Books have the power to change our lives. We may not know it right away, but we allow ourselves to discover our inner and truest selves by reading. Dr. Tracey Jones joins ghostwriter and communication arts professor Kent Sanders on The Daily Writer Podcast to discuss powerful insights on reading and writing. Together, they delve into the power of books and the impact they could make in our amazing lives. They discuss the writing process, habits and the essentials for us to achieve greatness and success in our professional journeys. Self-development is a key to being the excellent leader we have always dreamed of. It is a continuous process. Have the ultimate love affair with learning, and tune into this episode!
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Listen to the podcast here:
Tremendous Leadership & The Power Of Books (With Dr. Tracey C. Jones)
If you're on this episode, you're probably already convinced of the power of books to change your life. What if you could not only write your own books but also help other people publish theirs. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of The Smart Business Writing. My name is Kent Sanders. I'm a ghostwriter and professor of communications. This is a show that helps you write amazing content so you can save time, stand out from the competition, and get more leads that turn into customers for clients.
I am thrilled to bring you this conversation with Dr. Tracey Jones, who is the President of Tremendous Leadership. She is an author, speaker, veteran, international leadership expert, publisher and host of the Tremendous Leadership Podcast. She is a passionate lifelong learner and her career spans top positions in four major industries from the military, to high-tech, defense contracting and publishing. She is a graduate of the United States Airforce Academy, a decorated veteran who served in the first Gulf War and also, the Bosnian War. She earned an MBA in Global Management and a PhD in Leadership Studies.
If you haven’t yet been introduced to Tracey, you might have heard of her father, Charlie “Tremendous” Jones who wrote the very well-known book called Life Is Tremendous. For years, I've used her father’s quote in many lessons and talks that I've given. He said, “You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for two things, the people you meet and the books you read.” It was a real blessing to be able to talk to his daughter who now leads their company. This conversation focuses on books and the impact they can have on our lives.
Tracey gives us some insights into her publishing company, Tremendous Leadership and also her process for writing books and some of her daily habits for writing. You don’t want to miss this episode because it’s full of great stuff. I took a ton of notes and I learned a few things as I do from all my guests that I'm going to start applying immediately to my own writing and productivity. This was a ton of fun. Tracey is a lot of fun as well and I know you’re going to love this episode. Let’s get right to it.
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Tracey, welcome to the show. I'm thrilled that we could make time to have this chat.
Thanks so much, Kent. It's tremendous to be here.
This was a difficult conversation to prepare for because I have many things that I want to ask you about. There are many spheres that you're involved in with your business, writing, book publishing, and many things. I'm going to try my best to keep this focus and not go 3 or 4 hours. Let me start off with this question. Give us a little background about your dad. For those who don't know who your dad was and his love for books and publishing. Why has that been such a critical factor in all this?
Thanks, Kent. You always got to go back to the origins of your DNA and your brand. That was from my father, our founder, Charlie “Tremendous” Jones who wrote a book back in 1967 titled Life Is Tremendous. The tagline is Enthusiasm Makes a Difference. It has never gone out of print in many years. He's a seminal thinker. Once you reach over 50 years, you're considered in the canon of knowledge. That's a real joy. It sold millions and millions of copies, just a little trade paperback about his love of his family, God and books, and cutting his teeth in the life insurance industry.
My father left the life insurance industry in the mid-’60s and that's a whole different podcast for whole different stories. He found himself on his own, with four kids and me on the way and he had to generate revenue. He started speaking and sharing his knowledge of building a business. He was also an avid reader. My father flunked out of school in the eighth grade. He grew up in the depression, a broken family, a lot of bad things that would put people in jail now. He had a voracious appetite of a very resilient nature.
His mantra was that you're going to be the same person five years from now that you are today except for two things, the people you meet and the books you read. He was a bibliophile of epic proportions. He was like, "You got to read." People would call him up and say, "Charlie, I need your input on this." He's like, "Pick that book up. Let's sit down and read it together." He was all-in, a living and breathing embodiment of the transformative power of books.
