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Introduction

Today I want to talk to you about the subject of personal development, or personal recommendation.

Now, I see and speak to a lot of entrepreneurs who are reading or listening to audiobooks getting through personal development that is, what I call, misaligned.

And if you’re making this mistake, this blog is for you.

So if you watch some of my stuff, I talk about the five fundamentals of business: finance, operations, people, sales/marketing, and then finally, corporate governance.

So what is the purpose of personal development?

Well, it’s to broaden your horizons.

Due to education subjects, if you look at personal development, there’s an absolute raft of people out there who are going to say ‘do this or do that’, ‘try this or try that’.

Or even blogs like this, where I’m just trying to pass on my knowledge that I’ve accumulated over the- God knows how long.

And try to help and steer, and either you connect with it, you don’t, you take value from it, you don’t.

There’ll be certain elements that are real penny-drop moments, or “a-ha” moments as we call them, for you in any of your personal development that you do.

And there will also be things that you know are just filler, where the author or the presenter is just using the information to fill those educational pieces.

If you are approaching this by going to your inner circle of peers who are on a similar or the same sort of level as you are, and saying what book should I read next?

What personal development should I listen to next?

That’s the absolute wrong strategy because what you’re going to be doing is you’re going to be grasping knowledge.

It’s not necessarily going to be relevant to the cycle that you’re in the moment.

What I mean by cycle is, it could be a business stage, it could be your own personal education stage, it could be a variety or even a mix of the two.

Don’t Look To A Fish On How To Climb A Tree

So, here’s a typical example to try and make some sense of that.

If you were really struggling with finance, you can’t read a profit and loss account, can’t read a balance sheet, can’t see trends, you can’t see the key metrics in numbers.

Doesn’t it make sense, that if you want to improve, here’s a business leader and actually in business that you can study finance from.

Now I’m not saying go to the open university, or something like the BPP University where I’ve studied, and become super-fluent in finance.

But tap yourself into a knowledge curve that talks finance, that gives you the basic information.

Again, if you start studying or struggling to understand how to build the right culture for your business and your team, you know to create that inner culture that people want to work for you.

Look at Google, look at Apple, why do people want to work there?

Because the culture is amazing.

You know you could even reference Infusionsoft over in the states that our digital marketing side is involved with.

The culture that they have there is excellent, in fact, it’s awesome.

And, if you were trying to build that, doesn’t it make sense that you study people, and you study personal development material, that’s going to help you put those in place?

And also, there’s a great book that I recommend you check out, “Built to Last” by Jim Collins or James Collins, that may be listed as the author.

So “Built to Last” by James Collins, it’s an absolutely awesome book to help you understand the culture and how to build a world-class culture in a business.