I Read 50 Books Per Year. These Are The Only Ones You Need To Read To Be Successful.

The $100 MBA Show - Omar Zenhom

Omar Zenhom shares 13 transformative books that shaped his thinking and business success, emphasizing timeless principles over trendy tactics. These reads focus on human behavior, decision-making, and resilience. The list blends classics with unexpected picks like religious texts and stoic philosophy. Each book is chosen for its power to change how you think, not just what you do.

Key takeaways

• Read to change your mindset, not just gain tactics
• Understanding human nature is key to business success
• Prepare for the unpredictable, not just the likely

Transcript preview

I've read over 50 books a year for over 10 years. And I want to be honest with you, most of them are a waste of time. I don't think you should read most business books. They got catchy titles. They have 10-step frameworks. They have tactics that would work maybe in 2016, but they kind of stop working by the time you finish a chapter. But there are some books that can genuinely change how you think, because it's not teaching you tactics. It's teaching you how humans work, how people decide, how people operate, and how history Business is not one skill in my opinion, it's a sum of many skills combined together to make you money. Today I'm going to share with you 13 books that changed the way I think and helped me build two multimillion dollar businesses. And in my opinion, they're worth more than any kind of trend report or marketing playbook. They really change who you become. They're going to make you better not only at one thing, but at everything you do. This is not only a reading list. This is what you need to master the game of the game. business and in a lot of ways life as well so let's go. Welcome back to the $100 MBA show I'm your host Omar Zenholm where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week Monday, Wednesday and Friday to help you start grow and scale your business. I got a quick favorite ask if this show has helped you in any way leave me a quick review you could do so wherever you listen to podcast this helps me and my team reach even more people who need the same no fluff practical business advice that you're getting from the show. It only takes a few seconds but it makes a huge difference. Thanks for being a part of our journey to help others on their journey. Before we begin, two quick things. Number one, welcome to the studio. We're here in our new studio in Sydney Australia. I'm here with Josh behind the camera who's running video and helping us produce all our new episodes. We're up in our game so that you can up your each lesson. Number two, the books I'm going to share with you today. Some of them I read on my Kindle, some of them I like to read on physical, and I also like audio books as well. So I'll give you some recommendations on which format to use for each book because some of these are really good for that format, like for audio or for Kindle. I'll explain as we go to each book. Let's start with book number one, The Black Swan by Nacem Nicholas Tala. This book is really important. This book is really important. Not because it's going to teach you're going to teach you some marketing tactic. It tells you how to plan for the future because you cannot predict the future. It's very, very hard to predict what's going to happen tomorrow, next year. And part of business is being able to do that, being able to build your business for today, but also for tomorrow in the years to come. What makes this book so important is that it highlights that the events that change everything in the world, the financial crashes, the pandemics, the technology shifts that happen like AI. The moment that it reshapes the industries overnight, a lot. are hard to predict. They come outside the range of what you thought was possible. So how do you prepare yourself? And that's what this book is all about, is that a lot of times we think that the unlikely is never going to happen, but the unlikely happens all the time. These rare things that happen in life are so impactful because people are just not prepared for it. And a lot of people just roll the dice in life and not prepare for these Black Swan events. Now when I said prepare, I'm not talk about worrying and having a bunker, I'm talking about worrying and having a bunker and having a bunker, about the fact that you can capitalize on these moments that a lot of people do not expect. Whether it's COVID, which is a Black Swan, or the 2008 Financial Crisis, that's a Black Swan, or even the internet when it launched back in the day. That is a Black Swan event where people just didn't see this coming. In my opinion, this book is a must read because you need to be prepared for all the contingencies in your business, not to worry, but to feel secure that you have prepared. If you play poker, you know that Pocket Aces is the best hand. But Pocket Aces, even though it should win most of the time, statistically it is the best hand every single time. But seldomly, it will lose. And that's a Black Swan event. And what you learn by playing Boucher a lot is that Black Swan events happen all the time. So you've got to be prepared to sometimes take the losses. I love this next one. The Innovator's dilemma by Clayton Christensen. Here's a question. That you