When he starts speaking, he can't speak without sharing all the books that have come into his life and made him tremendous because if you act like you did it all, that's completely disingenuous. None of us is that good. He always gave street props and promoted other people's products, not just his book. He sold millions of other people's copies of books and shared with people, “You hang around with great people, but there are all these great books that you can take home and read to continue the growth process."
There's a school of psychology called bibliotherapy. I tell people, "Take two books and call me in the morning." It's about how by reading stuff, you can begin healing yourself. He was way ahead of his time. He started the company, Life Management Services, speaking and promoting books. He's like, "Why don't I publish too because I've got all these other great speakers." We've published with Jim Rohn, Brian Tracy and Ken Blanchard. We published Jim Stovall's The Ultimate Gift, Mark Sanborn's The Fred Factor. He was always in this niche of leadership and personal development. A huge chunk of personal development is reading. It was a beautiful fit.
He went on to glory back in 2008. At that point, I transitioned back and said, "I know nothing about this. I'm an engineer by trade but let's check it out." Here we are. It was Executive Books for Executive Leaders. When I came back, I transitioned it to Tremendous Life Books because our books aren't just for executives. Now, we're under Tremendous Leadership because we're doing a lot of our own content now but still publishing other people's stuff.
That is an inspiring story. I love that. Did your dad ever tell you stories about what his process was for writing that first book and how that came about?
Power Of Books: When you are ignorant and refuse to learn, you cannot discuss calmly and rationally divergent points of view.
He did not. I didn't get it. He had a contract with Tyndale and this is back in '67. That was a true contract, not like now where everybody has these self-publishing arms. There's nothing wrong with that. This was when books would get published, you had to do this. I didn't know how he did it but I know every 100,000 copies, he'd get this one in Boston. He'd sign it to me. Tyndale got it out there and published it, but he was the one who gets it out there. I tell that for our aspiring authors out there, "Publishers publish. The author is the one that gets it out there."
He was speaking everywhere. He was handing books out. He said that for every book he gave away for free, he would sell twenty. He's like, "The more I give away for free books, the more money I make." He would give to give. I don't know how he landed that but he did. I think it was him being out speaking. I don't know if he reached out to them this. These are things I wish I could have asked him but I didn't know anything about publishing before I came back. Now I know that's a big deal. His process for writing, I still have boxes. It's like I'm still getting to know my father. His notes, doodles, dog ears. I'll find things half-written and that's how I keep putting out his stuff because he left such a wealth of stuff. My father, like every true entrepreneur, was not very organized but he was hardworking. He kept processing stuff, kept putting it out there, and wrote an awful lot down.
Let me hone in on something you said. I've never heard anybody put it this way but it's so true. It’s about for every book you give away, you sell twenty. That is fascinating. That goes against so much conventional wisdom that most authors think they're so intent on selling books. They forget about giving books away. Can you dig into that a little bit? That's fascinating.
We publish our stuff but we also are book distributors. We do high volume at a high discount for organizations that want to use books. A book means nothing to somebody unless you can crack the cover for them. My father would stand up on stage and would read a sentence or two. It's like a test drive on an automobile or when ladies go to a makeup counter. They put it on you and you see it’s beautiful, then it's like, "I got to have some of that." I tell people when I pass the jewelry counter, "Don't put it on me. Once I see it on me, then I have to buy it." This was the same thing with books.
He would stand up there and open a couple. Typically, he'd kiss it and hug it. People are like, "I got to have some of that." He would drip out. My father always said, "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink. You can put salt in its oats and make them thirsty." That is what he did. The Parable of the Sowers from the Bible. He shared books and people would look at him and go, "If that's what books makes you become, I want to have it." He modeled this love affair with books and it was contagious.
You're involved in something that most people would be afraid to take on and is a big challenge, that is running a publishing company. You have channeled your and your dad's love of books. Not just into reading books and into writing your own books but publishing other people's books as well. I would love if you could share what you're trying to accomplish with the Tremendous Leadership, your publishing company, and what that's all about. For anybody who's reading this, how can they maybe get involved in that and submit books to you for consideration?
