Welcome to Mindful Monday!

My new book, The Price of Becoming, is now available to pre-order. Please do that now. If you've already done so, thank you! Email us (me or Eli@LearningLeader.com), and we'll send you a digital copy of the book right now. If you want to see all the cool pre-order bonuses we've set up for you, CLICK HERE.

Here are some things from this week...

• Dr. Henry Cloud shares why high performers seek more coaching than ordinary people
• Why you should run a book club...
• Some words about AI Slop from Jack Raines
• 7 Rules about selling
• Wise Words from Dan Pink

#688: Dr. Henry Cloud - "You get what you create and what you allow."

​Dr. Henry Cloud is a clinical psychologist, leadership consultant, and NYT bestselling author whose books have sold nearly 20 million copies worldwide. His books include Boundaries, Integrity, Trust, and Your Desired Future. We covered: The Difference Between a Dream & a Vision, Why Revenue Is Not a Goal, the 5-Step Model for Achieving Any Goal, and Why the Highest Performers Seek the Most Coaching. You can also WATCH our conversation on YouTube.

Run a Book Club For The Price of Becoming​

Book clubs are awesome because they help build community around a set of ideas. They create great dialogue. And there is power in learning useful and entertaining things together. Because of that, we have built a guide to run a The Price of Becoming book club. If you'd like to run a The Price of Becoming book club at your workplace or in your community, let me know, and I'll send you the guide.

Brevity as a Sign of Humanity

AI slop is everywhere. It seems 90% of the articles on the timeline are AI slop masquerading as “unique insights.” It’s not that all AI content is “bad,” but the misrepresentation of LLM output as one’s original thoughts is intellectually dishonest slop. I love AI tools and how helpful they are for what I do. I probably spend a few hours a day using Claude, Chat GPT, Perplexity, and others. However, outsourcing your thinking and publishing slop on the internet seems like a bad choice. I hope you don't do it. Or if you are, I hope you stop. (This was inspired by Jack Raines' recent essay about AI Slop)

7 Rules About Sales...

1. Sales is a lot like golf. You can make it so complicated as to be impossible, or you can simply walk up and hit the ball. I’ve been leading and building sales orgs for almost 20 years, and my advice is to walk up and hit the ball.
2. Sales is about people, and it’s about problem-solving. It is not about solutions or technology or chemicals or lines of code or artichokes. It’s about people, and it’s about solving problems.
3. People buy 4 things and 4 things only. Ever. Those 4 things are time, money, sex, and approval/peace of mind. If you try selling something other than those 4 things, you will fail.
4. People buy aspirin always. They buy vitamins only occasionally and at unpredictable times. Sell aspirin.
5. I say in every talk I give: “all things being equal, people buy from their friends. So make everything else equal, then go make a lot of friends.”
6. Being valuable and useful is all you ever need to do to sell things. Help people out. Send interesting posts. Write birthday cards. Record videos sharing your ideas for growing their business. Introduce people who would benefit from knowing each other, then get out of the way, expecting nothing in return. Do this consistently and authentically, and people will find ways to give you money. I promise.
7. No one cares about your quota, your payroll, your opex, your burn rate, etc. No one. They care about the problem you are solving for them. (Learned from this Y Combinator post)

Wise Words from Dan Pink

"THE PRICE OF BECOMING refuses to sell you a shortcut. Instead, Hawk shows how small daily deposits — one hundred shots, five hundred words, a single tough conversation — compound into something that looks like an overnight success to anyone who wasn't paying attention. This is a clear-eyed, powerful book.” -- Daniel H. Pink, #1 New York Times bestselling author of DRIVE, WHEN, and THE POWER OF REGRET

Mindful Monday is a reader-supported publication. If it helped you, forward it to your friends. Thank you! -- Ryan

Ryan Hawk NEW Book - The Price of Becoming​