there are services out there. They would take your entire book and summarize and give it in content and just kind of abstract of the book. Yeah, see, look, you gotta look into this. It doesn't matter whether you read a whole book, you read an abstract that the point here is, Have you learned anything out of the book? And did you get a point across this, something that you can apply to your life, your business, your leadership, whatever. Was that, right? If you can get just one or two nuggets out of the book. I think it's worth your time and on your time on a book and buying a book or or listening a podcast. I think that's how you can do it. Okay,

Scott Montminy: 4:31

let me thinking now, because, you know, I'm dating myself, but when I was in high school, since I brought up the summer reading list, you would buy the Cliff Notes. Now, you know, then my older kids, it was Spark Notes. Now I'm guessing that the pile of books gathering dust sitting next to me, I could just ask chat GPT to summarize it for me. Yes.

Andy Weiss: 4:51

So funny anecdote on on the Cliff Notes side, my English teacher, sophomore year of high school. I don't know if she was trying to put the fear of God in our heads or not, but she would tell stories of living in New York in her college years, and that she and some of her peers would get money from Cliff Notes to write the abstracts. And so they would go out to the bars and, you know, have their socialized and then come back and write the sections of these. And so she's like, they're all over the map, like they may have or may not have even read the book. So she's like, use it at your own peril.

Sameer Penakalapati: 5:33

Yeah, yeah. That's true. That's true.

Andy Weiss: 5:37

So Sameer, what's on what's either on your reading list, or something that you've read recently that kind of really struck a chord, and you got a nice idea or insight out of Yeah.

Sameer Penakalapati: 5:48

One thing that I really liked recently, it's a, it's a and I like the small books I'm talking to some number of pages. So there's a recent book I read was a stop overthinking. I was just flying out of JFK to India, and I had some time. I was, I was just checking the books, you know, the bookstore, and I found this book stop overthinking, because who's not doing that? We all overthink about things. So I was, you know, it caught my attention that, okay, this is such a topic. This is such a problem for everyone, right? And we all overthink about stuff that most of the time, it's not true, right? Just a fear, fear of overthinking, fear of overthinking about some stuff that's going to happen. You know, we build our own imaginary scenarios and then build a fear around on it and just thinking about and just, you know, just makes our lives tough. So I wanted to read the book and see the author, Chase Hill. And I thought I enjoyed reading the book. I read most of the book from my flight from JFK back to India. It was, you know, almost 20 hours flight, and with a couple hours of stop over in Dubai. But it was an interesting book. And the one of the things that that the book caught my attention was thoughts make up who we are and whether you have a positive thoughts and you have very rational thoughts, and that's how you look into your work, your world, your family, your peers, and if you're overly worried about for every small thing that makes up the life that much more difficult. So I thought it's such a simple thing, but so true. There are a lot of anecdotes and and I think it's unfair for you know, to talk about the whole book, yeah, so, but

Andy Weiss: 7:49

it's a nice little taste. It's so I haven't read Scott, I don't know about you, I haven't read. Stop overthinking. I'm intrigued. But one of the things that struck me was, you know, Sameer, listening to you talk about it, and then also, having read your LinkedIn post about it, reminded me of it of a similar but different book. The book that came to mind for me was one that kind of keeps coming back in my working life and kind of day to day life as well. And it's this. It's a book called The One Thing by Gary Keller. And Scott will attest to, it's kind of influenced how we approach marketing. We have a twice a week marketing stand up. And the construct for it is, comes from, from this book. And the thesis in the one thing is the idea of this focusing question, and it and that question is, what's the one thing that I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary. And so it's, you know, that the simplicity of that question, like, what's the one thing? So, you know, Samir, I think the overlap here is, you know, if we can focus on that one thing, maybe, does that help us stop overthinking, stop over kind of reacting, because that one thing is kind of maybe the strain that that helps unravel, kind of the rest of the mess and stuff. So Scott, you've heard us both kind of talk about two different books, thoughts takes.

Scott Montminy: 9:12

Well, it's funny. They're intersecting themes. I mean, thoughts do create the reality around us, and we can get caught up in them, for better or worse. It can inspire us on one hand, or it can take us down a rabbit hole that's very unproductive, and we can focus on things beyond our control. So when I heard Samir talking about several weeks back, now about to stop overthinking it the logic that he explained. And if you follow Samir on LinkedIn, you can, you can read his his write up about it, but the logic that he brought to the conversation when we talked about doing an episode about books that he's read actually influenced how we went about attacking this podcast. We're thinking, well, which microphone do we have? Which, you know, what platform are we going to use? Let's just do it. Stop overthinking it. Let's just do it. And whatever you know is, is we're going to learn from it regardless, and we're going to evolve as we go. But stop overthinking it. So I think it's really, it's really relevant to anything. And it's, doesn't surprise me that you could connect it to something else you read. In fact, it has me thinking about a book I've been reading with one of my sons called chop wood, carry water. And it's, it's about building your own house, in focusing on, you know, the moment, in, in appreciating the journey as much as the destination. And I think that's part of not overthinking things, because we get caught up in the future or in the past, and instead, we're, we're missing out on the whole point of it, and what's going to create the reality we're trying to create. And that

Andy Weiss: 10:44

it's an interesting thread, Scott, because I think, you know, we had a earlier, earlier episode talked about kind of using generative AI and business and stuff. And I think, you know, as I think about how we build prompts, how we do stuff, in order to get the output that you want from the AI, often you're having to give instructions, break down something in its fundamental parts to get the AI to do what you want it to do. And in that process, in that journey, I think you also uncover some things that you may have not thought about, and so there's some some connectivity between a lot of the topics that the three of us have been discussing so far. So

Sameer Penakalapati: 11:30

want to say one thing you know this is this is a perfect connection between people fear about AI, and because of that, they're they're losing their jobs, and it's it's just a fear. But that's not the facts, because if you look into that, the whole AI evolution, it also brings more opportunities than ever that existed today. So that's what they call the book talks about the fear is the number one response to excessive worries and overthinking brains. And it's so true for this whole thing, you know, the whole AI thing, people are so worried about it, right? Just because we are overly, excessively thinking about the negative consequences. But there are lot more positive consequences. That's what they talk about. Like, you know, how you think leads your actions. So hopefully that that benefits,

Scott Montminy: 12:23

embrace the journey and embrace a you know, instead of being afraid of it, and instead of dragging your feet, run head, you know, run head first into the pool, and you will find out that it's not that cold. The water's not that cold, yeah. So

Andy Weiss: 12:39

speaking of journey, Scott, I think we it's time for us to thank the folks who have been on this journey with us.

Scott Montminy: 12:44

I really appreciate everyone who has liked, commented and subscribed to any and all of our episodes. I encourage you to do so. We we ask of you very kindly to do so. In fact, we're on Spotify, we're on YouTube, and the list of platforms is growing. By the time you listen to this, who knows who might be on 50 other platforms? I'm sure we'll be on all the major networks too, but until then, we are Now Hiring!