My father believed everybody had a book in them. Typically, we don't want to read about the success stories because then we feel bad like, "Why can't we be that good?" If you are brought through something and he would say to me, "Tracey, if you don't share that with the world, that's incredibly selfish. The reason that you were put through something to break you down is so you can get built up so you can share it with other people that are going to need your wisdom." Now I can do this one-on-one and become incredibly exhausted or I can write a book and get the word out there and the legacy. I can read my father's wisdom even though he's been in heaven for many years.
For those authors that are out there doing book tours and speaking, we typically start out and we want to speak to a million different places. I don't care if it's to one person or ten people. I'm doing it. We then get smart and go, "I'm going to limit it to this many people and get a better reach." That's a seasoning thing. Especially if you have a ministry or a company, he would say, "Everybody in a company needs to have a book to share with incoming people what the culture of the organization is." For your ministry, that's a wonderful thing that you can hand out to people to share what your book is about as a wonderful donor source or to bring people up to speed on it.
The key is making people aware of the tremendous work you're doing or the tremendous experiences you have that can help other people. It's like the Bible. The number one bestseller of all time. Yes, Jesus was on this Earth and he spoke his word. Thank God, we got it written down because we have the living word of God when we open it. If nobody would have written it down, we wouldn't have it. I always tell people, no matter how you learn, whether it's visually or audibly or kinesthetically, books are a tremendous thing to come alongside you because we all learn in different ways. It's important to have a book along with anything that you have. You're speaking should be delivered in book format too.
If you think about it, let's fast forward to 100 years from now. How is anybody going to know what you thought, what your experiences were or your life story? Our video files, Facebook posts in 100 years, who knows what that stuff's all going to be? A book anybody can read a book as long as they can read. A book is the only sure-fire way that you can preserve your knowledge, your wisdom and your story for future generations.
Power Of Books: If you don't share your skills and talents with the world, that's incredibly selfish.
That's why my father loved biographies and autobiographies. When you look and you can read all the greats from the dawn of mankind, it's profound. All the answers are out there inside the two covers. It's just, “Do we take the time?” I'm very excited about Tremendous Leadership because people are like, "Nobody reads anymore." I'm like, "Lazy or dumb people don't read anymore." I don't know who you're hanging out with but I'm hanging out with the movers and shakers. You cannot be a leader if you're not a reader. I'm sorry, you just can't. I went back for my PhD in Leadership. Why? In twenty years that it hit in my head, haven't I learned everything? No. I needed to know what the grounded research says about leadership.
When you have a love of learning, that's who in turn makes the world a better place. You know as well as I do, Kent, that is the answer to everything, poverty, ignorance, lack of critical thinking and wars. When you read knowledge, all the great history from Booker T. Washington to Abraham Lincoln, everybody had this beautiful love affair with learning. That doesn't happen by sleeping with a book under your pillow. We have this beautiful mechanism in our brains and your mind is a muscle too. I'm most excited that there are some of the top thinkers out there that are helping people to rediscover a love affair with reading and teaching them. It's like every other skill. You get better at it the more you do it.
I've been impacted by the writing of Ryan Holiday who's written a lot about stoicism and other things. I confess I had never read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I've been reading that lately and it occurred to me. This is amazing. He is a great Roman Emperor from 1800 years ago or so. He kept a journal that we can now read. It's amazing how his thoughts and his experiences were preserved for us. I'm grateful that we have this technology of books. I know that sounds silly because books have been around forever, but there's so much wisdom that you can gain from somebody's life. They have written it down and we can consume that in a few hours. It's amazing when you stop and think about it.
Technology is brilliant because anybody all over the world, I travel a lot all over the world. Even in Africa, everybody has a cell phone in 5G. We can pull up anything and change our lives or get in touch with whatever information we need. It's powerful. What you were saying, truth is timeless. Some people are like, "I'm not going to read the old stuff." I'm like, "The ego to think that in the last 30 years, you have evolved into something higher than the thousands of millenniums before you. That shows how woefully and willfully ignorant you are.” That's part of what's going on with this inability to discuss calmly and rationally divergent points of view. You can tell that's from uneducated people. That's not a political statement. That's anything.
