Intro to book reviews
When I was in school, if I’m being candid, I didn’t really enjoy much of the academics. One of my least favorite things was book reports. I didn’t like reading (mostly because I’ve never been good at it), and I hated writing about things I didn’t want to read in the first place (I’m looking at you The Island of the Blue Dolphins).
That was something that I carried with me for a long time. I have always had an affinity for audiobooks, even though I didn’t realize it for a long time. It all started with Hank the Cowdog and carried on with Harry Potter.
Early on in my adult life, I started to find more enjoyment in audiobooks and it has led me down several paths that I’m sincerely happy that it has.
In this blog series, I hope that you are lead to books that will help enrich your life and assist you in finding direction both professionally and personally.
Pitch Anything
Being in an industry that is overrun with hacks and amateurs, we’ve struggled over the years with how to present ourselves in a way that tells our potential clients that we know what we’re talking about, and doing so in a way that we’re not using the exact same buzzwords that everyone else uses in video like “high quality,” “premier,” and “professional.”
In the last few years, Jacob and I have found ourselves in several different entrepreneurial groups. One specific person who surfaced in many of them was a man whom we’ve become friends with named Austin Hughes. I couldn’t tell you what the conversation was about, but, he ended up telling us about the book, Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff.
The book really dives into the psychology of how to pitch products, services, or anything (yep… I went there).
I burned through the audiobook within a few days. It’s very insightful and really shed a lot of light on ways that we were presenting ourselves that were doing more harm than good.
My Thoughts
While there were a lot of things of tremendous value in this book, as a creative, there were a lot of things that weren’t. There are some ideas that go against my nature and really don’t represent how I want most of our clients to see us.
My biggest hangup with the book is that he’s using multi-million and billion dollar deals as examples and it’s a bit overwhelming for me to think in those terms since we hardly venture out of budget ranges of a low five figures.
Pros: we learned a lot about how to position ourselves in conversations in ways that give us authority over what we claim we can do. It has also taught us how to play hardball with some clients who just love challenging us.
Cons: If you’re not careful, it’s not hard to burn bridges using his methods. Some of these bridges, we’ve looked back and felt like we had dodged bullets. Others, it’s possible that we lost a good potential business relationship.
Leave us some comments
I would love to hear your thoughts on this book, if you’ve read it and I would also like to hear some feedback on books you recommend and why!
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