Your Best Self #2: Lessons from Starting a Book Club

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product.This week on Founder’s Journal, we're doing things a little differently. We are dropping a mini-series focused on being your best self. I'm giving you mental models, strategies, and tips to get you in the right mindset before the new year. That means instead of just one episode Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, this week we're giving you two: a new show that you won't want to miss plus a classic episode you maybe haven't heard before. If you haven't listened to today's classic episode, go back and check it out. Today, I am talking about my founder book club and the lessons I have learned from it. Let's hop into it. 

Why I started a book club

So a few weeks ago, I started a book club for 20 or so startup founders, and we're just a few days into book number one and that book is called The Sovereign Individual. It was highly recommended by [inaudible], two amazing thinkers, but I've learned so much already even though it's only a few days in, not just from the book and not just from the book club members, but from the process of putting this thing together. And so what I want to do is walk you through my process for forming a book club and how it has helped me to grow as a professional. If you're thinking about starting a book club of your own, great, you're going to have a full playbook after this. But even if you're not thinking about starting one, this episode will provide you just as much value because what you'll see is that an activity completely unrelated to my job and to business has actually been an incredible driver of growth for me professionally. So let's start with why: Why did I start a book club? A few big reasons. 

I wanted to actually read all the books I bought

First, I do something that a lot of book people do. I love to buy books. Every time I'm on Amazon and I see a book, I buy it. Every time I  see someone mention a book on Twitter, I buy it every time I'm in a mall and I stop in Barnes and Nobles, I buy it. And then I love to find ways not to read the books that I buy. I wanted to create a form of accountability where I'd actually read the books that I buy and more important than just getting my money's worth for spending money on books and never getting the value out of them, I have seen how transformative reading can be for how I think and I wanted to make sure I didn't deprive myself of that growth. And I had confidence that there were other people that felt the same exact way. 

I wanted a sense of community

Second reason why I'm starting this: I have been yearning for a greater sense of community for the last year or so. And I talked about this in the annual reflection episode, but community is so important on the internet specifically, because it makes this massively abundant place feel approachable and intimate. It's a lot like, you know, Michigan, where I went to college, feeling huge and you want to find ways to make it smaller. And creating a book club would offer me a community of like-minded founders, who I could potentially become friends with, learn from, and connect with. 

I wanted to practice operational skills

Third reason why I started this: I wanted to keep my operational muscles warm. And it sounds silly, but not being in the day-to-day of Morning Brew, I miss growing myself operationally. I feel very creative right now. I feel very collaborative. I feel like I'm networking a lot, but I don't feel like I'm working on my operational chops. And if I ever end up starting another business, those are really important. And I thought book club would be a really easy project to force myself to organize my thoughts and operate a community without committing myself to something forever since a book club isn't a business. 

How I did it

So that's why I started book club. Now I want to walk you through how I put it together, step-by-step, so you can form one if you'd like to, but also, so you can see how unlikely activities are actually amazing opportunities to grow as a professional and as a thinker. So the first step in forming the book club was deciding the focus of this group. Not all book clubs are created equal. And my belief around a book club is that the book is literally just that: It is just the tip of the iceberg for an amazing community. It is just the entry point. And so what I asked myself is beyond reading, what sort of interests or what sort of people do I want to surround myself with in general, regardless of whether we're reading a book or not? And so I decided to go with founders, because I believe there's a lot of shared experience and shared challenges that would create so much fodder for conversation, but also because founders tend to be great critical thinkers. And I really wanted to surround myself with more critical thinkers moving forward. And so this first step outside of just creating focus for the group and deciding on founders, there's a bigger learning here, which is that creating clear focus around any product you're launching, whether it's content, whether it's software, it provides the necessary constraints you need to offer the best experience possible. 

Curating the group

Next step was curating the group. I knew I wanted founders, so now I needed to go find founders. And of course through my experience, I know a bunch of startup founders, but I didn't want to ask people if they wanted to be a part of the book club. I wanted people that were already in search for something like this, and I wanted people to be intrinsically motivated enough to opt in. So my immediate thought was I have this audience on Twitter. It's a perfect place to start looking for founders, especially because the startup and venture capital community is addicted to Twitter. And so that's what I did. I tweeted out, quote, Starting a founder book club. If you're interested in joining, shoot me a DM. Going to start with an intentionally small group in the beginning, but may expand over time and will most definitely not be reading exclusively business books. So the learning from this was not just for a book club, how to curate a group, but something that I believe has helped me so much in building Morning Brew and thinking about business in general is being scrappy. And the way I think about being scrappy is using the resources at your disposal to achieve a goal. In this case, it was leveraging my Twitter audience, but say I didn't have a Twitter audience. I would think of other connections I have to founders to be able to solicit interest in a book club. 

Figuring out what members wanted

Third step, we had the focus of founders, we're working on curating founders, now I needed to vet the founders and know what they were looking for in the book club. And so I ended up getting a couple hundred DMs to the tweet I just read to you, which took a bunch of time to go through to make sure that the person messaging me was a founder and that I was being intentional about forming a book club that was diverse in thought and background. And to those that I thought were a good fit, I ended up sending a Typeform survey for folks to fill out. The survey was six questions. It took two minutes to answer and it asked respondents questions like, why are you joining book club? What book genres are you most interested in? How often would you like for book club to meet? And what is your email so I can reach out? So there are actually a few broad learnings in this step in the process. 