Reading helps you expose your own biases, assumptions and blind spots. That's why we read, it’s so we can unlearn what we thought we knew and relearn it. It's the only thing that's going to save the world. I'm excited that it seems like people are looking at what has worked in the past 40 to 50 years and going, "We're not getting better as a civilization. We're getting dumber, meaner and stupider. What are we going to do to change this?” Books and reading more of Adler's book. I got to tell you something. My dad loved books and I was always like, "I don't love them that much." He was obsessed with them. I came back to run this company. I'm like, "I better learn to love them." You can't fake it. I used to sit around other book lovers and I'm like, "They love this stuff." You can learn to love books.
I read on a need to know, not a need to grow. Reading for a need to grow is like being in a marriage and just being compliant to the rules of the confidential relationship of marriage, or you can be all-in committed. There's a whole different thing. Mortimer Adler's book How to Read a Book, I cry every time I read it. You read that and you realize it's not just a book. We tell people, "You don't have to finish it. If you're not picking up what it's putting down, this isn't school. You're not going to get quizzed on it. Put it down."
I probably have five books I'm reading at any given time. I'll zip through about two of them and the other three. Maybe I'll pick up, maybe not. My father always said that probably throughout his lifetime, he scanned 300,000 books but had the same 30 to 40 that he always went back to. He is grounding literature. That's what I tell people to do. Get in there, pick your salient points and you'll get at least one. You can download books on Kindle, mine too for $0.99. There it is. Even if you flip a couple of pages. It's incredible.
People have worked for years on books many times. When you read the book, you're reading their distilled knowledge. You're essentially adding years to your life every time you read a good book.
Yes, you are and expanding your horizons in your mind. How much of our brains we don't use? We go back to the little reptilian piece that wants a fight or flight. If you're a believer like me, we have the mind of Christ. Christ knows everything.
Tracey, I do want to ask about your new book called SPARK. Before I do that, I would love to dive into your publishing company a little bit. What are the advantages, the disadvantages, the challenges of running a publishing company that publishes other people's books, as opposed to doing your own stuff?
Power Of Books: Love for learning makes the world a better place. The answer to poverty, ignorance, and lack of critical thinking enhances your knowledge by learning.
The advantages are, you get to be known as a publishing house, which is cool. You also get to build up your canon of knowledge that draws together when you find your niche. What I have for my clients then is I get to have a lot more things to offer them other than my stuff. I know my stuff is tremendous but there are a lot of other tremendous writers. It's the old Ken Blanchard, “None of us is as smart as all of us.” A tremendous life is about not just reading a book, but the lifelong love of learning. It's given me a great opportunity to be linked with some of the other great motivational and leadership thought leaders out there and subject matter experts.
That's the first thing. You get to establish your credibility as somebody that attracts and delivers this kind of wonderful knowledge base to everybody else. The bad side of it is, you have to have all the other associated costs that come with that. There are many times when I think, "If I could do my own stuff and all I have to focus on is that." What fun is that, Kent? I love reading other books. As much as I say, "I'm going to stop publishing other people's stuff and focus on mine." Here comes another great manuscript and I'm like, "Our readers are going to love this." That's the way it happened.
Have you published a lot of public domain material?
We did. My dad was ahead of his time with that, A Message to Garcia, Acres of Diamonds, As a Man Thinketh, The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace Wattles, and The New Common Denominator of Success, we sell tens of thousands of this every year. They're in these little booklet formats. He started doing these little classics. He would get the public domain stuff from patent. These little books, Bradford, You're Fired! is public domain, A Message to Garcia, Booker T. Washington and Acres of Diamonds. He has Milton Hershey, just the greats that he loved.
