Give me five minutes in a conversation and there’s a decent chance I’ll bring up a book. Someone mentions they’re wrestling with pricing, or a hard conversation with a business partner, or just getting out of their own head, and my brain starts flipping through everything I’ve read looking for the one that hits that exact spot. When I find it, I get genuinely excited to hand it over. Probably why people ask me for recommendations as often as they do.
The Advice I Overheard Secondhand
Part of where this habit comes from is an interview I did with Cynthia Zhai on my podcast, World of Speakers. She told me about a piece of advice her father used to share. She heard it from him, took it to heart, and found that it worked.
The advice: “The difference between you now and you in ten years comes down to two things. The people you meet and the books you read.”
That landed. I’d always liked reading, but that conversation gave me more intention behind it. I started reading more, and across a wider range of fields than I had before, business, psychology, communication, persuasion, whatever seemed useful at the time.
As of writing this, I have 267 books in my Audible library, and more than a hundred physical ones spread across three bookshelves in my house. No single book taught me everything I needed to know about building something of my own. It was always a mix, one book for this problem, another for that one.
Why I Finally Built the List
This week, as I near the publication of my next book, EntrepreneurSHIP, Get Your Startup Shipshape, I realized how many books I’ve read, and how many people I’ve met, have influenced the tips and experience that fill its pages. So I decided to include the books behind EntrepreneurSHIP in the book itself, as a but wait there’s more bonus. Books that have helped me along the way. But I didn’t want them to just live inside the book. I wanted to actually build the list that had been living in my head for years.
That list is live now at ryan.online/books, sorted into seven categories: sales and persuasion, startup and strategy, marketing and storytelling, mindset and habits, money and business operations, creativity, personal growth and wellbeing. Somewhere I could share it, reference it, and keep growing it instead of trying to remember it mid-conversation.
Wherever you’re at in building your own EntrepreneurSHIP, there’s probably a book on that list that can help you get to where you’re trying to go. If you’re looking for a recommendation, I’ve got you.
And if there's a book on your list that's helped you and you don't see it on mine, there's a spot right on the page to submit it.
I might just add it to my queue.
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Maybe it ends up on the list too.