Creating work for people

First, while the survey was helpful for me to design book club, there is just inherent value in creating work for people in order to see if they are actually committed to the thing that you're soliciting interest in. So this is why I actually don't mind, say, long interview processes with Morning Brew or with businesses because it acts as a natural selection tool to have the people who care most rise to the top. I knew that the people who filled out the type form were clearly the founders who cared most about joining a book club. Another important learning from the survey is thinking about choice and how much choice you want to provide to people. The short answer or the short learning is that as a manager or as a book club facilitator, you want to limit choice as much as possible. People are really bad at choosing when they have a ton of options and the less you limit choice, the harder it becomes for you to operate a business or a book club efficiently. 

Make a list

That leads to the fourth step. We had the focus of founders, we curated the founders, and we vetted them and solicited their interest. Next was creating a list of everything that needed to be done in order to make book one a success. So now that I had this focus, I had my 20 or so founders and I had the results of this survey. I stepped back and I made a list of everything that needed to be thought of and needed to get done so book club could start smoothly. And so I visualized this list in the same way that I visualize any plan when thinking about the strategy of a business: I'm at point A. I need to get to point B. There are many intermediate steps that need to be done to get from point A to point B, so I need to list all of those out and then I need to prioritize them well. And the way I always do that in everything, in work, in life, is I started asking questions. I list out all of the questions that need to be answered in order to achieve my goal. So for book club, the questions included, what book are we reading? How are book club books selected? How quickly will we read each book? How often is book club meeting? When is the best time to host our first book club meeting? How long will we meet for? How is the discussion structured? How will the group communicate in between meetings? And that basically gave me a sense of, what do I need to answer and what do I need to achieve to get to where book one is a success and I have no concerns about it? 

Execute from highest priority to lowest

And that leads to the fifth step, which is executing on the list of questions from highest priority to lowest. So what I did is I took these questions. I prioritized them by creating deadlines for myself, and I started tackling them one by one. So going back to this concept of being scrappy or resourceful, anytime I had to answer one of the questions I just read to you and thought that the best way to answer the question was by leveraging someone else, I made sure to do that. I tweeted out asking for book recommendations and kept a master sheet of these recommendations that I'll actually share with you in the show notes so you can check them out. I tweeted out asking people who had run book clubs before, how they held people accountable to read each book. I wanted to figure out what was the right balance of like not babysitting people, but making sure we have a cohesive group that's reading together and staying on track.

And that's how I organized basically a dozen different tasks that stood between me and starting a book club in a way that felt approachable and not daunting. And this is literally the same way that I tackle any problem in business or in investing when there feels like a ton of moving parts that I can't keep my head organized around. 

Announcing the club

And then there was the sixth step, which was announcing book club. The final step after answering all these questions, deciding the focus of the book, having them fill out the survey, getting the founders into the group, was to get the book club going. And so we created a Telegram group for book club to join and to be able to chat in between our meetings. I sent out a Doodle poll for people to select the best day and time in a specific week in January that I offered for us to meet because it's a 20 person group. I ended up selecting two days because there was no single day that everyone could meet. I held a vote in our Telegram group where I picked four finalist books from that master spreadsheet that I shared with you and whichever one had the most votes, that was selected as book one. So in this case, it was The Sovereign Individual. And then I created and shared a spreadsheet that showed how many pages needed to be read by each person in the group each day, in order for everyone to finish the book before our first meeting date. So in the case of this book, because it's 400-something pages, we have to read 16 pages a day before our meeting in the beginning of January, if you want to be done with the book. 

Now, sure. This episode was about book club and why decided to form it, how I thought it would help me grow, and a playbook for you to use if you want to start your own book club, but there's an entire meta lesson to this entire episode that I hope you're noticing: What I've effectively done by forming a book club was creating non-business project for myself that was fun and finite, but could help me grow as a professional in so many ways, from refining my abilities to prioritize a bunch of tasks that I've never done, to being resourceful and asking for help when I don't know all the answers, to thinking of every question possible so I'm not caught off guard when book club starts, to communicating things clearly to book club so people think I have my shit together and trust the process that I'm running. It sounds a lot like the things that are needed to be a great manager or a great leader in business. Just food for thought. 

I want to hear from you

Now I'd love to hear from you. Founder’s Journal has absolutely taken off like a rocket ship in the last few months, growing to hundreds of thousands of listeners and being consistently in the Top 25 on the podcast charts. There are a ton of you, but in this scrappy Morning Brew style that I love, I want to get to know many of you. So if you haven't yet done, so please reach out. Shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com and tell me a little bit about yourself and why it is that you listen to Founder’s Journal. Also, if you haven't yet done so, make sure to pound the subscribe button for Founder’s Journal on Apple, Spotify, or the podcast player of your choice. It's the number one way that we grow, but it's also the best way for you to find out when new content drops, especially this week with the mini-series and double the episodes. As always, thank you so much for listening and I'll catch you next episode.