The public domain stuff is incredible because, after a certain amount of years, it becomes public domain. You got to make sure that it's clear to use. We love repurposing. One of my favorite books doesn't have an author to it. It's called The Kneeling Christian. You can get the free download PDF and it's by an unknown author. It was written 150 years ago but I’m like, "This is good." There's much stuff out there that is now public domain that you can take and repurpose. A lot of the master key to success stuff. A lot of the personal development stuff. That's what people do with it because there's nothing new under the sun. Truth is timeless. It's all contextualized based on how we view it in our lingo, but the principles are always the same. Don't shirk the old stuff. That's the foundational stuff from which everything else has been built upon.
That is so true. I couldn't agree more. Let me ask about your new book because I know you are excited about that. I'm excited that you sent me a copy. I can't wait to get my hands on that. I love eBooks. I love audio but there's still something magical about print books. Talk about your book, SPARK: 5 Essentials to Ignite the Greatness Within. Why did you write this? How will this benefit readers?
For our readers out there, I'm speaking on leadership. I looked around a few years ago and I realized there were a lot of people in the audience that had PhDs. I thought, "If I'm going to be speaking as a leadership expert, I should have the terminal degree." I went back to school for it. I love learning. I love leadership. I have tons of experience but I wanted to know the leadership theory. I like street smarts but I also like head smarts. When you have the how it should work versus this is the reality of where the rubber meets the road, that makes you a well-rounded person that can see the truth. Not in theory only and not in application only. You understand why it went down that way, why it did or didn't work.
I went back and got a PhD in Leadership. They said, "PhD stands for Piled High and Deep. I didn't know that but now that I got this phenomenal piece of knowledge where I had one tiny little iota to the whole sea of knowledge. I didn't do that for nothing. I looked at Henry Cloud and Ken Blanchard, all these people that I love that had PhDs, Nido Qubein. They took their seminal research theory and they wrote it in layman's terms. I wrote it in PhD speak so you have to cite every word. Academic speak is different but I thought the principles are still sound. SPARK was the layman's distillation and generalizability of what every leader can have. I did have a lot of my research in it because sometimes we think leadership is this touchy-feely, maybe I'll get it.
There are universals for it like the Law of Physics and Thermodynamics. You can take it to the bank that when you do this, this is going to happen. Yes, we have people involved. There's a certain amount of the unknown there. For the most part, my PhD was on crisis leadership, followership, how followers reacted to their leader in the crisis. The theory of self-efficacy, which is personal discipline and self-innovation. I love that. It came out at a good time. It was supposed to be released in March 2020, then the pandemic hit. I'm like, "The providential timing of it all.” I'm talking about crisis leadership and this whole pandemic and one thing after another hit. I thought, "This is a good time. People need this." When it's smooth sailing, everybody's like, "Whatever."
Leadership is easy. I was in the military. Peacetime military is easy. It's when the bullets start flying that you need to have been reading great books and having expanded your knowledge base, knowing how to have a contingency plan, knowing how to pivot and deal with the fog and friction of life in general. That's why I wrote SPARK. It's all about regardless of the circumstances that are going on outside of you, life is already happening inside you. It's what you bring to the forefront. It's unpacking and unfolding the greatest version of you to respond to whatever happens. That's how SPARK was born. I wrote the PhD and I thought, "This is great. I don't think people are going to read my 250-page PhD." I can distill what I've learned into a book that everybody can eat, process, and created a little construct around it. There you have it.
Power Of Books: Reading helps you expose your own biases, assumptions, and blind spots. That's why we read, so we can unlearn what we thought we knew and relearn it.
If somebody wants to read your dissertation, can they do that?
They can. If you are on an EDU website, you can get on JSTOR or all the different places, but I have it on our website on Tremendous Leadership. Also, if you email me, I would be more than happy to email you a free PDF copy of it. I also have my chapter five, which are the research implications. That's what people want to get to, your findings and implications for organizations. If you send me an email at TremendousLeadership.com, you can find it on our website, you can find it. I have uploaded it. If you want to research it and cite it, it's absolutely out there but I'd love to send you a copy too.
Tracey, this is a show for writers and you're a writer yourself. You work with a lot of authors. Your dad was a very successful author. What do you feel are the main 2 or 3 habits that make someone a successful writer?
