As business owners, we all face time pressure and a long to-do list!

Juggling the two is hard enough, and then you think about the self development and continual learning that you know you should be doing…

• You hear someone saying that Simon Sinek’s ‘Start with why’ changed their thinking about their sales and marketing processes, and add that to your reading list.
• Your pile of ‘to read’ books is growing still further, but you still haven’t finished ‘They Ask, You Answer’ yet…
• The last book you started wading though was wordy and seemed to take forever to get to the point, which just made it even harder to find the time to plough on.
• Audio books are a great option, but the blocks of time you have are small, and getting through a 10 hour book is a slow process

There is now another way!

In this week’s episode I’ve got all the details you need to make things easier…

Transcript:

If you’re anything like me, the to-do list is always really long and time is always short.

And as business owners, we know that self-development and self-improvement and learning constantly is really, really important, but it’s always a challenge to fit that in to the time that we’ve got, taking into account this huge long to-do list.

That’s where I thought it might be worthwhile sharing knowledge about something called Blinkist.

It’s an App where you can listen to full-length audio books. So, so much so Audible, why would you?

With Blinkist you can listen to a 15-minute summary of the key insights from any one of the books in their huge library of non-fiction.

If you’ve got a period of free time it can be hard to actually get the motivation to pull out a book or to flick onto Audible. But with a 15-minute slot you can actually listen to all of the key points of some of the really good business books that are available.

Now I do like a good business book but Blinkist includes LOTS of nonfiction books. Within their library, there are 27 different categories.

Some of those that are most interesting to me and with business owners in mind are things like:

• Entrepreneurship
• Marketing
• Sales
• Leadership
• Personal development
• Motivation

Essentially, all of the sorts of subjects that we all would benefit from studying and from learning more about at various points.

The library includes books such as by Seth Godin, Robin Sharma, Simon Sinek, so all of the big authors are on there as well.

Not every book is on there though. “They Ask, you Answer” by Marcus Sheridan, for example, doesn’t yet appear, so you would have to pick and choose.

Why do I think it’s such a good idea?

Reminders

The thing I really like about it was if you have already found time to read a book and you feel you need to revisit it, you may not need to reread the whole book.

Actually listening to the 15 minutes-summary and the key insights might be all you need just to trigger and remind you of those key points.

Decision Making

It may be that you think, well, actually listening to the 15 minute-insights might tell me whether or not I want to invest the time in reading the whole book because not all of us are the same.

It’s really important to be discerning about where we spend our time, and this may help!

Not all of us will get the same benefit out of a book that somebody else recommends and found really valuable. Blinkist could be an opportunity to ‘try before you buy’.

Pricing

You can do a 7-day free trial of Blinkist, which is great, and obviously gives you a great opportunity to check it out.

If you do decide you need longer, you have two options.

Annual Subscription – £60, payable as £4.99 per month over a 12-month period.

Monthly Subscription – £9.99 per month.

If you think about the number of business books that we’ve probably all bought over the years that we just haven’t quite got as far as finishing, this might be a good opportunity to invest in Blinkist and check some of them out and get to feel like you’re catching up on some.

You could do a lot of catching up over a 7-day trial!

I love a good business book as I said before, and I’m definitely going to be using Blinkist to catch up on some that I know that I would benefit from rereading as a bit of a refresher. I’ll also use it to get through some that have been recommended so I can test them out first and see what benefits there are for me & that I can pass on.

So that’s my recommendation for this week’s episode. Do let me know if you give it a go and let me know what you think. Otherwise, I’ll see you all very soon.