should really think about. Because it terrifies every successful business What if you're doing everything right, exactly what you're supposed to be doing, but your business still gets crushed, still gets killed, and goes out of business. That's the central argument of the innovators dilemma. Great companies fail not because they're badly managed or they don't do a good job. It's because they're managed really well. They continue to do what works for the business. But unfortunately, what works today not going to always work tomorrow. This book is all about what you need to do to work on your current business, but also, work on your second business, which is the business you will become. And I find this fascinating because what I have found in business and in life and the fact that you'll notice that we're in a new studio is that if you don't change, if you don't evolve, if you don't become something new, it's very, very easy for you to die as a business. You become sale, you don't become relevant anymore. And this book is all about how do you continue to do what's working in your business but also innovate. The masters at this are Apple, Apple computer. in the habit of constantly cannibalizing their current products. They innovate and replace their old products as fast as possible. So for example, when the iPhone came out, they cannibalize their best selling product, which is the iPod. Right? The iPod instantly got killed by the iPhone when they came out with the iPhone. Now why do they do this? Because if they don't do it, their competition will. So they rather innovate and take over their product line and start selling more of the new product line, giving the latest thing, it's the latest thing, the latest thing, the latest technology, the latest technology, the latest technology, the latest technology, the latest technology, the latest technology, the latest technology, the latest technology, the latest technology, the latest technology, the It's what the customers want now. The next book is Influence by Robert Chaldini. Influence is one of the OG books on persuasion, on communication, on how to work with other people. This falls on to the umbrella of everything in business, sales, marketing, communication in general. Essentially, every sale you make in your business, every negotiation you win, every partnership that you build with a vendor or even somebody that's gonna market your business for you. It all depends on understanding how and why people and why people agree to things. How do people actually get on your side? And Chaldini spent years studying the philosophy of persuasion and understanding how to influence people and distills it into this book. I actually find it incredible that we have access to this book. It's like an absolute game changer. And it's the reason why it's got like over 7,000 reviews on Amazon because it's a book that has lasted the test of time. I mean this book came out about 15-20 years ago. So it's one of those classics that it will constantly teach you're how to win people over. There are classic rules that if you follow them you will succeed in business. Things like reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking and trusting somebody, scarcity. All these things are taught in depth in this book. And these are not manipulation practices. These are understanding how human beings operate and understanding how you can operate knowing how people operate. If that makes it, he says, the boy here is that you need to understand. how to win when people are on the fence, when people are not sure about you, how to make sure that you quickly build a relationship with them so they understand that you have their best interest in mind. This book gives you an operating system of how human decision-making is done. And whether you know this or not, this is happening, this is happening in front of you. And if you are aware of it, you could take advantage of this operating system. You can take advantage of how people just exist and how they work when it comes to making decisions. I really recommend that you read this book to understand these invisible forces. A lot of this sounds a little bit vague, but he makes it super clear so you understand with every human interaction you have in business that you can understand how to win them over, how to make sure they win and you win. My next book is Supercommunicators by Charles Doohig. I had the pleasure of meeting Charles. We had them here on the podcast. You should check out that episode. We'll link to it in the description. But most people think they're good communicators. They're good communicators. I have been talking all my life. I should know how to talk, right? No. I used to think I was a great communicator given the fact that I've published over 2800 episodes of this podcast, but I had a lot to learn through this book. In this book, Dewhigs research shows that people who connect and most effectively are the ones that do something very specific that you can learn, that you can actually learn so that you can connect with other people at a very deep level. And that connection is everything. When you feel like you're connected to somebody and they're connected to somebody and they're connected to somebody and they're connected to somebody and they're connected to somebody and they're connected to somebody and they're connected to