We hit it on it already. I think they're already voracious readers. They have this love of learning and reading makes you a better writer. When I got that PhD, I write now at a completely different level than what I did before. I already had written nine books before. It teaches you to process information and write in a way that takes it to a whole new level. They already love reading. They already understand the transformative power of books. Most of the greatest people who've come to me already have this singularity, this voice inside them that tells them, "You went through something and you need to tell the world about it." There's almost this compulsion like, “I have to get it out.”
The other best thing is that's the poetry part. The plumbing part is they're very disciplined. Every day, they write and blog. I get people to come to me with an idea on the back of a napkin and people have already self-published their books and everything in between. I know if they have done their due diligence and spent the time to get people to review the copies, to get somebody to look at it, I know they're serious about it. If I have somebody that'll come to me and say, "I want to write a book on this." I'm like, "Let me see it." "I haven't read it yet." "Let me see your blog post." "I'm not ready yet." I'm like, "Don't waste my time." You're already going to be writing and writing is like going to the gym. Start fifteen minutes a day, 400 words. Everybody can write.
My first book was four years of 400 words each blog. However, it works. It's the old Good to Great principle. What is your message to the world? I got a PhD in Leadership. I didn't teach the world anything new, but I gave one slight piece to the body of knowledge. What is that one thing that you've experienced that you can tell in your voice that the world needs to hear? That's the first thing. Not what you want to just transmit, but 19 out of 20 books that sell are dealing with a pain point. The world is in a lot of pain. People need help trying to figure out solutions. It's not that easy. Number two, are you disciplined enough to roll up your sleeves and engage in the day-to-day, week-to-week or month-to-month habit of writing. The more you do it, the better writer you become.
I spent the afternoon working on a client book. I was sitting there writing and I was thinking what you're talking about. I thought this isn't that hard. You have to sit down and do the work. Writing for many people feels like hard work but it's a matter of, "Did you do the work? Did you not do the work?" Many writers or people who want to write think it's all about the talent or you got to be a great storyteller or all those things. It mostly comes down to, are you willing to sit behind the chair and do the work?
A lot of people sit down and write, and nothing's coming out. That creativity hasn't started. I then say, "Go read." It's like when I sit and I listen to a sermon. I'll be listening and all of a sudden, in the next 30 minutes, I'm writing down my thoughts as a result of what I thought based on what he said. You can start writing based on what you’re thinking as a result of what you've read. I then tell people, "Tease it out," just like my PhD. There are going to be certain common threads in everything you write that bubble up. Those are your main legs. The three-legged stool that you build your writing on. The other thing is people have said to me when I was speaking, "Tracey, when you spoke on this, I saw your eyes light up." I didn't know it because I was worried about not having my pages fall off the stage or stutter. Ask friends and say, "Where do you see me get totally jazzed about?" They're going to tell you and that's probably where you should land.
I love the idea of getting feedback from others because we can't always see where we're shining. We're doing things, but we're sometimes not the best objective judge of ourselves.
We've been living in it so long it's normalized. I remember the whole StrengthsFinder thing where they're like, "I always taught you're in the military, you can't have a weak link. That always meant focused on the weakest thing and make it strong." I always wanted to be a writer growing up, but I was like, "No, because I'm a good writer." I went to Engineering, which is not the best fit for me but I had enough of the smarts so I could do it. StrengthsFinders like, "No, do what you're intrinsically gifted at." I'm like, "Of course." I should have known it. The good news is the beauty of writing is it doesn't matter your age or your stage in life. You can start right now.
Power Of Books: The beauty of writing is it doesn't matter what your age, culture, and expertise are. You can start right now.
That's a good place to wrap up this conversation because no truer words could ever be spoken. You got to get started and do it.
If you don't want to write, you record. I would record my interviews with people in my PhD. I didn't write it all down. I even transcribe it. There are systems out there that you don't want to write. You don't know how to write, just speak. The beauty of writing is if you write in a conversational tone, those make great books. It doesn't have to be a PhD written thing. People love people who are conversant and that kind of thing.
