Right, I need to tell you all about my new book, The Six Minute Entrepreneur.
It’s been a labour of love, this book, and I wrote it for you guys!
I get asked all the time to go and speak at events, to come and speak to entrepreneurs, and I have people asking me to mentor them.
People want to know what’s happened to me in my career that I can share with them so that they can learn from it, either so that they don’t make the same mistakes that I made, or so that they can learn from the successes that I’ve had and they can go on to replicate that success.
And I don’t mind sharing because I want you to learn from my mistakes!
I want you to learn from my successes because I’ve found that the more you put out into the universe, the more you share this around, and it’s funny how the universe seems to deliver more back.
I spend a lot of my time going out and speaking to entrepreneurs, mentoring entrepreneurs and sharing my story. But I just can’t reach hundreds of thousands of people easily in one go.
So, this was a labour of love last year. I spent months and months putting this book together and I’ve tried to make it really easily accessible. If you’re anything like me, chances are you don’t have endless amounts of time. For instance, I’ve tried to listen to loads of podcasts to enhance my learning but I just don’t have time.
So I asked myself what was reasonable and I came to the idea of six minutes a week.
Six minutes is a reasonable amount of time to ask someone to give up. If you can find six minutes a week to work on your own self-development, then I can commit in that six minutes that I can share with you a story from my life that is going to have some takeaways that you can learn, take learnings from me and implement in your own entrepreneurial journey.
And whether that’s starting a business, scaling and growing a business, dealing with things, maybe you don’t have a business but you’d like to deal with things like mum guilt and imposter syndrome, general things that I have to deal with in my life.
Now, I’ve broken all of these things down into manageable bite-sized chunks with simple little stories and the reason that there are 52 stories is because this is a year’s worth of learning for you.
I’m really passionate about this so I want you to get the book, then I want you to read one chapter a week. You read through the chapter, which will detail a story from my life, then at the end of that chapter, I’ll be really clear on what the take away message is.
We’ll cover what happened in that story, but also what it is that I wanted you to take away from that learning. And then, to really reinforce this, I’ve given you a little bit of homework.
I’m a big believer in working on your own self-development. Just listening to one podcast or a series or listening to a little piece of advice isn’t going to make the difference. It’s once you put that into play in your own life and you model that in your own business, that’s when it’s going to have an impact.
So every one of these stories has a piece of homework related to what you should have learned from reading that chapter. And I’m going to ask everybody to do one chapter a week.
If you gallop through the whole book and read the whole book in a weekend, it’s brilliant you’ve taken all that on board. I can almost guarantee you none of it’s going to have an impact on your business. Whereas if you work on one chapter a week, you’ll really take the time that this book needs to really understand and digest these bite-sized chunks.
Now, I want to take you back to what really inspired me to write the book, where this came from. So I don’t know if you know, but my autobiography came out a few years ago and that is the story of my life. It’s an interesting story, not only for business people, but for anybody who’s interested in my life, the story of my kind of life to date and within that book there are quite a few learnings and take-homes.
Around that time of my first book, I would get asked to go and do big talks and corporate talks and speak to other entrepreneurs. For example, people would ask me to build stories from my life and what I realized is, at first I used to try and gavel the whole 20 years of my career into a 45 minute talk. It’s too much for people.
So instead, I started just thinking about the audience there and choosing three pivotal stories and moments from my life that would be specifically applicable to that audience and delivering just that story in a really meaningful way.
In planning out a framework that I would have for all of the different talks that I would go to, I realised that I had dozens and dozens of these stories that were applicable in different walks of life.
And that’s when I had that real light bulb moment of, okay, so someone could come and watch me at an event and hear me speak and learn three stories from my life, or I can put them in a book and I can get them 52 stories from my life, which hopefully they learn a lot from.
So that’s how the book came to be! And it really has been a labour of love because I can talk for England!
I worked with the amazing Alex Hemingsley, who’s the ghostwriter who worked on my autobiography with me and I’ve given her the essence of the story, and then she’s brought that down into six minutes of readable text and format for you.
And then also Jason Dawe been instrumental in pulling this together with me. He’s been able to help me work on the exercises that people can work on to really take home the key learnings from each of those stories. So between the three of us, we have delivered not just a self-help book, but I promise you a business book, which is easy to read.
Hopefully you’ll have some laughs along the way with me at some of the things that I’ve done in my career, but really take some big learnings home that you can learn from and take forward in your career.
I’m dying to know what you all think about it!