Dictation is such a helpful tool. Just walk around and dictate something. It's a great way to write a book. Tracey, how can people get in touch with you and find out more about your publishing company, your books, and all the cool things that you're doing?
They can get in touch with me on TremendousLeadership.com. There's our email and all our social media. We even have the Write That Book, our books, our new releases, and all different things. I've even written books with my rescue dogs. I've written children's books. You can see all our new releases there. If you send an email to me, I always send a link back to do a 30-minute discovery call with you. It’s complimentary to talk about you and what you'd like to do.
Remind people what your email address is.
TJones@TremendousLeadership.com. If you type in TremendousLeadership.com you will come right to my world headquarters in South Central, Pennsylvania.
Tracey, this has been a blast. I love your energy. I love how you inspire people to write, not just through your own books, but through a publishing company, which is awesome. That's inspirational. Thanks again. This has been a blast.
Thanks so much, Kent, for all that you're doing. Happy writing, everybody.
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I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Tracey. That was an absolute blast. Here are my three biggest takeaways from our conversation. Number one, you have a book in you and if you will not share it with the world, you are being selfish. I know that sounds like a bold statement but for me, it goes back to the question, why don’t we write more? Why don’t we put ourselves out there into the world? It’s because of fear. Honestly, if we’re held back by our fear, that’s selfish. That means we’re thinking more about ourselves than about other people with who we can help with our book.
I truly believe that if you have a message and you’ve been wanting to write a book, you have a moral and an ethical obligation to do it. I know it’s hard, intimidating and a lot of work but if you feel like you have a message to share with the world, if you’ve got a story to share, whether it’s your story or a made-up story like fiction, a business parable or non-fiction, poetry or whatever it is that you want to share with the world, if you have a burning message inside of you, you have an obligation to get it out there and to do it in spite of your fear and your lack of knowledge or experience with books because we can help you with all that stuff, but you got to get it out there.
Takeaway number two, a book should deal with a pain point. I'm mainly talking about non-fiction books. My question to you is, if you’re working on a non-fiction book, what problem does your book solve? That’s an important question and that’s the reason why you should always put together a book proposal before you write any book whether you are using traditional publishing or self-publishing. When you put together a book proposal, it helps to define what the idea of the book is, who the audience for the book is, what you want to accomplish with it, what the outline of the book is and so forth. I always recommend putting together a book proposal because it’s definitely going to deal with what problem is your book going to help solve.
Takeaway number three is when you have a publishing company, you can help get other people’s books out into the world. This is something I thought about in the last couple of years. I love books. You can tell by this show that I love books and writing. I have seriously thought about setting up a publishing company. I already have a publishing company for my own stuff but I thought about taking on other people’s stuff as I have more time, ability and so forth. I don’t know if it’s something I want to do necessarily but I thought about it a lot. I'm intrigued by this idea. Tracey has been very successful with her Tremendous Leadership publishing company and that’s a cool model to follow. There is a lot of good that you can do in the world whenever you can take people’s material and you can get that out to the masses. You can get it out there to people who need those messages.
It’s something to consider. For most people who are reading this, that’s not a goal that you may have, to set up a publishing company but I want to plant that idea in your brain. I always want to encourage you to think bigger and that’s a good thing. For the vast majority of people, thinking bigger is defined as writing one book. I want you to think bigger than that. I want you to think about not just writing one book but many books. If you want to think even bigger than that, what if we help other people get their books out there? I wanted to continue to think about that as well.
That wraps up this episode. I want to give a massive thanks to our very special guest, Dr. Tracey Jones. Make sure to give her a shout-out on Instagram @TremendousLeadership. You can also check out her website and be sure and check out her podcast which is phenomenal. Thanks so much for reading and until next time, remember that your writing has the power to change people’s lives. I will see you in the next episode.
Important Links:
Dissertation - Perceptions of Leader Effectiveness In An Organizational Crisis: A Case Study Of Follower Self-Efficacy
@TremendousLeadership - Instagram